Ellie Pell after the 2020 Olympic Marathon Trials

A single tree in a field, late in the season

Ellie Pell’s route into distance running is the one every coach says does not happen: team sports through high school, no particular running background, and then an accidental win at a half marathon that suggested she should probably take this more seriously.

She did. By the time of this episode she had brought her marathon down to 2:41, finished third at JFK 50 — one of the deepest fields in American ultrarunning — and won a trail 50k outright, beating the men’s field, which got her a good deal of attention she had not gone looking for.

Atlanta

The episode was recorded in the days after the 2020 Olympic Marathon Trials, run in Atlanta on 29 February in conditions that wrecked a lot of race plans. Pell went in without the pressure of a realistic team place, which turned out to be the best possible way to experience it: she met most of the field, ran it for what it was, and came away with the sense of having been at the event rather than having been processed by it.

The most quotable detail is the least athletic one — she came home with a free pair of shoes that she reckoned would cover a decent chunk of her next holiday. Marathon Trials economics, summarised.

Next up

The plan from there is Lake Sonoma 50 next month, and the episode includes a public appeal for someone to split an Airbnb with her — which is roughly the level at which the economics of this sport operate, two weeks after running an Olympic Trial.

Gear segment

The episode closes with the show’s regular gear round-up, that week covering running socks — several brands compared on fit, seams and durability — and two trail shoes then new to the market, the Brooks Caldera 4 and the Saucony Peregrine 10. The Peregrine in particular was the shoe a lot of people ended up in for the next couple of seasons.

The shape of the season

What comes through is how quickly the whole thing has been assembled. Three years ago she was not a runner in any serious sense. This spring she has a Trials start behind her and a 50-miler in front of her, and she is still treating the entire arrangement as a piece of unexpected good luck.