Even for the most promising runner, choosing the U.S. Olympic Trials as your first marathon might be akin to playing before a packed crowd at Carnegie Hall a year or so after taking up the piano.
Or, to pick a simile that fits perfectly into Jeralyn Poe Kiprotich’s life, it’s like sitting down to write your doctoral dissertation without having done all the coursework and research.
The talent may be there, the potential more than evident, but that’s quite a pressure-filled environment in which to make your debut if you aren’t exceedingly prepared for what might transpire.
But Jeralyn Poe Kiprotich is not afraid to try hard things, to put herself out there, both in running and her academic career. So, after qualifying for the 2024 Olympic Marathon Trials with two 1:10 half marathons in 2023, she hit the streets of Orlando last February to see what might happen.
Well, the streets of Orlando hit back. Poe Kiprotich’s debut at 26.2 miles was derailed by side cramps five miles in. She pushed on, but never really found her footing and wound up finishing 76th in 2 hours 41 minutes 15 seconds – not exactly the debut she had in mind.
Slightly less than a year later, Poe Kiprotich, 27, is back to take another crack at the marathon, lining up among the elites in the California International Marathon on Dec. 8.
This time, she feels better prepared and more confident. Most assuredly, based on training and past performances in the half marathon and a third-place finish last month in the Pittsburgh 10 Miler, Poe Kiprotich will run a personal best, maybe slicing a full 10 minutes off that Trials performance, and be among the contenders on the streets of Sacramento.
When she ran the Olympic Trials, she was knee-deep in coursework and research in her doctoral program in Ecological and Environmental Informatics – studying the relationship between climate change and the weather and its consequences – at NAU.
Now, having switched from training under Mike Smith to McKirdy Trained’s Jack Polerecky, and having only a year left in her five-year Ph.D program, Poe Kiprotich is ready for the physical and mental challenges the marathon poses.
CIM will be only her second race since the Trials, her first at the marathon distance, mostly because she’s been engaged in a marathon of another kind – her doctoral pursuit. Currently, she’s in the midst of writing her dissertation on better modeling for projecting the levels of carbon dioxide being released in the decomposing Arctic permafrost due to climate change.
She’s nearing the finish line academically, but really just starting her pro running career. Poe Kiprotich was an All-American cross country runner at Michigan State, the top runners on a Spartans team that finished sixth in the 2019 NCAA Championships. After losing her senior outdoor track season to Covid, Poe Kiprotich started thinking about grad school, and found that NAU had one the nation’s top programs in her field of interest.
And, of course, it didn’t hurt that NAU also has one of the best distance running programs in the country, as well. So Poe Kiprotich could close out her collegiate running career running the 5,000 and 10,000 meters for the Lumberjacks while starting her doctoral program. Oh, and another factor was that her boyfriend, now husband, elite miler Justine Kiprotich, was training in Flagstaff.
After her eligibility ran out, though, Poe Kiprotich kept on running.
She has always, she said, been more than a one-dimensional person. She’s able to juggle both time-consuming and draining undertakings and be successful at both.
Would it be better, or perhaps just boring, for her to devote herself solely to either running or her Ph.D”?
“I think about that a lot,” she said, nodding vigorously. “Like, if I had chosen just school or just running, I don’t think I would’ve been able to handle it. It’s like, you don’t tie your identity to one thing. You can have a lot of different passions. When something’s going hard, you don’t tie your identity to a bad race. You still have things that are important to you. … I don’t regret (doing) either one. I’m happy having that balance.”
Long term?
Well, there’s plenty of time to sort that out.
Poe Kiprotich could go all-in on running and see just how fast her marathon times can get. Or, she could go all in on working for governmental agencies in her environmental expertise. Or, she could continue to do both for as long as its feasible.
Option three seems her more immediate choice. After she becomes Dr. Poe Kiprotich, she hopes to land a post-doc position – often a precursor to prestigious jobs – and continue to train and race as an elite.
Asked if it’s feasible to do both, Poe Kiprotich just smiled.
“Great question,” she said. “I ask myself that question every day. I honestly just have to take it day-by-day. I can’t say what the future is going to hold next year or the next five years. Next year, I will have graduated, and my life will not be as flexible as it has been now.
“I’m mentally preparing for that. It might look like taking a step back from running a little bit. We’ll have to see. But I do know that running will always be a huge part of my life.”
So far, juggling both has worked out quite well.
It’s not multi-tasking for Poe Kiprotich, though. When she’s running, she’s running. When she’s coding and crunching data and writing her dissertation, she’s totally immersed in that, too. She said she loves losing herself on a long run and pushing herself on threshold workouts, getting the most from her body as she can, and she also loves to hunker down and code, saying, “I could sit at the desk all day. (Coding) is like a puzzle. It’s fun.”
There is, she said, time for exercising both body and mind.
“It takes a lot of compartmentalization,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been doing really good with it. When I’m at practice, I think about running. When I come home from practice, then I think about school. This last year, with thinking about graduating and wrapping up my dissertation, it’s been a little harder to compartmentalize.
