At the track in the woods, in the southeastern corner of Nike's 200-acre Beaverton, Ore., campus, it is mid-May and the weather is good for running. It is neither warm nor cold, the sky is overcast, and there is no wind. Shalane Flanagan, the 2008 Olympic bronze medalist and the American record-holder at 5,000m and 10,000m outdoors and 3,000m and 5,000m indoors, is warming up on a 2-mile wood-chipped trail that encircles the Nike campus. Her coach, Jerry Schumacher, is inspecting the track. It has rained the evening before, and near the start and finish line, which is guarded by a statue of Michael Johnson on one side and a sign advising walkers and joggers to use lanes 4 and 5 and abstain from wearing spiked footwear on the other, there is a slug. It has Schumacher concerned. "I've got to kick that off there. Because that poor guy, if he gets trampled --"
"He doesn't stand a chance."
"No. He's dead where he sits. If I leave him on the track."
There is nothing else on the track, or at least nothing of note. Schumacher walks its length anyway and scuffs away some leaves, sticks, and several more slugs where he finds them. Soon, Flanagan, who is nearing her 29th birthday, returns from her warm-up, works through a series of drills and strides, and runs 13 600m repeats at 10K pace with short jogging recoveries. This is nearly 8,000m worth of work and it is done at 30-minute 10,000m pace, which only five women in history have ever sustained for an entire 10,000m race. Flanagan's PR is 30:22.22; she is No. 17 on the world all-time list and tops the American list by a margin of 28 seconds. Simon Bairu, a 27:23 runner and the Canadian national record-holder, paces her through 12 of 13. Schumacher and Flanagan call the workout a fartlek, though what Flanagan does is neither unstructured nor unscripted, as "speed play" might suggest.
Because each interval in this fartlek begins and ends in a different place from the one previous, Schumacher must move around constantly, checking Bairu and Flanagan's splits and monitoring Flanagan's effort. He does both volubly and enthusiastically. Among media and the running public, Schumacher has developed a reputation as tight-lipped, answering questions brusquely and more often avoiding interviews altogether, but in person he is irrepressible. At the adidas Grand Prix in New York in mid-June, I arranged to speak with Flanagan after her race in the 1500m. When she appeared, behind schedule, she told me that she was late meeting her parents for dinner and had to leave. "I'm really sorry," she said. "Jerry got talking."
On June 16, three days after returning from New York, Flanagan announced her intention to race the New York City Marathon on Nov. 7. It will be the first marathon and only the second long road race of her career, though the announcement, widely anticipated in the American distance-running community, surprised few. Flanagan has spoken about her wish to run marathons for years and, without committing outright, has long suggested that New York was a likely candidate for her debut. Partly in expectation of the move upward, Flanagan joined Schumacher and his Oregon Track Club group a year and a half ago and began renovating her approach to distance training from the ground up. The transition has not been entirely smooth. Her first year under Schumacher was the first year in 15 in which she failed to set a personal best, and by almost any measure she has lost her position as the dominant female distance runner in the U.S. Even among her cohort of driven elite runners, Flanagan is extremely competitive, and the demotion has stung. For now, though, she believes the decision will pay off , and she believes the timing is right. "After Beijing, I looked at the rest of my career and what my goals were, and there are still some track times that I'd like to hit," she told me in May. "But I think my number one goal is to win a major U.S. marathon. Even over winning another Olympic medal."
Flanagan's debut in the marathon is inevitably accompanied by a reference to her genetic lineage: her father, Steve, was a cross country specialist for the Colorado Track Club in the 1970s who once ran a 2:18 marathon, and her mother, as Cheryl Bridges (she is now Cheryl Treworgy), placed fourth at the world cross country championships in 1969 and held the women's marathon world record, in 2:49:40, from 1971 until 1973. The couple's union lasted from the mid-1970s when they were both training in Boulder until Shalane was five, in 1986. Shalane and her younger sister, Maggie, who returned from a two-year Peace Corps deployment to Madagascar last November, were born in Boulder and moved with Steve to Marblehead, Mass., after their parents' separation. Steve Flanagan is now 62 and works retailing athletic equipment. Cheryl is a running photographer. Much of Steve's career was spent in physical education, and he describes himself as an exercise evangelist. Shalane's first experiences running were with her father, who began inviting her on 2-mile Sunday runs when she was 10 or 11. But Steve is an exercise evangelist, not necessarily a running evangelist, and these first runs were ad hoc and never mandatory. Shalane did not begin running competitively until taking up track in eighth grade, and even then kept her distance from the sport. She played soccer through the fall of her freshman year at Marblehead High School (her first season of cross country was in 1997, her sophomore year) and swam for Marblehead during the winter instead of running on Marblehead's indoor track team. "I can't say that she ever overtrained," Steve says. "But developmentally I thought it would be good to take a break. Psychologically, too." She was never much of a swimmer.
