The Laps Down Under ⏱️
Lap 268: Sponsored by Atlanta Track Club
Sponsored by Atlanta Track Club
A New Era Starts at the Peachtree!
For the first time in more than 50 years, the Peachtree has a new title partner. This July 4, the Northside Hospital Peachtree Road Race marks the beginning of a new era for the world’s largest 10K.
It’s one of the most iconic days in running when 60,000 runners take over Atlanta. If you’ve ever thought about running Peachtree, this is the one! Celebrate America’s 250th Birthday with people from all over the country!
Enter the lottery now until April 21, or skip the lottery and become an Atlanta Track Club member to guarantee your spot.
👉 Be part of the next chapter.
Compiled by David Melly, Kyle Merber, & Paul Snyder
What To Watch At The 2026 Boston Marathon 🦄
It must be April, because spring is in the air, flowers are blooming, birds are chirping, and World Marathon Major season is about to get very, very busy. Tokyo may already be in the books, but the double whammy of the Boston and London Marathons in the next two weeks are poised to really set the road running circuit on fire.
The 130th Boston Marathon goes down this upcoming Monday, and it’s staring sky-high expectations in the face. Last year saw Sharon Lokedi and Hellen Obiri battle their way to a course-record run, with Lokedi persevering in 2:17:22. On the men’s side, Americans had a breakout day as Conner Mantz, Clayton Young, and Ryan Ford all finished in the top ten in 2:08:00 or faster. So it’s safe to say the runners toeing the starting line in Hopkinton this year have some extra-large supershoes to fill.
Both defending champs are back, but this year’s race will be defined, at least in part, by the absence of two big names who competed in 2025. Obiri, the two-time Boston champ in 2023 and 2024, is taking on the field in London this year. Mantz faced injury woes in training during this buildup and had to withdraw. But you’ll barely miss them on race day, because the fields are stacked as ever, with seven sub-2:20 women and ten sub-2:05 men entered.
The other returning main character at Boston shows up a little different every year: the weather. This year it’s looking… decidedly iffy, with a small but nonzero chance of showers in the forecast and wind forecasts still changing hourly. Temperature wise, race day should float in the high-40º to low-50ºF range most of the morning. So if you’re hoping to watch fast times (or are yourself running and looking to set a new PB), it’ll all come down to whether the wind and precipitation break favorably, which right now looks like a coin toss.
Women’s Race
The marathoning resume Sharon Lokedi has put together at 32 years old is one of the best in the world—it just gets overshadowed, occasionally, by her friendly rival Hellen Obiri. There will be no overshadowing on Marathon Monday, however, as Lokedi enters with the fastest PB, the mantle of defending champ, and a giant target on her back.
Across seven career marathons, Lokedi has really never laid an egg. Her lowest career finish was a ninth-place run at the 2024 NYC Marathon, but that was just three months after the Paris Olympics, and when you knock out those two races she’s finished on the podium of every other marathon she’s started. She has two WMM titles, but she’s also finished second or third behind Obiri in three other races. If you take New York in 2024 out of the equation, here’s the list of women who have beaten Lokedi head-to-head: Hellen Obiri, Sifan Hassan, Letesenbet Gidey, Tigst Assefa. End of list. Basically, if Lokedi is on the starting line with a full, healthy block of training in her legs, you’ve gotta be an all-time great to even stand a chance.
All indications suggest that that’s what we’ll see once again, as Lokedi ran 67:10 for second behind Obiri at the NYC Half in her only tune-up race of the spring. Irene Cheptai is the next returner from last year, where she finished fourth, and has the second-best PB. Ethiopian Workenesh Edesa is the rare entrant on her second marathon of 2026 already, as she finished third at the Osaka Women’s Marathon in January—but last year she came back from the same race to win the Hamburg Marathon in around the same timeframe, so she’s shown she can turn it around just fine. And the other most intriguing international name is Mary Ngugi-Cooper, who’s twice finished on the Boston podium and is coming off a fifth-place finish in Chicago last fall.
