Boston marathon impressions - spoiler inside

Triathlon Forum
1

Just got back from watching the FOP’ers of both the women (started 30 min ahead which is great for exposure IMO), and men. I was standing at Coolidge corner, at a slight downhill section. Hailu Negussie (ETH) won the men’s race in 2:11:24, Catherine Ndereba from Kenya won women’s in 2;25 and change. Alan Culpepper was best US guy in fourth (he was in 5th w/ about 2 miles to go, and 6th at 35K, so he had a nice finish).

  • not a single person on forefoot strike that I could see. probably had something to do w/ the slight downhill, but still interesting.

  • a running form coach would have had a field day. Running styles like you wouldn’t believe: arms crossing over the middle, (one) arm(s) hardly swinging or pumping vigorously, it was pretty interesting.

  • the one or two unifying things seemed to be a VERY high leg kick, and extremely low leg mass. quite a few of these gals and guys really do run on toothpicks. A little later on, some pretty muscular types came through, but the FOP are very slight.

Fun day! Beautiful weather as well. Hope all ST’ers reached their goals.

2

No surprises here - top level runners run like they run. They are very lean and thin framed. Upper body actions can be somewhat misleading. You are right to notice the leg action - that is key. High knee lift and high turnover are standard. As is a very relaxed body. You can’t run for 2 plus hours at that pace and not be relaxed for just about the whole way.

Fleck

3

I’d describe their form with one word: Effective.

4

sure, that works. To me, it was pretty clear that differences in cardio and muscular fitness separate these people far enough that upper body mechanics have little impact on the outcome of a race. it also reminded me how painful a marathon is.