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 start lines while his own nerves churned, and about learning to convert that nervousness into excitement instead of dread.

The training picture is stranger and simpler than you'd expect from the nation's most-watched high schooler. He doesn't wear a watch most days. He can't tell you his exact mileage, and he runs Miami's brutal humidity. He credits sleep above everything else for keeping himself intact, and he credits Frankie Ruiz, the coach he has known since birth, for a program built on consistency rather than heroics.

Marcelo also revisits Balboa Park in detail: the gap that opened at the bottom of the hill, getting caught, and praying for one more surge with 300 meters left. His plan for the rematch is almost defiant: Have fun. Stay aggressive. Race like he still has nothing to lose.

Along the way, the two discuss Flagstaff team trips and flooded shoes in the Everglades, his sister's rise, UNC and a future in finance, why the class of 2027 might be one of the deepest ever, and a post-race celebration involving roughly a hundred donuts.

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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. After that, closing hard got easier, because he knew he could.

The rest he breaks down with unusual candor. In Zurich, he waited too long to move, got stuck in lane two while Parker Wolfe opened a gap. Brussels, he was right on Balew's shoulder thinking about the American record, then Balew went all out from 300m to go and Graham got defensive instead of racing to the line. At Budapest, he made a big move at 300m to go, was right on the leaders at 200, and then Jakob came past. Looking back, he thinks he had the juice to take the lead with 200 to go.

One small mistake per race—and being in position to make those mistakes at all is the leap from last year.

He also walks Dominic through the training. Six years with Alex Gibby, Harvard through the pro ranks, and the program is much the same minus the mid-workout bench press. This year: mileage up to 105-110 for a stretch, plus twice-weekly all-out sprint work. He’s still doing six-minute pace on easy days, mostly alone in Athens on a quiet public track.

The 2027 goal is simple. He wants to win something—a Diamond League race, the Trials, worlds—and let the confidence compound. The guys also touch on soccer practice, Columbia, a "fratified" Harvard team, and his fall movie pick.

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, and both are now chasing sub-3 marathons this fall.

They open where the Austin hybrid scene actually lives: peptides, HGH, and TRT. Fusco has never touched any of it and won't endorse it, but he's honest that more people are using it than listeners think.

From there it's the practical stuff. Why you can't pull the endurance lever and the strength lever at the same time, and why seasons beat balance. Why the jacked hybrid athletes on your feed spent a decade lifting before they ever ran. Why full-body training three times a week beats a bro split. The triangle of performance, longevity, and aesthetics, and the cost of picking a corner.

They also discuss Fusco's five foundational supplements, his case for creatine as a runner's recovery tool, and a blunt argument that most athletes are chronically underfueled—and why sometimes a burger and fries is the right call.

He also puts his sub-3 confidence at 60%, admits he's failed three times, and explains what Austin heat has done to this block.

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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 channel they built after an indoor season of workouts none of them thought were possible. Coach Eyestone hated the cameras at first, and the phrase itself came out of watching teenagers run times that made the old ceilings look silly.

Tayvon finally talks about the workouts everyone used to whisper about: post-race 800s, sub-two splits, a coach who barely looked up. Hedengren goes the other direction—41 miles a week as a high school senior, a jogging-stroller childhood, a dad who ran for Eyestone in the 90s, and a sister who beat him in every workout. They get into the Belgian draft horse math that explains why teammates pull more together than alone; the realities of an increasingly international NCAA; and a sleep bet that ends in a bleached mullet.

Plus, speed suits on grass, why a miler still cares about cross country, what a November-focused build looks like at BYU, and a hypothetical dinner for Gordon Ramsay that nobody wants to cook alone.

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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 center of this conversation with the physicist-turned-journalist behind Endure and the Sweat Science column at Outside. Alex is a self-described data guy who spent a career chasing what’s measurable and kept colliding with the part of running that isn’t: the days something shifts, the races where belief outperforms any supplement. He walks through the ice bath study that separated the cold water from the story we tell ourselves about it, the self-talk intervention that produced an 18 percent gain in time to exhaustion, and why he’s careful about debunking things that work because we believe in them.

They also get into Breaking2 versus the Kipyegon sub-4 attempt, why times keep sliding and what that does to a high schooler, coaches who invent splits mid-workout and the trust that makes that work, and the two years Alex spent fighting his college program before deciding to run the workouts as written.

At 50, he’s back racing masters cross country, for his teammates. They also touch on Zátopek, Paula Radcliffe, and why you should never, ever take a PR for granted.

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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 back to Bandera in 2024, when a few coachless months in Georgia were enough to prove to himself he could hang with anyone. On Western States, he is unsparing and unbothered at once: he went in giving himself a ten percent chance to win, came out believing it was eighty, and wrote every lesson down in a notebook.

He breaks down what the Alps taught him at CCC: from the climbs that go straight up to the hiking and poles he had never practiced with.

The training talk is specific. Hans walks through his jump to 120-130 mile weeks peaking at 145, up to 36,000 feet of vert before CCC, the move to Boulder in March, and the sweat test that revealed he had spent years taking in triple the sodium he needed. He defends his much-criticized diet with a simple argument about aid stations, explains why he fuels every run over ninety minutes like it is race day, and leaves young runners with carbs, consistency, and a reminder to enjoy their lives.

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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 consistency beats perfection. Why a plateau isn't a bug in the program. What quietly rots a team culture from the inside. And here’s the line worth writing down: you don't rise to the occasion, you fall back on your preparation.

Then a runner's guide to protein: what this macronutrient is actually doing in a body that has nowhere to store it; what the science now says about the anabolic window and how much you can use in one sitting; where the real daily target comes from; and why the animal-versus-plant question is messier than either camp wants to admit. Dominic pushes back hard on the plant-based side, and Riley Witt's anti-electrolyte take gets its moment too.

And then the hard one: why almost nobody quits on time; how sunk cost keeps runners in workouts, seasons, careers andrelationships long past their expiration date; and the two tools Alex uses to make that call before emotion takes the wheel.

They close on a big weekend for Alex's athletes—a 1-2 at the US 20K Championships, a world title, and a marathon debut coming in Chicago.

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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.

She walks Dominic through the actual training: 115-mile weeks, 25-mile long runs with fifteen at six-minute pace on an altitude treadmill before ten more miles at marathon pace, and Alberto Salazar's habit of tacking on surprise reps until athletes cracked. The centerpiece is the session she still calls the hardest of her life—a morning tempo, then 400s at 58 seconds that were supposed to be four and became ten, with Galen Rupp jumping in to pace, and Jordan averaging 58.7.

Underneath all of it is faith.

The priest who traveled with the group to majors, the wrist rosary she wore in every marathon, and the Catholic athletes' conference where she met Alberto by what she can only call fate. She explains the Kobe tribute kit at the 2020 Trials, the comment he left on her Instagram after she tore her hamstring, and how studying his mental game shaped the way she coaches today.

On a comeback she's candid: most likely done, maybe one percent, and it would take a miracle. The fulfillment now comes from Hogan Performance and from her son, Micah.

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