Fast Women: The Marathon Project makes its return
An eye-opening look a Grand Slam Track’s finances, and a race with no winner.
Issue 386
Is there someone in the running community you think is amazing? There’s still time to nominate them for recognition in an upcoming Fast Women newsletter. I will likely be publishing select responses next week, so let’s say the deadline is Saturday, December 27.
Priscah Cherono pulls off a surprise win
On Sunday morning in Chandler, Arizona, Kenya’s Priscah Cherono stole the show. The 45-year-old mother of three broke away early in the Marathon Project and ran mostly solo to a 2:25:17 win. Cherono wasn’t listed as one of the top contenders heading into the race. And according to her World Athletics profile, prior to this, she had raced only once since 2019.
I appreciated how the race’s broadcast team adjusted quickly. Molly Seidel wasn’t expecting Cherono in the race, but she knew exactly who Cherono was, because she had finished second to her at the Boulderthon Half Marathon in September. And mid-race, agent and race co-founder Josh Cox stopped along the course to talk to Cherono’s coach, Scott Simmons, and relayed what he had learned on the broadcast.
Cherono, who is a 2008 Olympian and 2007 world championship bronze medalist in the 5,000m, apparently retired from the sport during the pandemic, but now she’s back at it, and Simmons has been coaching her for the past few months. Though she slowed during the second half of the race, she held on to break her nine-year-old marathon personal best by more than two minutes.
Some of her competitors struggled. Paige Wood and Kellyn Taylor ran in second and third place early on, but both dropped out. And Germany’s Blanka Dörfel, another one of the top seeds, did not start the race due to illness.
But a number of athletes had successful days. Molly Grabill worked her way up to finish second in 2:28:56 and qualify for the 2028 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials. Jane Bareikis has already qualified with her win at Twin Cities, but she improved her qualifying time by two-plus minutes, running 2:30:16 to take third. Sweden’s Hannah Lindholm, who is 46, finished fourth in an impressive 2:31:19. And in her marathon debut, Peru’s Mica Rivera Wood took fifth in 2:31:35.
There were six new Trials qualifiers, including Grabill. She was joined by Lily Anderson (sixth, 2:34:12), Flannery Davis (seventh, 2:35:10), Jessica Watychowicz (eighth, 2:35:35), Jaci Smith (ninth, 2:36:20), and Carter Norbo (10th, 2:36:25). I believe that brings the number of women who have hit the Olympic Trials qualifying time to 92. (Update: The number is actually 98, not sure if I counted wrong or just forgot to add the six new qualifiers.)
Norbo was part of the pack paced by Jess McClain, and afterward, McClain sent me this footage she shot of Norbo at the finish line. Talk about being a full-service pacer. And Norbo has a good story. She missed qualifying for the 2020 Olympic Marathon Trials by 38 seconds. And less than 16 weeks after she had twins, she missed the 2024 Trials by 83 seconds. Now she has two-year-old twins and a four-month-old and she is headed to her first Trials.
I thought the race did a bunch of things well. Seidel was excellent on the broadcast, and Cox got a lot of good information zipping around the course on a golf cart. The broadcast of a major marathon could never be that agile. The weather could have been more cooperative, though. It sounds like conditions were ideal at the start, but by the end, they had warmed up a bit too much.
And both the gold wave (51 finishers) and the pro race (24 finishers) were tiny on the women’s side. I imagine that made things quite lonely at times. There was better turnout on the men’s side, with 85 finishers in the gold wave and 48 in the pro race. It seems like the race organizers have built a promising product, and I hope they can attract enough runners for the event to continue. (Results)
An eye-opening look at Grand Slam Track’s finances
Before I touch on the lack of journalism in the sport, I want to acknowledge Margaret Fleming’s contributions this year. She is a breaking news reporter for Front Office Sports, so she covers far more than just track & field. But she has broken some of the Grand Slam Track-related news this year, and was the reporter behind this article, which got a lot of people talking about Citius Mag last week.
The piece pointed out that Grand Slam Track had amended its bankruptcy filing on Monday. There are a lot of things people could have taken from the document, but the one many track & field fans zeroed in on was the fact that Citius Mag was owed $272,915.80, more than every athlete except Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.
