The McKirdy Micro Marathon #2 produced 35 men's U.S. Olympic Trials qualifying times. How small is still too large to be considered tiny?
A look back at the 2004 Olympic Marathon Team Trials shows how popular the sub-elite chase has become, as a surge in mid-level performances is only partly attributable to better racing shoes
Yesterday, Bakline’s McKirdy Micro Marathon, advertised by its organizers as “meant for the ‘on the cusp’ athlete looking to run the OTQ standard or faster,” was held in Rockland State Park in New York State. To qualify for the race, men needed to have run a time of “2:25 or equivalent” in their pursuit to run 2:18:00 (or faster).1
The results, which are unfortunately posted on the spectacularly failed Web-programming experiment known as Athlinks, indicate that 77 men finished the race, the slowest of them in 2:36:28. Thirty-five of them met the 2024 Olympic Marathon Team Trials standard, or “OTQ.” Each presumably did so for the first time, as it’s unclear why anyone would have run this race with a Q-time in hand. The Trials kick off in Orlando, Florida, a genuine marvel of multifaceted American decadence, on February 3, 2024—a scant 111 days from now. That’s if the country doesn’t become too fucked up in the interim to allow for such luxuries, and I am at times genuinely lacking confidence in a positive outcome on this front.
Nevertheless, heading into yesterday, 153 American men had run 2:18:00 or faster on USA Track and Field-allowed courses, which coincidentally include a maximum start-to-finish drop equal to or less than that of the Boston Marathon course—about 460 feet. Another eight men had gained entry by running a half-marathon in 1:03:00 (or better yet, even faster).2
This means that approximately 195 men have now qualified for the 2024 Olympic Marathon Trials. One of those men is Ben Decker of Yarmouth, Maine, who placed 20th yesterday in 2:17:04.
Decker reaching the Trials standard and this race being termed “micro” carry personal and generalized echoes respectively of the 2004 Olympic Marathon Team Trials, which I attempted to qualify for. For one thing, 77 finishers is six more than in the 2004 Olympic Team Trials Marathon. At that race, only 17 of those 71 finishers—among 86 starters and, as I recall, 101 sub-2:22:00 qualifiers, including 2:22:02-but-allowed-in-guy Chad Worthen—broke the current qualifying standard of 2:18:00. And the course used in Birmingham, Alabama that year was reasonably fast, even if the day of the race was cold. The slowest 2004 Trials finisher clocked a 2:37:38, not far outside the time of the slowest male McKirdy Micro finisher (who was beaten by six women).
The early years of the twenty-first century represented the nadir of American marathon running during my lifetime. In 2001, I was the seventh American at the Boston Marathon and 28th overall in a time of 2:24:17. While better shoes can be credited with an average boost to times of maybe of a couple of minutes at the sub-elite range, the simple fact is that more “pretty fast” or “local-yokel”-caliber dudes are continuing to compete seriously after unspectacular collegiate careers and chase mid-level glory or merely the personal satisfaction of achieving something they understand is challenging but within their range.
Why this has happened isn’t clear, at least not to me, but a number of concurrent social and vocational trends may shed some light. For one thing, even without a “pandemic” and sweeping associated shifts to working from home, remote employment has become an increasingly available option, albeit not for people who want to make a great deal of money. Also, more people are either delaying having kids or not having them at all, which translates to more free time, less of an inclination to settle in one place, and a greater tendency for people to pursue meaningful wanderlust, be this training to run a solid marathon (at any level), becoming so good at a video game that thousands of people regularly watch you play it online on Twitch or Rumble, or wearing HOKA gear and jiggling around on a Brooklyn sidewalk for a few minutes a day as part of am especially livid “…aaaaaand here’s our TOKEN FAT BLACK LADY!” corporate gambit.
Either way, I like to think that a lot of people who strive to reach a high level despite little to no promise of superstardom go on to take what they have learned to coaching high-school kids. This is already evident all over the country, but needs to become even more so as old goats retire or are gradually canceled and are often replaced by incompetent or lazy yutzes ill-equipped to even take up space on a bus, and probably acquired largely via Athlinks layoffs.
Another person who strove, quite mightily on occasion, to reach the 2004 Olympic Trials—often literally alongside me—is Ben Decker’s father Byrne. When I started working with Pete Pfitzinger in early 2003 in exchange for building Pete a coaching website, Byrne, who was one of my Central Mass Striders teammates, rapidly became one of Pete’s clients.
Byrne at the time was a partner in the largest law firm in New England north of Boston. He had four kids, Ben obviously among them. Perhaps accurately, I remember being in Byrne’s house in Maine in August 2003, when the two of us did a 20-miler the morning after I slopped my way through a nearby 10K road race3, and seeing Ben wandering around the house with a hockey stick in his hand.
Byrne was not putting his life aside to try to reach the Trials. And although he didn’t make it, he came almost comically close, with Peter Bromka—who ran 2:19 and change between three and eighty-nine times in short order when the standard was 2:19:00 (or faster)—supplanting Bryne in 2020 as the guy who stands as the undisputed first man left out of any Olympic Marathon Trials, based not so much on the closest single miss as on a pattern of repeated tries and misses close enough to count as “if only one thing had gone better, can’t pack it in yet!” failures.
Bromka, 38 during most of his quest, was even older than Byrne was back in the day. Here are Byrne’s results during the qualifying period in 2002 and 2003:
Pete wrote about what it was like to coach a group of Olympic Trials hopefuls, including Byrne and myself, remotely—then a fairly new concept—for the January/February 2004 issue of Running Times. Maybe the most interesting thing about it is that the terms “text” or “GPS” don’t appear even once.
It does appears that there are a lot more people like Byrne and me around these days, nobly inhaling the farts of our elite betters from near enough to make it seem worthwhile. There is certainly no shortage of online coaches today, either, but I don’t think this accounts for much, if any, of the boom in Trials qualifiers, very-near-missers, and one-the-fringes effluvia-sniffers.
The race included both men and women, who needed a 2:45 or equivalent to gain entry, but since I already dedicated one post today almost entirely to women, if I mention them too much, too soon, my inbox will be flooded with the usual complaints from rapidly melting MRAs who keep close track of what I say about which subpopulations or humans and what this content consists of. This is compared to available demographic data, all of it falsified or unattributed, to determine whether I am operating within acceptable 2023 discursive parameters.
World Athletics does not recognize performances run at Boston or the California International Marathon, which drops 340 feet from start to finish, as record-legal. The maximum allowed road-race drop per WA guidelines is 1 meter per kilometer of race distance, which for a marathon is 42.2 meters or 138-plus feet.
Look at the name of the runner three places behind me at that 10K in 35th. I don’t recall ever being challenged to a rematch in the twenty years since.