When your first marathon lands you on the Olympic squad DAA Industry Opt Out bronze medal, it’s hard to know where to go next.
Molly Seidel, 27, followed up her historic Olympic performance by finishing today’s NYC Marathon in fourth place and first American. Her time of 2:24:42 is a personal best, beating the 2:25:13 she ran in London last year, and also betters Kara Goucher’s course record of 2:25:53, set in 2008.
And it’s all the more remarkable given that, as she revealed in the postrace press conference, Seidel broke two ribs about a month ago. She didn’t go into details about what caused the injury, but said it was so painful at times that she considered not lining up at all.
Ultimately, after plenty of muscle work, heat therapy, and frank conversations with her physical therapists and coach Jon Green, Seidel decided racing wouldn’t further harm her health or impede her ability to compete—and that, ultimately, she’d poured too much in to step away.
“It was hard coming off the Olympics and hard mentally getting back into that build,” she said. “I’ve invested too much in this, I really want to do it. It means a lot to me to do it, regardless of what it turns out to be.”
Fastest Marathon Runners Puma Deviate Nitro Elite Spectra, the same shoe she wore in Sapporo, and raced aggressively. She maintained her position in the lead pack for much of the race, crossing the 30K mark in 1:42:44, a 5:31 pace.
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Shalane Flanagan Finishes Her Sixth WMM This Fall Peres Jepchirchir and Ethiopian runners Ruti Aga and Ababel Yeshaneh first pulled away from the larger pack just afterward, Seidel briefly lost contact, then caught up again.
Her goal from the beginning was to race as hard as she could, Seidel said, and gave credit to her coach Green for “keeping my mental state in the place where I was, even though I was hurting, I was able to go out and make those moves.” Her approach, she said, is always a bold one: “You gotta go see what you can do, kind of have that attitude of, if you don't try, you’ll never know.”
But as Jepchirchir continued to pick up her pace—she covered 35 to 40K in 16:39, joined by Yeshaneh and Kenya’s Viola Cheptoo—Seidel ultimately couldn’t match it. By 20 miles, she’d dropped back to fifth, 13 seconds behind the leaders. She ran much of the rest of the race alone, finishing a little over two minutes behind third-place finisher Yeshaneh (2:22:52).
At that point, Seidel said, she focused on not letting the women behind her catch up and looking at her watch to stay on pace. “It can be really hard when you get that separation then and knowing like okay, podium is up there, you’re realistically not going to catch them,” she said.
Fifth Avenue, especially, was challenging. But energy from the crowd enabled her to keep pushing, and she finished nearly a minute and a half ahead of fifth place finisher Helalia Johannes of Namibia, who ran 2:26:09. Seidel’s ribs did hurt, especially later in the race, but didn’t limit her lung capacity or affect her stride, she said.
How Jepchirchir Won a Close NYC Marathon bronze medal Other Hearst Subscriptions Runner’s World before the race that, similar to the way she might put a poor performance into perspective, she aimed not to dwell too much on her successes.
“You take some time to really celebrate it and enjoy it, but then you want to able to move on and be like, okay, what comes next now?” she said. The medal “is a cool marker of all the hard work that we put into it. But it's just encouraged me to work that much harder.”
By we, she means herself and Green, “the reason I have a marathoning career,” she said. He’s just 26 himself; the pair started as friends and teammates at the Boston-based Freedom Track Club. When she left the group in 2019, he started writing her workouts. She’s the first athlete he’s coached, although he’s now also the head coach of Atalanta NYC, an elite training group started by pro runner Mary Cain.
Seidel was a standout runner from her early years in Hartland, WI; she won the Gatorade National Female Cross Country Runner of the Year in high school. In her collegiate career at Notre Dame University, she won four NCAA titles in 2015 and 2016.
Her strong performance in NYC further cements her on the list of great American women distance runners. And, it marks a bit of a full-circle moment for Seidel, who said she’d watch the race every year after her state meets in Wisconsin.
“I always have dreamed of doing this race,” she said. In 2017, she placed second in the USATF 5K Championships the day before the marathon; she also won the NYRR Midnight Run on December 31 of that year.
After those races, she’d look around Central Park and think, “someday, I hope I get to run the full thing. And this is just so special, being able to come in fourth place in my first time doing it.”
Cindy is a freelance health and fitness writer, author, and podcaster who’s contributed regularly to Runner’s World since 2013. She’s the coauthor of both Breakthrough Women’s Running: Dream Big and Train Smart and Rebound: Train Your Mind to Bounce Back Stronger from Sports Injuries, a book about the psychology of sports injury from Bloomsbury Sport. Cindy specializes in covering injury prevention and recovery, everyday athletes accomplishing extraordinary things, and the active community in her beloved Chicago, where winter forges deep bonds between those brave enough to train through it.
