Normally, on his long-run days, the twenty-seven-year-old marathoner C. J. Albertson would wake up excited. As an élite runner sponsored by Brooks, he is paid to run farther and faster than almost anyone else. But, one Sunday morning in late November, he woke up not wanting to run at all. Lying in bed, he began to rationalize why running outdoors didn’t make sense: the temperature was rising, and a semi-recent wildfire near Fresno, where he lives, made the air smoky. “And it wasn’t bad,” he clarified, “but it was smoky enough that it gave me an excuse.”
Motivation had never been a struggle for Albertson when facing extreme and monotonous challenges. He has built a reputation in the running community for an eccentric training regimen in which he attempts—often on a whim—feats that are both remarkably dull and impressive. In April of 2019, he broke the indoor marathon world record at the Armory in Manhattan, running two hundred and eleven laps around a two-hundred-metre track in just under two hours and eighteen minutes. Marathon runners often wait until the event itself to run a full twenty-six miles, but Albertson is known to log runs approaching forty. He adopted a mantra to fit his training mind-set: “Running is easy.”
That sentiment didn’t hold up during the pandemic. In February, 2020, U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials, Albertson placed seventh and then took two weeks off. That’s when the pandemic began to surge, and he wasn’t sure when to restart. “I kept thinking, ‘O.K., now I’ll really start training,’ but how could I be training?” he said. “I’m not training for anything. I’m just running. So what am I doing?” Professional runners plan their schedules around the sport’s biggest events, aiming to peak when the stakes are highest. Now there were no stakes. It seemed likely that 2020 would be a stagnant one for track and field.
But, in a period with few meets, a remarkable number of records went down: those for the 5,000-metre race, the 10,000-metre race, and the 400-metre hurdles, each for both men and women; the collegiate men’s indoor mile and outdoor 1,500 metres, and the women’s 800 and 400 metres; the U.S. high-school boys’ indoor mile and 1,500 metres, and the girls’ 5,000 metres; the European men’s 5,000 and 1,500 metres; the Australian men’s 10,000 and 1,500 metres. On June 6th of this year, the Ethiopian-born Dutch runner Sifan Hassan smashed the 10,000-metre world record by more than ten seconds, crossing the finish line with arms outstretched and mouth agape. “No one should be able to do that,” an announcer uttered in disbelief. Two days later, Ethiopia’s Letesenbet Gidey came to the same track and beat the two-day-old record by almost six seconds. A week after Notre Dame’s Yared Nuguse ran a collegiate-record 3:34.68 in the 1,500 metres, Hobbs Kessler, an Ann Arbor high schooler, broke the long-standing high-school record—in 3:34.36. “That was pretty cartoonish,” he said. Records were made to be broken, but things were getting out of hand.
The pandemic fell at an interesting time for Grant Fisher, a twenty-four-year-old distance runner from Grand Blanc, Michigan. A high-school and college standout with distressingly impeccable running mechanics, he had joined the Bowerman Track Club, an élite training group sponsored by Nike, after graduating from Stanford in 2019. Despite his success, he began his professional career as a long shot for the 2020 Olympic team; only three Americans are selected in each event, and Fisher, a twenty-two-year-old resembling a puppy-dog version of the actor Taylor Lautner, seemed a few years from his prime. His first months of training confirmed that impression. Already exhausted from a rigorous collegiate racing schedule, final exams in electrical engineering, graduation, signing with an agent, and moving to Portland, he fell behind in one workout after another during his first high-altitude training camp, in Woodland Park, Colorado. By the end, he had injured his Achilles tendon. When the group returned to Utah for another session, he frequently fell behind the rest of the pack. Sometimes, feeling merciful, his coach would pull him off the track a mile early.
The tempo of brutal training can last only so long. Before big races, workouts ease, mileage decreases, and runners “taper” for fast performances. No one wants to show up at the Olympic trials, or any other major meet, exhausted. But, when all the meets were cancelled, traditional training plans were, too. The marathon runner Des Linden, who was thirty-seven last year, decided to take a month off from running—her longest break since 2017—to give her body a chance to heal after years of consistent strain. Some runners in their prime followed a similar approach, addressing nagging issues with an extended break. With fewer collegiate races, college coaches found themselves with abnormally long blocks of time to train their athletes for specific events. It was a similar situation for the Bowerman Track Club. “My team seemed to really lean into training almost harder than we would have had there been an Olympic Games,” Fisher said. “We would just experiment with how hard we could train without the consequence of blowing up at a major championship.” In previous years, his group might run a ten-by-mile interval workout at about a 4:50-to-4:55 pace per mile. He and his training partners aimed closer to 4:40, and Fisher held on.
