That said, life has a different tint now: she’s 40, with a year-old son, a coaching job, and plenty of promotional work to do for Nike and her three cookbooks. No, she’s still an Olympic silver medalist (for the 10,000 meters in 2008), a New York City Marathon winner (2017), and a hardened veteran with two decades of world-class competitive efforts.

“I was nervous at the beginning, because I wasn’t sure I was ready,” she says. “I made it to the end because I was as proactive and preemptive as I could be.”įlanagan doesn’t pretend she’s just like everyone else. She didn’t train well, she felt the endeavor was “in serious jeopardy” midway, she had to hone her fueling and recovery skills, and she needed help from family, friends-and even regular blood testing.įlanagan succeeded, she believes, not because she was super fit, but because she anticipated the stumbling blocks and knew how to hurdle them. But ask Flanagan how it went, and she’ll tell you quite the opposite. She initially hoped to complete the six marathons with an average time of under three hours -and she did handily, with a final average of 2:38:30.įrom the outside, it seems obvious that she had a perfect plan and followed it to a T. Tracing the arc of Flanagan’s finishes, it’s apparent her project was work of precision engineering. She started strong, rolled through the middle marathons, and ran an impressive best-of-six 2:33:32 in the capstone New York City Marathon. Flanagan ran them all in what she called Project Eclipse. Due to COVID, spring races were rescheduled, so Berlin, London, Chicago, Boston, Tokyo, and New York were held in a seven-week span. Last fall, four-time Olympian and marathon great Shalane Flanagan came out of retirement to pursue the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of running all six of the Abbott World Marathon Majors in one season.

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