LetsRun did some follow-up reporting and has been focused on the fact that Citius Mag and Grand Slam Track did not clearly disclose their financial relationship. Citius founder Chris Chavez told LetsRun, “From our perspective, the relationship was fairly clear to our audience given the volume of coverage, the co-branded content, and visible elements like shared branding.”
While I agree that it was pretty obvious to a lot of people following along that Citius was almost certainly being compensated for the work, it’s also true that they did not adequately disclose that in almost all of the content they produced. On the December 17 episode of the Citius Mag podcast, Chavez stressed that they never claimed to be journalists. But the fact is that whether they are journalists or not, they are required to disclose the partnership every time they put out content.
This is hardly just a Citius Mag issue. This is widespread on running-related social media and among content creators. But I assume this case is ruffling more feathers because of the amount of money involved, and because what Citius does could easily be mistaken for journalism at times. If people wanted to get upset solely about a lack of disclosure, there is plenty of other content in the sport to be upset about.
(This is not me saying other media outlets are likely being paid for their content and not disclosing it properly. Though I imagine there’s some of that, too. This is me saying that a lot of the content I see on my social media feed is backed by brands or events on some level. And even if we all know that X athlete or influencer is supported by a brand or an event, the relationship is not clear in most posts. This should probably be a wake-up call for a lot of people in the running industry. This article does a solid job of explaining the requirements, but the article also points out that FTC enforcement is likely to weaken under the Trump administration.)
Chavez told LetsRun that the $272,915.80 is the full amount Citius Mag is owed for their work. It does not include what Chavez is owed for doing TV commentary at two of the Slams—he has been paid half of that amount. (Side note: As you may or may not remember, Grand Slam Track paid to sponsor one issue of this newsletter earlier this year. I hope it’s quite clear what is and isn’t an ad here.)
All of this has resulted in quite the Citius Mag pile-on this week. And unfortunately for them, they’re being attacked over money they didn’t actually receive.
The responses I have appreciated most are the ones from people who have focused on Grand Slam Track’s excessive spending. “The amount, especially for an endemic influencer brand not producing the event broadcast for the brand, is eye-raising,” RunnerSpace’s Chris Nickinson wrote on BlueSky. “I have seen non-endemic influencers get paid obscene amounts over the years but those are folks with outsized and outside audiences.”
And one meet director, whose name I will leave out of this because their account is private, wrote in their Instagram stories, “I feel bad for these vendors but this is extremely irresponsible spending! Really wish GST would have consulted people with experience running meets before planning.” In the post, 11 of the vendors, who are owed between $238,000 and $3 million, were listed.
I was surprised by how much Citius Mag was theoretically making. All of this has raised conversations about what journalism is and isn’t, and who is funding the coverage of the sport. What I’ve seen is that if you are willing to basically do PR for a company or an event, there’s quite a bit of money to go around. Brands and events would rather have people doing PR for them than journalism about them. So that’s where the money is. And that’s one of the reasons there are so few journalists left covering the sport. (Which has led to a lot of important stories not being told.)
A good number of people who cover the sport, regardless of what label they use in describing themselves, accept free travel to cover events or products. In those cases, disclosure is required. But I think it would be very difficult to accept such an offer and also remain objective in one’s future coverage or posting. But almost all journalism is sponsored by brands to a certain extent, so it’s an imperfect model either way.
The 2023 NCAA 10,000m—the race without an official champion
This is a good example of a story that needs a journalist on the case. Back in June, Track and Field News pointed out that this document indicates that Everlyn Kemboi’s participation in the 2023 NCAA Outdoor Track & Field Championships was vacated by the NCAA Committee on Infractions. Running for Utah Valley University, Kemboi won the 10,000m that year and finished second in the 5,000m. But it was not clear why her participation was vacated.
Last week, Emily Venters, who finished one spot behind Kemboi in both of those races, posted on Instagram saying that she fought to have the results corrected, but the NCAA denied the request. Regardless of the rest of the story, this part seems ridiculous to me. At all other levels of the sport, if an athlete is disqualified, the results are adjusted. Venters should be the 2023 NCAA 10,000m champion and 5,000m runner-up, but according to the NCAA, she apparently is not.
