Marathon Season Preview
Fall is here and we all know what that means. Time to bring out the knickers, tights, arm warmers, and lot’s of layers, time for cross-country season openers, time to start raking the leaves, and time to start getting pumped for Fall Marathons! Oiselle Team is chasing the Olympic Marathon Standard (meet the Standard Chasers) and Kara Goucher is ramping up for her first races in Oiselle (read the latest in Kara's comeback). Bye bye summer - Hello fall!
Last year at this time Oiselle HQ was bustling over excitement for our first ever appearance at New York Fashion Week. Not only that we were fresh off the high of signing 11 new elite runners to our Haute Volée team and adding 100 new Volée members. The potential within both of those groups was outstanding and mind blowing. Knowing that a handful of our Volée team members were on the cusp of greatness: Training their butts off with goals of setting an Olympic Trials Standard in the marathon. Guess what? Three of them did in fact do just that, last fall: In October at Columbus Marathon, Heidi Greenwood ran 2:42:08, in November at Marshall Marathon, Aubrey Moskal ran 2:40:14 and in December at California International Marathon, and Heather Lieberg ran a 2:39:53. Amazing! And those were just the cherry on the top, there were a ton of PR’s and season best performances within our 250 member team.
And here we are looking forward to the next four months with 200 more Flock members added to our run community and that many more women to cheer on, many of which are training for their A-goal this fall: Marathon Madness in its finest! October is the month of all months in terms of most marathons: around 650 marathons were scheduled in 2013 and 119 of them were in the month of October. So, within our run community what races stand out – which races are we excited to watch and why? These are just a few of them – more detailed #oiselleteam lineups will come weekly on oiselle.com but here’s some races that we are going to be looking forward to:
9/21: Rock and Roll Philadephia Half Marathon: Kara Goucher, Heidi Greenwood and Andie Cozzarelli
10/5: Twin Cities Marathon: Heather Lieberg and Michelle Paxton
10/5: Lakefront Milwaukee Marathon: Melissa Gacek and Sun Torke
10/12: Chicago Marathon: Jen Bigham, Shal Fullove, Allison Maxson, Stacy Cail, Kristine Burgess, Kelsey Markham, Heidi Greenwood, Erin Christ, Krissy Murphy, Kristen Kirkland, Kim Pearlman, Jenna Embrey, Paige Lowder, Holly Roberts and Atha Vermillion
10/26: Houston Half Marathon: Emilia Benton
11/2: New York City Marathon: Kara Goucher, Gabrielle Kotkov, Lisa Janssen, Prianka Nandy, Stephanie Jimenez, Farron McIntee, Paulette Ference and Dori Gray
11/16: Big Sur Half Marathon: Megan Rolland, Kara Foster, Paulette Ference and Kayla Evans
11/23: Philadelphia Half Marathon: Heidi Greenwood, Nicole Hart, Abby McGill, Emily Ward and Kelsey Markham and Marathon: Robyn Broker, Stacey Black, Victoria Freile, Liz Anjos, Jess Clarke and Danielle Heffernan
12/7: California International Marathon: Jen Bigham, Stacy Cail, Jenny Hitchings, Robin Kutner, Nicole Dobransky, Mary Johnson and Jenny Cox
And believe me there is sure to be more! Stay tuned for more specifics on which of these women are going to chasing the Olympic Trials Marathon Standard and what specific races will be there goal races. Just thinking about all of this dedication and commitment, makes me lace up the trainers and head out the door!
KMet
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