Marblehead is one of two places in the U.S. where Flanagan is treated like a celebrity. The other is Eugene, Ore., "Track Town, USA," and Flanagan more or less avoids it because the attention is too much. (Flanagan's husband and agent, Steve Edwards, says that the last time she worked out at Hayward Field in Eugene a pack of track fans materialized and began recording her splits.) Flanagan was a standout at Marblehead, ultimately winning a national title in the mile indoors before entering the University of North Carolina in the fall of 2000. While there, she won two NCAA cross country titles and qualified for the 2004 U.S. Olympic team at 5,000m. Flanagan signed with Nike soon before the 2004 trials and stayed with assistant coach Michael Whittlesey in North Carolina through 2005, but an undiagnosed foot pain that arose after the Olympics kept her from racing in 2006. Eventually, she would have an extra bone removed from her left foot and move from North Carolina, where she and Edwards own a house and plan to settle, to Portland, where she began working with John Cook. She returned to the track in 2007 and immediately set to breaking records. Her second race back from injury was an 8:33.25 3,000m indoors, an American record by 6 seconds, and by the end of the summer she would lower Regina Jacobs' national 5,000m record and qualify for a second world championships team at 5,000m.
Flanagan says that she chose UNC in part to ensure that her collegiate experience was multidimensional; she and Edwards like to emphasize that she still makes room for balance in her life. When I asked Flanagan about her career's consistent progression and longevity, she said she guards against mental burnout, but basically that she doesn't really know. Edwards jumped in: "You'll still go out and eat a hamburger, and we'll take vacations, we'll get away from the sport," he said. It is hard to find an elite athlete who won't at least pay lip service to balance, and to a non-professional runner it was jarring to hear Edwards brag about eating hamburgers, but it is also true that Flanagan is one of the rare female distance runners to have parlayed high school success into even rarer achievement at the collegiate and professional levels. Whether she deserves credit for a willingness to eat hamburgers or the opposite is an open question; that she has been running in a high-pressure environment since she was 15 and shows few signs of collapsing under the load at age 29, even coming off the worst year of her career, is not.
In the fall of 1999, her senior year at Marblehead, Flanagan arrived at the Foot Locker Northeast Regional race with something to prove. She had been ill for the qualifying race her junior year and, with a solid lock on the last qualifying spot, had collapsed 30 meters from the finish line and missed nationals. She returned to Van Cortlandt in '99 ready for war. "Instead of just making it to nationals, which I would have been delighted with, I wanted to set a course record, I wanted to win, I wanted to end my senior year with a bang," she recalls. With Erin Donohue, her future teammate at UNC and later under Cook, she hit the first mile under 5 minutes. It was too much for both runners. Donahue struggled home in 79th, and Flanagan, in front of the main field by a huge margin, collapsed within sight of the finish line for the second year in a row.
"She is one of the most competitive people I've ever met," Whittlesey says. "She needs to know how to use it at the right time in the marathon. She has the ability to put her body into the danger zone." Whittlesey, now the distance coach at Kansas, believes, uncontroversially, that Flanagan also has the physical make-up to run with or ahead of the best marathoners in the world. But the marathon has a record of humbling aggressive athletes, and Whittlesey bookends his comments with an important caveat. If Flanagan cannot control herself early, he says, she may find her first marathon a difficult race to master.
This concerns Flanagan, too. Part of her brilliance has been an ability to close out distraction during races, including the distraction of her own mind, and run her body to its limit. Very few athletes can do this, but if anything allowed Flanagan to win an Olympic bronze medal in Beijing, 24 hours after recovering from a serious bout of food poisoning, it was this singularity of purpose at the time of competition. Flanagan had qualified to run both the 10,000m and 5,000m in Beijing, and before the 10,000m she was so ill that Cook tried to talk her out of running to save herself for the 5,000m. She was determined, however, and the race is now a matter of record: Flanagan outran future world champion Linet Masai over the final 800m, broke her own American mark, and won a bronze medal, only the second women's Olympic medal at 10,000m in U.S. history.
