On April 14, Meb Keflezighi's improbable Boston Marathon victory, which was the first by an American man or woman in that race since 1985, proved once again that he is the ultimate big-race competitor. But with all respect to Keflezighi's talent and longevity, American fans who remember cheering Keflezighi's Olympic silver medal-winning run a decade earlier would be forgiven for wondering, "Who else we got?" Why is Keflezighi the only American winning majors these days?

The answer is, like the marathon, long and difficult to master.

"The state of American marathoning has to be looked at in the context of distance running in this country as a whole, and in that respect we're at a level we've never been at," says Sam Grotewold, elite athlete coordinator for New York Road Runners. The U.S. is indeed enjoying something of a golden age in distance running. Galen Rupp won a silver medal in the 10,000m at the London Olympics and recently improved his own American record at that distance. Leo Manzano won silver in the 1500m at the London Games, and Matthew Centrowitz placed fourth in that event. Bernard Lagat, a five-time world champion who is in in the twilight of his career, won silver in the 3,000m at this year's world indoor championships, while Ben True and Hassan Mead, two promising athletes in their 20s, each ran 13:02 for 5,000m on the track in May.

On the women's side, recent results have been similarly auspicious. Shalane Flanagan won bronze in the 10,000m at the 2008 Beijing Games, the first Olympic track medal by an American woman in a distance event since 1992. Shannon Rowbury won a bronze in the 1500m at the 2009 world championships. Jenny Simpson won the 1500m world title in 2011 and followed that up with a world silver medal in Moscow last summer. This July in Paris, she came within a tenth of a second of Mary Slaney's 31-year-old American record. Later that month in Monaco, Molly Huddle improved her American record at 5,000 meters to 14:42.64. These are fast and heady times for American distance running.

RECENT UPSWING

Historically, Grotewold says, there has been an inverse relationship between America's performance on the track and in the marathon. "Usually, the U.S. is successful at one of those, kind of at the cost of the other. That's not the case right now. I think we could certainly make the argument that they're both up."

Grotewold cites performances by 25-year-old Lauren Kleppin, who in March placed third in the Los Angeles Marathon in 2:28:48; Annie Bersagel, a 31-year-old Oslo-based attorney who ran 2:28:59 to win Dusseldorf in April; 27-year-old Clara Santucci, who in May won Pittsburgh in 2:32:24 (2.5 minutes slower than her personal best); and, of course, Keflezighi, whose Boston was a personal-best 2:08:37.

Winning Pittsburgh or Dusseldorf may not exactly be the stuff of childhood daydreams, but the data bears out what Grotewold is saying: American marathoning is "up" right now, at least compared with the dark days of 2000. That year, the winner of the men's and women's Olympic marathon trials ran 2:15:30 and 2:33:31, respectively, and the U.S. sent just one entrant in each race to the Sydney Games. In 2001, the average time of the nation's 20 fastest marathoners ballooned to 2:17:43 and 2:39:40, the slowest averages of the past 30 years.

Since then, the U.S. has improved significantly at the distance. The Moroccan-born Khalid Khannouchi became an American citizen and in 2002 improved his world record to 2:05:38. At the 2004 Athens Games, the U.S. was the only nation to win two marathon medals--the silver by Keflezighi and a bronze by Deena Kastor. In 2006 Kastor improved her American record and broke 2:20 for the first time by running 2:19:36 to win London. Keflezighi won the 2009 New York City Marathon. Kara Goucher and Flanagan have each recorded top-three finishes in New York. Ryan Hall ran 2:06:17 in London in 2008 and a tail-wind-assisted 2:04:58 in Boston in 2011. In the same race, Desiree Linden ran 2:22:38 to become the third-fastest American woman ever. Flanagan took over that spot at this year's Boston, where she ran 2:22:02. Dathan Ritzenhein has broken 2:08, and Abdi Abdirahman has broken 2:09.

But the current strength of the U.S. marathon field was perhaps best demonstrated on Jan. 14, 2012, at the Olympic trials in Houston, where Flanagan won the women's race in 2:25:38. Amy Hastings ran 2:27:17--a time that would have won every previous women's trials handily, but which earned her only fourth place. Five women broke 2:30 in Houston, while only six sub-2:30 performances had been recorded in the first seven U.S. women's Olympic trials combined.

The men's race was even more competitive, as the top three finishers ran 2:09s. Ritzenhein's fourth-place time of 2:09:55 would have won all but one previous Olympic trials. Eight men broke 2:12; there had been a total of eight sub-2:12 performances in the previous seven trials combined. It was a dazzling display of depth at that distance. "What country outside of East Africa has ever had four guys in one race run 2:09?" asks Bob Larsen, the Hall of Fame coach who has guided Keflezighi's professional career. "We've made great gains since 2000 and since 2004, when we got the medals."

