Like why do those matter for you in particular? I guess like especially coming from the 10K and that track background not that long ago.

I think that, you know, I have some theories about like 5K guys going to the marathon because it's not always a smooth transition.

Yeah, hit me with it.

I want to hear this.

I'll answer the question in roundabout way.

But like when I look at like a lot of the good marathoners now, like even people like Connor, a lot of them have been like 10K runners their whole career in college.

Like there are 10K runners in college.

What's left, I guess, between now and November 1st? Like, are there any last training sessions or workouts coming up that really, I guess, like are the confidence workout or whatever it is you have?

You know, what are, what are your thoughts on that for

easy? Yeah.

I think that it's easy to make, like you look at someone's training and it's really easy to take one thing away from it.

But if you look at his training as a whole, you already hit on it that like his volume is so high, he's running upwards of 150, 160 miles a week.

So he's getting in so much work just because of the volume.

But then if you look at his hard workouts, it's like he'll do, I've seen maybe 20 K tempo runs at sub three minute K pace in the altitude, probably on dirt roads in Kenya.

So he's hitting these incredibly hard sessions.

Was this in St. Moritz?

Was that something you were actively thinking about or were you still just like, "I'm going, and if I'm 61:30, that's okay," or, "If I'm 63 flat"? Like, what was sort of like, what was your gauge to hold back or push?

Yeah, so I would say early on it was just get with the pack and kinda wait for, like you were saying, that moment for it to, like, settle down, and it kinda did.

You know, there were people off on the front pushing it and, you know, there, I was kind of always in that, like, second pack.

You always had a few athletes out front kinda pulling the race along still, but I just wanted to settle into that second pack.

And, you know, you see the 5K split, I don't know what it was, like 14 low, something pretty fast, and then 10K we're around maybe 29 minutes.

Still, like, way faster than a pace that I think I can hold for a marathon.

But, um, as we went on and we're getting, you know, mile seven, mile eight, then you're starting to think of, like, "Okay, the p- the start was really fast, but I need to start thinking, you know, the Newton Hills are coming up.

And so, like, what has that just been like? And, um, you know, I just think that's, like, really, really cool and special.

And speaking specifically about Laura as a coach to help out with that, and also Ryan recently joining the team as a training partner, maybe you could just kind of introduce them to everyone that's listening that isn't as familiar and kind of what they've been up to.

Yeah.

So Laura came on the team kind of in the spring, summer.

And the idea was like to really start building out this roads team with athletes, you know, focusing on road racing, either having already done the marathon or working up to the marathon like myself.

And so things were a little slow, like getting athletes initially.

And so like... we were kind of in a holding pattern it was like helen myself and laura but like helen doesn't really train with me i don't really train with helen much i mean sometimes but um then in the last like 12 weeks it's really kicked off like we signed ryan ford who didn't debut but he ran his first time at the chicago marathon 209 um but it's been good like i think we needed this like As you know, the demands on the road are just different.

I think it was hard in the spring trying to road race following the structure of a track team.

totally and so honing in on what's upcoming in in uh next week how we feeling just in general going into the race and i don't know if you have anything like i mean you've you've been so dialed in you've gone to the course you've been studying do you have any specific kind of race plans or ways that you're going about and thinking about it going into the actual race day