The Perfect Season

Photo by Adrian Umpierrez

The Perfect Season

Words Jeff Merrill

A couple years ago, I made a statement that I was pretty adamant about. When making a public statement, one is likely to become irrational in defense of it, and the hotter the take, the more entrenched the person defending it is likely to become, like a rabid raccoon in a steakhouse dumpster. This wasn’t a scorcher of a take, I’m no Nick Wright, but it was one that I felt strongly about and made arguments to fortify my belief rather than put it through the old scientific method to really test it. Experts might call this getting high on your own supply.

In a world where pre-championship track meets exist largely for runners to attain qualifying standards for Championship races, I proposed that pacers should not be allowed in meets prior to the World Championships and that all record attempts should be kept until afterwards, when athletes could take aim at all the records in the books in a month-long festival of moonshots.

This, I thought, would effectively limit the pursuit of time standards and focus athletes on racing against each other in meets where they could achieve points in order to try to qualify by world ranking. Racing is what us die-hards say we always want to see. It’s why we love the championship meets. But I underestimated how much record-breaking can boost the excitement for head to head racing.

Because this was before 6 world records were broken in the span of 9 days in February.

Feb 8th

Grant Fisher breaks the Indoor 3,000m record - 7:22.91 (and Cole Hocker - 7:32.14)

Yared Nuguse breaks the Indoor Mile record - 3:46.63 (and Hobbs Kessler - 3:46.90)

Feb 13th

Jakob Ingebrigtsen breaks the Indoor Mile record and Indoor 1500m record en route - 3:45.14 and 3:29.63

Feb 14th

Grant Fisher breaks the Indoor 5,000m record - 12:44.09

Feb 16th

Jacob Kiplimo breaks the Half Marathon record - 56:42

Now, I’m champing at the bit to see what these record breakers can do against each other in an un-paced racing situation for all the steakhouse garbage. Record chasing before racing is kind of like the NFL combine before the season. In the combine, you learn all the performance measurables for an athlete- their 40 yard dash, how many times they can bench press 225 lbs, their vertical and broad jump. Seeing what the world’s best runners can do in set-up paced, time pursuits puts a measurable on the board, a number reached in an environment manufactured to achieve the fastest mark. Indoor track, where the conditions are especially controlled, works as a great space for this. The achievement of these ridiculous marks heightens the anticipation amongst fans. Once we know what they can do when we have curated a space to isolate their physical potential, we want to know what they can do with that measurable when they're thrown into an unpredictable situation and have to anticipate and react to the moves of highly skilled athletes. We also want them to hold the level of fitness they had when achieving those combine marks so we know they’re at peak ability. Or better yet, show up in the ideal form, uniquely fit to take on the field that is assembled.

In a recent interview, Matthew Centrowitz said something to the effect that athletes today would find his training strange, because he trained for sit and kick races, since that’s how the 1500m was run in his day.

There’s a difference between being fit to run flat out fast, and being fit for a specific kind of race. You wouldn’t train the same way for a 10k road race as you would for a 10k mountain race. In track, the racers are the hills- their skills and tendencies form the terrain, and that differs from era to era and race to race.

Whatever the particular focus of your training as a runner of yore, your entire season was built to have your best race on a single day, within a 4-5 week period, at the end.

At this current moment in time, it seems that no one really knows for sure how the advancements in tech, nutrition, training, etc… etc… are coalescing to give us an unprecedented onslaught of remarkable marks, but there is general agreement that at least in the shoe tech department, an athlete’s ability to recover from hard efforts is improving. After a taxing 10k-specific workout in the old days, a world class athlete might take a week to recover, but now, if they wore ‘super shoes’ during the effort, they might be ready to have another hard effort the very next day.

The ability to train harder, more consistently, coupled with new fueling options like Maurten Bicarb, which stems the body’s ‘rising muscle acidity during anaerobic efforts’, is allowing athletes to reach higher peaks than they had previously. As the new tools are used more and more, we will also see if athletes are actually able to sustain peak racing-level fitness over a longer period of time.

