Catching up with 2:10 Marathoner CJ Albertson

·1 hr 31 min·5 clips

CJ Albertson says Valencia ended with him walking the streets covered in poop and watching the race on his phone.

CJ Albertson opens by revisiting the Olympic trials and the moment he got dropped while still running fast. He describes how rough that felt, even though he knew he was fit enough to keep pressing. What he kept coming back to was a simple cue: relax. He says he leaned on a mindset that running is easy and that the marathon is easy, so the answer is not always to grit through pain. Instead, he tried to find a way to feel good while running. That shift helped him go from 20th to seventh over the final 10K. The conversation then turns to what keeps him healthy. He says peak marathon training is when he is really running a lot and feels adapted, with consistency helping his body settle into a rhythm. For him, that steady volume matters more than chasing a special fix. The hosts ask about the weight room, and he starts by backing up into his childhood. He grew up playing a lot of sports, especially basketball. That meant jumping, moving, and loading his body in different ways before running was the whole story. He also lifted a lot when he was younger. Squats, cleans, and other lower-body work were part of the mix. He thinks all of that helped build coordination, bone density, and muscle. He adds that genetics matter too. Still, he keeps circling back to the idea that years of varied movement gave him a base that now shows up in marathon training. Steeplechase comes up as well. He says he was not a great steepler and kept dealing with the same hormonal injury there. The marathon feels different to him because the higher-volume work seems to agree with his body more. The hosts stay with health, lifting, and injury questions, including the kind of nagging issue that shows up right when everything else is going well. His answer stays grounded in routine, adaptation, and the value of building a body that can handle work. He does not pitch a magic exercise or a perfect formula. He talks instead about the long view of athletic development. At the end, he says people who really love something usually figure out how to run fast in it. He also suggests that the American marathon could look very different in the next five to ten years. The whole conversation stays easy, curious, and practical, with enough wandering to feel real without losing the point.

As heard by us

A steady marathon conversation about durability, relaxation, and racing hard without forcing it.

Run Free focuses on the part of marathon running that rarely gets attention: the stretch where patience matters and the work is as mental as it is physical.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want marathon advice that stays calm when the race gets hard.

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