As far as Americans go, it’s honestly easier to list who’s not competing as the full roster of 2024 Olympians and 2025 World team members are all on the start list. That’s Fiona O’Keeffe, Emily Sisson, Dakotah Popehn, Susannah Sullivan, Jess McClain, and Erika Kemp. Throw in Annie Frisbie, the second American in both Boston and New York last year, and Amanda Vestri, who finished one spot behind Sisson in New York as well, and it’s starting to look more like a U.S. cross country meet than an international marathon. Plus, Sara Hall will battle it out with Aussie Lisa Weightman for top masters honors.
It’s tempting to frame the race as “Sisson takes on the new guard,” but let’s not forget that Sisson is still only 34 years old and theoretically entering her prime marathoning years. The better frame may be “who’s the best American marathoner in 2026,” because every potential contender to that title is heading to the same race, at the same time, to kick off spring marathon season.
Men’s Race
If either John Korir or Benson Kipruto breaks the tape on Monday, a third name will immediately spring to mind: Evans Chebet. From 2022 to 2023, Chebet was on one helluva hot streak, winning Boston, New York, then Boston again before injuries slowed his roll for the next few seasons. Neither Korir nor Kipruto can make it three straight majors with a win, but Korir could defend his Boston title and Kipruto, the 2025 NYC marathon champ, could make it two in a row.
On paper, Kipruto has the benefit of both recency and longevity, as he’s won a WMM in four of the last five years, including Boston in 2021. Korir has the slight blemish of a DNF in Chicago last year on his card, but he bounced back two months later to win Valencia in a new PB of 2:02:24. Chicago aside, Korir has won every race that he’s started going back to 2024, where he finished fourth in Boston, and he beat a strong domestic field in his tune-up, a 10km XC race in Kenya.
Those two are the headliners, but that’s not to say that another strong contender couldn’t take them both down. The second- and third-placers from last year, Tanzanian Alphonce Simbu and Kenyan Cybrian Kotut, are both back looking for revenge, alongside 2024 NYC champ Abdi Nageeye and 2024 Berlin champ Milkesa Mengesha. Two intriguing dark horses are 2016 Boston champ Lemi Berhanu, who hasn’t run a WMM race in four years but has a handful of recent wins at sub-major races like Paris and Prague, and Sydney Marathon champ Hailemaryam Kiros, who doesn’t race often but took second at the Xiamen Marathon in China in January.
With Mantz out, it’s tempting to favor Clayton Young as the top American in the mix, but he’s the third-fastest entrant by PB (and second fastest BYU alum behind Canadian Rory Linkletter). Young does has a decent shot at a top-five finish and top domestic honors, but he’ll have to take down two of the four fastest Americans in history: Zouhair Talbi, who ran 2:05:45 to win Houston in January, and Galen Rupp, who turns 40 in three weeks but still has a lifetime best of 2:06:07 next to his name. Rupp has run well in Boston before, finishing second in 2017, but it would undoubtedly be a surprise to see him get back to that level on Monday.
Rupp’s fellow old-timer Sam Chelanga is also on the start list, competing for top masters honor at 41 years young. Of the other contenders for top American, three guys who finished in the top 15 last year are all back: Ryan Ford, Wesley Kiptoo, and CJ Albertson. But perhaps the biggest threat among the 2:08 crowd comes in the form of 26-year-old Alex Maier, who ran 2:08:33 to win the Dusseldorf Marathon last fall in his second attempt at the distance. Like his Puma teammate Fiona O’Keeffe, Maier’s talent could very well outweigh his relative inexperience.
What will we be talking about next week?
Marathon predictions are a thankless task, as you inevitably end up getting graded along the binary of did you pick the winner, or not. So let’s think about this in a bigger-picture sense: what should we be watching for in Boston, and what will it mean for the sport writ large?
If Lokedi or Korir repeats, the answer is simple: They’ve both been central in conversations around who the world’s best current marathoner is, but another signature win firmly cements them in the category of greatest road runners of their generation. If someone else wins, the more important consideration is how. It’s less indicative of a change in the overall pecking order if someone is able to steal a win with a well-timed sprint in a slow race than if they tear the field apart. Evans Chebet’s first Boston win was a harbinger of things to come, mostly because of the absolutely lethal move he made in the final five miles, splitting 13:55 from 35k to 40k. If we see something similar from a relative unknown, that could be an indicator that they’re about to become a lot less unknown over the next few seasons.
