Gather the fastest possible runners.
Have them toil in secrecy, allowing only limited contact with the civilized world.
Never ease up, especially not during altitude training, when the hardest and most crucial marathon preparation takes place.
Then there is the club known as Northern Arizona Elite, where training logs are published online each day. Key workouts are filmed, photographed and shared on social media, the team website and in certain cases a YouTube channel. The 11 runners in the club, especially the veterans who run the biggest races, are required to be as public as possible about every aspect of their pursuits. The club is, essentially, a digital running reality series.
Its members are hardly the superstars of the sport. The three who are competing Sunday in the New York City Marathon — Stephanie Bruce, Scott Fauble and Scott Smith — are long shots to win. They have their sights set on the top 10, but none has ever come close to winning one of the world’s six major marathons.
Yet they are constantly blogging and tweeting and giving advice to runners getting ready for their first 5k or trying to shave those last few minutes from their marathon times so they can qualify for Boston.
This may sound counterintuitive; after all, what football team opens its playbook to an opponent before the Super Bowl? The NAZ Elite approach to strategy and data, however, illustrates that there are no real secrets or shortcuts to success in long distance running anymore. It is also a new concept for how top runners can subsist and thrive in a sport that has massive participation but relatively few fans. The idea is to present not just the triumphs in competing and training but the trials and the failures, too — for runners to be something more than just their trophies.
This twist on the usual secrecy of elite running clubs is Rosario’s brainchild. He is an Olympic Trials marathon qualifier who founded the Big River Running Company, a running specialty store in St. Louis. As he moved into coaching and decided he wanted to lead a club for the best of the best runners, he realized he needed to offer more to a shoe company than victories if he was going to persuade one to sponsor his efforts.
So Rosario came up with the concept of a team that searches for the spotlight nearly every day and goes public with everything about training, including distance and pace, that fans don’t hear about usually. He sought out runners who were fast and had the potential to improve, but who were also good, supportive teammates who would be willing to unload their hopes and dreams and insecurities often enough to establish a rapport with as many runners as possible. Hoka, the small shoe company known for its feather-light cushioning, signed on, agreeing to fund the bulk of what is now NAZ Elite’s roughly $700,000 annual budget.
“There’s no other club that is going to tell you what they are doing every day of the week,” said Mike McManus, senior sports marketing director at Hoka.
Fauble, who turns 27 on Monday, said he began to understand the reach of the club when the group was in Boston in the spring for a 5k race and the Boston Marathon.
Most marathon runners race that distance only twice each year. Unless their name is Eliud Kipchoge, who has won 10 of his 11 marathon starts, the race is a crapshoot. Over the course of 26.2 miles, so many things can go wrong. Injuries are common. Wins are rare.
Bruce ran a marathon in 2 hours and 29 minutes in Houston in 2011 but says only now — after two children and nearly 18 months of pregnancy — is she in the best shape of her life. Winning in New York probably will require a time around 2:25. “I want to be the best version of myself on the day,” she said.
Bruce’s teammates, Fauble and Smith, said they are focused on being competitive, of experiencing the race from the front. “We’ll work together,” Smith, 32, said.
Smith, who finished 14th in the 10,000 meters at the Olympic Trials in 2016, used to wait tables to support his running. The idea that he and the 10 other club members are sharing some kind of trade secrets is absurd, he said.
“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to come up with a training plan these days,” Smith said.
Rosario started the club here, at 7,000 feet above sea level, in part because it allows for vital altitude training that increases red blood cells, which carry oxygen to muscles. He drafted his wife, Jen, to serve as the team videographer and photographer, so that the runners can continue to raise their profiles — and Hoka’s — even when they aren’t winning. Rosario acts as a kind of general manager for the team, picking its members, negotiating salaries for the runners and managing the budget.
How much the runners get paid depends on their experience and success, but since 11 runners are dividing about $500,000, no one is getting rich.
In mid-October, the NAZ Elite crew drove an hour to 3,000 feet of elevation in Camp Verde for one of its last brutally intense workouts before the marathon. It was a mix of quad-burning three-mile tempo runs that topped out at a grueling pace of 4 minutes and 45 seconds per mile and increasingly fast, lung-searing interval runs that ranged from 400 to 1,600 meters. The goal was to go faster when they were tired to prepare them for a New York marathon that is usually filled with changing paces and surges.
“We want to run in the lead pack,” Rosario said.
Fauble ran 2:12:35 in his debut marathon in Frankfurt last year, which is an impressive debut but still a ways from world class. Kipchoge’s marathon world record is 2:01:39. Fauble would be thrilled to break 2:10.
If he can do that, he would keep up with other NAZ Elite runners who are beginning to have competitive success as well. In June, Kellyn Taylor, who is often running next to Bruce in videos, won and set a course record (2:24:28) at the Grandma’s Marathon in Minnesota. In July, Bruce won the 10k national road championship at the Peachtree Roadrace in Atlanta. Aliphine Tuliamuk, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Kenya, won national championships in the half marathon and the 25k earlier this year.
While the winning is welcome, it is not required for NAZ success.