Lokedi Led Chicago Until the Last Kilometer. Feysa Won It.

Who was in front

On Sunday in Chicago, Hawi Feysa defended her title in 2:13:33, a personal best, and beat Sharon Lokedi by 34 seconds. Lokedi crossed in 2:14:07, and Brigid Kosgei was third in 2:14:55 (Marathons.com, Sun-Times). Feysa is the first woman to repeat in Chicago since Ruth Chepngetich won in 2021 and 2022.

The detail worth sitting with is the order of the closing stages. By Marathons.com's account, Lokedi led most of the way home, began to tire with about a kilometer left, and Feysa accelerated before the final turn. The woman who spent the last stretch at the front was not the woman who got the last word.

That is not a mystery, and it is not a character story. It is a very ordinary thing that happens at the end of long efforts, and most of us have been on one side of it without having a name for it. This post is about what that finish suggests for the part of your own training that nobody likes to rehearse: the last 20 percent.

The shape of the day

Chicago's women's race started in a lead group of seven that broke up shortly before 10K. Halfway came in 1:06:06, with three pacemakers still working. Lokedi briefly lost contact at one point and rejoined.

Do the arithmetic on that. A 2:13:33 finish means anyone who went through halfway with that group ran the second half in roughly 1:07:27, about 80 seconds slower than the first. Nobody ran a negative split. The race was won by the person who slowed down least in the final stretch, not by the person who was fastest at any given moment on the clock.

The men's race had the same signature. Amos Kipruto's group reached halfway in 1:00:21, on 2:00:42 pace, and he won in 2:01:09 after surging at 35K, which works out to a second half about 27 seconds slower than the first. Jacob Kiplimo, who pushed before 30K, was fatiguing by the end and finished fourth in 2:04:18. Different race, same lesson: the surge that mattered came late, and so did the cost of an earlier one.

Weather was mild, around 15 degrees Celsius with no wind, so there is no easy excuse in the conditions. Both races were decided by who had something left, not by who had something early.

Why leading costs something

We should be careful here. Nobody outside those athletes knows what Lokedi was feeling at 41K, and a 34-second gap is small enough that a different turn, a different drink, or a slightly different surge could have flipped it. Treat everything below as an argument about training, not a diagnosis of a race.

The argument is this. Running in front is work that does not show up in the pace. Choosing the line, owning the decision to hold or push, and having no one to follow all carry a cost that your watch will not log. If you have ever run a tempo alone, then run the same pace in a group and felt it get easier, you already know the shape of it. In a race, that difference gets collected at the end.

The take here: most of us train as if the end of an effort is just more of the middle. It is not. It is the part where the same pace costs more, where your form starts to make decisions without you, and where the athlete who has practiced being tired at pace has a real, specific advantage over the one who has only practiced being fresh at pace.

Practicing the last 20 percent

Common coaching practice, and the logic behind the durability work in the coaching knowledge the app draws on, is simple: if late-session pace fades while heart rate and perceived effort climb, the end of the effort is a limiter, and the fix is to train there on purpose. Long easy work builds the base for it. Tempo or race-pace segments placed late in an already long session rehearse it. Fueling practice keeps the tank from being the thing that ends your day.

For a runner, that might look like a long run where the final 20 to 30 minutes move from easy to steady. For a cyclist, it might be the last block of a long ride held at an effort you would normally only touch fresh. The point is not to make every long session hard. It is to put one small, controlled piece of fatigue-plus-effort in a session, once in a while, so race day is not the first time your body meets that combination.

Two cautions. First, this is an add to a plan with room for it, not a patch for a plan that is already too heavy; piling late-session effort on top of a stack of hard days is how a good idea becomes an injury. Second, race week is not the time to start. The guidance on the last week before an event is about readiness, not new fitness: protect sleep, keep everything familiar, and trust the work already done.

What the app can and cannot see

Training Signals can show you part of this picture and not all of it. Your effort score names the input it came from, whether that is power against your FTP, heart rate, or duration, so a late block that looks hard on paper is something you can check rather than assume. If you set a dated event goal, the coach frames the final week around arriving fresh rather than chasing fitness, and checks in after the date to ask how it went. The Fitness, Fatigue and Form trend is there to be read over weeks, which matters here, because one hard finish inside a long session tells you much less than the pattern of how your last 20 percent behaves across a block.

What it cannot do is tell you what Lokedi or Feysa felt, or split a 34-second margin into fitness, tactics and luck. Nobody can. If you want your own late-session numbers to mean something, the useful move is dull: do the same kind of late effort several times, in similar conditions, and compare.

Where this argument is weaker

There is a counterargument, and it is a good one. Plenty of races are won by the athlete who goes early and never gets caught, and plenty of leaders hold on. Leading is not a mistake, and sitting in is not automatically smart. Racing tactics depend on the field, the course and the day, and a finish like Chicago's is one data point, not a law.

It is also worth saying that the people in that race are elite marathoners with coaching, support and recovery that most of us will never have. Copying their approach to the last mile is not the lesson. Noticing that the last mile is its own skill is.

The part you can use this week

Look at your last three long sessions. Where did the pace or power fade, and was it the last 10 minutes, the last 30, or somewhere earlier? If you do not know, that is the first thing to find out. If the fade is late and steep, put one modest late-session effort into your next block and see what the same session looks like in a month.

Lokedi was in front for most of the finish and still came second. The race did not end where she was running well. It ended where she ran out, and Feysa, who had been behind, still had a turn left in her legs.