As far as the American race-within-the-race goes, the women’s side is essentially a de facto national championship. A signature performance here from O’Keeffe, Sisson, or anyone else would pretty much solidify their spot atop the ranks of U.S. marathoners for the time being, and the burden would be on their challengers to prove otherwise in the fall. The men’s race, with the absence of the American record holder, won’t be quite as conclusive, but if Talbi can bounce back from Houston with another 2:05 or Young can contend for the podium, surely Mantz’s seat on the throne will start feeling a little warm.
More than anything else, next Monday signifies once and for all that spring racing season is fully underway, and if you’re starting to find yourself bored of watching endless laps around the oval, things are finally getting interesting.
Imagining A Whole New System Of World Championship Selection 💭
DISCLAIMER: These ideas are malleable, open to debate, and far from a hill we are willing to die on. It’s a conversation starter!
Championship racing is fun because anything can happen in a tactical race. Championship racing can also be a difficult way to select a team…. because anything can happen in a tactical race.
At the Australian National Championships, the downsides of a tactical race were on full display as jostling turned to chaos with less than 100m left in a crowded, slow race. Defending champ Jess Hull had a clear line of sight to the finish, but with a small pack still there beside her, Claudia Hollingsworth was full of energy but trapped. That’s when Hull got clipped from behind and went down.
The 21-year-old Hollingsworth closed in a remarkable 56.8 seconds over the final lap and crossed the finish line in 4:17.06 but with a looming sense of worry about what the judges would say. Well, she was DQ’d… initially. Sarah Billings was then determined to be the winner and with it, automatic selection for this summer’s Commonwealth Games. The second (and possibly third) spot would come via discretionary selection. All bets were on the many-time global medalist, Jess Hull, receiving a selection.
From an Athletics Australia perspective, that slow of a race, the fall, and subsequent DQ were not what you wanted. The purpose of having trials is so your best athletes can fairly duke it out to see who has the best shot of earning medals. That didn’t happen here.
It turns out that didn’t necessarily matter, either. Hollingsworth’s disqualification was overturned the next day. In general, we’re ticket-carrying riders on the Hollingsworth hype train, but that isn’t necessarily a decision we agree with at face value: her cut-in was a fairly obvious obstruction that impacted another athlete’s race. Rightly or not, Hollingsworth is now going to the Commonwealth Games through that automatically selected spot.
Beyond feeling bad for Sarah Billings—who for 24 hours thought she was on the team—it’s worth reflecting on the validity of a system where the actual original outcome was clearly so far from what the hoped for outcome was. Are trials races really the best way to determine team selection?
World Athletics is the governing body that, in addition to hosting the World Championships, oversees events and regulations surrounding qualification for the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games. The International Olympic Committee and Commonwealth Games Federation are also independent entities, so it’s slightly more complicated in this instance. But for the sake of this argument, let’s just keep it clean and pretend we are discussing sending a team to the 2027 World Athletics Championships.
As things stand today, World Athletics sets the standards and manages the world rankings system that is leveraged for athlete qualification. The limitation to the ranking system is that even if an athlete has reached a certain standard, it’s still up to the federation to select them for its team. And there are 214 member federations with their own unique ways of deciding who gets those coveted spots for Worlds.
For the most competitive countries—where there are usually more than three athletes capable of hitting the standard— the national championships are a really big deal. If you don’t show up on that day, often six weeks ahead of the meet you’re hoping to qualify for, then you don’t go.
The whole system depends on a very basic assumption: that federations should get to set their own rules for who wears the national colors each year. But if World Athletics is in charge of the event and determining who qualifies, why is the team selection outsourced to the federations?
You could, for the sake of argument, view national governing bodies’ role in the process as more of a middleman with a frustrating tendency toward inconsistency. Rather than Team GB holding out developing athletes, shouldn’t it be up to World Athletics to say who’s invited? Instead of Kenya not announcing the Trials location until a couple weeks before, World Athletics would simply give the Kenyan federation a list of accepted names. In lieu of Australia hosting qualifying meets five months in advance, World Athletics could save them the trouble.