But runners need something to train for, and, as the pandemic extended, only a few opportunities arose. Linden and her coach thought that she would aim for the Comrades Marathon, a fifty-six-mile race in South Africa, but it was cancelled. Fisher and his teammates observed the same pattern. “So our general attitude as a team was, ‘Let’s not count on any of these meets actually happening,’ ” he said. Bowerman Track Club planned a meet of their own. Held on the track of a local Catholic high school near Portland, the summer 2020 series featured only Bowerman runners and didn’t allow fans, in accordance with state law.
The goal of the intrasquad races was to run fast, and, specifically, faster than the Olympic standard. Finishing in the top three at the Olympic trials guarantees a selection to the Games only if the runner has run at, or ahead of, the standard, or is ranked in the top forty-five in the world. But the standard is tough. Fisher, who finished in the top four of the N.C.A.A. Track & Field Championships 5,000 metres all but one year of college, entered 2020 with a lifetime best of 13:29. The Olympic standard is 13:13.5.
What makes hitting the standard more difficult is that the goal of racing isn’t usually to run fast, but faster than everyone else. Runners often go out conservatively and positionally before kicking to a blazing-fast finish. That dynamic doesn’t play out in a hundred-metre championship race, when élite men and women run in individual lanes and finish in fewer than ten and eleven seconds, respectively. But in the 800 metres and beyond, the time difference between a fast race and a slow, tactical one is stark. Most runners find it easier, physically and mentally, to stick behind a leader for as long as possible. It’s simpler to follow someone than to control a pace, and, when it’s windy, leaders break the wind as others relax in their slipstreams. But hanging back comes with its disadvantages. Passing someone in lane one (the lane that is farthest to the inside) means running around them, adding to the total distance. And staying behind a group can leave a runner “boxed in”—stuck in the inside lane with runners in front, behind, and to the right. In a sprint finish, runners may find themselves trapped.
Tactical races emerge most often on the biggest stages. In the 2008 Olympics, Ethiopia’s Tirunesh Dibaba won the Olympic 5,000 metres in 15:41—a minute and a half behind the record she set two months before—with a final lap at a four-minute-mile pace. In 2016, the American runner Matthew Centrowitz won the Olympic 1,500 in 3:50, a full twenty-four seconds behind the world record. “For men of their class,” the announcer said within forty-five seconds of the start, “this is an absolute jog.” By the last lap, the group jog had turned into a chaotic mass of thrashing limbs. Centrowitz sprinted away, finishing in a time one might expect out of a top high schooler. When you win the gold medal, your time doesn’t matter.
But, when there are no meets, no prize money for place, and no competitive glory, time is all that matters. If runners were going to compete, they were going to run fast, and races were planned accordingly, with every variable controlled. As Fisher prepared to run in the Bowerman Intrasquad Meet, he knew exactly how fast he would run each lap for a majority of the race, and who would be leading at any given point. He knew that two pacesetters would keep a steady clip at the Olympic standard for a large majority of the race, at which point another teammate would take over. He knew there would be no elbowing, no fighting for position, and no strategic pace changes. After the starting gun went off, the team would get in a single-file line in the inside lane and run one lap after another. They would wear the best racing spikes Nike had to offer, outfitted with features like a mini air bag, a carbon plate, and special foam.
Instead of flying coach to an unfamiliar city, searching for something nutritious to eat, and killing time in a hotel, Fisher cooked for himself and slept in his own bed. He drove himself to the meet in his father’s old Infiniti, warmed up, and prepared to run faster than he ever had before with some of his closest friends. When the starting gun went off, the team spread out in a line, turned off their tactical brains, and followed two extremely overqualified pacemakers—Mohammed Ahmed and Lopez Lomong—until the last eight hundred metres. Three runners finished under the Olympic standard, and Fisher ran an eighteen-second personal best, at 13:11. Less than two weeks later, he paced Lomong to the ninth-best time by an American, and Ahmed to the tenth-fastest time ever. In a similarly controlled race a few months later, Fisher ran 13:02, his personal best.
When Des Linden took aim at the 50K world record, she had the same approach. “Racing is so strategic and calculated,” she said. “You try to figure out how to try and mind-read people, but also fit it into your own game plan. Where are my strengths? What are yours? It’s very chess. Time-trialling and chasing time are very checkers. Like, I’ve got to get to this mile at this time, and I need to do it as evenly as possible, and then I need to extend that over x amount of distance. And you just put your foot on the gas and go.” She decided to run on a flat bike trail in Eugene, Oregon, on a cool Tuesday morning in the spring, following the marathoner Charlie Lawrence the whole way. She broke the record by more than seven minutes. C. J. Albertson ran a hundred and twenty-five laps around an outdoor track and beat the men’s record by more than a minute.
