Bookmarkable running moments of 2022
Some of these selections may have deftly eluded makers of similar lists
I labeled 86 posts “Competitive Running” this year, including this one. Almost two-thirds came in the second half of the year, suggesting a strange ability to couple niche writing momentum to a burgeoning sense of civilizational collapse.
Some of these posts were about training principles, others were dives into history, and a handful were polemics or indictments, entries in the latter class always settling things for good until the next goddamned time. But the majority probably had something to do with current events. That seemed like enough posts for me to justify mining my own site for material about what happened this year in the world of competitive running, which is good because otherwise I wouldn’t know where to start.
I’m not sure what everyone else noticed out there and on their various brain-frying screens, but below a sampling of what I apparently did. I chose twelve events; I wanted one for each astrological sign, but that was too complicated, so I just frame-shifted this intended scheme forward by about nine calendar days.
January: Keira D’Amato broke Deena Kastor’s sixteen-year-old American women’s record in the marathon in Houston with a 2:19:12. When Kastor ran 2:19:36 in London in 2006, it not only made her the first American woman under 2:20:00, it made her the first under 2:21:00, as Kastor’s 1-minute, 40-second improvement on her own AR from the same race three years earlier vaulted her from tenth on the all-time world list to fourth.
When D’Amato crossed the finish line in Houston, she became the 23rd-fastest woman in history. But if the women’s marathon had become a far more competitive game in sixteen years at the start of 2022, it would end the year having made just as large a leap in just twelve months: D’Amato is now “only” 45th all-time, and wound up 29th on the 2022 list. With a 2:19:12.
That might be as amazing as D’Amato running as fast as she did on such sparse training. Supershoes + motherhood + proper aging = NO LIMITS, worldwide. And above all, have faith in yourself.
February: Grant Fisher shattered the American record in the indoor 5,000 meters with a 12:53.73 on Boston University’s ultra-fast track, the first of the race’s seventeen sub-13:15 finishers (results). That set the tone for the year Fisher would have, as he also set three outdoor national records (3,000m, 5,000m, 10,000m).
Short month. Short item.
March: Fisher’s 26:33.84 10,000 meters in the Sound Running TEN was the most ridiculous of any of the American records he or anyone set this year. In splitting 13:23/13:10, he showed he had plenty in reserve. This arose from a 24-year-old whose collegiate best was 13:29. He clearly made a wise decision in joining the Bowerman Track Club.
Fisher’s teammate and fellow Stanford grad Elise Cranny just missed Molly Huddle’s 2016 AR in the same event with a 30:14.66. But she too has no regrets about her choice of professional environments, as her best 5,000 meters at Stanford was a shade under 15:50.
April: Ross Tucker provided an analysis for Letsrun.com of the decision by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) to uphold Shelby Houlihan’s four-year doping ban, which began in January 2021 but was kept from the public by Houlihan and her entire team until five months later.
Tucker kept as much editorializing as he could out of his comments, leaving that to the Letsrun.com team. But to me, the main takeaway was that Houlihan was aware that tainted-meat stories had gotten other athletes’ bans overturned—justly or otherwise—and decided to cook up a plausible-sounding story along those lines, not knowing it what she said could be refuted by basic supply-chain data.
Most of the running world seems to wish Houlihan could return right now. As her absence of contrition and claiming of zero responsibility shows, she’s clearly learned something: American running fans have morphed into an ethically dubious demographic that doesn’t care who dopes as long as the right idols stay out of trouble.
May: Gary Martin of Archbishop Wood High School outside Philadelphia ran a 3:57.98 mile in what might as well have been a solo effort, as second place was almost 20 seconds behind. That made him the fourteenth American high-schooler to run under four minutes for a mile, indoors or out, and also made him the only one other than Jim Ryun to do it in a high-school race without pacers.
Martin had already missed the four-minute barrier twice in the spring 2022 by narrow margins. With the amazing run at his conference meet, Martin dropped the average of his three fastest outdoor miles of the season to 3:59.98.
June: Jakob Ingebrigtsen ran the fastest mile of the century at the Bislett Games and moved into #6 all-time with a 3:46.46, yet missed Steve Cram’s European record, also the meet record. The only other man to run under 3:47 since the onset of the millennium is Alan Webb, whose 3:46.91 from 2007 should be toast by the end of next summer.
The Bislett Games emphasized to me how much women’s track has caught up to men’s since Cram’s heyday. The winning time in the men 5,000 meters at this year’s Bislett Games, 13:03.51, was slower than Said Aouita’s and Sydney Maree’s times from the same meet 37 years earlier. It was the women’s 5,000 the other night that put the quality stamp on the entire meet. Twelve women ran under 14:58.89 despite drizzly conditions. Actually, all of them ran under 14:52, but 14:58.89 was Ingrid Kristiansen’s world record as of July 27, 1985.
