This weekend will be the 1-year anniversary of the 2020 US Olympic Maraton Trials. Jonathan Gault caught up with all of the Team USA marathoners except for Abdi Abdirahman - who at 44 has started to mentally decline and forgot to call in to the teleconference (joking). They had some interesting things to share. Perhaps the most newsworth is Rupp is dreaming big.
Rupp said :
“I want to win. There’s no ifs, ands or buts about it. That’s definitely my goal. I've gotten a silver medal in London, a bronze medal in Rio, and so hopefully I'll be shooting for gold for sure in Tokyo. I know it's not going to be an easy ask. It will be a tall task. There's obviously a tremendous amount of great marathoners out there right now and the Olympics are always going to be a tough test. But I thrive on competition and I can't wait to have the opportunity to go in there with the best in the world and really see what I can do."
Rupp also revealed that his training under Mike Smith is a lot different.
Gault wrote :
From a running perspective, the extra year has given Rupp more time to adjust to Smith's system. Under previous coach Alberto Salazar -- whose appeal of his four-year ban for anti-doping violations will be heard by the Court of Arbitration for Sport next month -- Rupp would hit each rep of his interval sessions "as hard as [he] could" and take a full rest before tackling the next one. Until he trained under Smith, Rupp had never run a fartlek. When Smith, the coach at Northern Arizona University, began working with Rupp in December 2019, he asked Rupp to turn over his previous training logs. The first thing he told Rupp after examining them?
"He didn’t think I was training much like a marathoner," Rupp says. "There was still so much track stuff that I was doing."
Now Rupp is growing accustomed to Smith's system. He feels he works just as hard in practice, but the workouts are different: slower, with more reps and less recovery.
"Having some new stimulus, having some different workouts that I’ve been doing, it’s been a challenge, but it’s been really fun for me at the same time," Rupp said. "...I couldn’t be happier with the way that things have worked out and where things are going."