Rather than leave everything up to Seb Coe sitting alone in a room with a whiteboard and a telephone, WA could simply double- or triple-down on its touted world rankings system.
The top three ranked eligible athletes from each country are selected. Hard stop.
In that system, athletes don’t have to worry about chasing standards at all. It further deepens the investment in a system that is currently being pushed hard, but not always acknowledged. If fans understand and become invested in the ranking system, if athletes are racing more often, if Diamond League and area races are prioritized over college meets, then the system is working as World Athletics designed it.
Certainly, some logical changes would have to occur. Firstly, national championships should be upgraded from category “B” stature to make them more valuable. World Athletics could mandate that an athlete must compete in their respective event at their national championship, but the finishing result would be more about ranking than qualification. Such a system would, however, open the door to even more gatekeeping by a small handful of WA officials, meet directors, and agents. The Diamond League in particular would need much more transparency around field selection.
And finally, the performance window for the world rankings should open on January 1st of that year. The current system creates a loophole where global championship results can “carry forward” and allow superstars to skip out on much-needed regular season appearances.
Every NFL team understands what needs to happen to play in the Super Bowl; each division doesn’t set its own playoff rules. Similarly, track and field could benefit from a lot more international consistency about “the rules” – and whether or not you think World Athletics should hold all the power, they have the ability to create a system that’s more streamlined for global championships to come.
Trust The Trophy Case Over The Clock 🏆
Depending on your outlook, something awesome or terrible for track and field happened this weekend: a story from our little sliver of niche sport fandom broke containment and wound up aggregated by global outlets as distinguished as The Guardian and as knuckle-dragging as Barstool.
The story in question was Australian teenage sprinting phenom Gout Gout taking down Erriyon Knighton’s U20 world record in the 200m while winning the Australian championship in 19.67—also significantly faster than one Usain Bolt ran as an 18-year-old. That makes for a splashy headline, especially when you are able to cram Bolt’s name into the sentence. Technically, Knighton’s 19.49 from 2022 is faster, but it was not ratified as the official U20 record, so the mark Gout bettered was Knighton’s 19.69 from USAs that same year.
Of course, it wasn’t all sunshine and daisies down under. The top seven finishers all PR’d and per LetsRun’s Jonathan Gault, the first five men across the line PR’d by 0.20 seconds or more. The wind for this barn-burner registered at 1.7m/s, within the legal range. But accounts of the race describe a “swirling diagonal breeze” that basically delivered a swift kick in the pants to athletes as they came off the bend. This of course led to another round of “was the wind really the wind” discourse, a debate that’s at least two decades older than Gout himself.
Gout’s wasn’t the only remarkable result coming out of Sydney. His fellow Aussie wunderkind Cam Myers simply ran away from a competitive 1500m field to break the tape in 3:29.85—not a PB for the 19-year-old wunderkind, but a remarkable run in and of itself.
Myers beat out Olli Hoare, himself a 3:29 man and Commonwealth Games champ, by nearly three full seconds in a race that had no rabbit. In fact, it’s the fastest 1500m run with no rabbits outside a global championship since at least 2000. 3:29.85 is the 157th fastest 1500m ever run, but almost all the 156 times ahead of it were run in well-paced Diamond League-type races or World/Olympic finals. It may be the first sub-3:30 under such conditions ever—or at least since at least 1993. Until Yared Nuguse, Cole Hocker, et al show up at this year’s USAs looking to make it quick, that’s a pretty impressive stat. And yet some will still cry “trackflation” and angrily produce a pile of scientific studies touting the effects of carbon plates and sodium bicarbonate.
What do Gout and Myers have in common, besides being Australian teenagers? Winning. Whether or not you think their times are historically great or historically irrelevant, the (1) next to their name is inarguable. Gout Gout actually defended his 200m national title, and while Australia may be 1/10th the size of the U.S., it’s a large enough athletics powerhouse that comfortably winning back-to-back senior titles makes you part of the international conversation. We’ll get a true measure of his place on the global stage in a few short weeks, when the Aussie makes his official Diamond League debut against Olympic champ Letsile Tebogo at the Bislett Games in Oslo.
