When Helen Schlachtenhaufen sees her fiancé, Brian Shrader, on the Chicago Marathon course on October 13, she’ll try to make eye contact. If he looks at her and nods, she’ll know he’s feeling good. If she sees a blank stare instead, she’ll worry.
Schlachtenhaufen, a pro runner specializing in the 1500 meters, will also monitor a less obvious sign: how sweaty Shrader is getting. She’s clocked so many miles behind him, she can tell precisely how hard he’s working by the degree of drip.
That’s because, despite the discrepancy in their distances, the two do many of their workouts together. “Her mile pace just happens to line up with my goal 5K-ish pace,” said Shrader, 33. “It’s always useful to blend those whenever we can. It creates a good little team atmosphere.”
The approach might be unconventional, but it works for the Boston-based couple, who met as members of the now-defunct Saucony Freedom Track Club in 2017. For about a year, they were just friends. But the more time they spent together, the closer they became.
Though they’d run some together before, their joint workouts got more serious during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020. “We started doing more of our actual training together,” said Schlachtenhaufen, 29, who’s still debating if she’ll change her name after the wedding. “That saved me during COVID, because it’s so hard to motivate when you’re by yourself. Neither of us were ever really by ourselves.”
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Shrader is still sponsored by Saucony; Schlachtenhaufen now runs for Nike and has no formal training partners. Her coach, Juli Benson, is based in Philadelphia. “Doing anything from 400s to 1000s at 1500 to 5K pace for me is just a grind,” Schlachtenhaufen said. “I can do it by myself, but it takes so much more out of me, and it’s so much less fun.”
Syncing the schedules of a miler and a marathoner requires a bit of coordination. The night before, they’ll talk through the specifics, consulting Benson if needed. Shrader is self-coached but counts Schlachtenhaufen (and Benson) among his trusted advisors. “If there’s anybody who knows me as a runner, it’s [Helen],” Shrader. “She knows exactly what I need and what I’ve responded to in the past.”
A (relatively) simple workout looks something like this: Shrader runs a hard mile on his own before joining Schlachtenhaufen, whose workout is 10 600-meter intervals in 1:45. He runs 2:55 kilometer intervals on 50 seconds of rest, essentially a threshold workout for him, pacing her for the first 600 before she drops out each time. Her rest, then, is a full two minutes—his 70-second last lap plus his 50 seconds of rest. If he needs more volume, he adds more repeats or another hard effort after she finishes.
Sometimes, they align completely—if she’s working on pure speed, they might run 300s together in 41 to 45 seconds or 200s in 27 to 31 seconds. “My max speed is about the same as hers, so she always has me on the ropes in those,” Shrader said. Sometimes, Schlachtenhaufen said, she even outkicks him, especially when he’s deep in marathon training.
Though he’s the one with pacing duties, pairing up benefits Shrader, too. “It makes the workout so much more focused on my end, knowing that she’s relying on me to hit the paces,” he said. “And it brings much higher quality into my training than I would otherwise put into it.”
Once Schlachtenhaufen’s season ended in September—a few races after this year’s Olympic Track and Field Trials, where she made the 1500-meter final and placed eighth in a personal best of 3:59.71—she repaid the favor by pacing his long runs on the bike, carrying along his nutrition and hydration. 25 miles seems like an eternity to a miler, even on two wheels, she said. But she tries to keep him occupied with a funny story when he wants distraction, or encouraging words when he’s struggling. Sometimes, they’ll talk wedding logistics—on a recent run, they decided where to host their post-reception party.
All the quality miles and long runs—along with a weekly day off, a change he implemented after seeing how it’s paid off for marathoners Conner Mantz and Clayton Young, who observe a day of rest for religious reasons—have given Shrader confidence that he might turn out another strong performance in Chicago.
Last year, he ran a personal best of 2:09:46 in Chicago and placed 11th. This year’s Olympic Marathon Trials in February went poorly; he dropped out after mile 17 with stomach problems. But he rebounded with a 10th-place, 2:10:50 finish in London six weeks later. Last month, he ran 1:02:29 at the Copenhagen Half Marathon, just 12 seconds off his personal best.
This weekend, he has his sights set on placing in the top eight and first American, and depending on the weather, shaving another minute or two off his time. He knows the competition among his countrymen will be tough, with athletes like Zach Panning, CJ Albertson, Reed Fischer, and Nathan Martin vying for the top slot. “My prediction is whoever is on top is going to have a very good day,” he said. “Honestly, it might be a good group of Americans performing a lot better than people give us credit for.”
Schlachtenhaufen will be keeping close tabs along the way. She knows the city—she’s from Lake Forest, a Chicago suburb—and will travel the course on foot. Last year, she saw Shrader five times. She wasn’t wearing her running watch, but her phone said she logged 12 miles, including one at a 5:15 pace as she sprinted across a loop to catch him.
Her brother lives along the course route, and the hope is to have brunch with Brian and her family post-race, in celebration. But no matter how the race goes, the pair will have more to toast soon: Their wedding is December 7 in Chicago, a city that’s now come to feel like Shrader’s adopted hometown, too.
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.