The only reason I can think of to not adjust the results (other than maybe the cost and the headache of attempting to reallocate awards) is the team score. In this case, adjusting the results wouldn’t have impacted the top four teams. But imagine if it changed who won the national title and what a mess that would be. NCAA rules are made with all sports in mind, so it’s possible that this policy would make more sense in a different sport. Regardless of the logic, it’s unfortunate.
The stickier part of all of this is that in her post, without naming her, Venters wrote that the athlete who finished ahead of her tested positive for a banned substance. And in a comment on the post, Venters wrote, “It was confirmed by a member of the NCAA Committee on Infractions that she tested positive for something banned.”
If Kemboi has tested positive for a banned substance, that information has never been made public. Kemboi reposted Venters’ post to her Instagram stories and wrote, “Defamation.” She later posted an Instagram note that read, “It has nothing to do with banned substances related (sic) at all.”
The NCAA does minimal out-of-competition drug testing, and the results are generally not made public or reported to USADA or WADA. So as long as an athlete isn’t good enough to also be tested by USADA or WADA, it would be possible for a collegiate athlete to dope, test positive, and not face major repercussions.
Given the NCAA’s policies, which seem to center around protecting student-athletes’ privacy, there’s a good chance we’ll never know why Kemboi’s participation in the 2023 championship was vacated.
But this does highlight a major issue in the NCAA: There are large amounts of money and highly valuable scholarships up for grabs and there’s not a lot of doping control. And given that, again, the NCAA makes its rules with all sports in mind, it seems unlikely that this is going to change any time soon.
Two running careers derailed, but a love of the sport that lasted
This is part six of six in a series about how runners’ relationships with the sport change over time. I will likely revisit this theme down the road, but this is it for now. (Here are parts one, two, three, four, and five.)
I’d like to think that these two athletes would have different experiences if they dealt with the same struggles today. But there is still work to do. And their stories are reminders that one’s experiences while young can have long-lasting effects.
There was a time when Lisa (Brown) Gurry dreamed of going to the Olympics. As a high school senior, she was one of the best young runners in the country. But in college, the only record she might have set, if anyone was keeping track, was for the most stress fractures—13 in total. She briefly medically retired from the sport and her running future was uncertain.
Throughout her 20s and 30s, Gurry ran very casually. But in 2018, at age 44, she completed her first marathon. She still has to be cautious about how she trains, but Gurry, now 51, has been marathoning ever since. In April, she’s scheduled to run the Boston Marathon, which will make her a World Marathon Majors Six Star Finisher. Her running journey hasn’t been what she expected, but she’s adjusted along the way, and she’s never lost her love of the sport.
Gurry began running in third grade, and by seventh grade, she could run a 5:30 mile. That year, she joined her older sister on the West Plains (Missouri) High School team. The school was a cross country and track & field powerhouse, and by the time she got to high school, she was running 50-70 miles per week.
“In hindsight, my coach had a training philosophy that might have worked okay for high school boys, but it wasn’t adapted in any way for me as a developing girl.” Gurry told Fast Women. “I wouldn’t blink at running 12 miles on a Saturday and 14 miles on a Sunday.”
During her junior and senior years, she trained with the boys’ team. She loved the sport and was determined to do what she thought would help her be great. In retrospect, she thinks she was dealing with REDs, but the diagnosis did not exist at the time, and she always got regular periods, so she had no idea she was on a collision course. She thinks her biggest problem was overtraining.
Gurry won four Missouri state titles. In her senior cross country season, she won the Kinney (which would become Foot Locker) Midwest Regional, and finished eighth at the national championships. That success opened many doors, and she accepted a full scholarship to run at the University of Arkansas, where her teammates included Deena Kastor, Sarah Schwald, and Nicole (Teter) Downin, all of whom would go on to run professionally.
But Gurry’s troubles became apparent soon after she arrived on campus. Within a month, she was diagnosed with her first stress fracture, and she learned that she had very low bone density and low estrogen. The next few years were full of disappointment. She would barely return to running before learning she had another stress fracture, sometimes several at the same time. During her junior year, when she was able to run for a longer stretch, her lower legs kept going numb. She was diagnosed with compartment syndrome and had to have surgery on both legs.
