VESTRI RETURNS TO MASTERCARD MINI 10-K WHERE HUGE YEAR OF GROWTH BEGAN

NEW YORK (05-Jun) — Halfway through the 2024 Mastercard New York Mini 10-K here in Central Park, Amanda Vestri quickly took stock of her position.  She was running in fourth place and the three women who were just one-second ahead of her –Senbere Teferi of Ethiopia, and Sharon Lokedi and Sheila Chepkirui of Kenya– were among the world’s best road runners.  It was time to test herself.

“My goal was to be top American in the race,” she told Race Results Weekly a year ago.  “So, there was a moment in time when it was either stay back with the chunk of the Americans or go ahead with the faster women at the front.”

Vestri, now 25, stayed cool as the three Africans eventually pulled away.  She went into grind mode and pushed through the second half alone.  Somehow, she managed to achieve a negative split (15:40 for the first half and 15:37 for the second), and finished fourth in a personal best 31:17.  She earned $7500 in prize money, a hugely important payday for a runner who was part of a well-established training group but had no shoe company sponsorship at the time.

“That’s probably one of the first things that my coach (Pete Rea of ZAP Endurance) mentioned to me after the race,” Vestri said in a telephone interview yesterday when asked about that negative split.  She continued: “Obviously, the goal is the same this year, just to go faster.”

Vestri –along with another 10,000 women– will race the 53rd edition of the Mini here on Saturday, the world’s first-ever road race for women, founded in 1972 by New York Road Runners.  She is part of an incredible elite field which includes some of the very best American distance women, like Olympians Weini Kelati, Emily Sisson, Emily Infeld, and Dakotah Popehn.  Abbott World Majors champions Hellen Obiri and Sharon Lokedi of Kenya, and Gotytom Gebreslase are also in the field (Teferi will not be back to defend her title).

Vestri comes into this year’s Mini as a completely different athlete from a year ago.  Working with her agent Josh Cox, she picked up a sponsorship with Brooks Running (based, at least in part, on her Mini performance), and has been stacking up months of quality training under Coach Rea and his deputy Ryan Warrenburg.

“I just feel like the consistency that we had built throughout the last summer of 2023, after I graduated, and then into 2024 started compounding,” Vestri explained.  “Month after month, I just felt like I was getting better and better, and training seemed to be getting better every month, even every week.”

After her Mini success, Vestri has achieved extraordinary growth as an athlete.  She took fifth in the USA Olympic Team Trials 10,000m last summer just three weeks after the Mini, beaten only by Weini Kelati, Parker Valby, Karissa Schweizer, and Jessica McClain.  She got second at the USATF 6-K road running championships, and sixth at the USATF 10-K road running championships. A year earlier it seemed unlikely that she would be a factor in those races, but her run at the Mini changed all that.

“It just kind of all culminated at the New York Mini,” Vestri said.  “That’s why this race is so special to me.  I don’t know; it just kind of gave me a different confidence as a runner.”  She added: “I’m excited to be back.”

Vestri wanted to try the half-marathon distance last fall, and Coach Rea was all-in.  She had planned to peak for the Valencia Half-Marathon at the end of October, but a little injury forced her to push back her schedule.  Instead of taking the long trip to Spain, Vestri went to Florida and ran in the low-key OUC Orlando Half-Marathon last December.  She popped a solo 1:08:12 in her debut making her the fourth-fastest American for 2024.

“My coach and I always wanted to go up to the half this past fall,” Vestri said.  “The plan was to do the Valencia Half-Marathon because we were just like, we want to run fast.  We want to go as far under 67 minutes as we can, and when I had that hiccup, that little injury, in October we were like, OK, we have to re-route now.  So, I took a few weeks off, and I’m actually the one who brought up the idea of doing Orlando just as a rust-buster, not for a good time.  I went into that race going, if I run under 70 minutes I’m going to be stoked.  So for me, it came as quite a shock that I came across the line close to 68 minutes.  I guess I didn’t realize how good it was at the time.”

She ran even faster at the Aramco Half-Marathon last January, arguably the most competitive half-marathon in the United States.  She finished fourth in 1:07:35 after smoking through 10-K in 31:40 and ten miles in 51:17.  Remarkably, Vestri wasn’t satisfied with that performance because her expectations had risen.

“We started thinking better numbers in Houston because we know how stacked Houston is,” Vestri said.  “Houston is another one of those races I feel, and my coaches feel, was an under-performance day.  I kind of grade myself on effort and performance outcomes after the race.”  She continued: “Houston should have been a 67-flat day, or under.  That’s where my fitness was at at the time.”

Vestri would run one more half in that training cycle, the USATF Half-Marathon Championships in Atlanta on March 2, part of the Publix Atlanta Marathon Weekend hosted by the Atlanta Track Club.  On a raw and windy day, she took third on a hilly course in 1:08:17 behind Taylor Roe (1:07:22) and Emma Grace Hurley (1:07:35).  She qualified for Team USATF for the (now cancelled) 2025 World Athletics Road Running Championships.

“Atlanta was just a grind fest,” Vestri lamented.  “I felt really, really bad the whole way.  That one was all heart.  There was no good feelings for me in that race, physically.”

Since then Vestri has raced three times, from the mile to 10,000m.  She was happy with two of them, but the third was a big disappointment for her.  At The TEN in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., on March 29, she finished 18th in 31:56.56, nowhere near what she had hoped for.

“That race was one of the ugliest races of my life,” Vestri groaned.  She continued: “When me and my coaches sat down after that race, we all think that what happened is that the three half-marathons, which was a new distance for me last year, in the span of three months that I did it in was just too much on my body and I did not give myself a chance to recover after them.  We were asking my body a little too much at that point.”

Vestri’s most recent race, a 5000m personal best at the Sound Running Track Fest in Los Angeles on May 24, went much better.  She finished fifth in a personal best 15:01.22.  That came on the heels of a 4:47.8 road mile in North Carolina, a race she did for training.  Those two races stimulated a different part of her aerobic system, part of her quest to be a more complete athlete.

“We’re going to dip down now,” said Vestri, who explained that she needed to also work on her speed.  “It’s not going to be comfortable; it’s going to feel like you’re sprinting.  But, at the end of the day that’s only going to help your 5-K, which is going to help your 10-K, which is going to help your half-marathon, which is going to help your marathon.  That’s kind of the approach that we took for that one.”

Reflecting on the past 12 months, Vestri has learned a lot about professional running and about herself.  She’s learned to trust the key people who are in her corner, she understands better the business end of the sport, and she’s learned not to worry too much about the approval of others.  She’s also trying not to be so hard on herself.

“Because I take my workouts so seriously I do have those high expectations for myself,” she said.  “It’s me putting those expectations on myself, it’s no one else.  I just feel like that’s always how I’ve been.  I think that’s ingrained in a lot of runners.  We’re always, like, type-A, I feel.  I envy the type-B runners.  I know some type-B runners and I’m like, I wish I was you.”

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The 2025 Mastercard New York Mini 10-K will be broadcast LIVE and FREE on four different platforms on Saturday beginning at 7:45 a.m. EDT:

. WABC-TV
. ESPN+
. abc7.ny.com
. NYRR Youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@nyrrvideo)