Boston B.A.A. 10k – News – Now Focused On The Roads, Klecker To Run Boston 10-K On Sunday

NOW FOCUSED ON THE ROADS, KLECKER TO RUN BOSTON 10-K ON SUNDAY
By David Monti, @d9monti
(c) 2025 Race Results Weekly, all rights reserved – Used with permission.

(18-Jun) – After a difficult year where an adductor injury forced him to be sidelined and miss the USA Olympic Team Trials and, by extension, the Paris Olympics, Joe Klecker has begun a new phase of his career where he is focused on road racing.  The 28 year-old, who trains with the On Athletics Club in Boulder, Colo., had never run a road race longer than a mile until this January.  But since the beginning of this year he has run five, highly-competitive road races and will do a sixth, the Boston 10-K, on Sunday.  It’s a transition that he and coach Dathan Ritzenhein had planned for a while, even if the timing had changed.

“The big picture was always in the off-year after Tokyo (2025 World Championships), make that transition,” Klecker explained to Race Results Weekly in a telephone interview on Tuesday.  “Then I got injured, pretty significantly, and we kind of thought that this might be the right time to push it up a year.”

Klecker had a complicated injury involving the intersection of his left adductor, a muscle on the inside of the thigh, and his abdominal muscles.  He announced in May, 2024, that he could not make it to the starting line for the Trials where he had hoped to make his second Olympic team in the 10,000m.  What he didn’t know at the time was that the injury would take the better part of a year to heal, and still lingered into January, 2025, when he made his half-marathon debut at the Aramco Half-Marathon in Houston.

“It was an interesting injury,” said the always-thoughtful Klecker.  “I would say it lingered until about December, or January, around the time of Houston.  I would say I was 90% healed, but it was the type of thing that after a hard effort, you’d still have some awareness of the injury. But, for the last three months, since February or March, it’s been completely gone.”

The Houston event was a road racing baptism by fire.  It’s America’s fastest half-marathon, and on a cold morning the pack went out at 14:02 for the first 5-K and 28:01 for 10-K.  That was too hot for Klecker whose splits were a more reasonable 14:13 and 28:38.  He ran a very solid 1:01:06, but finished 18th, nearly two minutes behind the winner.  It was at that moment that he realized that there was going to be a bigger learning curve than he thought to master the roads.

“The original plan…