“It’s all started to blend together, which is kind of exciting at the same time. I go for a run, I’m still thinking about science and everything. Sometimes, in the morning, I’ll be coding and get stuck on my code, or whatever, and start to get frustrated, but then I go for a run and clear my mind at practice. Sometimes, it actually really helps. IT’s honestly like a refresher. Just step away sometimes.”
Poe Kiprotich has been doing both since 2021, so she’s had plenty of practice at this bifurcated existence.
Unlike other graduate transfers to NAU’s distance running program, Poe Kiprotich didn’t seek out running first and then find a graduate program to enter. She found the program first.
“It’s all worked out so well,” she said. “I came out here, originally, for grad school. NAU, honestly, is an incredible program for climate-change research and what I’m doing. (She applied) in January of 2020, before Covid. I intended to come out here after I graduated but covid started. (track cancelled).
“So I thought, oh, this is also the best school in the country for running, so it works out well. Why don’t I do my last track season (2021) at NAU? I contacted Smith and it worked out really well. It was a lot to balance for a year, but I got some closure on the last track season I didn’t have at Michigan State.
“My first year in the program was a lot of course work and taking classes, statistics and computer classes, but I was able to work around that with my schedule for (track) practice. A lot of my program is doing research and that kind of took off more in the later stages. But I was still trying to balance running, classroom and research. It was a lot, but when you’re focusing on what you have to do that day, it’s really not that bad.”
After that first year, Poe Kiprotich was assessing just what type of running would be best for her talents. She said she always preferred cross country to track – she was one of the greatest prep cross country runners ever in Nebraska, winning state titles all four years – and led a nationally-ranked Michigan State team – but wanted to take a shot at qualifying for the Olympic Trials in the 10,000 meters.
She ran 31:59 at the Sound Running event in California in May of 2022, then placed 18th in the U.S. Championships in Eugene, Ore., in 32:15. Last year, she tried again to get the U.S. Trials auto qualifier for the 10,000 (31:30), but ran 32:39 last March at The Ten in California.
For most of 2023, however, Poe Kiprotich turned to road racing and found more success. She debuted in the half marathon by winning the Mesa Half in 2022 in 1:10:51. She ran 1:12:46 at the New York City Half in March of 2023, then placed second in the Indianapolis Monumental Half in 1:10:47.
Her half marathon times seemed to auger good things once she jumped to the marathon distance. After getting the auto qualifier for the Marathon Trials via her half times, Poe Kiprotich decided about a year out to compete in the Trials as her first marathon.
She considered running a marathon before as a prep, but decided to put her time and effort into the training block for Orlando. And, remember, she was knee-deep in her doctoral program at the time.
“I don’t regret not doing a marathon before,” she said. “I’m young and doing another marathon before that, I don’t think my body was ready for it. I was pretty fresh out of the NCAA running, and just getting a lot of half marathons under my belt was the goal at the time. Originally, I was thinking, maybe I could do New York before that, but it would’ve been a quick turnaround.”
Poe Kiprotich said her training went well in the Trials build. She was running 92 miles a week despite having to train through a Flagstaff winter in which a snow storm always seemed to coincide with her scheduled long run.
She lined up in Orlando on Feb. 3 “feeling fit.”
“And I felt good for the first five miles,” she said.
Then those side cramps appeared, and it threw off her race plan.
“That’s kind of not the way I would expect to have the marathon to feel,” she said. “That’s not how I wanted it to feel going into it. I don’t know what happened. It was a hot day. My training was really great going into it. A weird day. You can’t expect your debut marathon to go awesome. It’s a learning experience.
“I talked to a lot of people about it and they prepared me for mile 20 and how bad it hurts. Something that I maybe didn’t know as much is that when you reach a challenge in the race, just how you’re going to overcome it. And that could happen at five miles in. And I didn’t anticipate it happening that early. What will be beneficial going into this one is knowing how to solve those problems knowing they’ll come up and not letting something that happens at mile five not derail the entire race. I’m learning how to bounce back over the course of two and a half hours.”
Undaunted, Poe Kiprotich pushed on. She switched coaches from Smith to Polerecky, but she said her training is basically the same, doing long runs and workouts with McKirdy Trained’s Dani Polerecky, Julia Paternain and Angie Nickerson. The only major difference, she said, is that she no longer does double threshold workouts, a Smith staple.
“School took the front seat the past year,” she said. “I started working with Jack in August. I’m still running 90 miles a week, but there’s not as much time to do races.
“I said at the beginning when I started working with him, I don’t have time to do these double thresholds. … We’re focusing on the long-run workouts, which is the same, the volume, which is the same.”
Poe Kiprotich goes into the CIM not necessarily trying to win the race, but have a good experience. Yes, as a numbers person, she does have a time goal.
“I know I’m more competitive and can run faster than 2:41,” she said. “A lot of my goals for this race is just seeing how much better I can be compared to the last one. For goal times? I think shooting for under 2:32 would be really awesome.”
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