Not A Real Distance

Hello! Welcome back to Footprint. Happy Friday.

🌍 Copenhagen is the world’s fastest city, according to Strava’s Year in Sport report. The Danish capital topped the rankings of fastest metro areas by average running pace logged on the app — closely followed by Aarhus, the country’s second largest city.

🗽 Running the Manhattan perimeter

⏱ An interview with athlete, race director, pacer and record-breaker Cal Neff

💡 Olympian Dakotah Popehn on breaking through

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Ten miles into the longest run of my life, I couldn’t help but smile last weekend. When I first got into running, it was a slog: each bench, streetlight and tree along London’s Thames Path a marker to hit without stopping.

I was steeling my legs to go ten whole miles – an almost unimaginable feat to me, at the time – at the 2018 Great South Run. Slowly, but surely, I learned how to run; how to breathe; how to push; how to pace; how to confront, if not conquer, the doubts that inevitably crop up.

A few weeks before the race, I was talking about all this to a friend, when someone butted in. “Ten miles?” they said, scrunching their nose. “That’s not a real distance.”

I remember how crushed I was to hear this. It felt like I’d barely made it to the gate of this thing, only for a keeper to tell me I wasn’t getting through.

I didn’t know then what I know now: that running, like most activities, has its fair share of these types. There will always be people who suggest you’re not a “real” runner, unless you can run the right distance, or at the right pace, or in the right shoes. (Coincidentally, more often than not they happen to have run said distance, or at said pace, or in said shoes.)

I carried on, and a few weeks later, ran what felt like a pretty real distance. A few months later, I ran a bit further; a few years later, a bit further; until the marathon. No more, or less, a runner than I ever was.

Along the way I met my friend Sam.

Sam doesn’t close gates. He holds them open, ushering through anyone he can find in the vicinity, until someone has to drag him away.

One morning last year, he asked me a question: why don’t we run the perimeter of Manhattan?

Of the many valid answers to this question, one leads the pack: it’s more than 30 miles. But rather than give the list, I hesitated, and moved the conversation swiftly on.

I’m not sure how many times he asked. Last Sunday, shortly after 8.30am, we set out at our own pace, and made our own way, around this peculiar island.

We talked. We laughed. We sighed. We groaned. We briefly got lost. We figured it out. Somewhere around halfway, in Sam’s head, his brilliant idea became my stupid idea.

Manhattan is hard to navigate at the best of times: a constantly-shifting array of road closures and building sites and diversions. The perimeter wraps around it all, expanding and contracting accordingly to form a unique, jaggedy loop on any given day.

We ended up running 32.61 miles. I’m not sure whether or not that’s a real distance, but it was an adventure I’ll remember for a long time.

Big voices are always going to say small things. Big brands are going to try and sell you things. Big names will try to influence you to do things.

But there are no real gatekeepers in this sport. Noone to tell you how far, or how fast, you need to run. Noone to tell you what to wear. Noone to tell you what to feel.

There’s just you. And the people you bring along for the ride.

Cal Neff still remembers his first big run. He had just turned four. As his Dad ran the Cajun Cup 10K in Lafayette, Louisiana, Neff ran the kids race.

He still has his bib, red ribbon, tiny T-shirt and fuzzy recollections from that day. It set the stage for a long, layered, life in running.

“I’ve not done a 100-miler yet,” Neff, 41, said in an interview. “My wife’s sitting next to me. She’s done 100 miles. So I’d better do it.”

Sure, he hasn’t run 100 miles. But from that first kilometer in Louisiana to 125km in Grande Cache, Alberta, for the Canadian Death Race in 2013, Neff has run most imaginable distances in between – and broken the Canadian record for the 50k.

He is also a race director, overseeing a string of trail races across Texas; a coach, training a few dozen athletes each month; and a pacer, having helped Keira D’Amato break the American marathon record, and Sara Hall run the second-fastest marathon by a US woman.

Plenty of people have suggested to Neff that this last element of his life as a runner – the responsibility of pacing other athletes as they chase down records – must carry extreme pressure. He doesn’t see it that way.

The need to come through for someone else, and putting their goal ahead of your own thoughts, feelings or strains, can actually reduce some of the pressure, he recalled. 

At Hall’s side as she sought the American record at The Marathon Project in December 2020, Neff focused “intently” on every kilometer as it came and went, trying to hit each in three minutes and nineteen seconds.

“You’re just doing that, over and over again,” he said. “That really just unlocked, for me, a capability to run it – probably the way you’re supposed to, honestly – super consistent, smooth. Taking the focus off whatever’s going on internally, doubt and maybe struggles you’re having.”

Neff has relied on pacers himself. “If you’re just trying to hit a very specific time, like a record, it’s a matter of just having people that you can trust to run that pace for you,” he said. “I like to just go to sleep on their heels. That’s kind of what I expect the athlete to do on me – tuck in, go to sleep, and not think about it, at all.”

For three of his own record attempts, Neff was joined by a different kind of companion. In February 2016, at the Katy Half Marathon in Houston, Texas, he set out with his daughter, Holland, and broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest half marathon with a stroller, finishing in 1:11:27.

“Well, shoot,” he recalled thinking. “I have two daughters, and I need to get the other one a record.” 

That October, he flew up to Toronto and pushed his other daughter, Alessandra, to run the fastest marathon with a stroller, finishing in 2:31:21. “It was kind of like pacing,” said Neff. “I just unlocked this performance... I was doing it for someone else, having my kid there.”

Along came his third daughter, Maya. “It was like, okay, can’t have two out of three,” he said. In February 2020, just as Covid-19 started to shut down the world, Neff ran the fastest 10k pushing a stroller, finishing the Houston Rodeo Run in 31:43.

It capped a trio of records, accompanied by each of his daughters – and memories, for a new generation.

FP32 • Runners Give Thanks • Read

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FP30 • The Circus To Central Park • Read

Dakotah Popehn toed the start line of her first marathon seven years ago with high hopes of qualifying for the US Olympic marathon trials, but it wasn’t to be. She dropped out of the California International Marathon in Sacramento, and nearly gave up on that dream.

She ended up running Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota, six months later, and qualified for the 2020 trials. Four years later, Popehn podiumed at the trials, made her first Olympic team, and finished twelfth at the Games in Paris.

“Just a reminder to anyone who isn’t exactly where they want to be right in this moment (including myself): nothing about this sport is linear,” she wrote on social media last week. “You put your head down, you do the work, and one day the breakthrough shows up.”