Victor Sailer/PhotoRun

EAST AFRICANS VS. THE WORLD

"Outside of East Africa" is the critical qualifier. The top American marathoners are running as fast as or faster than they did 30 years ago, but the U.S.'s market share of the top times has dwindled dramatically since Kenya and Ethiopia emerged as dominant forces in the mid-1990s and separated themselves even further in the mid-2000s. The numbers are staggering: Kenyan and Ethiopian athletes are responsible for the 39 fastest marathons ever run and 61 of the fastest 62. Ryan Hall's 2011 Boston effort makes him the lone non-East African to crack the top 40. In the two-and-a-half-year span between Jan. 1, 2012 and June 30, 2014, there were 135 sub-2:07:30 marathons; all were run by athletes representing either Kenya or Ethiopia. Ritzenhein's 2:07:47 in Chicago in 2012 made him the third-fastest American marathoner of all time, but it was good for only ninth place in the race, behind four Ethiopian and four Kenyan runners.

On the women's side, the gulf between the East Africans and the rest of the world is pronounced, if not quite as wide as on the men's side. Since Oct. 1, 2008, there have been 39 sub-2:20 performances--20 by Kenyan women, 18 by Ethiopian women and only one by a non-East African runner, Aliaksandra Duliba of Belarus. (The results of Russia's Liliya Shobukhova, who ran 2:18:20 in 2011 but has since been exposed as a drug cheat, have been removed from the records.) In the first half of 2014, the eight fastest times were run by Kenyans and Ethiopians.

The best Americans are improving, but they are often nonfactors in major marathons because the competition from East Africa is so deep. Flanagan's huge personal best at this year's Boston placed her only seventh, more than 3 minutes behind Kenyan winner Rita Jeptoo. And each year there are more East Africans running incredibly fast. "Maybe I'm exaggerating, but for every one that makes it, there are probably 40 that crashed and burned," Larsen says. Echoes Keflezighi: "We see the 2:03s, the 2:04s, the 2:05s [by men], but how many others are there that don't make it? We don't see the study that says these [East African] runners had success, but there were 2,000 trying."

There are a variety of explanations for East Africa's prowess at the marathon. It could be a numbers game, as Keflezighi suggests; there is no soccer or football or basketball or baseball to dilute the talent pools, as in the United States. The top East Africans are "genetically designed to be good distance runners," says Jack Daniels, an exercise scientist and coach of several Olympians. Daniels dismisses the theory that being born at altitude confers an insurmountable advantage. "If altitude was the answer, then all our top runners would come from Colorado," he says.

However, living 6,000 to 8,500 feet above sea level, as most Kenyan and Ethiopian marathoners do, is ideal for reducing injury risk in marathon training, says David Martin, a statistician and running historian who holds a doctorate in physiology. Most East African athletes do their anaerobic threshold running on unpaved roads in a relatively temperate climate. "The pace of such runs is slower than at sea level, due to the altitude, which reduces the risk of injury from high-impact stress forces," Martin writes in an email.

Regardless of their optimal training environment, Ethiopian and Kenyan runners may simply be more motivated than American runners, Daniels says, because prize money in marathons and other road races can change their life circumstances dramatically. "East Africans, if they can win $20,000 or $30,000 in a race, that's half of an income for life," he says. "The biggest advantage they've got is the motivation." American athletes, by contrast, have many other, more reliable ways to make a living, particularly if they've already parlayed their running talent into a free education and a college diploma.

MAKING THE JUMP

The pursuit of that free education may be what's preventing many a potential American marathoner from ever getting started in the 26.2-mile event. "There's no high school-age kids or college-age kids who have a goal of trying to run a good marathon," Daniels says. "They'd rather work on getting a scholarship for college, and I don't blame them for that--it costs a lot of money to go to college."

Daniels is in favor of the addition of the marathon to the NCAA championship program, so that younger American runners would be incentivized to pursue it from early in their careers. As the system is now, these young runners focus on running fast on the track in order to gain--and then keep--a college scholarship, and by the time they graduate, Daniels says, many are so burned out from the years of brutal practices and frequent races that they have no desire to transition into marathon training. After enjoying a successful college career and experiencing the gratification that comes from being part of a good college team, many of these American athletes opt to move on from the sport upon graduation. Even if they do want to give professional running a go, they may prefer to stick with the shorter distances they raced in college, as opposed to moving up to the great (and often lonely) unknown that is marathon training.

