Molly Huddle Moves Up to the Half Marathon in NYC
Posted by Runner's World on March 11, 2014
Molly Huddle, a U.S. record holder and Olympian for 5000 meters on the track, entered the .US National Road Racing Championships, a 12K in Virginia in November, to see how she’d be able to handle longer distances. She handled it just fine, outdueling Shalane Flanagan and setting a world best of 37:50. Huddle now moves up even further in distance; she’ll run the NYC Half, 13.1 miles, Sunday.
How etched in stone are your workout schedules? Some runners get a week’s worth of workouts in advance, and the program is quite rigid. Others show up and aren’t even sure what’s going to happen that day. What’s your situation? Does Coach Treacy tend to change things based on how he thinks you’re feeling?
Molly Huddle: Ours is very subject to change. He’ll give us a couple of weeks worth of workouts and runs, but me, Amy and Kim pretty much decide what time we do things doing the day. That part of it is really last-minute. We’ll change our schedule if somebody feels they need another cup of coffee or something. Ray will usually give us two or three weeks at a time and then change it if we’re tired or something.
You’re moving up a little in distance now, but your training partners are two women associated with longer races. Is it assumed that in the shorter work, you’re going to be a little bit faster, and in the longer work, they’ll go a little bit longer than you?
MH: Kim and Amy seem to do better with the mile, mile-a-half, two-mile reps. I’ll usually do one less rep than them in that area. I’m not really much faster than Kim, but I’m just more comfortable with it. I don’t get sore from doing 400s, whereas nowadays she has to force that workout because she’s just done so much long stuff. We definitely pull each other in different directions that way. But it’s been really helpful that we’ve been able to line up together on so many workouts. Ray’s done a really good job of trying to blend us together.
One ostensible reason you went to the .US National Road Racing Championships, a 12K, was because you wanted to start moving into the longer distances. Obviously, that went really well. Can you talk about your desire to do the NYC Half and how that fits into whatever the grand scheme of things is?
MH: I definitely wanted to do a half this year because I do want to try a marathon in the future. I said earlier that I do want to do one before 2016. This half is another test to see how I handle the longer stuff, even though I know the marathon is a whole other ballgame. I really want to move up in small steps. It’s a good time of year for me. Usually I’d be doing world cross country around now, so this kind of replaces that. And I’ve been doing longer stuff over the last two months. It’s been about five miles a week higher than my normal winter. I’ve hit 90 as many weeks as I can.
Is there a timetable for the first marathon? Could it be as early as this fall?
MH: It could be, this being an off year [ie, no global championships outdoors]. I’m going to see how track season goes. If I get some goals out of the way early or feel that I’ve done all I can do in the first part of the summer, then I would definitely like to switch gears and think about a fall marathon.
