It is amazing to see him and Ritz being so young and with so much potential. I hope Ritz chooses the marathon.

Yeah thats awsome. Brain sell is my idol though. Working class guy with children and a family putting in 160 miles per week in the mornings before work. He maintains a physical job on top of his training. Thats what impresses me.

Hall and Ritz are 25. That is not very young on the world scene. Western marathoners tend to peak later than the East Africans, but there are a slew of Kenyans who are younger than Hall who are as fast as he is or very close. Marathoners in general can run fast at a late age. Perhaps he will go on to do great things. He certainly is exciting to watch as a front-runner.

I'm excited too, but let's not overstate the young angle.

Southern Man



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We're on a road to nowhere. Come on along.

Watching his run to the finish gave me goosebumps

The heat of Beijing will make the Olympics extremely hard to predict.

What amazed me most about Hall's run yesterday was the 1:02:45 2nd half split on that challenging course while running by himself for most of it.

He ran a great race I thought. My hats off to Ritz for a great race too. And of course Sell...I couldn't be happier that he made it.

Here's a complete hypothetical for those that like numbers. I use a formula that predicts a person's ideal marathon time for a specific day and course. You input your first half time and final time, and the formula will spit out what you could have run on that day and that course if you'd run perfect splits. Kind of a masochistic thing that tells you what you could have done that day if you hadn't been stupid and gone out too fast

It's completely unscientific and hypothetical, but uses the ratio of every second that you run too fast over the first half, you give back two seconds the second half. I've plugged dozens of marathon performances into this and it is surprisingly accurate. Most people see their "ideal" number and say 'yeah, that's the shape I thought I was in if I ran smart'.

I can't remember where it came from originally, but the theory claimed that a negative split would contain the same ratio. Running negative split would cause you to leave time on the course in the same manner as going out too fast. Plugging Hall's numbers in you get 2:07:50.