Halfway across the world, a whole bunch of people threw the discus further than any of their compatriots ever had before, with some help from a friendly headwind—the preferred gust direction of the discus community. Sam Mattis broke the American and area records in Ramona, Oklahoma, finishing fourth overall with a 72.45m toss. Matthew Denny’s 74.04m winning heave set a new Australian and area record, and Jorinde Van Klinken won the women’s competition in a Dutch record of 70.99m.
Because there are no wind limits associated with the throws, basically every all-time toss measured on the Ramona wind tunnel can feel like it comes with an asterisk. But instead, let’s look at it this way: Mattis was nearly two meters up on 2024 Olympic champ Rojé Stona, and just a few centimeters behind 2022 World champ Kristjan Čeh. We’re closing in on a decade since the last American medal in the men’s discus, and Mattis just sent the clearest message yet he’s becoming a podium contender.
The struggle of comparison isn’t unique to 2026 or track and field. In every era, across every sport, athletes have worked to maximize their own outcomes within the context of their circumstances. Bill Rodgers is nowhere near the U.S. top-ten list anymore, but he won eight major marathons across Boston and New York and 2:09 in a pair of shoes that look like they’re purposely designed to give you a stress fracture. It’s not crazy to suggest he could take on Conner Mantz on some time-bending neutral ground.
The clock may be absolute, but it’s not an arbiter of truth by itself. Increasingly, fans contort themselves into knots with mitigating factors and caveats. Parsing the sport’s results this way is exhausting and joyless. Instead, skip the rigamarole entirely and focus on a complementary, but easier to grapple with, truth: who won? That gets us closer to pure sport, where head-to-head matchups and competition are all that matters.
No matter how cynical you might view their recent results, athletes like Gout and Myers clearly possess superstar potential. You don’t need to contextualize and overanalyze their results to prove it—just put them to the eyeball test. Then just back and enjoy the show as they take on larger and better fields to see exactly how long their winning ways persist.
More News From The Track And Field World 📰
– In big European marathon action, Shrue Demise of Ethiopia lowered the course record at the Paris Marathon, clocking 2:18:34, while Italy’s Yemaneberhan Crippa broke the tape for the men in 2:05:18. Meanwhile, the Rotterdam Marathon saw an Ethiopian sweep, with Guye Adola (2:03:54) and Mekides Shimeles (2:18:56) taking top honors.
– On the general injury front, Peres Jepchirchir has withdrawn from this month’s London Marathon after sustaining a stress fracture late last year; and Jakob Ingebrigtsen—per his agent—is recovering nicely from surgery, and while he has ruled out competing in May or June, July racing appears to be on the table.
– In “horrifying state of geopolitics spilling over into sports” news, the Doha Diamond League meet has been postponed to June 19th. Originally scheduled for May 8th, the organizers—apparently optimistic that one month is enough time for things to cool off—are also relocating the competition to the climate-controlled Khalifa International Stadium.
– The Cherry Blossom 10 Miler, which doubled as the U.S. championship for the distance, produced two new national winners. Emma Grace Hurley went 50:52 to secure what was somehow just her first U.S. champs crown, in the process mixing it up with Ugandan national record-holder Joy Cheptoyek and overall winner Asayech Ayichew, who boasts a 29:43 10k PB. And Graydon Morris— of “Gracie Morris’s brother” fame—took second overall and top American in 46:18.
– Ryan Hagan, a junior at SUNY Geneseo, obliterated the old NCAA Division III 1500m record, going 3:38.67. That mark puts him almost eight seconds up on the rest of the descending order list for the division. Hagan originally enrolled at Georgetown after high school, then transferred back home to New York State ahead of the 2024 cross country season—but if there’s any doubt about his DIII bonafides, please note he was wearing a bandana for this race.
– Melissa Jefferson-Wooden and Letsile Tebogo have both shared their intentions to compete at this summer’s World Ultimate Championships.
– The 2026 Global Runner Survey is open for responses! If you’ve got opinions on the state of road racing, this annual Running USA survey is an important one to fill out—lots of races use this data to inform their decisionmaking. As an incentive for participating, you’ll have the opportunity to enter to win one of four sought-after race registrations. The survey is open until July 31.
Interested in reaching 20,000+ dedicated runners and track and field fans? Advertise with us here.