52,149 people not named Ruth Chepngetich also finished Sunday’s Chicago Marathon. And while it’s hard to imagine any of them having a better outing than she did, what kind of weekly athletics newsletter would we be if we didn’t at least breeze through some of those performances from the Windy City? 

There was a fine men’s race, but pretty much everybody has already forgotten about it. Eventual champion John Korir was part of a pack of 10+ dudes at the halfway point, hitting 13.1 miles in a brisk 1:02:19. The reason we use a phrase like “brisk” here and not something a bit more scintillating like “blazing” or “hot, hot, hot!” is because when the late Kelvin Kiptum set his world record in Chicago last year, he clocked a 1:00:48 split. And therein lies part of the problem – the marathon is such a time-based race that unless an athlete is registering the sort of splits required to give the WR a scare, we invariably lose a bit of interest.

Although a 2:00:XX performance went out the window almost as soon as the gun went off, we still got to watch a masterclass performance. After that 1:02:19 half we mentioned earlier, he pressed his foot to the gas and dispatched the entire field with a couple sub-4:30 mile splits. Korir ultimately won by over two minutes, in a time – 2:02:44 – that makes him the sixth fastest marathoner in history.

That’s one hell of a performance! But it wasn’t a world record. It wasn’t the result of a 26.2-mile duel that culminated in a sprint finish. And it wasn’t billed as a grudge match between Korir and a loathed rival (that’s a rarity in the marathon – you just don’t race the same people enough to get an Ingebrigtsen-Kerr thing going). So what we’re left with is a marathon that is empirically one of the best ever run, but that barely triggers so much as a drip of dopamine for fans at this point.

Susanna Sullivan steals the show.

Any time an athlete of Keira D’Amato’s, Sara Hall’s, Emma Bates’s, or Betsy Saina’s caliber lines up for a marathon, there’s at least the possibility that the American record is going to go down. The fact that we had four such athletes in this field sent American distance running fans into something of a tizzy. Rumors of never-before-reached fitness circulated about at least a couple of these athletes, so no matter how much they downplayed their intention to take a stab at sub-2:18:29 in the days leading up to the race, the buzz was there.

But D’Amato ended up dropping out with plantar pain a little before halfway, Hall and Saina had a rough second half, and Bates – one of the most consistent runners in the game – had an “only okay” kinda day, finishing 11th in 2:24:00. Instead, this was a statement race for Susana Sullivan, who missed out on the Olympic Trials Marathon due to injury, but has since been “super patient.” During her leadup to Chicago, she ran fewer miles than she had for previous marathon builds, and the result was a healthy stretch of training she called “a dream couple of months.”

This isn’t an anti-mileage section, nor is it an anti-mileage newsletter! We don’t mean to diminish the importance of going out there and pounding the pavement in preparation for a race as demanding as the marathon. But even in the long-distance world, sometimes less is more. Sullivan’s success in Chicago is a nice reminder that stacking months of what others might consider B+ training often yields better results than the home run swing approach, where eight consecutive A+ weeks are rendered moot if you’re too banged up or fatigued to tap into the earned fitness.

So kudos to Sullivan on a methodical training cycle that allowed her to take a risk on Sunday – she went out at damn near her half marathon PB – and hold on for a race that catapults her closer to the upper crust of American marathoning.

CJ Albertson is the most exciting – and at times frustrating – American marathoner.