The lack of a support system after college was a particular problem for American runners 15 to 20 years ago, Larsen says. "Maybe they were pushed into a situation too early, like high-level races in Europe that discouraged them," he says, recalling that Keflezighi was nearly lapped twice in his first international 10,000m race after graduating from UCLA. "We lost some marvelously talented athletes that I would argue could've been great long-distance runners, but never developed post-collegiately."

To address the deficiencies of the American system, Larsen and Joe Vigil in 2001 founded what is now the Mammoth Track Club, a training group they hoped would provide the kind of post-collegiate support elite American runners were lacking at that time. It was the doldrums of American distance running--a year after a dismal showing at the Sydney Olympics--and the plan was to bring together a group of elite American post-collegiates who would focus on aerobic base training and high levels of threshold work, done at altitude. "A lot of the [college] programs had gotten away from that because interval training is so spectacular in what it does over the short term for an athlete," Larsen says. "We wanted to extend people's careers beyond when they graduated from college to give them a couple of years to catch up to the amount of running that many of the Africans had done when they were young."

The Mammoth system yielded almost immediate dividends: Keflezighi's and Kastor's Olympic marathon medals came just four years after the low point that was the Sydney Games. Those Athens results, Larsen says, convinced other Americans of the value of altitude training, and more Olympic development training groups popped up--in Flagstaff, in Boulder--incorporating Larsen and Vigil's philosophy of bringing post-collegiate athletes along slowly, emphasizing aerobic threshold runs instead of racing, using altitude and sea-level correctly, and, of particular importance for marathoners, working to improve running mechanics. "Meb does drills all the time, and he's extremely efficient at 4:50- to 5-minute-mile pace," Larsen says. "He just flows."

Keflezighi's physical gifts, as well as those of Ritzenhein, Flanagan and Linden, have helped the U.S. remain as the third-best nation in the world at the marathon, even as it falls further and further behind Kenya and Ethiopia. But why, more than a dozen years after the creation of the Mammoth Track Club, is there a gap between those top American athletes and the rest of the U.S. marathoners? Why aren't more U.S. men running under 2:10 and more U.S. women running under 2:26? Explanations vary:

Too few of the American runners with the natural ability to run sub-2:10 and sub-2:26 have found the right training situation. Aspiring marathoners need to be nurtured, and the years immediately after college graduation are critical, Larsen says. "It has to do with family and friends and associations, but some people really blossom and some don't."



It takes a long time to develop as a marathoner, and a lot of athletes just haven't gotten there yet. Says Kastor: "It is important to get in years of mileage and strength work to conquer the marathon. I ran seven marathons over five years of training before breaking 2:20."



Americans wait too long to give the marathon a try, and when they do, the individuals who attempt it often aren't the best candidates to excel at that distance, Daniels says. "The ones that try the marathon try it because they haven't been good enough on the track, but not being good enough on the track kind of proves that they don't have the ability to run a good marathon."



The performance gap between the top two or three athletes and the rest is nothing new, Grotewold says. "There's sort of this hole at 2:10 or 2:11, but it's always been that way. It was Bill Rodgers and Frank Shorter, and then a couple of minutes back, it was everybody else. It was Bob Kempainen and Keith Brantly and then everybody else. It was Rod DeHaven and then everyone else. And now it's Meb and Dathan and on a good day Ryan, and then a minute or two back, there are a lot of people."

PLUMBING THE DEPTHS

Although observers of American distance running have different explanations for the perceived lack of depth that exists now, the consensus is that there is unprecedented talent currently clogging the high school and college pipeline. That bodes well for the future of U.S. marathon competition, particularly now that the post-collegiate infrastructure is taking shape, in the form of several new training centers, including the recently formed Boston-based New Balance group coached by Mark Coogan.

Larsen points to the number of American high school boys who have recently run close to 4 minutes for the mile or under 9 minutes for 3200m, and says that with college coaches taking a long view of their athletes' careers by emphasizing aerobic base training, fast times are ahead. In the meantime, Larsen says, "I'm pleased that people are still excited about that sub-2:30 or -2:11 debut."

So maybe the fact that Keflezighi is still in contention to make the 2016 Olympic team is more a testament to the caliber of athlete he is than an indication of the state of U.S. talent. "I would pick Meb to make that Olympic team in Rio," Grotewold says. "I think that by the 2016 Olympic trials, we're going to have a half-dozen men who can run 2:10. I really believe that."

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