CITIUS MAG: Once you run a big performance, people start following you on Strava, other pros are talking about your training — how did that feel?

VINNY: There are definitely more eyes than ever before. The biggest surreal moment was being on a podcast with Rory (Linkletter) and he said everyone in Flagstaff is talking about me. I was like, “Why? Like I’m in Youngstown.” But yeah, even around town now, people at my girlfriend’s gym ask how I feel about Chicago. It’s almost a more public announcement of what’s been going on, but it’s also been happening our whole lives. I’ve been posting on Strava since high school, every day, so that part’s not out of the ordinary. It’s just funny there are more eyes on it.

CITIUS MAG: Let’s go back to June 28th — the reel on the CITIUS MAG Instagram of you running at Planet Fitness, 26 miles into a treadmill run. What was happening there?

VINNY: Yeah, it was hot in Ohio. That part was more of an experiment than the rest of the block. I’d been back at it two weeks after Toledo, already at seventy miles a week, which was the bread and butter of my last block. I had a 6-8 week middle phase where the question was: How short can we make the marathon feel? The mindset was: If people do 24- or 25-mile long runs to prepare for a marathon, let’s train for 50K. Let me do 26- to 29-mile long runs and make that marathon feel like just over a two-hour effort.

Seven weeks in a row, I was over 26 miles. Then I took a few lighter long run weeks, then did 30 miles on August 30th, then 28, 26, and then started coming back down. That was my big block of — How short can we make the marathon feel, not at marathon pace, but putting in like a 50-mile effort mindset. I just wanted to be in a pretty decent zone for a long time, so that when I get to mile 16 and I’ve got 10 miles left, I’m thinking about a day I ran 30 more miles.

CITIUS MAG: You allow yourself to get pretty close to the ceiling in workouts. What are you learning from tiptoeing up there?

VINNY: Anyone who’s ever coached me or trained with me would say I’ve never shied away from pushing hard. Even on race day in the past, when things went wrong, it was usually not a fitness problem — it was under-fueling or just not quite being ready for the day. The treadmill is actually a good tool to hold me back. That’s why everyone asks whether the treadmill translates to the roads — and yeah, the treadmill is easier, that’s pretty well established. But I know that when I get to the roads, I can push harder and reach that same ceiling. So the treadmill work is about building the fitness without always going all the way to the well, saving that for when it matters.

CITIUS MAG:Charles said on this podcast that it’s good that many roads lead to Rome, and that he texted you to say he was hyped to have you in the Chicago field. What did you make of that?

VINNY: Charles hit it right on the head. Many roads lead to Rome. I’ve had five coaches in college and learned something from every one of them. But if I’m not going to have a coach, I really have to figure out what works for me specifically, because on a big team you can’t be fully individualistic.

My whole thing has been that I know I’m fitter. I feel stronger. And that’s because I’ve put every single thought into this training based on what I feel, not what I have to do because a coach wrote it down for next week. That’s what excites me most. I’m not just hoping it’s working. I know it’s working.

CITIUS MAG: Are you also treating this as a big experiment with the treadmill and how much you’ll incorporate it and the data you’ll carry into the next block before the Trials?

VINNY: It definitely depends on the next race. If it’s New York, I’ve got Milk Creek Park right across the street, which is extremely hilly. With the treadmill running, this was an experiment and a way of making the mileage feel manageable. It didn’t always feel manageable, but the lesson was how much volume and intensity I can actually take.

In the future, I can probably keep the higher base volume but bring up the intensity, because I know what the floor is now. You pick your battles. You get one or two chances to really go to the well and put something great on the board. This block has been about figuring out where some levels are. I was mindful of what I was pushing and where I was throughout it.

CITIUS MAG: Emma Grace Hurley sent in a question. She says: What’s your five-year plan?

VINNY: Really cool. She’s been killing it this year — I see her name everywhere…There’s a collective push happening in American marathon running right now and it’s exciting to feel like a part of it.

Five-year planis being part of this push for the U.S. marathon to be genuinely competitive at the world level. Growing up, it was always Kenya, Ethiopia, Japan putting up the biggest numbers. The next five years in American marathoning are going to be something. I’ll at minimum have four races on the calendar next years, including the Trials. But yeah, going race by race right now.