Still, it is impossible to know which races will reward aggression and myopia and which will punish them. In early May, an hour before Chris Solinsky, another Schumacher-trained runner, waited patiently for Galen Rupp to lead him through 9,000m before becoming the first non-African to run under 27 minutes for 10,000m, Flanagan tried to will herself under her own 14:44 American 5,000m record. She fell well short. In part, she was the victim of circumstance --the race rabbit made it less than a mile, leaving Flanagan to run alone for over 3,000m on a windy evening --but she was unable to reevaluate her race plan as circumstances shifted. She faltered over the last lap and was passed by Shannon Rowbury, her former teammate under Cook, in the final straight, and ran 15:04.23. When she won the 10,000m bronze in Beijing, she passed halfway in 15:11.
Flanagan's transition to the marathon comes with an added level of intrigue because its success will be viewed, rightly or wrongly, as either validation of her move from Cook to Schumacher or condemnation of it. "The question is, what's going to happen now that she's away from Cook?" one veteran journalist asked me. For many this is exactly the question, and Flanagan's struggles over the past year have done little to put it down.
But it is the important question in only a limited sense. Cook is a mid-distance specialist, and Flanagan's intention to run marathons --which, given her family history, was not a difficult intention to divine --gave the Cook-Flanagan union a finite shelf life in the best scenario. That scenario did not play out: Flanagan left Cook abruptly in early 2009 and ignited a mildly acrimonious controversy in distance-running circles. (In published stories, Cook accused Edwards of meddling and stealing coaching secrets; Flanagan said that she and Cook had never meshed "personally and professionally." After that, things settled down, at least in public.) Flanagan's decision to leave was accelerated by Cook's sudden dismissal of Donohue, Flanagan's close friend, from the group's altitude camp in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, forcing Flanagan to close ranks and head back to the U.S. Flanagan recently told reporters that her decision to leave Cook was about her marathon goals. That is an important part of the story, but the immediate decision may have had more to do with Flanagan and Cook's souring relationship and with Donohue's dismissal, even if thoughts about the marathon were on the horizon.
A more interesting question, though a less salacious one, is whether Schumacher can apply his long-view coaching philosophy to an athlete whom he has not guided from late adolescence, and get the same results that he has had with the other athletes in his group --Solinsky, Matt Tegenkamp, Evan Jager, Bairu and Tim Nelson --or whether Flanagan will continue to struggle. The question remains open, though the final race of Flanagan's summer track season, a controlled and patient 14:49.08 5,000m at the Prefontaine Classic, Flanagan's fastest 5,000m under Schumacher, could be the nascent signs of an answer.
Inside the Schumacher camp, there is little concern. Bairu, Nelson, Flanagan and Josh Rohatinsky, the 2006 NCAA cross country champion, are all taking the late summer off from racing to prepare for New York. Schumacher, of course, is riding a year-long wave of success that is unparalleled in the U.S., and he enjoys a great deal of credibility and authority with his athletes (and, it should be noted, with the public, his media persona notwithstanding). Schumacher's word is gold in the camp, and it is no wonder why. Of the five men in American history to break 13 minutes for 5,000m, Schumacher coaches two, Solinsky and Tegenkamp. His runners swept the podium in the 5,000m at USAs in 2009, and before coming to Portland he led a string of teams that recorded five top-two finishes at the NCAA cross country championships from 2002 to 2006. The least accomplished Schumacher-bred athlete is Tim Nelson, and he is a world championships qualifier with a 27:31.56 10,000m best.
But the results of the past year are the fruit of years of work. Schumacher has been coaching Solinsky and Nelson since 2003, Tegenkamp since 2000. In the same period, Flanagan and Rohatinsky bounced between two different coaches each before settling with Schumacher, and, though they run different events, in relative terms both have significantly underperformed their Oregon Track Club teammates. Flanagan says that Schumacher is training her as if she were a much younger athlete; after low-mileage, speed-intensive programs with Whittlesey and Cook, she is finally beginning to develop her aerobic system. She now runs twice a day, something she rarely did early in her career, and her mileage has increased correspondingly. With Cook, she maxed out between 70 and 80 miles a week, while under Schumacher she has gone over 100 and expects to top that during specific marathon training in the fall. Her workouts, which were demanding under Cook but not long, now routinely total between 8,000 and 10,000m. In the back two rooms of the condo she owns with Edwards in Portland's Northwest District neighborhood, Nike has installed altitude machines which lower the oxygen content to a level similar to what she might experience naturally at 12,000 feet. When it comes to aerobic training, Schumacher told me, "She's a rookie."
