Cherry Blossom Ten Mile Run

Um, actually, really more just in 2026.

He had a, a campaign where he ran the Cherry Blossom 10-Miler.

He ran Beach to Beacon in the summer, and both of those races went pretty well.

I mean, Kieran was a, a, a kind of a 1,500, 510 specialist.

Wow.

'Cause we-- Yeah, we, he, he ran Cherry Blossom and we're like, "Okay, this guy has a future on the roads." And then he ran a couple races over the summer and we were like, "Okay, we wanna go into this first marathon block well-rested." And so we didn't wanna cut that recovery block short and- The way the calendar worked out, he had eight to nine weeks to do a marathon build before New York.

Uh, Boston was a little bit closer to 16 weeks, and, and Chicago now is gonna be about 15 or 16 weeks from the moment, like, workouts started and we, we kinda really got serious about the training.

So yeah, hopefully that's a good overview.

I wanna talk a little bit about training and working with James.

Um, I saw on VDOT you hit a 79.4 VDOT at Cherry Blossom, which was a huge performance, 46 flat.

I think he broke the American record.

Unfortunately, someone else broke it [chuckles] who was in, in front of you in the race, so.

Hmm.

Okay.

And then any workouts in particular leading up to Cherry Blossom that gave you a big confidence boost? I'd love to hear if there was anything that stood out in particular.

Yeah.

He is a 10-time JFK finisher, a 9-time Boston finisher, by my counts, a 6-time Highland Sky finisher.

He has... been in the top of his age groups at Cherry Blossom, Marine Corps Marathon, other Marine Corps races.

And I believe he's going to tell us this in a little bit here, but I believe he started running all after the age of 50.

A very, very impressive resume for the last 10 years, all condensed into that amount of time.