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Which Direction is Ryan Hall's Career Headed?

Published by
RunnerSpace.com/RoadRacing   Oct 21st 2013, 4:26pm
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Is Ryan Hall's window closing?

Published by ESPN on October 18, 2013

During a long, hard year, Ryan Hall's long, hard runs have rarely posed a problem. It's been the easy days that have tended to explode.

Late last year in Redding, Calif., for instance, Hall was just rounding into shape after a sharply disappointing 2012 season, during which injuries forced him to drop out of the Olympic Marathon around the 10-mile mark and withdraw from a much-anticipated appearance at the New York City Marathon. Thus ended a five-year run in which Hall had logged 10 consecutive world-class marathons, including a 2:04:58 performance at Boston in 2011, the fastest time ever run by an American.

But by December Hall had started working with a new coach, Renato Canova, and he and his wife, Sara, had just moved into a house on the outskirts of Redding. On a dark afternoon, as the remnants of a typhoon pummelled California's Central Valley Region, Hall set out for an easy half-hour recovery run, one of the rare relaxed workouts allowed under his new coach's rigorous system.

Hall zipped into a red rain shell, put on a red ball cap, and stepped out into the storm. The rain rang like grapeshot over the surface of the bass pond in front of his house. "That pond is what sold me on the place," he says. "I've fished it almost every day since we moved in. I dream about teaching my kids to fish here, when the time for children comes."

Hall followed a circular drive out to the highway and turned right, running on the shoulder past an elementary school and grocery store. The rain beat against him in crashing sheets, but Hall moved steadily, with his signature, galloping stride. About a mile from the house, however, with no warning twinges, a shout of pain rose from his lower back.

"I couldn't believe it," Hall recalls. "I didn't want to believe it."

This wasn't the plantar fasciitis that had dogged him through the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials or the hamstring pain that had driven him off the road in London; this was a new affliction. Hall stopped, pivoted, and managed to limp home. He had suffered a serious muscle strain that took weeks to heal.

By early February of this year, he seemed back on track. Along with Sara, a professional middle-distance runner, and his younger brother Chad, a former Foot Locker national high-school cross-country champion, Hall was by then in Flagstaff, Ariz., his altitude training base. Almost 10 weeks remained before the 2013 Boston Marathon, and Hall's training clicked along on schedule; on Wednesday, Feb. 7, he and Chad had hammered a 23-mile run at 6:15 pace, at 8,000 feet elevation.

"My right quad had felt a little hot over the last mile, but overall it had been a great workout, a real confidence-builder," Hall says. "I thought I had turned the corner."

The next morning, Sara, Chad, and Ryan embarked on an easy hour's spin on a dirt road by Lake Mary. Hall parked his SUV, and his two dogs boiled out of the back seat. Early sunlight flooded over the snow peaks. The next week, he and Sara were scheduled to fly to Kenya, where Hall would train for a month under Canova's eye. They had bought their airline tickets. All Hall had to do now was run for an hour, without even glancing at his watch.



Read the full article at: espn.go.com

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