Still, Schumacher has little direct experience coaching the marathon, and the only athlete in his group to attempt one under his tutelage, Rohatinsky, dropped out of the Boston Marathon in April. Schumacher's athletes all complain that they do marathon training, but there is a possibility that what they do is in fact proper 5,000m/10,000m training, and that the marathon demands something different --and something therefore untested with this coach and these runners. I asked Schumacher what he thought about advising a group of new marathoners as a new marathon coach. His response was typically vague. "I'm excited about it," he said. "Although it's really early in their careers, I'm excited about it and I think they're excited about it. This is a big challenge." Well, sure.
In January, Flanagan made her half marathon debut at the U.S. championships in Houston. She won in 1:09:39, a good run but nowhere near the barnstorming 1:06:57 that Kara Goucher unleashed when she defeated Paula Radcliffe at the Great North Run in 2007. The comparisons to Goucher, who also made her marathon debut in New York City and who trains with the other half of the Oregon Track Club under Alberto Salazar, are likely to grow. So, too, with Deena Kastor, whose 2:19:36 is the only major American distance record that Flanagan does not own, and who will be on the starting line in New York. Flanagan's race in Houston was a fitness test --had she run well enough, Schumacher may have let her debut in Boston this past spring, her hometown marathon, but she did not. Keeping her out of Boston wasn't a very hard sell; Flanagan has said consistently that she will run a marathon when Schumacher tells her that she is ready, and the ease with which she accepted Schumacher's decision is a measure both of Flanagan's professionalism and Schumacher's influence. But neither are limitless.
A day before Flanagan's fartlek on the Nike track, she and Edwards drove from her condo in Portland to the Nike campus for an easy 1-hour run. She dropped a backpack in the Lance Armstrong fitness center before heading outside with Edwards to warm up around an adjacent soccer field. Schumacher has measured a 533m loop around the perimeter of the field and, in following it, his athletes have worn a faint path on the field's otherwise perfectly cut surface. After one loop, Tegenkamp drifted alongside. Solinsky arrived after another, then Nelson; after the group had moved out onto the wood-chipped trail Jager and Bairu appeared. Edwards, a 1:52 high school 800m runner who met Flanagan on the track team at UNC, has acted as her training partner since 2005. He is not built for long-distance running, and the training has been harder for him than for his wife. Bairu's track season ended after he broke the Canadian national record at Stanford, and for six weeks in May and June he spelled a grateful Edwards on Flanagan's longer workouts. Flanagan and Solinsky have spoken about scheduling some of Solinsky's long runs to coincide with her marathon pace work, and Edwards and Schumacher are keeping their eyes open for a permanent training partner for Flanagan, who was hoping Jenny Barringer might sign with Nike when she turned pro in January. (She went with New Balance.) Nationally, there are only a few women who can last 3,000m at Flanagan's goal 10,000m pace, and choices are slim.
If New York goes well, Flanagan's second marathon will be at the U.S. Olympic trials in January, 2012, and, if she qualifies, she will run the Olympic marathon in London. She is approaching the marathon during a down swing in the event, domestically and internationally, although neither she nor Schumacher has expressed much interest in any strategic implications of the transition. Schumacher, to his credit, is focused on preparing Flanagan for the distance, not the competition. Flanagan's timing also works well for the New York Road Runners, who like to have a marketable woman on the starting line every year, and this year, even with Goucher and Radcliffe skipping the fall marathon season to have babies, they have two in Kastor and Flanagan --the past and future of American marathoning, or something like that. I asked Flanagan if she always wanted to run marathons. "I remember in high school, I had just started running and maybe at the time my mile PR was 5:10, and watching these women run 5:20s blew my mind. To think that you could string that together for 26 miles was amazing," she said.
"I guess you could say I wanted to be a marathoner. But I didn't know if the marathon would like me, necessarily. I was hoping that one day I could get to the point where I was strong enough to run one. I think it's a huge feat to do that. Whether it's competitive or not."
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