How They Train: Jake Riley
By: Michael Mcmillan
Tags: Marathon Runner, Runner Profile, Running Training, Marathon Running, Marathon Training

Photo courtesy of on-running.com

Jake Riley is a 32-year old marathon runner from Bellingham, Washington. This past February, Riley finished second to Galen Rupp in the United States Olympic Marathon Trials and will be running that distance in the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo. Riley’s story is inspirational because his Olympic trials success came after several years of injury and running self-doubt. Riley changed coaches, had major surgery, and almost gave up on running. Still, he came back to make the US Olympics marathon team.

Riley has some impressive results, listed here. His personal outdoor track best in the 5000 meters is 13:32.82, which he ran on May 18, 2012. Also on the outside track, his best 10,000 meters time is 27:59.37, which he ran on May 2, 2015. On the roads, his best half marathon time is 1:02:56, which he ran on March 16, 2014, and his best marathon time is 2:10:02, which he ran when he made the Olympics team on February 29, 2020.

Some of his other race finishes include a 15th place in the 2016 Olympics Marathon trials and a 10K win in the 2012 USATF Club Cross Country Championship.

In 2019, Riley was the first American finisher and ninth place overall in the 2019 Chicago Marathon.

Currently, Riley lives in Boulder, Colorado where he trains under Jim Troop and is enrolled in a Master’s degree program in Mechanical Engineering. He plans to work in running shoe research and development after he completes his degree and finishes his time as a professional runner. This past summer Riley signed with the On footwear company.

High School and College

Riley ran high school cross country and track in Bellingham, Washington. After high school he won a track scholarship to run at Stanford University. Riley was an eight-time All American in track and cross country while at Stanford. His best college finish was the 2010 10,000 meter championship where he finished third.

How Riley Trains for the Marathon

Riley’s coach, Lee Troop, provides Riley with a standard marathon training plan to follow. Here is an outline of a typical training block for him:

Sunday: Two-and-a-half hour long run.

Monday: Easy runs AM (one hour or so) and PM (35 to 40 minutes).

Tuesday: AM workout session (hills, intervals, tempos, fartleks) and PM easy.

Wednesday: One hour-and-a-half run in the AM.

Thursday: Easy runs AM (50 minutes) and PM (35 minutes).

Friday: AM workout session and PM easy run (35 minutes).

Saturday: Easy runs AM (50 to 60 minutes) and PM (35 minutes).

In addition to these regularly scheduled runs, Troop also assigns Riley a longer, 3-hour run about six weeks before a marathon. Then about three weeks before a race, Troop has Riley do an 18-mile progression run.

For the workout sessions, tempo runs are run at half marathon pace, the fartleks are run at 2:40 to 3:00 minutes per kilometer with recovery between efforts at 3:00 to 3:15 per kilometer. The interval sessions are run at 10K pace to start, with Riley working the effort down to 5K pace.

Some Marathon-Specific Workouts

There are two marathon-specific workouts Riley likes to run on a regular basis. The first one is called the Moneghetti Fartlek. This workout involves a 20 minute tempo run with a set of harder surges in the midst of the tempo run. The surges consist of:

· 2 x 90 seconds at half-marathon pace with 90 second recovery.

· 4 x 60 seconds at 10K pace with a 60 second recovery.

· 4 x 30 seconds at 5K pace with a 30 second recovery.

· 4 x 15 seconds at all-out pace with a 15 second recovery.

The workout ends with 1 or 2 miles of cool-down running.

This workout is important to Riley because it helps train him to be able to dig deep in the last few miles of a marathon, when his legs are tired and don’t tend to want to turn over quickly. As Riley puts it, “It’s great practice for a race, when you need to throw in a surge on tired legs.”

The second big marathon workout Riley likes to run is a tempo run that also includes a time trial at the end of the tempo. Riley runs this tempo by running up a steep hill for two miles and then running the two miles back down and following this with an all-out 5K uphill on a gradual slope.

Riley starts this workout by doing an easy workout or dynamic warm-up drills, and ends the workout with a mile or more cool-down run.

For Riley, this workout has mental benefits as well as physical benefits. “This workout takes a ton of mental strength because it feels hard the whole time. But you need to consciously hold back a bit in the beginning to be able to speed up at the end.”

This is a great workout to run when you are scheduled to do a hill workout or you are scheduled for a tempo run that is 5 miles or more long.

Coming Back from Injury and Disappointment

Riley’s great finish in the Olympic Trials comes after many years of injury and disappointment in his running and in himself. After he graduated from college in 2012, Riley moved to Rochester Hills, Michigan to join the Hansons-Brooks running team. His training with the Hansons-Brooks team was fruitful and two years later, in 2014, Riley raced his first marathon in Chicago and finished in 2:13:16.

By the next year Riley was starting to have some issues with his Achilles tendon. Rather than treat it properly, though, Riley trained through the injury as he prepared for the 2016 Olympics Marathon trials in Los Angeles, where he finished 15th.

After this, he decided to quit the Hansons-Brooks team and he and his wife moved back to Washington. The injury didn’t get any better, causing him to reduce his workouts to cross-training as the injury was too painful to run on. During this time he consulted several doctors and tried many different treatments, all without success.

To make matters worse, Riley and his wife decided to separate and not long after that Riley contracted Lemierre’s Syndrome, a bacterial infection that affects the throat and carries lymph fluid throughout the body. Luckily, his doctors caught the syndrome in its early stages and they were able to fight off the syndrome during a 5-day hospital stay. After recovering from Lemierre’s, in October 2017 Riley was convinced by some of his running friends to move to Boulder to join the Boulder Track Club, coached by Jim Troop, an Australian and three-time Olympic participant.

Soon after this, one of the runners on the Boulder Track Club committed suicide and this sent Troop into a spiral that had him eventually disband the track club, through he did keep working with a few runners, including Riley.

Finally, in May 2018 Riley had surgery to fix his Achilles issue, which was finally diagnosed as being caused by Haglund’s deformity. He couldn’t run for three months so he did strength exercises during the layoff to solve some imbalance problems that were contributing to his injuries. He was finally able to start a walk/jog program in August.

He started racing again in Spring 2019, mostly local races in the Boulder area. In May he finished 25th at the Bolder Boulder 10K with a time of 31:20 and in September, at the USATF 20K championships, he finished in 15th place with a time of 1:10:59, marking the beginning of his marathon racing comeback, which culminated in his October 2019 Chicago Marathon finish in 2:10:36, which made him the first American finisher.

Jake Riley’s story of a successful college runner struggling to find his place as a professional runner provides all of us with a great story of success, failure, disappointment, and a comeback. Anyone who has been injured or gone through a personal crisis that led to a prolonged period of not being able to train can relate to Riley’s story and use it as motivation to get back to running when their situation improves.

Thanks for reading and please respond to this article or email me at mmmcmillan1@att.net with your comments and suggestions.