Well, here we are: the 200th Lap Count. If our “laps” were really 400 meters, we’d be closing out our 80th kilometer this week (also known as 1.4 Sifan Hassans). That might not be a lot for weekly mileage, but it’s a lot for weekly emails.

To put things a bit less esoterically, 200 editions means we’ve officially tied ABC sitcom Coach (starring Craig T. Nelson) in total number of “episodes,” and slipped right past CSI: NY (197 eps). If there was any way for us to make residuals off syndicated newsletter reruns, we’d be set for life.

It’s not lost on us that 200 weeks is a long time, and that some of you have read well over three years’ worth of track and field analysis, opinions, interviews, rants, and digressions. You forgave us for the occasional typo and always let us know when we missed something important. Whether you heeded the call of the wild Kyle Merber’s Twitter account and subscribed for Lap 1 or you just signed up (welcome!), we’re honored and touched that you’re here, sipping coffee with us every Wednesday morning, and want to say thank you. 

It’s a very cool feeling, knowing that something that launched as a pure passion project – and has more or less continued to operate as one – now regularly contributes to the discourse around our favorite sport. But rather than get too navel-gazy (and to make sure we don’t cut into too much Christmas and/or Hanukkah present-opening time), we’d rather reflect a little on just how much the sport has changed since TLC was conceived in March 2021.

In many ways, it feels like track and field has entered an entirely new era post-pandemic, and that all the changes, large and small, have added up to a sport that looks very different now than it did three years ago.

We made it through two Olympic cycles.

A lot can change over the course of a typical four-year Olympic cycle. Stars are born, stars burn out, stars tear their hamstrings, and one shining moment can make or break a career. For the athletes themselves, the quadrennial cadence of our Olympic-obsessed sport also forces tough decision-making about training setups, coaches, contracts, or even retirement. After Tokyo was delayed, we learned that a three-year cycle is still long enough for a lot of those same things to happen anyway. Athletes like Jakob Ingebrigtsen, Soufiane El Bakkali, and Sifan Hassan had never won an Olympic title when TLC began, and then-reigning Olympic champions still included David Rudisha, Mo Farah, and Usain Bolt. Shoutout to the special few who were on top then and are still on top now: Ryan Crouser, Faith Kipyegon, and Nafi Thiam.

Notable Centrowitz-shusher Cole Hocker “pulls a Centro” of his own.

Our prime readership demographic (nerds of a certain age) can undoubtedly recall with 100% certainty where they watched Matt Centrowitz put on a tactical masterclass en route to a stunning Olympic gold in the Rio 1500m. You probably got chills and thought some variation of “that was cool and I’m sure something like that will not happen again in my lifetime.” For Gen Z nerds, that special moment may have been Cole Hocker storming to victory at the 2021 Olympic Trials, shushing the crowd (but also maybe Centro) as he crossed the line. Hocker’s legend only grew from there, and in Paris, he secured an Olympic gold medal of his own – albeit in a faster race with a completely different race strategy.

The Bowerman Track Club moves to Eugene.

When this newsletter began, the Bowerman Track Club was still hoovering up every available North American distance record, and joining the team was one of few avenues for Americans (and Canadians) to land global distance medals. But a high profile doping scandal, numerous key retirements, the team’s departure from its long-term Portland home base, and the coaching staff taking on side jobs at the University of Oregon really scrambled things up in Bowermanland and left the once mighty squad reeling. Change can be good: just ask Grant Fisher, Elise Cranny, and Woody Kincaid. The pipeline of promising young talent hasn’t fully dried up – notably, Kaylee Mitchell and Charlie Hicks have signed up for the Schumacher System – so the club’s best days may not yet be behind them.

On Athletics Club arrives in a big way.

When On Athletics Club was founded in August 2020 on the backs of Dathan Ritzenhein and Joe Klecker, there was a real curiosity to see what, exactly, the company behind the weird-looking Roger Federer shoes would be able to get out of its first real foray into track and field. Fast-forward three years, and the answer is (so far): two Olympic medals, a Commonwealth Games title, World Indoor gold, three World Marathon Major victories, a bunch of national records, and one of the better podcasts in the game. Not a bad return on investment.

Eliud Kipchoge is no longer unbeatable.

