ORLEN Prague Marathon – News – Colley Aiming For Fast Time At Prague Marathon Sunday

COLLEY AIMING FOR FAST TIME AT PRAGUE MARATHON ON SUNDAY
By David Monti, @d9monti
(c) 2025 Race Results Weekly, all rights reserved – Used with permission.

(02-May) — Andrew Colley arrived in Prague yesterday from North Carolina a little tired, but full of positive energy.  The 2024 Manchester Road Race champion is ready to wave goodbye to his current marathon personal best of 2:11:22, set at Chicago in 2023, and knock as many minutes off as possible at Sunday’s ORLEN Prague Marathon.  His training the last two months in Blowing Rock, N.C., has been strong, and included a 20-mile cut-down run which started at 5:50 per mile pace and finished at 4:45.  He knows he’s definitely got a lot more potential than 2:11.

“The marathon is the one event that… I’ve under-performed pretty heavily,” Colley told Race Results Weekly in a telephone interview from his hotel in Prague last night.  “There’s a 2:07 pace group, and I’m going to go out with them.  It might be a little conservative with how training’s going, but you never know with the day, too.  That’s my goal: to still run 2:07 pace through 20 and see how much I can take off in the last 10-K.”

Colley, 34, who is the senior member of the ZAP Endurance program under coaches Pete Rea and Ryan Warrenburg, has had Prague on his calendar since last December.  His agent, Josh Cox, reached out to the event and Colley got an early acceptance.  That allowed the 3:58 miler and his coaches to set up his training and racing program so he could satisfy several other goals and still be in peak marathon shape for Prague.  He ran a 1:00:47 half-marathon personal best in Houston on January 19, set a new course record of 13:33 at the Armagh Road Race 5-K in Northern Ireland on February 13, and took fifth at the USATF Half-Marathon Championships in Atlanta on March 3 where he ran 1:01:09 on a hilly course.  Each of those races was aligned with his Prague preparations.

“We knew we wanted to go for the fast half,” said Colley, who ended up getting sick in December but recovered enough to run well in Houston.  He continued: “We knew we wanted to do a couple of fast halfs and a marathon a little later.  So, it still worked out that I got the pieces of the puzzle put into place for today.  Even though they weren’t the perfect days for me, they were still part of the ticket to here.”

And what about that 5-K where he won in a sprint finish?

“With Armagh… it was really about proving that my close is still there from…