July: The World Athletics Championships were held in the United States, inasmuch as Oregon still counts, for the first time. There, in the 400-meter intermediate hurdles final, Sydney McLaughlin turned in the most unbelievable standing world-record performance in track and field history, in any event.
There are endless ways to contextualize McLaughlin’s 50.68, and it’s hard to find one that doesn’t reveal how unique a performance this was. That time was bettered by only 31 NCAA Division I collegiate men this spring. The fastest time on the NCAA Division III men’s list this spring was 50.88 seconds. In theory, Sydney McLaughlin could have competed as a transgender male this spring and won a collegiate title in the 400-meter intermediate hurdles.
McLaughlin’s existence is statistically impossible. So until someone proves she’s not a deeply religious hologram, this is the most likely explanation for anyone able to do what she’s done. It’s that or something no attractive Christian-American female sprinter would ever resort to, paving the image for a long, scandal-free career (see also: Allyson Felix).
August: Since I allow myself considerable bias in deciding what’s important, I’ll highlight this post (filed under “Personal Essays”) about the CIGNA 5K, held in Manchester, New Hampshire on the second Thursday of August. My nephew and brother-in-law ran solid races there this summer, and after a bout of anemia that derailed Hayden’s sophomore cross-country season, he ran a personal best in the mile earlier this month in a throwaway pre-holiday-break meet.
It’s probably easy to tell when I’m having fun here.
September: At the Berlin Marathon, Eliud Kipchoge broke his own world record by 30 seconds despite over-ambitious and pacing. His 2:01:09 translates to a pace of 4:37.24 per mile, and he covered the last 1.367 miles of the marathon at 4:35 pace.
With splits of 59:51 and 1:01:18, Kipchoge clearly could have run significantly faster, but we* already knew this. What we now know is that there’s a good chance he could have run 2:00:30 today off a halfway split of 1:00:15 to 1:00:20.
D’Amato was widely hyped as the pre-race women’s favorite, but I don’t think any serious observers believed she stood much of a chance to win. She ran a creditable 2:21:48 for sixth, but finished over six minutes behind Tigist Assefa of Ethiopia.
Assefa is now the second-fastest Ethiopian woman marathoner ever (2:15:37) and eighth on her country’s the all-time 800-meter list (1:59.27). That’s like an American man running a sub-1:44 800 meters in or soon after college and then developing into a sub-2:07 marathoner. The level of belief in oneself required for that kind of transformation is extremely rare, but is clearly becoming more prevalent around the globe.
October: At the Chicago Marathon, Kenyan Ruth Chepng'etich missed the women’s world record by just 14 seconds despite running her first 5K at 2:07:30 pace. Chepng’etich's 5K segments and last 2.2K:
15:11, 15:29, 15:39, 15:51, 15:53, 15:58, 16:24. 16:37, 7:16 (=16:30 5K pace)
Mapping these onto a 2:01:39 (the second-fastest men's time ever) results in an opening 5K of 13:45, a first 10K of 27:46, and a halfway split of 59:32 in a theoretical male flameout-cum-triumph.
Emily Sisson was ahead of D’Amato’s American record schedule from the start, then accelerated slightly to run 2:18:29 to place second and return the AR to the ranks of the nulliparous. Nike may want that record back at some point. But for now, Sisson holds both the American half-marathon (1:07:11) and marathon records for women and is probably the only rational choice for U.S. female distance runner of the year. (Camille Herron could make a case.)
November: Now we’re into territory I can remember fairly well without squinting or referring to any screens. The NXN Northeast Regional race saw four New Hampshire boys place among the top seven, three of them qualifying for the national finals (results).
At the Nationals this month, Byron Grevious of Phillips Exeter Academy was the second junior in the race with a 12th-place finish, Patrick Gandini of Gilford High School wound up 39th, and Aidan Cox, who was fit but fighting injuries all fall, took 92nd.
"Success doesn't test you; you have already won. Failure doesn't test you, your competition is completed. It is adversity that tests you, when events seemingly conspire to remove you from the contest altogether. Now your education begins."
December: The Valencia Marathon was the site of the most-anticipated marathon debut in a long time, with Letesenbet Gidey of Ethiopia prepared to translate her 1:02:52 half-marathon in the same city just over one year earlier into something unprecedented.
Gidey did in fact run the fastest time ever for a first-time marathoner, but her 2:16:49 fell well short of most expectations and only got her second place. Meanwhile, also-debuting Kevin Kiptum blasted a 2:01:53 to not only win but leave him third on the all-time list behind Kipchoge and Kenenisa Bekele.