CITIUS MAG: Let’s talk some specific workouts. September 8th — 2x50-minutes in the morning, 4x20-minutes in the afternoon. That wasn’t even the original plan?

VINNY: Yeah. When I pick my workouts, I write out five options the night before or the morning of based on how the body feels. Then I’ll text someone and ask them to pick one. I always have one really tough one on there and I always somewhat hope they don’t pull it. That day two people picked the long workouts. I knew I wanted to do forty-plus. That was one of my tune-up weeks — how much volume can we get at a specific intensity?

It was supposed to be fifty and forty for the morning. I got to forty-five minutes into the second rep and I was like, well, I’m already here, might as well go to fifty. Then I thought — we’re already at twenty-five miles on the day, I can stop at forty or push the envelope. We pushed the envelope and got to forty-five miles for the day. That’s one I’ll remember for a long time.

CITIUS MAG: 36 miles at about 4:56 pace. Eighty-six miles across three days. What does your body feel like the next day?

VINNY: I went to work and my coworker Mark asked, “Since what? A long run?” And I said “No, since like... I don’t even know.” It was a lot. In college, my best week was eighty-five miles in six days. I had just done eighty-five in four. And then I still had three days left in the week, including a 26+ mile long run. I hit 138 miles that week. That was my peak mileage week, my last giant — I’d say stupid — week. But it was a lot of fun.

CITIUS MAG: What’s the fridge look like?

VINNY: I’ve got a couple of fridges — my girlfriend’s house, my parents’ house. We’re big hunters, so there’s a lot of venison. I’m big on a protein shake in the morning even when the gut’s a little rough from the day before. Don’t count calories, but try to get in as many as possible. Last week I couldn’t figure out what I wanted at breakfast — I was starving — thought about McDonald’s for the calories, ended up with a giant Arizona burrito from Filiberto’s. Sunday dinners with my parents every week. We meal prep chicken thighs for the whole week — definitely better than chicken breasts. Meal prepping helps, and having a support system behind it is very beneficial.

CITIUS MAG: There were some mile repeats at 4:44 pace. That’s 2:04 pace. When people observe your training and say he hasn’t really done anything at race pace — is that how you view it?

VINNY: Yeah. In the Toledo block, I initially thought my race pace was going to be 5:10, then figured around 5:00, and I never really pushed a lot under 4:47 or 4:48 — whatever the actual average pace ended up being. I didn’t really want to change that approach much. You get excited when you start seeing 4:30-something on the watch, and that can blur your vision. Is that my marathon pace? Do I really want to run that for 18 miles in one long run?

What I like to do is work a little under goal pace and a little over it — make a sandwich in the middle — without spending too much time exactly at it. I don’t even want to know what my marathon pace feels like in training, because then on race day I’d either get excited and push harder, or think something’s off because it doesn’t feel quite like training. So I’ve been working around it rather than on it.

But the big thing — I want to come into these final weeks still feeling like I could PR my mile. Not just my marathon. My mile. And I believe I can run four or five seconds faster than my PB right now, which is sitting at 3:59 from a Notre Dame home meet in 2024.

CITIUS MAG: You ran a 4:11 uphill two weeks ago.

VINNY: It was pretty flat at the start and then North Park has rolling hills, and I think the last half mile was net uphill. At least I’d like to believe that. That run had a specific theme — I wanted to do something very hard early, see if I could bounce back and run an hour and a half afterward, and end up getting down under marathon pace on a second effort at the end. It was a real cool realization: even after doing something extremely hard early, you can come back later. That was kind of the whole day.

CITIUS MAG: Expectations for Chicago. With all the American record talk — are you racing the clock or racing the guys?

VINNY: I feel like everyone’s going in to race the guys. What Clayton did was really smart because it sets a baseline. If you’re an American trying to run the record at Chicago, you know there’s going to be a pacer at a specific pace, and you at least have a framework to orient around. In my mind, there is an extremely high probability that the record gets rewritten next Sunday. That’s not a crazy thing to say with Clayton, Charles, and — I’d like to put myself in that conversation, but those two for sure.