When we clicked our first few keys on the Lap Count typewriter, three things in life were certain: death, taxes, and Eliud Kipchoge winning any marathon he started. 50% of the content churned out by the early CITIUS MAG ecosystem was about the inevitability of Kipchoge and much hay was made about his sub-two-hour marathon attempts. There was one small crack in the armor, a sixth-place finish at the weird 2020 London Marathon lap-a-thon, but an Olympic title defense, Tokyo Marathon victory, and lowering of his own world record in Berlin made that one race seem like a blip. But alas, even the Kipchoges of the world eventually turn 40, buckle under the strain of it all, and lose their automatic favorite status whenever they line up. His 2024 season only included two races: a 10th-place showing in Tokyo and a DNF in Paris. Is this the end of the road for ol’ Eliud? We doubt it. But his quest to win every world major is looking increasingly quixotic.

Mondo Duplantis and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone become unbeatable.

It’s easy to forget that two of the biggest track and field stars of the 21st century really only became world-beaters in the past three or four years. Mondo Duplantis was already the world record holder, thanks to his 6.17m and 6.18m leaps in February 2020, but the Swedish (via Louisiana) pole vault sensation had yet to pick up a senior global title until Tokyo (To be fair, he took silver at Worlds in 2019 at the age of 19). Now he’s got four gold medals, eight more world record bonuses, and no viable rival in the sport. Another fellow silver medalist from Doha is a little-known hurdler by the name of Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, who was already an Olympian after making the Rio team as a high schooler in 2016 but had yet to get the best of then-world record holder Dalilah Muhammad. She’s now claimed the WR for herself, lowered it nearly two full seconds, and left the competition on hurdle #9.

Name, Image, and Likeness comes to the NCAA.

College athletics looks very different now than it did a few years ago. A slew of changes have hit the NCAA system, some triggered by legal disputes and court rulings and others by the ever-evolving ecosystem of conferences, programs, and procedures that the overlords in Indianapolis work to manage. Perhaps the most dramatic was the June 2021 shift to allow collegiate athletes to financially benefit from use of their name, image, and likeness – for both the changes it brought and its ripple effects it caused. In the track and field world, shoe companies jumped at the opportunity to throw a few bucks and some gear at seemingly every up-and-coming athlete in the hopes of both promoting a new generation of runners and locking the best of athletes into pro contracts with the same brands. For a “non-revenue” sport, it sure seems like NCAA track and field is all about the money these days!

Collegiate distance running goes absolutely crazy.

Blame it on super shoes, COVID eligibility, NIL, international talent, the BU track… however and wherever you want to assign blame, the net result is that the NCAA record books have taken an absolute beating in the last few seasons, particularly in the distance events. We saw the first sub-15 5000m (and second, third, and fourth) and sub-31 10,000m on the women’s side and the first sub-13s and sub-27s performers (two each, actually) on the men’s – not to mention big chunks off the collegiate records in the men’s 1500m, women’s steeplechase, and women’s 800m. The depth has also skyrocketed. To use one hotly-debated example, 38 men broke four minutes in the mile during the 2021 indoor season. In 2024, a whopping 108 men got under the barrier.

Vaporflies aren’t quite the cheat code they once were.

We spent a lot more time going back and forth online about “super shoes” in 2021. Really, it all goes back to 2016, when the introduction of prototype carbon-plate Nike racers at the Olympic Marathon Trials got competitors all hot and bothered and fans studying up on terms like “stack height” and “running economy.” Vaporflies haven’t gone anywhere – just take a look at the start line of any road race with more than a handful of entrants. But the technological arms race of the late 2010s, after spilling over into track spike technology and introducing new “innovation” alongside a $500 price tag, seems to have evened out a bit. There’s a range of pricey but competitive offerings available on the wall at any given run-specialty store, and the results at the top have much more parity: the six U.S. Olympians selected at this year’s Marathon Trials represented four different brands (Nike, Puma, New Balance, and ASICS), as did the six Olympic medalists (Nike, adidas, ASICS, and On).

5 minutes get knocked off the women’s marathon world record.

Remember in 2019, how Brigid Kosgei’s 2:14:04 felt otherworldly when the then-25-year-old Kenyan knocked Paula Radcliffe off the top of the record books? Well that’s practically jogging these days, as Tigst Assefa shaved another two minutes off in 2023 then Ruth Chepngetich took the record places no woman had ever gone before, into sub-2:10 territory. It’s a reminder of how quickly the sport can evolve at times, and also how quickly a shocking outlier becomes a new normal. Sub-2:15 is still quite special, but now the barrier has been broken six different times by five different athletes, and Chepngetich also now claims the mixed-bag honor of holding the fastest non-winning marathon time in history at 2:15:37, which she clocked en route to a second-place finish behind Sifan Hassan at Chicago in 2023.