At the end of that year, she was granted a medical hardship waiver, which meant that she could keep her scholarship but her NCAA career was over. She was heartbroken. “That was the first time I think I realized that hard work doesn’t always win; you can’t hard work your way to success if your body just won’t cooperate.”
Gurry attended the University of Missouri for graduate school and she reached out to the coach to see if he needed an assistant. Instead, he suggested she use her remaining eligibility to run for the team. She told him she didn’t think she could, both because of her status with the NCAA and her injury history. But they found a way. That fall, she and her teammates qualified for the NCAA Cross Country Championships, the only NCAA championship Gurry ever ran. “It was still not what I would have wanted,” she said. “But it was kind of a nice bookend.”
Gurry planned to run indoor and outdoor track at Missouri as well, but another stress fracture unceremoniously ended her collegiate running career for good.
After college, Gurry married one of her former University of Arkansas teammates, moved to Seattle, and began a long career at Microsoft. For many years, she ran a few miles a few times a week. After she had her third child, she wanted a goal to help her regain some fitness, so she began running half marathons. In 2018, she made her marathon debut at the New York City Marathon.
The race was a challenge. Around 18 miles, she was tempted to drop out. “I was like, ‘This is not what I had envisioned. I should be able to be much better than this,’” she said. “But I saw my husband soon after and he encouraged me to finish, no matter what it took. That was a good push to put my ego aside. The goal was to complete a marathon, so somehow, someway, I had to get to the finish line.”
Despite how she felt at mile 18, Gurry became hooked on the distance. She has a personal best of 3:48 and remains deeply grateful that she’s still able to run. When she was young, being a champion runner was central to her identity. Now she has the ability to enjoy running at whatever pace her body allows.
For a long time, JoLee Gillespie Stephens believed the running chapter of her life was behind her. A foot injury at the end of her college career never fully healed, and for years, running wasn’t an option. But roughly 20 years later, she found her way back to the sport.
Stephens was a standout runner growing up in Colorado Springs, Colorado. She earned two state titles in the 800m and one in the 1600m, along with several relay and team titles. She had a fantastic high school running experience, and upon graduating in 1997, she became a member of an incredibly deep team at BYU.
Stephens’ experience running for the school was a mixed bag. She met some of her closest friends—many of whom she still sees regularly—and has a lot of great memories from her time there. But she also dealt with some significant injuries and never felt like she reached her full potential. At times, it was difficult to get individualized coaching on a team with one distance coach and so many stars.
During the five years she ran for BYU, the team won three NCAA cross country titles and finished second twice. In 2001, when the team won the national title in dominant fashion, Stephens was the alternate. Had she been on any other team in the country, she likely would have been a top-five runner, but that was the closest she came to running at the NCAA cross country. On the track, she qualified for the NCAA indoors and outdoors in 1999.
During her junior year, Stephens developed a stress fracture in her shin, which initially went undiagnosed due to an unfortunate situation with the school’s athletic trainers. And in her final year of running, possibly in part because everyone on the team was required to train in the same model of Nike shoes, she developed plantar fasciitis in both feet.
The athletic trainers told her it was safe to run through it. “They were like, ‘It will go away once you stop running,’” she told Fast Women. “I ran on it a lot because it was my last season and I wanted to finish out my eligibility as best I could.”
She finished out her final track season, in 2002, injured. She tried orthotics, a cortisone shot, and time off, and nothing made a dent. In the meantime, Stephens went on with her life. She got married, earned a Ph.D. in art history, and had two children. She tried physical therapy multiple times, and with time, the pain in her right foot went away, but the pain in her left foot lingered.
Eventually, she was able to start walking more, and while living in Maryland, she got into hiking. “I was just thinking, ‘Well, I probably won’t ever be able to run again,’” she said. “And I’d sort of made my peace with it. So I thought.”
In 2020, Stephens and her family moved to the Phoenix area, and her passion for hiking grew. She had more options, and they were more challenging. One of her college teammates invited her to hike rim-to-rim in the Grand Canyon. To prepare, Stephens increased her training and felt her fitness build.
“I started to feel that endorphin rush that I did not realize I had missed so much, because you can really get your heart rate up pretty high on all the hills here,” she said. Hiking the Grand Canyon with her friend made her realize she wanted to push her body more, like she used to.
