What to Expect From the 2019 World Track Championships

Throughout the IAAF World Athletics Championships, WIRED’s editor in chief, Nicholas Thompson, will be chatting with Knox Robinson, the former editor-in-chief of The Fader and the founder of The Black Roses running club in NYC.

Nick Thompson: Knox, good afternoon! And welcome to WIRED. I’ve run a lot of races and workouts with you over the years, and I’m delighted to now finally do something with you that doesn’t involve physical pain. Also, I’m happy to inform you that the last guy I did one of these chats with, turned it into a #1 best-selling book. So you should be good.

Knox Robinson: I’m stoked for this Nick! You’re a decent marathoner but I’m more impressed that you’ve turned WIRED into the best running magazine out there. So I’m glad you’ve asked me along to chop it up and dig a little dirt on Doha.

NT: Heh. Well, let’s start with the first medals race, the women’s marathon, which begins at midnight tonight (5pm ET). People are worried about the heat and the humidity. And running when it’s 90 degrees Fahrenheit sucks. But for a championship race, as long as it’s safe, I’m all for it. Strange weather leads to strange outcomes, like the Boston Marathon two years ago where a science teacher at my old high school somehow came in fourth because all the elites dropped out.

KR: It’s gonna be a wild kickoff for the Champs—a midnight marathon?!?!?! And that start time isn’t even really gonna beat the heat, right? I gotta admit I stole a glance at weather underground for the forecast: you’re right about the 90 F but the troubling “real feel” line on the graph is 109 F, coming down from 119 F earlier in the day!

I’ve blocked Boston 2018 from the memory as I dropped out at 30k with hypothermia LOL, so for me another reference for a championship race in harsh conditions would of course be the 2008 Olympic Marathon in Beijing, when high heat, humidity and pollution at the early am start didn’t stop the leaders from taking off at world record pace, with the infamous Sammy Wanjiru winning with a new Olympic record and Kenya’s first gold medal in the marathon. Crazy is as crazy does!

For the Beijing Games, Nike made these ice-filled cooling vests from recycled shoes … with the thinking that because so much energy is spent cooling the body during competition, if you lower the core temperature beforehand you end up saving more energy for the race itself. I probably didn’t explain that right but as far as gadgets go, the vests are pretty cool. They pop up on eBay from time to time … I have two.

NT: And do they actually work? I’m skeptical. Also: I should add that I’m rooting for Carrie Dimoff on the US Team. She’s 36 and the mother of two—and so I assume, like you and me, she’s gotten in quite a few miles with her running stroller. I’m told too that she’s been training in a heat chamber for the race.

KR: Summer dog days were so bad this year—a sign of the times perhaps—but a couple folks told me that heat training isn’t only about acclimatization; the benefits of heat training are said to mimic those from altitude training. I couldn’t tell if that was urban running legend or gallows humor but I was too hot and tired to research further. Instead I just cut way back on my training and told myself I was doing the right thing.

NT: Huh. I hadn’t heard that before. Though of course I’m also skeptical of altitude training. Sure, it might make you faster, but it screws up your sleep so badly that I feel like the gains are easily lost. And maybe the same is true of heat training. If you can do it, it helps. But doing it also makes you hate the sport. (Also, I think you may be taking this “reduce core temperature” thing a little too seriously in some of your training.)

Speaking of enhancements, you mentioned the other day that you’ve been hearing about elite runners refueling with ketone? I remember one paper showing it could have serious benefits in cyclists. But is it really better than beet juice, which I know a ton of elite athletes take before endurance races?

KR: Ah, the marginal gains era. I guess that was one takeaway from this summer’s Tour de France—that most of the top teams had ketone supplement drinks in their bottles. And now folks on letsrun messageboards—so often a dubious source of information—are saying the supplements might improve performance by 15 percent?? When Geoffrey Kamworor smashed the half marathon world record a few weeks ago, he went to the drinks table three times … three times for a 58 minute race in ideal conditions? It was then that one of the live commentators actually suggested a link to the Tour de France drinks. Turns out it was just Maurten that Kam was sipping on—no surprise there I guess—but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t asked some gym-based bros for the inside scoop on ketones. I’m fuzzy on the science, though: I get what ketosis is, I’ve read about ketogenic diet trends, but I don’t get how you’d use the drinks mid-competition. Definitely up for trying it before we race each other next. If it’s not banned, it’s not cheating. Right?

NT: It’s definitely not banned for a tempo run in Prospect Park. We’ll do it. Three loops. I drink water, you drink ketone-fizz. I say it’s 25 percent odds you finish ahead of me by two minutes, and 75 percent odds that I finish ahead of you by 15 minutes because you’re wretching somewhere in the woods.

KR: In the marginal gains era, you gotta go all in! Reviews say ketone drinks are almost, well, undrinkable … but the question is: how bad do you want it?

NT: One race everyone’s going to follow is the men’s 100M. Who you got: two-time convicted drug cheat Justin Gatlin or missed-his-drug-test-check-in-three-times Christian Coleman?

