POLL: Who was the top American female distance runner of 2022?
If we* can agree that only two viable candidates exist, it's a close race
I planned to experiment for the first time with Substack’s poll feature by issuing both the question below and a companion one for males. I quickly realized that this is pointless.
No American man had even close to the year the Bowerman Track Club’s Grant Fisher did. Fisher broke four American records—in the indoor 3,000m and the outdoor 10,000m, 5000m, and 3,000m, in that order—and absolutely shattered three of them in the process. His 26:33.84 made him the fastest American over 10,000 meters for 2022 by almost 45 seconds despite the second-fastest, Fisher’s BTC’s teammate Sean McGorty, himself ascending to #10 all time on the American list with his 27:18.15 in the same race.
Fisher’s 2022, as generated by the kindly interactive database maintained by World Athletics:
On the women’s side, it’s a close contest between two athletes: Alicia Monson. who ran one cross-country race but otherwise limited herself to the track1, and Emily Sisson, now a pure road racer.
In January, Monson, a member of Boulder, Colorado-based On Athletics Club, recorded the fourth-fastest time ever by an American over 3,000 meters indoors. The three women ahead of her all ran their sub-8:30 performances in the same February 2020 race, and all were then BTC members: #2, real go-getter Shelby Houlihan, who’s since been suspended for doping; #1, Houlihan’s spiritual Siamese twin Karissa Schweizer, who looks and sounds as trustworthy as a ferret in heroin withdrawal; and #3, classic airhead Colleen Quigley, who departed the BTC in February 2021.
Monson’s 8:26.81 3,000m from August makes her the second-fastest American ever outdoors over the distance, as she now trails only Mary Slaney’s 8:25.83 from 1985 (twelve years before Slaney was suspended for flunking a testosterone exam). That followed an 14:31.11 5,000 meters in June that moved her into third all-time on the U.S. list—she’s outranked there by Houlihan (still suspended) and Schewizer (still emanating cheatstank).
As a roadstress, Sisson, a New Balance athlete coached by Ray Treacy, raced less than half as often as Monson did this year—six vs. thirteen finishes, at least per WA—but covered far more distance, about 73.5 miles vs. about 37.9 miles. (That’s trivia, not something I factor into who I think enjoyed the better year.) She also grabbed two American records, although WA seems reluctant to accept her 1:07:11 in the half-marathon.
Sisson’s American record in the marathon was stunning, even after a Kooky Tomato had prepped polite society for such a time with a 2:19:12 in January on minimal training. Sisson would up #20 worldwide with her 2:18:29, while Kooky landed at #29. Meanwhile, the fastest 2022 marathon by an American male was Conner Mantz’s 2:08:12 debut, ranking him #163 in the world for the year.
Just wait until Sisson turns 35 and starts really hitting her prime.
Now, concerning the poll: I don’t know if you can vote if you stumble onto this post on the Web. It may be accessible only to e-mail newsletter recipients. I hope this isn’t the case because the site seems to get about a third of its routine traffic via people who have bookmarked the site and have no inclination to receive e-mails (which is what I, being older, would probably do). I’m doing this mainly as an experiment within a greater plan to waste extraordinary amounts of time this week.
(12/20/22 5:16 p.m. note: I have already fucked this up. While editing the poll to make the vote counts visible, I reset the totals to zero. at that time it was 10-2-2 with Sisson leading and Monson tied with “Someone else” for second.)
The 5,000m at the Weltklasse Zurich meet, in which Monson ran 14:38, was on a tracklike circuit so nonstandard that WA considers the event a road race.