The performances taking place in February suggest it’s a possibility. A major reason that performances required to rewrite the record books were not commonplace in past eras was that it was difficult to maintain peak racing fitness for middle and long distance runners for longer than a 4-5 week period, and that you risked injury by venturing into the difficult zones of training to reach those peaks too often. Training builds were based around this knowledge. The winter season was used for building an endurance base, stock-piling mileage in order to layer speed as the outdoor season approached. In recent years, there has been a shift across the sport to a more holistic approach to training, touching all speeds at every point of the year. This shift was brought on by evolving knowledge around physiology and training and aided by more finely-tuned performance and recovery tools becoming available.

To my knowledge, it is unclear at this point whether the aid in recovery provided by the new tech will prolong a peak, but by the look of the structure of this season, if it does not, athletes will have to get razor sharp when it comes to peaking multiple times per year- which is likely what they are attempting to do.

The decision by World Athletics to push the World Championships out to mid September has given the opportunity to many athletes to essentially split the season in half and peak twice: once early for Indoor World Championships in March and once for Outdoor World Championships in September. This would explain the peak fitness we are seeing early (although the number of world records is still unprecedented). Between now and July and September, there would be a lull in racing before the end of the season peak. But! smack in the middle of the year from April to July is the brand new Grand Slam Track League. Athletes who have recently run under the old world records- Grant Fisher, Yared Nuguse, Cole Hocker, are signed on to compete in 4 meets (8 races) against top level competition, mid-season, before World Champs.

This year’s calendar: a record-breaking indoor season, GST, and national and World Championships will require a precise peaking schedule with little margin for error- a call to climb the mountain multiple times.

Grand Slam Track has been shouting from the rooftops that they value racing above all else, which is why they have decided not to allow pacers in any of their races- a move that Dumpster Raccoon Jeff from a couple years ago would be very excited to see.

Whether the decision to ban pacers was made intentionally to safeguard athlete's health or a stroke of luck, the result of it will provide athletes with a slate of races where they may not have to go to the well every time in hard-from-the-gun efforts. This may allow athletes to train through the GST and save their top form for the World Championships. This scenario also, however, provides a ripe hunting ground for world class challengers. A Jakob Ingebrigtsen, for example, given his status, has the ability to look over the GST schedule, pick a meet that fits his training build, command a hefty appearance fee to show up, and do some damage, while still being able to do the same in select paced Diamond League races. We’ll see how that plays out, given Ingebrigtsen’s track record in un-paced races (pretty good in the 5k! Room for improvement on the GOAT scale in the 1500m).

In addition to appearance money for each meet and prize purses never before seen in the sport, GST could be providing something equally valuable to its roster athletes- something that American-based trackies have long touted as a major benefit of the NCAA system. GST may wind up being an incredibly valuable arena to hone racing skills. Instead of getting to the line at Championships having only run in set-up, rabbited races all year, GST racers will have been in 8 scenarios where they will have had to navigate a field entirely constructed from the other contenders in it, and play their best hand. This crash course in racing will occur at tan opportune time for them in the calendar, in a valley of intense training between peaks. Given the span of the season, GST racers could even select specific meets within the league to dial up a peak and make a bid for the $100,000 first prize, while using the others to get comfortable racing on tired legs.

If they play their peaking right, this experience could pay dividends when they get to the World Championships in September to face a majority of the field that is likely a little rusty when it comes to tactics.

Let’s hope the oddsmakers don’t catch on.

The structure of the season provides a fine viewing experience for fans as well, going from Combine-like record chasing to a period of un-paced racing, into the championships. If I were to make a tweak, I might add a single paced time trial effort between GST and the Championships so that we can see what tools the contenders are bringing in to the fight for the ultimate prize. I'm not quite rabid on this take though. In my evolved state with plenty of tasty garbage at my grubby little fingertips, I remain a reasonable raccoon.

Circling back to assess my original hot take-

• Chasing records indoors is cool 👍
• Mid-season un-paced racing to prep for Champs is beneficial 👍
• Early season assessment of how World Champs might play out and honing training for how you expect to play the game is golden docuseries material 🧠
• I don’t really care to watch record attempts after World Champs. 👎
• Let WC’s cap off the season and let’s move on to football & cross country, where the ultimate fall would be traveling across the country in an RV to tailgate college football games and xc races coinciding on the same campus in the same weekend. 🏈 🏃

  I would call this traveling TV series: FallGOAT.