KR: More cheating. For years I was really down on Gatlin, because really, c’mon dude. But I’ve grown fascinated by him—first as a foil to Usain Bolt in Bolt’s last two seasons, and then just as as a riveting character … a piece of living history or an anachronism in a way. He’s got a lot of grey hairs! US Olympian (and London 2012 silver medallist) Leo Manzano told me in Mexico there’s an expression “Más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo”—the Devil knows more because he’s old than because he’s the Devil. So as an old dude myself I’d like to see J Gat turn the young lions back. Coleman in particular has a lot to prove—in more ways than one.

NT: You know, it’s funny, I’ve found myself captivated by Gatlin too, and wanting to believe his rather bizarre excuses for his positive tests, like the tale of the over-eager masseuse with the suspicious moisturizer. But, more, I like someone who has consistently gotten crushed by Usain Bolt staying mentally strong and sticking with it. Speaking of drug use, did you see the weird video from the German newspaper last week that maybe showed a Kenyan runner getting injected with maybe EPO?

KR: I’m a sucker for those German TV journo hit jobs! Watching those videos you’d think EPO and PEDs are so widespread—like, athletes as strung out extras in “New Jack City” except in high altitude training camps—but I never saw anything like that on trips to Kenya or Ethiopia. Did you follow that purported EPO drug sting with the Somalian coach in Sabadell, Spain a few years back? Sounded like a wild scene.

NT: I did! I too frequent those letsrun message boards, which are the source of always-interesting and sometimes-correct rumors about drug use. But let’s switch now back to the races. As my Twitter friend and elite racer Chris Derrick pointed out in an email, this is the first championships without Haile Gebrselassie, Kenenisa Bekele, or Mo Farah since 1993. I follow the sport pretty closely and I can say I have no idea who’s going to win the 5,000 or the 10,000.

KR: I’m stoked to see fresh faces on the scene. The 10k should be a proper battle not just between Kenya and Ethiopia but with Uganda’s Joshua Cheptegei hungry to stand on top of the podium after a silver in 2017—the same year he blew a big lead at the World Cross Country Champs with a half mile to go in front of a home crowd in Kampala to finish faded and staggering to a heartbreaking 30th place. And what about Ethiopia’s Yomif Kejelcha? Crazy that the kid set the indoor mile world record this past winter, then stepped up to the 10k for Doha.

NT: I’m keen on Hagos Gebrhiwet, partly because of that bonkers race this summer when he miscounted the laps, blasted a 54 on the penultimate lap, and then had to try to scamper back in. Any of the Americans catch your eye?

KR: Too many! I love Team USA’s prospects, from our expected dominance in the sprints and hurdles to some race-ready guys in the distances, to the storylines in the women’s 800 without South Africa’s Caster Semenya on the starting line. Also really glad to see the return of our national treasure Allyson Felix after an unexpectedly complicated pregnancy (reported by your office neighbor SELF) and sponsorship complications that unfairly go along with that far too frequently for female athletes.

NT: Yes, that story in SELF was profoundly moving—and, man, the author is good. Here’s a line from it. “That’s the thing about Felix’s journey, her process of grappling with what happened to her—it’s not just about becoming someone’s mom; it’s about becoming a different person in another way, choosing an identity that you didn’t even know you wanted in the first place.” Everyone should read it. And we’re definitely going to be talking about the women’s sprints as this goes on.

Also, we’ve been told by readers to follow the women’s hammer throw carefully. I’m going to step away from the computer for a minute to read up in Lope Magazine. But who do you have in that event?

KR: You got me there. But the thing about track is, for me at least, it’s endlessly watchable. It’s the highest level of sport, of course. But it’s also a maximum expression of our gene pool as a species. So for track nerds or nuts or junkies or whatever you want to call us … watching the women’s hammer throw is going to be as engaging as anything else.

NT: Totally agreed. This is why the World Championships are so mesmerizing. It’s humans doing things we’ve done since we first existed as a species: running, jumping, throwing. People make fun of track and field, but it’s on Grecian urns for goodness sake.

Last one for today, who’s your pick in the men’s long jump, which has its preliminaries on Friday? I usually root for Americans, but here I’ve got to go with Luvo Manyonga, who has one of the most incredible stories of anyone in track and field. He grew up in South Africa, learning the sport by jumping over piles of stuff on street corners as crowds watched; then he struggled with drug addiction; but eventually he became the best in the world.

KR: South Africa in general is good for mind-boggling narratives, from Manyonga to Caster to Oscar Pistorius and on back to Elana Meyer in the ’90s and Zola Budd in the ’80s. A visit there helps you understand it a little bit more—for reasons of history and geography it’s isolated from much of the developed world so it always feels like it’s in constant conversation with itself. That often creates a hothouse atmosphere that yields wild results for the culture. It has a very futurist feel to it—as if the place keeps churning out storylines we hadn’t yet considered but will very likely experience soon enough.

NT: That is the perfect note to end on. In fact, I’ll put in one last final link: a photo of you, barely vertical, at the end of the Comrades Ultamarathon in South Africa, two years back, with the caption “devastation, exhaustion, relief.” That’s roughly how I think the marathoners are going to be feeling in a few hours. But one of them will get a gold medal around her neck too. So now let’s go watch, and start this chatting back up next week.