The RunSignup.com description of the Marathon Project, a special December race for élite marathoners, was only one line long: “This race will be fast!” On a pancake-flat course in Chandler, Arizona, in ideal weather conditions, and with several pacemakers for men and women, Sara Hall ran the second-fastest American marathon by a woman, and seven men ran under the 2:10 barrier. Joshua Cheptegei broke the 10,000-metre record in a race with three pacemakers and a special lamp-based pacing system that displayed the world-record pace on the track’s inside rail. The record seemed certain enough that, with a couple of laps to go, the announcer went on a three-minute monologue about the sheer magnitude of the accomplishment, his voice quivering and breaking in exhilaration: “This is a night that will never be forgotten by any of us who are privileged enough to be here. . . . That was incredible!”
Runners knew that, when opportunities arose, they had to perform. Before Athing Mu’s first meet as a middle-distance runner as a freshman in college, her coaches told her that they had no idea whether COVID would force another long string of cancellations, so she might as well go for it in every race. “And I think that’s why my indoor season was so good,” she said. “Because that’s the mentality I had at every meet—do it right here now, because I don’t know if I’m gonna be able to do it again.” She set the indoor N.C.A.A. record for the 400 and 800 metres and the outdoor record in the 800.
As the months went by, running fast became not just a goal but a reason to keep going. “It appears like I was just dialled in and training and not affected by all this,” Albertson said, “but it was actually the opposite. All of these results came because I was trying to keep myself from going insane and trying to find something to do and occupy my mind with. I was just struggling.” At one point, he kept himself motivated by attempting to finish first in as many online Peloton group classes as possible. And, on that one smoky day in November, he set his treadmill to a 1.5-degree incline and a 4:58-mile pace and ran twenty-seven miles. “I don’t think I fully anticipated going through with it,” he said about his unofficial world record. “But, once you get started, or at least for me, then it’s, like, ‘O.K., just keep going a little bit more. . . . ’ And then you run a 2:09 treadmill marathon.”
In June, the field in the Olympic trials’ 10,000 metres went out conservatively, and finished hard. Fisher spent most of the race running laps between sixty-five and sixty-nine seconds, pushed and pulled by unpredictable changes in pace, and was unintentionally slashed across the legs by other runners’ spikes. Three thousand metres into the race, he sat in seventeenth place, content to hang back as a few unproven collegiate runners tried to push the pace, trusting that he could catch up if he really needed to. He ran the last lap in fifty-four seconds, finishing second behind his Bowerman teammate Woody Kincaid, and qualified for his first Olympics with a time forty-three seconds worse than his best.
A week later, he raced in nearly ninety-degree heat at ten in the morning in the trials’ 5,000 metres. For the majority of the race, the pace was slow enough that the 2016 Olympic silver medallist Paul Chelimo could fully turn his torso and wag his finger at anyone who accidentally clipped his heels. When Fisher and Kincaid tried to sprint by him in the final straightaway, he dragged them all the way to lane four, forcing them to run diagonally. All three qualified for the Olympics, all at least twenty seconds off their best times. Of the forty-one men who competed in the 5,000- and 10,000-metre finals, not one set a personal best.
Fisher reached Tokyo in the midst of one of its worst recorded heat waves. The Olympic marathon, which was moved a few hundred miles north, to Sapporo, in anticipation of high temperatures, was still so hot that runners stuffed ice into their tops mid-race. In Fisher’s 10,000-metre final, the Ugandan runner Stephen Kissa pushed the pace, built a ten-second lead, then dropped out after 6,000 scorching metres. With just 400 metres to go, the eight runners in the lead pack sprinted to the finish. Fisher, who would likely not have been in the field a year ago, finished in a surprise fifth—more than thirty seconds back of his personal best. Cheptegei, who set the world record in the event last year in 26:11, ran 27:43 for second. A week later, Fisher finished ninth in the 5,000 metres, and Cheptegei first. As the Ugandan crossed the line and embraced a teammate, he was surely not thinking about the fact that he had run twenty-three seconds back of his personal best, or wishing he could have pushed the pace a lap earlier. “He’s done it with heart, he’s done it with passion,” the announcer said. “And he’s proven that as a world-record holder, he can come and deliver under pressure when the times are irrelevant.” When races matter again, the times do not.
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