THE RUNNING EFFECT PODCAST

Salt might be the most overhyped thing in your running bag. Alex Ostberg is back from Chicago, where Charles Hicks became the No. 3 American all time on a record-eligible course, for his monthly breakdown of the last four editions of The Rundown. He and Dominic start with electrolytes, a piece prompted by Riley Witt’s hot take. They cover why sweating actually raises blood sodium, the four dials that decide whether you n...

Nobody builds a distance program at Harvard. Alex Gibby did it twice over 

Alex arrived at Harvard in 2017 and inherited a program that had almost never made nationals, and didn't have a single athlete setting a PR after early February. Ten years later, the Crimson men have qualified for the NCAA Cross Country Championships six straight seasons, and Gibby has coached Graham Blanks to back-to-back NCAA cross count...

Natasza Dudek only wanted a PR. She got history instead. 

Now a junior at Ann Arbor Pioneer and the reigning Gatorade National Girls Cross Country Player of the Year, Natasza joins Dominic midway through her 2026 season to look back on the year her name went national. She remembers watching her oldest sister Zofia’s finishing kick win the 2019 Foot Locker title on a computer screen. She also explains what she learned as t...

The woman who breaks four minutes in the mile has probably already been born.

That's the opening claim from Professor Andy Jones, the Exeter physiologist behind Nike's Breaking2 project, and he gives her ten to fifteen years. The problem right now, he explains, is a split field: some women have the aerobic engine and the critical speed but no anaerobic reserve, while others have the speed and no endurance. Faith Kipyegon came up sho...

After Josh Kerr's mile world record, Danny Mackey had 478 unread texts. He answered about 20 of them.

The founding head coach of the Brooks Beasts Track Club joins Dominic at the end of the best season of his career. Josh Kerr broke the mile world record in London, about an hour after Brandon Miller won the 800m. Mackey still says he hasn't really reflected on any of it. He explains why: after 217 NCAA coaching rejections, he's stil...

Some coaches chase talent. Todd Witzleben builds it.

When Witzleben took over at Manhattan University in June 2025, one regional ranking had the Jaspers 41st out of 42 teams in the Northeast, with six men on the cross country roster. A year later, there are 16, and he's talking about a 7:25 time in the 4x800 relay. Dominic sits down with the former Buffalo associate head coach to talk through the rebuild: from leaving a MAC program ...

Vinny Mauri got drug tested at a Planet Fitness.

Five months after his 2:05:54 marathon at Glass City made him the fastest marathon debutant in American history, the self-coached Ohioan returned to the show just days before his second marathon in Chicago.

Dominic starts hot. Vinny explains why he emailed USADA himself the day after Toledo, why he feels honored rather than offended by the doubters, and how his firs...

Four hundred straight dual meet wins don't happen by accident. 

Sean McCafferty, entering his tenth year as head cross country coach at Christian Brothers Academy (CBA) in Lincroft, New Jersey, joins Dominic to unpack the culture behind one of the most storied programs in high school running. Sean ran at CBA before competing at Princeton, and he later took over the program from Tom Heath, who led it for...

Ethan Strand is a national champion who still believes he finished second.

He found out Jonah Koech had been busted for doping in the middle of a treadmill run, when Parker Wolfe tapped him on the shoulder, and his first reaction was anger. In this conversation, Ethan tells Dominic why the title still feels strange, why he feels worse for Hobbs Kessler, and why he thinks a positive test should end a career. He also covers ...

Aleksander Lingauer is stepping away from running. He says it out loud here for the first time.

This one was recorded in person in Columbus, the fourth time he and Dominic have sat down together and the first time with no race waiting on the other side of it. Near the end, Aleksander announces that he is pausing his racing indefinitely. The reason is a book—the account of his 419-day solo walk across Europe, shelved when he si...

Marcelo Mantecon has spent his whole career as the young guy. Not anymore.

The Belen Jesuit senior joins Dominic for the next episode of our Fleet Feet series leading into the Brooks Cross Country National Championships, and he arrives carrying something he didn't have last December: a target. He talks about welcoming the pressure that comes with being the top returner, about what he absorbed watching Jackson Spencer stay calm on st...

Behind Graham Blanks' 12:47 5K & 7:27 3K: 6:00min Easy Days, Training Alone & Racing Jakob Ingebrigtsen 

Graham Blanks can tell you exactly what he did wrong in every race he ran this year.

Monaco is the exception, and the one he's most excited about. It's the only race this season he finished and then couldn't sleep—his own heuristic for a good one—and the first time he really put down a fast 400m at the end...

Two guys named Dom, one goal, two completely opposite ways of getting there.

Dom Fusco returns to the show for the first time since March 2023, and this one isn't about his cardiac arrest—it's about the question flooding Dominic's DMs: how do you build real muscle without giving up your running times? Fusco has done it from the football side, Dominic from the distance running side, ...

Dominic sits down with Carter Cutting, Isaac Hedengren and Tayvon Kitchen a day after the Cougars opened their season in Terre Haute. It starts as a debate—Jakob versus Kerr; whether Hawker belongs in that tier; whether one down year should count against anybody—and the three of them push back hard enough that Dominic ends up defending his take alone.

From there it turns into the story behind New Standard, the ...

Alex Hutchinson ran his 1500-meter breakthrough because a timekeeper called the splits wrong.

He’d been stuck at just over four minutes for three years. Then, in one indoor race, a mistimed clock told him he was running three seconds faster than he was—and he ran 3:52, then 3:49, then 3:44 across the next two months. His old coach went through the logs looking for the reason. There wasn’t one.

That story sits at the...

Hans Troyer led Western States for 62 miles, DNF’d, and still calls the day a win. 

Eight weeks later he was on the CCC podium, which tells you most of what you need to know about how he metabolizes a bad race. Dominic welcomes back the 26-year-old for the first time since before his 2025 Western States debut, and Hans admits the stretch since has felt like three years crammed into one.

He traces the self-belief ...

Nobody quits while they're ahead.

Alex Ostberg is back for the guys’ monthly walk through of The Rundown, and this one runs from the foundations of the sport to the psychology of knowing when to walk away.

They open with ten things Alex wishes he knew as a high school runner—the talk that started this whole collaboration, and one he still finds himself repeating to professionals a decade later. Why&nbs...

Rocky Hansen spent the offseason quietly begging Habtom Samuel not to turn pro.He lost to Samuel twice—the NCAA cross country final in November and the outdoor 5,000 in June—and his reaction to Samuel leaving wasn't a relief. It was a feeling of disappointment at losing the rematch. That instinct sits at the center of this conversation, recorded a few weeks into Rocky's final collegiate season.They get into the race he'...

Jordan Hasay Hogan never officially retired.

She was the most hyped teenager in American distance running. She was a Foot Locker champion as a freshman, she acquired eight California state titles, was an Olympic Trials 1500m finalist at sixteen—and then went on to run a 2:20:57 marathon in Chicago. In this conversation, she opens up about the Nike Oregon Project years in a way almost nobody has.

Sh...