Vinny Mauri Lets His Friends Pick His Workouts by Number

Vinny Mauri doesn’t always know which workout he is running until somebody texts him back. The self-coached Ohioan, who ran on American record pace for 30K at the Chicago Marathon on Sunday before finishing 10th in 2:06:45, writes three or four sessions on a sheet of paper and sends them out to training partners, friends or people he is talking to on Instagram. “Hey, pick a number one to four,” is the whole message, he told Marathon Handbook in an interview during race week.

LetsRun first reported the habit earlier this month, describing a friend who sends back a number while Mauri warms up. In our interview he added that there is usually one pretty tough session among the options, and he doesn’t let on which number it is.

His biggest day of the Chicago build, on Sept. 8, started the same way. The number that came back that morning pointed to a pair of long treadmill reps, the second of them meant to last 40 minutes, and at 46 minutes into it Mauri decided he might as well take it to 50. He doesn’t run to set paces, going instead on “whatever my body’s feeling,” and he put the two reps at about 5:02 and 4:57 per mile, with 60 seconds of rest between them, partly because the treadmill shuts itself off after an hour.

By the time he had finished his warm-up and cool-down he already had 25 miles on the day. His afternoon sessions had been running to 18 or 19 miles in the weeks before, so a 40-mile day was suddenly within reach, and the list went out again, this time with a quiet preference of his own. “If anything, I was just hoping that someone was going to coincidentally pick that longer workout. I never said what it was,” he said.

The afternoon became 4 x 20 minutes, with somewhere between 25 and 40 seconds of rest, one of those breaks again forced by the machine resetting. On any rep under 30 minutes he expects to be quicker than five-minute pace, though he was quick to add that a flat belt doesn’t come with the hills of a road. The second session alone came to about 20 miles, and he was in the middle of his usual 10-minute cool-down when he checked his total. “I’m at 43. Like, this is insane,” he remembered thinking. He ended the day on 45 miles, 36 of them at an average of 4:56 per mile.

He remembers heading home that night looking forward to a burger and a beer with his friends and his girlfriend. “It felt hard, like it was a lot of time on feet, but I just felt very strong throughout the whole thing,” he said.

Mauri has written his own training since he left Notre Dame, through his 2:05:54 debut at Glass City in April and the ASICS contract that followed in September, and most of it happens on Planet Fitness treadmills in northeast Ohio. He likes how controllable the machines are and that he can take on as much fuel as he wants, and the weather that week in September gave him one more reason to stay inside.

Just over a month later, in Chicago, he went through 30K in 1:28:15, 25 seconds inside the pace Conner Mantz held for his 2:04:43 American record on the same course.