Different strokes for different folks, they say. Patrick Smyth prefers the structured training of his road racing background, but Morgan Arritola is carefree. The divergent paths brought victory to both over the weekend at the U.S. Mountain Running Championships in Bend, Oregon.
Smyth battled eventual second- and third-place finishers Andy Wacker and Joe Gray over three laps that stretched to 12K, with 850 feet of elevation gain and loss on each lap. He finished in 46:10, 10 seconds up on Wacker and 41 seconds ahead of Gray.
“It was a bit of a cat-and-mouse game,” Smyth said after the race from his new home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “I’d get away on the downhills and get a decent gap [on Wacker and Gray], but they’d catch back up on the climbs.”
After reaching each summit with either Wacker or Gray, or both depending on the lap, Smyth would accelerate during the transition period to enter the downhill stretch with a clear line of sight.
“I just ran away from them, put the afterburners on a bit,” he said of the decisive third downhill. Smyth’s first lap was his fastest, but he expects that he was well under 4:30 per mile pace on each downhill.
That speed on the descent comes from his road running past. The 28-year-old holds a 62:01 half marathon best, and just ran 63:20 in June at Minnesota’s Garry Bjorklund Half Marathon, qualifying for the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials as a result. “Probably my quickest half since 2010,” he said.
Smyth refers to his training as “bread and butter stuff.” His weekly 85 or 90 miles per week includes a track workout, threshold tempo efforts.
Joining Smyth on the national team heading to Wales in September for the world championship race are Wacker, Gray, Andrew Benford, J.P. Donovan, and Josh Eberly.
As close as the men’s race was, the women’s was not at all.
Morgan Arritola, already the bronze medalist at the 2012 World Mountain Running Championships, dominated the women’s race with a 36:20 winning time, 77 seconds up on second-place over the 8K course.
“I train for what works for me,” Arritola said. “I don’t worry about who is running, who is not. I just have to do the best that I can do.”
Arritola spends her summers back home in Ketchum, Idaho, but attends college in Bend during the school year, studying to become a nurse. Still, she’d never run on the Mt. Bachelor course before.
“It’s two laps, I’ll figure it out,” she said.
Arritola, 29, powered past early leader Kimber Mattox three-quarters of the way up the race’s first big climb, and led for the remainder.
“All or nothing on the second lap,” she said of extending her lead. “I don’t look back, just go from point A to point B as hard as I can.”
That simple approach complements Arritola’s unstructured training. “I don’t train full time. I keep a healthy perspective and do what I can with the time that I have,” she said. She does speedwork when it feels fun and said she knows what she can do, and where she can excel.
When pressed to describe that downhill stretch, Arritola admitted that she hoped for something even more extreme. “From my perspective, it wasn’t technical at all,” she said.
Arritola hopes for more logs, roots, and rocks at worlds, where she’ll be joined on the four-women U.S. team by Kasie Enman, Mattox, and Alison Morgan.
