How poorly will Galen Rupp run in Chicago?

Maybe I'll be ordering the Baked Crow Special by the time you read this, but simple logic tells us one thing for certain: Pre-race interviews with Rupp are pointless

Galen Rupp is a 35-year-old distance runner who holds various American track records. He’s the fastest U.S.-born American marathoner in history. He’s had a stellar career, proving he can both chase records and win (or place well) in global competitions.

Most longtime running fans don’t like Rupp much, or at least wish someone else had those records, and it’s easy to see why. Rupp was coached starting in his teenage years to all of these glorious achievements by suspended pariah and admitted former doper Alberto “This testosterone cream isn’t the microdosing tool it appears to be” Salazar, and along with Mo Farah managed to enjoy a thoroughly dopey-looking career for a long time without any negative consequences. (Losing a coach, which is not like losing the right to compete or having records or titles stripped, doesn’t count. Neither does having a lot of haters.)

It doesn’t help Rupp’s image that he has the charisma of a Howdy Doody doll crafted of rotting deadwood, and is in every respect the 1980s caricature of the kid who went out for track mainly so he could run away from the jocks who were imprisoning him in lockers after absconding with his carefully trimmed PB&J sandwiches.

This morning, Rupp is running the Chicago Marathon, a race he won in 2017. Whether he has ever broken the rules of fair play is unknown to most, but it is undeniably true that when he opens his mouth, bullshit pours out in a regular basis.

Before this year’s Olympic Marathon, Rupp’s “new” coach, Mike Smith, told Letsrun’s Jon Gault that the returning bronze medalist in the event was supremely ready to race in Sapporo.

I compare a lot of the data from that [Olympic Trials] preparation to now and I think everything is ahead of schedule compared to the information I had then. His 10-12 weeks leading into this, his volume is fantastic, his workouts are fantastic.

Rupp didn’t bomb at the Olympics; he was dropped by eventual champion Eliud Kipchoge at 30K and gave up over 100 meters per mile to EK in the final half-hour-plus of the race to place eighth in 2:11:41. Not bad for someone at least four or five years past his peak, right?

Well, as it happens, “fantastic” means something different to Mike Smith than it does to most people. At the pre-race press conference in Chicago, Rupp disclosed that a calf problem had affected his training before the Olympics.

Notice the extraordinary sense of history repeating itself here, apart from Gault not getting the Letsrun byline.

Well, it’s safe to say Team Rupp has already been fuckin’ with fans, truthwise, in 2021. In the second half of 2021, in fact. With respect to an imminent marathon race.

Meaning, it would be fairer than ever at this point to demand something along the lines of evidence of fitness from Rupp. After all, no one can make him prove whether anything attached to him has been hurting or not.

There is, however, Rupp’s 1:01:52 at the Great North Run five weeks after the Olympic Marathon—plenty of time in the Vaporfly era, really—and four weeks ago. On its own, this was a pretty dismal showing. If you’re aware of Kara Goucher’s 1:06:57 and Brigid Kosgei’s 1:04:28 Great North Run efforts, Rupp’s time looks really bad, but in 2021 the usual point-to-point downhill course was replaced in 2021 with an out-and-back version, so it’s merely “not good.” It’s worth about 2:09-2:10 for a marathon on its own, commensurate with almost everything Rupp has done since the Olympic Marathon Trials over a year and a half ago, including a 27:59 track 10,000 this summer.

Rupp is still one of the best in the U.S., but he’s nowhere close to what he used to be and to pretend otherwise is the ultimate exercise in arguing for the faint aroma of red roses while basking in your dog’s fartcloud.

Can he offer us* anything else, keeping in mind that the Rupp-Smith unit has, in the very recent past, failed to disclose essential information about Rupp’s health to the running media? Well, there’s this:

Rupp ran 25 miles with 20 to 21 of it “really hard.”

Oh? Do expand, but try to keep your comments to a sane mini—

I closed really well in there and ran really hard the whole way. The average pace was a little quicker than what Mike initially had out, but he was pumped about it and I was pumped about it. Those long runs are the biggest confidence booster. When it comes for marathon training, you gotta do everything, the miles, all that stuff. But, really, I think what’s always given me the most confidence is when you’re able to get those long runs in, you know, consistently on a regular basis and then also those really hard ones. Nothing simulates better what you’re going to feel than when you’re on your feet for a really long time and running hard for a really long time. That’s the closest thing you have to a race. That definitely gave me a lot of confidence hitting that last one out really well.

Okay, no one goes on and on about how great these runs are unless he knows they, or something else important, have not gone nearly as well as hoped. Organically, Rupp is sort of a dumbass, and seems understandably disinclined to talk to the press since he knows most people who do have brains dislike or at least mistrust him. But he’s done enough interviews to have a tell, and Galen Rupp only hammers away at something in circles when he’s lying more than he usually appears to be doing.

Now, Rupp is admittedly not alone among runners in hiding the fact of suboptimal fitness or health. There is no strategic advantage in admitting weakness. I’m just having fun feeding what little seemingly solid data is available into the prediction machine.

True stats nerds, some of whom regularly read this blog, could even try applying a kind of Bayesian analysis to interview situations like this one.¹ But that whole suggestion is just an excuse to signal that I sometimes read Astral Codex Ten, a revelation made only by people implicitly claiming to be exquisitely rational and smart.

Whatever the case, if Rupp runs any faster than 2:08:30 tomorrow, I will be shocked. 2:09:30 seems more likely and would still represent a pleasant surprise. Keep in mind that either of these, while arguably no longer even “world class,” would represent a superior effort by an American, even though everyone else now has access to the kind of shoes he and only a select few others had access to in 2016, leading Robert Johnson of Letsrun to pronounce Rupp, Shalane Flanagan and Eliud Kipchoge guilty less than a year ago of “mechanical doping.”

It’s unlikely that Galen Rupp will drop out of the race unless he is genuinely forced to. I don’t think he wants to end his road-racing career on the same kind of ugly streak Ryan Hall, the second-fastest U.S.-born marathoner ever, did. I think that if he does finish after running what appears to be his best possible October 2021 marathon, he’ll run between 2:09:45 and 2:10:30, assuming reasonably mild weather conditions. (The temps should be in the low 70s, with a dew point in the low to mid-60s; not great, not abysmal for an elite marathoner.) It’s harder to say where this might place him, but possibly as high as third or fourth.

Ideally, the 2021 Chicago Marathon will be the last anyone sees of Rupp as an athlete. He’s had a fine and lucrative career, trailing a miasma of malfeasance with him the whole time and helping make professional distance running a worse environment for all involved than when he first trotted into it.

1. Bayes’ theorem:

P(A) and P(B) are the simple (prior) probabilities of A and B being true respectively.
P(A | B) is the probability A is true given the knowledge B is true.
P(B | A) is the probability B is true given the knowledge A is true (also called the likelihood of A).

So, what is the likelihood Rupp is now very fit, given what can be known about his recent fitness and his comments about it?

An estimate of P(A | B) supplies a rough answer. Let A be Rupp’s claim(s) to fitness and B be evidence of that fitness. We* know that P(B | A), the term in the numerator on the right, is a small and shrinking number, because Rupp has already said “I’m fit as hell” lately only to then reveal otherwise, both verbally and on the race course. Also, P(A) < P(B), as Team Galen’s statements about his preparedness lately have outpaced his actual preparedness.