Stephens began working with a new physical therapist. She was pretty skeptical that anything could help, but it made a difference that her PT was also an endurance athlete. It also gave her access to tools that her previous PTs hadn’t used, including dry needling and shockwave therapy.
The process wasn’t easy, but she committed herself to doing her PT exercises, and time, combined with the additional treatment, led to meaningful improvement. She was gradually able to return to running. In November 2023, she ran a local turkey trot 5K—her first race in more than 21 years. “It was just a [silly] local race, but it was kind of a big deal to me to be able to do it at all,” she said.
Now 46, Stephens, has been able to run the race three years in a row. She’s still figuring out what her foot can handle, but she’s been able to run two to three times per week. She still considers herself more of a hiker, and has completed a number of challenging 20+ mile day hikes. Together, hiking and running have allowed her to rebuild her fitness and feel more like herself again.
“I just feel so incredibly grateful, and I’m not taking any run for granted,” she said. “I was in Colorado [earlier this year] and to be able to run again on the trails and roads that brought me to the sport as a high schooler is incredible. It makes me emotional.”
Other News
I was glad to see Alabama’s Doris Lemngole win The Bowerman last week. Her 8:58.15 steeplechase alone should have sealed it for her, but she also won the 2025 NCAA indoor 5,000m title. The award is solely for track accomplishments, but she is also a two-time NCAA cross country champion. She is the first person from Kenya to win the award.
It was heartbreaking to read the news of Christina Chambers’ murder. She was a sports broadcaster, mother, and avid runner.
Canada’s Lucia Stafford has joined the M11 Track Club.
Jamaica’s Kelly Ann Beckford, who ran for the University of Houston through 2024, has joined UA Mission Run Baltimore 800m.
This article has more details about what to expect at the World Cross Country Championships in Tallahassee next month.
Whittni Orton Morgan’s baby has arrived.
CNN published an article about efforts to change women’s sports uniforms, and it includes a Bailey Kowalczyk mention.
For New York Road Runners, Emilia Benton talked to Laura Thweatt about her new coaching role with the On Athletics Club.
Podcast Highlights
I always appreciate Sinclaire Johnson’s honesty and I thought she was really good on I’ll Have Another following her win at the Kalakaua Merrie Mile.
It was great to hear from Peninsula Distance Club coach Dena Evans on the Citius Mag podcast after she coached seven women to sub-2:37 performances at CIM. Evans has been coaching at a high level for years but rarely gets the recognition she deserves.
Malindi Elmore (who was coached by Evans at Stanford) talked about becoming the fastest Canadian of all time in the 45-49 age group on The Shakeout Podcast. Yes, she surpassed the men’s record, too, when she ran 2:24:53 at the Valencia Marathon.
I appreciated how frank Leigh Anne Sharek was about her recent Olympic Marathon Trials qualifying performance on Road to the Trials. “It was a struggle,” she said. “The first 26 miles, I was feeling like I wanted to drop out.”
Additional Episodes: Gabi Rooker on The Marathon Podcast | Great Britain’s Jazmin Sawyers on Podium Athletics | Jess McClain talked about pacing the Marathon Project (pre-race) on Inspired Soles | Amanda Mosborg on Road to the Trials | Anne Audain on Starting Line 1928 | Kenya’s Sharon Lokedi on The Running Effect | On Running in Circles, BYU’s Riley Chamberlain said she’ll redshirt the outdoor track season and come back next year
I really did think this week’s newsletter was going to be shorter, but some of the news was harder to predict than usual. I hope you all have the best week and happiest holidays possible.
Alison
Another great newsletter. Thanks for everything you have shared this year.
Loved the newsletter. One small clarification on the FTC point: you note that “it was pretty obvious to a lot of people following along that Citius was almost certainly being compensated.” That’s actually the key threshold the FTC uses.
Under the FTC’s Endorsement Guides, disclosure is required only when a material connection is not reasonably expected by the audience and could affect how they evaluate an endorsement (16 C.F.R. § 255.5). The FTC’s analysis is context- and audience-dependent, not a blanket requirement to disclose on every piece of content.