What a Debut! Emily Sisson Shows She’s Ready for the Marathon in London – runnersworld.com

• In her marathon debut, Emily Sisson placed sixth at the London Marathon.
• Her time of 2:23:08 makes her the sixth-fastest American woman (on a record-eligible course) at the distance.
• Training partner Molly Huddle finished 12th in a time of 2:26:33, which was a personal best.

For a marathon rookie, this was one heck of a debut.

Emily Sisson, 27, clocked 2:23:08 to finish sixth at the London Marathon this morning, the fastest ever debut by an American on a record-eligible course.

“It’s a good place to be,” Sisson said. “We’ve got a lot of things to build off and to improve in the future.”

There was a little less joy for fellow American Molly Huddle. After running with Sisson to halfway, the 34-year-old soon lost contact and finished 12th in 2:26:33.

“That wasn’t good,” said Huddle, who still took 11 seconds off her previous best, the 2:26:44 she ran to finish fourth in New York last November. “I definitely didn’t feel as good as I did in my last marathon from the start. I’ll chalk it up to that.”

With Sisson and Huddle sharing the same coach in Ray Treacy, they went into the race with a clear plan of working together for as long as possible.

The goal was to clock about 71 minutes for the first half, expecting that would leave them well adrift of the leaders. But on a windy morning in London, the race favorites chose not to follow the pacemakers.

“It definitely didn’t go as we expected,” Sisson said. “It was a lot slower than we were thinking.” With things slightly off, it meant in her very first marathon that Sisson had to learn a key skill of the event.

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“Adjusting—that’s been key all build-up,” she said. “There’s always something unexpected in the marathon. There’s just so many variables. The race we expected went totally out the window.”

Sisson and Huddle reached 10K together in 33:43, running in a 13-strong pack. They began to lose contact with the leading contenders shortly before halfway, which Sisson and Huddle reached in 1:11:49.

It was then when Sisson surged ahead, with Huddle making sure to heed her coach’s advice.

“Ray said you’ll probably split at some point [so] just do your own thing after that, don’t go over your line trying to chase each other,” she said. “I was hoping I could run 5:25, 5:30 [per mile], but I just got slower and slower. My legs were not going.”

At 30K, reached in 1:42:21, Huddle was 10th, 41 seconds and two places behind Sisson. But she said she was also in a world of hurt.

“I thought about dropping out, but I wasn’t sure how bad my time would be,” Huddle said. “I realized I was well within the Olympic Trials [qualifying] time, so I needed to stay in and do my best.”

Sisson, meanwhile, was only getting faster, moving up two places in the closing miles to sixth as she passed Buckingham Palace and ran toward the finish on The Mall.

Sisson had proven her versatility in recent months with a 67:30 half marathon in Houston and a 10K PR in Stanford (30:49.57), and she appears to have many options as she now looks to the future.

“I feel like for [the Olympics in] 2020 I can look at the marathon and the 10K,” she said.

During her college days in Providence, Rhode Island, her coach often told her she was made for the marathon. Is that something Sisson now believes?

“All signs pointed that I’d be good at the marathon, [but] you don’t really know until you do one,” she said. “I think that’s a good first marathon. We found what works training-wise.”

Up ahead, women’s champion Brigid Kosgei of Kenya blitzed a 1:06:42 second half to reach the finish in 2:18:20, a turn of speed that surprised Sisson given the conditions.

All marathoners face their own personal wall, and for Sisson it arrived with just a couple of miles to run. “Once I got to 24 miles I was like, ‘Okay, now I’m ready for the finish line,’” she said. “The wheels started to come off.”

But Sisson had few regrets after such a promising debut, even if it wasn’t quite perfect.

“We wanted to run faster ideally, but given the conditions and the way the race went out, that was a good performance,” she said. “It’s my first one—I’m still learning.”

Huddle had a similar mentality after the race, having known early on that it wasn’t going to be her day. “I felt rough from 10K on—my legs were really achy,” she said. “It didn’t feel easy when we were running 5:30s. It was just a bad day.”

But she was quick to look ahead.

Huddle revealed that she will return to the track in the summer and target the 10,000 meters at the World Championships in Doha before running a half marathon in the fall. She added that her next marathon will be at the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials in February, 2020.

It may have been fastest of her four marathons, but it wasn’t what Huddle wanted—something she summed up well when reflecting on the distance.

“Sometimes,” she said. “You have bad days in the marathon.”