Cue the comeback: Olympian Dylan Wykes back to hard training

It has now been five years since Dylan Wykes ran the 2012 Olympic Marathon in London. There, he placed 20th overall and was the first of three Canadians after running 2:15:26.

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What seemed like a stepping stone on the path to faster times ended up being a bit of a turning point. A string of injuries, including multiple stress fractures, prevented him from putting together the training necessary for success to follow. As such, Wykes stepped away from serious running.

In the time since, Wykes has helped launch a massively successful coaching service in Mile2Marathon (M2M), based out of Vancouver with a satellite group in Toronto. Wykes directly coaches some 40 athletes across the country while the entire M2M crew includes well over 100. The group meets three days a week (Tuesday and Wednesday evenings for workouts and Saturday mornings for long runs) around Vancouver. Now, being a running coach has in essence, become Wyke’s full-time job.

Wykes is also a husband and a father of two young girls, who are 11 months and two-and-a-half years old. Of course, life has become a balancing act between sleeping (that was rough he says, but much better now), feeding and daycare drop-off. “Thankfully I have Francine. She’s an absolute saint. There’s no way I could do it without her,” says Wykes of his wife who is a post-doctoral fellow at UBC.

While life got busy and running wasn’t his main priority, Wykes admits it was tough to see the 2016 Rio Olympics come and go. At one point, he had hoped to make a serious attempt at qualifying for his second Olympic Games but things just didn’t come together as he had hoped. However, things are starting to change.

“If you asked me a year ago, I would have told you I was probably done [training at that high level],” says Wykes. “But after running the Vancouver Sun Run in April [finishing 16th in 31:21], I decided to ramp things up a bit and see if I still had it in me.” Since then, Wykes has resumed hard training under the guidance of his long-time coach, Richard Lee, (who also coaches the British Columbia Endurance Project). “Having Richard has added some much-needed accountability to my running. He tells me to do workouts and I actually do them,” Wykes says. In addition to doing workouts, his training is far more structured and his mileage is back up although not exactly as high was it was in the past. Currently, he runs about 160K per week. He’s hoping that this lower mileage combined with slower recovery runs will be his ticket to avoiding injury.

“The one thing I do differently is to run my easy runs a heck of a lot slower,” he says. If it’s not a workout or long run, Wykes advises running at least 40-seconds per kilometre slower than marathon pace. He himself actually runs about a full minute slower. He also admits (somewhat embarrassed) that he does very little stretching or strength work in the gym. 

Wykes ran the Calgary Half Marathon in late May where he finished third in 1:06:59, He’ll also get a chance to put his fitness to the test when he runs the Edmonton Half on August 20th. One of his goals is to qualify for the World Half Marathon Championships in March 2018 which is taking place in Valencia, Spain. He’ll also run a final tune-up at the Eastside 10K in Vancouver to test his progress to that point.

If all goes well, he plans to seriously consider a return to the marathon in the fall. His personal best is currently 2:10:47 (the third fastest by a Canadian). That he set in Rotterdam in 2012 but after two DNFs in 2015 (Boston and Fukuoka), his last marathon finish remains the 2012 Olympic Marathon in London.