Where I sit is: I know I’m fitter than I was in Toledo. Unless something catastrophic happens, I’ve already done something really cool this year. I found what I’m meant to do. So a PB would be great. How much of a PB is the question. The American record is about seventy-five seconds away from what I ran in Toledo. It’s been in the back of my mind. But even if I run one second faster, or ten seconds, or a minute — I’m still a marathoner. That’s what I’ve been meant to do. We’re still really young in this thing.

CITIUS MAG: It sounds more freeing than pressure-driven.

VINNY: Totally. Toledo was a debut effort — what I could do alone, without help, with just the crowd and my support system. This is my debut race of the marathon. And no matter what, you’re going to gain time just from having people to race with, people to take the reins when you’re questioning yourself at mile sixteen. They’re probably trying to drop me, but I’ll rationalize that they’re helping me out. I’m just excited to race on a properly closed course too. In Toledo I was jumping over flower bushes at 4:40 pace with six miles to go.

CITIUS MAG: What’s the moment of the race you’ve visualized most?

VINNY: Honestly, the start line. Just taking a deep breath, taking in a smile, looking around, realizing all this work is done — this is the fun part. My whole thing going into this has been: how do I get to the start line healthy? I’ve never been able to say that in my entire career. Not even in Toledo. And now I’m there. So I’m just really looking forward to standing on that line feeling strong, because I’ve been to two-and-a-half hours of effort on the treadmill, I’ve had two-hour-twenty runs outside — but I’ve never stood on a start line feeling like I’m genuinely ready to go.

CITIUS MAG: Tell me the story of USADA showing up at Planet Fitness.

VINNY: Okay. So it was actually my girlfriend’s birthday. Tuesday is usually when I’m most on schedule — within fifteen minutes of where I want to be. I waited for her to go to work, was going to grab her a coffee, and was literally on my way to the gym when I get a call from an unknown number. It had a name at the bottom. I pick up and it’s USADA, saying they’re at the Niles Planet Fitness and I’m not there. I told them I’m 12 minutes away, I’m on my way right now, I just got caught up grabbing coffee.

I wasn’t sure if I’d listed my workout start as 8:00 or 8:30. They called at 8:15. They want to do a blood draw before a hard effort or at least 60 minutes after. So they were probably trying to catch me early.

I got there, they did the blood draw at the lobby table while I got on the treadmill for my warm-up — so people are walking into Planet Fitness and I’ve got a band around my arm with a needle in it. Then I did the urine sample after my warm-up, because that’s always the last thing I do before I leave the house and I was not ready at that point.

The whole thing from when I showed up to when they left was maybe forty-five minutes. They were really nice and cordial. From the time I walked in, I basically just said — give me twenty minutes for a warm-up and I’ll be ready. They stayed for the warm-up and were very cool about the whole thing. I had people texting me like, dude, were you getting drug tested at Planet Fitness? Because everyone saw the blood draw happening at a table in the lobby. Pretty funny day.

CITIUS MAG: Where are we with Planet Fitness on the partnership side?

VINNY: They gave me a free year membership, a quarter zip, and a water bottle I use every day when I forget mine. They’ve reached out.

As far as where things stand more broadly, Hawi and I were on the same wavelength of — let’s get the shoe deal done first, focus on Chicago, and then open the floor to everything else. I love their gyms. It’s a couple of minutes down the road. The only real inconvenience is when it gets really hot in Niles and Warren and everyone runs their AC at once and just shuts down all the power to the Eastwood Mall.

CITIUS MAG: One final question: Win, lose, or blow up, what do you want people to take away from your 2026?

VINNY: That’s a hard thing to navigate. I’ve never really had eyes on me before, so I’m still figuring out what people should take away from what I’m doing…Figuring out the right balance of what to share and what the message is — I think that’s actually my biggest next step, regardless of what happens in Chicago. But whatever happens, I’m just going to keep being me. This sport has treated me so well this year. I have too much respect for it to change.

Listen to the full episode here.