The US mad scientist of marathoning

Chicken Coop Heat Lamps and 2:09 on a Treadmill: Meet the ‘Mad Scientist’ of Marathoning

C.J. Albertson trains in unusual ways, and it’s working: The 31-year-old Californian is getting faster as the New York City Marathon arrives

C.J. Albertson was the top American finisher in the 2024 Chicago Marathon. Michael Reaves/Getty Images

By Jason Gay

Nov. 1, 2024 9:00 pm ET

Let’s just say C.J. Albertson is an unconventional elite marathoner.

A handful of years ago, during the pandemic, Albertson ran a 2:09:58 marathon on a treadmill, a feat which makes me exhausted just to type. When he raced in college at Arizona State, he liked to slather on his own homemade muscle rub, which he concocted with turmeric, magnesium flakes and cayenne, among other ingredients.

Colleagues immediately noticed an effect.

“My teammates were like, ‘Why are you…bright orangy yellow?’” he says.

Albertson’s Instagram followers know that when the 31-year-old prepares for racing in the heat, he fills his treadmill “pain cave” with those incandescent red bulbs used for chicken coops and buffet carving stations. He looks like a roast beef sandwich doing intervals.

Albertson is self-coached, unsurprisingly. He’s actually a coach himself—at Clovis Community College, in his hometown of Fresno, Calif., where he never asks his runners to try any technique he hasn’t tried himself.

“I describe him as sort of a mad scientist,” says one of his runners, Joaquin McGee.

As an athlete, Albertson competes in all kinds of distance events. He just ran a personal best 2:08:17 marathon in Chicago (good enough for seventh place and top American status) but he also owns the world record for an indoor marathon (2:17:59) and the 50 kilometer (roughly 31 miles—Albertson blistered it in 2:38:44).

On Sunday, Albertson expects to run with the contenders at the New York City Marathon—despite running hard at Chicago just three weeks ago.

Such madness is routine for Albertson. Actually, he doesn’t think it’s madness at all.

“There’s nothing about [it] that doesn’t make sense to me,” Albertson says.

C.J. Albertson competes in all kinds of distance events. Photo: Paul Rutherford/USA TODAY Sports

Pushing limits is in his nature. When he was younger, Albertson’s technique for heat training was to park in the sun and bake in his car, in 100-plus temperatures.

“My parents were like, ‘I don’t think you’re supposed to do this,’” he says.

To be clear: Albertson had a phone, and his parents brought water and checked on him every 10 minutes, but it goes without saying…

Do NOT try that at home. You are not C.J. Albertson.

Albertson was a talented runner in college, but he wasn’t the best of the best. He didn’t expect to run professionally. After school, he started substitute teaching. He focused on coaching. He joked he was a retired runner.

But when he started marathoning at the end of the last decade, Albertson quickly got faster. It’s gotten to the point that Albertson’s routinely at the front of major races, even as he continues his college coaching job and attends to a growing family (Albertson and his wife, Chelsey, also a runner, have two young children.)

Albertson made a breakout impression at the 2021 Boston Marathon, where he led the race alone for 20 miles—at one point opening up a two-minute gap on the front group.

WHO IS THIS GUY? The internet wondered.

Caught late in the race, Albertson wound up finishing 10th. He explained afterward he was simply the “best downhill runner in the world” and wasn’t trying to do anything unusual.

Albertson isn’t expected to win in New York, where the fast field will include the defending champ and Olympic gold medalist Tamirat Tola of Ethiopia, 2022 NYC winner Evans Chebet of Kenya, and U.S. Olympians Conner Mantz and Clayton Young.

But Albertson’s ascent (and his training posted on the Strava training program) has become a fascination in the running community, says the longtime racer and writer Amby Burfoot.

“None of us imagine ourselves winning the Olympics or the New York City Marathon,” Burfoot says, “But we all think maybe if we ran tough, trained a little bit harder and put on an extra pair of sweatpants to sweat more, maybe we could get better. And that’s what he’s doing—at the elite level.”

Now sponsored by the shoe and apparel maker Brooks, Albertson likes to say “running is easy,” even when it’s hard. He inhales the latest training science, and carefully monitors the training of competitors like Mantz and Young. He’ll do heavy volume, battling through long runs where he doesn’t feel 100%.

Albertson even has a term for these sloggy efforts: “Functional Zombie Training.”

“Maybe my body wants to make more hemoglobin or make more mitochondria, which is fantastic,” he explains. “I want [my body] to put its energy into doing that. I don’t need to feel happy or excited or bubbly.”

Des Linden, the 2018 Boston winner and Albertson’s’s fellow Brooks athlete, calls Albertson a “super smart and thoughtful athlete” and thinks he will keep getting faster.

“He reminds me of those really brilliant kids who can’t make it through high school because the structure doesn’t work for them,” Linden writes in an email. “I don’t think his training is all that unconventional, he’s taking care of all the fundamentals, but doing them in a way that keeps him curious and interested.”

C.J. Albertson made a breakout impression at the 2021 Boston Marathon, where he led the race alone for 20 miles. Photo: Maddie Malhotra/Getty Images

Albertson’s runners at Clovis Community College can’t believe their luck, having a top American marathoner as their coach. “He’s a great coach,” says McGee, a second-year student studying Kinesiology. “His brain is always going. He’s always thinking of running and ways to make himself and all of us faster.”

Keeping it interesting is as essential to Albertson as lowering his times. A certain amount of Functional Zombie Training is inevitable, but a runner needs mental stimulation, too.

“You can’t keep doing the same thing over and over again,” he says. “Especially training alone—it gets boring.”

Marathoning’s mad scientist shouldn’t have this problem—in the chicken coop pain cave, or Sunday in the New York streets. He may not finish first, but C.J. Albertson will never be boring.

Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com