Olympic marathon didn’t go the way Bellingham’s Riley hoped, but in end ‘I’m an Olympian’
It may not have been the run Sehome High graduate Jake Riley was looking for, but in the end, only one thing mattered.
“I’m an Olympian. That’s pretty cool. That’ll work,” Riley said in a post-race video with coach Lee Troop posted to Troop’s YouTube account Sunday evening, Aug. 8, hours after Riley became the fifth Bellingham-born athlete to compete in the Olympics.
Riley finished 29th in the men’s Olympic marathon Sunday in Sapporo (Japan) Odori Park with a time of two hours, 16 minutes, 26 seconds — just less than eight minutes behind Kenya’s Eliud Klipchoge, who successfully defended his gold medal from the 2016 Rio Games with a time of 2:08:38.
Riley said he had set a goal of finishing among the top 10 in the race and that “I executed our plan through, I would say, about 30k. Then the wheels started to fall off.”
The plan, Riley said was to break down the race into four segments of approximately 10k each:
▪ “Go out relaxed” in the first 10k.
▪ Show “patience” in the second 10k.
▪ “Run with intent” in the third 10k.
▪ And then get more aggressive — “No more next times” — in the final portion of the race.
Through the first half of the race, Riley said he ran relaxed and showed good patience, especially when a large group broke away early. Only five kilometers into the race, Riley found himself in 74th place, Troop said.
But Riley said he maintained his pace running mile splits between 5 minutes and 5:03 — “I was feeling pretty good doing it” — and group hopped toward the front of the field as runners struggled to keep up with the pace set by the lead group and fell off.
At the 20k mark of the race, Riley said he “was ready to move,” and increased his tempo, but around 30k, he felt himself start to fade a little bit.’
“And then right around 35, the monkey jumped on my back, and everybody who’s ever died in a marathon before knows once that happens, there’s just nothing you can do,” Riley said.
Rather than being aggressive like he wanted, Riley said his whole mentality became making sure he finished and did so without walking.
“I had a bad day, but pretty much everybody was having a bad day,” Riley said. “But I closed it out, I finished it out in the top 30, which was not where I wanted to be. But at the same time, for as big of a blow up as I felt it was, it was OK.
“I think I learned some lessons that I think we can fix in the future. Ultimately, I don’t think I embarrassed myself out there. I still beat some pretty good guys. There were a lot of people today that had a bad day.”
Though Riley said he found the temperatures cool at the beginning of the race, he called them “sneaky.”
“It wasn’t the oppressive, all-encompassing heat they had in Tokyo, but yeah, it was no joke,” Riley said.
As for the overall experience, Riley was appreciative for the opportunity in Japan, even though that experience included COVID restrictions and he wasn’t able to attend the opening or closing ceremonies.
He also said he was appreciative of the support he got from Bellingham and Boulder, Colorado — which he now calls home.
As for what’s next, Riley said, “I’ve got a lot of bucket list marathons I’d want to run. It might be a little aggressive, but I’d like to get all the marathon majors in. We’re going to try to knock a couple of those off, it sounds like. Get a little bit of road racing in — hopefully a little cross country.
“I know at this point the calendar is full with all the things I’ve said, but cross country is my first love, so we can get a couple of those in. Have some fun races in there.”
