Culture
Why Manchester United signing a running coach makes sense – even if it wasn’t Amorim’s call
As January transfer window signings go, a 78-year-old American track and field coach is unconventional. For Manchester United and Ruben Amorim, even if it wasn’t the head coach’s call, it actually makes a lot of sense. The appointment of Harry Marra, on a consultancy basis for a few weeks, is designed to improve United individually and collectively at covering ground efficiently and repeatedly.
Marra, who graduated from Syracuse University in 1974 with a master’s degree in physical education and exercise science, is best known for coaching USA decathlete Ashton Eaton to gold at the Olympics (London 2012, Rio 2016) and World Championships (Moscow 2013, Beijing in 2015, where he also got the world record, since beaten). Eaton still holds the world decathlon best over 400 metres (45.00 seconds), and in the top 25 decathlon performances of all time, his 10.23s 100m ranks second.
Marra’s relationship with Eaton dated back to the early 2010s when they worked together at the University of Oregon, where Marra also coached Brianne Theisen to NCAA titles and collegiate records. As a heptathlete, she went on to win an Olympic bronze (Rio 2016) and world silvers (Moscow 2013, Beijing 2015).
Marra also spent over 10 years working simultaneously with the San Francisco Giants baseball team and as USA Track & Field’s decathlon coach.
In 2018, Marra coached Indonesian sprinter Lalu Muhammad Zohri to gold at the World Athletics U20 Championships. With a personal best down to 10.03, Zohri is on the cusp of becoming only the 11th Asian man to break the 10-second barrier in the 100m.
What’s this got to do with Manchester United? Quite a lot. It’s a sign of Marra’s coaching quality that, over 40 years he has had success with teams, groups and individuals of varying ages, backgrounds, starting levels and resources. If the critique is that his age makes him out of touch, consider the open-mindedness and adaptability he has needed to work with top athletes and teams for longer than Amorim has been alive.
Marra with Eaton in 2016 (Andy Lyons/Getty Images)
More importantly, running more and better is something Amorim wants United to do. “If you want to win the Premier League, you have to run like mad dogs,” he said in December, before a 3-2 defeat against Nottingham Forest, his fifth match in charge. “If not, we are not going to do it (win), that is clear. It’s impossible to win the Premier League without a team that, every moment, runs back, runs forward. Even with the best starting XI, without running, they will not win anything”.
The sports science-led revolution of the late 2000s catalysed a transformation of the Premier League into Europe’s most athletic league, and it’s still increasing in intensity. One study of Premier League games between 2006 and 2013 showed 30 and 35 per cent increases in high-intensity and sprint distances. Another paper found rises of 12 and 15 per cent in the same metrics from 2014-15 to 2018-19. Data from SkillCorner shows the rise has continued. This season, high-intensity distance match averages are 16 per cent up on the 2018-19 campaign. Sprint frequencies have risen by a fifth and sprint distance over 23 per cent.
“It was not me, it was the club,” said Amorim of the appointment of Marra. “We are always trying to bring experienced people to share knowledge with the staff, to understand the body, to understand how you can improve our players. It was not me, it was not something new. He’s not there to coach the team, he’s there to coach the staff about everything about the running, et cetera. It’s a simple thing that we are used to doing to improve as a club.”
Amorim wanting to build a team on intensity and physicality is not new. Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool and Bournemouth all had or have identities underpinned by pressing and aggressive running. His predecessor, Erik ten Hag, wanted United to be “the best transition team in the world”. He also turned to specialist coaching, appointing Benni McCarthy as a striker coach before Marcus Rashford produced his most prolific season in 2022-23 (30 goals in all competitions).
Importantly, any specialist sprinting coach is not going to make players significantly faster. Acceleration, power and top speed can be refined but not taught. Those attributes owe so much to a player’s physiological predisposition. That is shown by the career trajectory of elite sprinters, whose talent is obvious in childhood and before deliberate training, and they reach world-class or peak status much earlier than other sports.
Instead, a specialist coach should help identify and minimise issues in mechanics that might lead to injury. Last season, United had the most time-loss injuries in the league and struggled to name a consistent back four. Harry Maguire and Mason Mount, who were injured multiple times, are examples of “problem cases” and “repeat rehabbers”, terms used by Jonas Dodoo, a performance consultant with Brighton & Hove Albion and Newcastle United who specialises in movement and sprint coaching and analysis.
Dodoo, whose background in sprint coaching came in rugby and then athletics, first worked as a performance consultant in football in 2016 with Derby County. He cites Theo Walcott and Tariq Lamptey — two players with notable pace — among the players he has helped rehabilitate. He describes the coaching model he uses as: “Brake, plant, separate. That’s what they need to be able to do.”
Marra coaching Eaton and Theisen in Eugene, Oregon in 2013 (Doug Pensinger/Getty Images)
“They need to be able to brake aggressively and efficiently so that they can plant effectively and separate from their opponents, and run fast,” says Dodoo. “You need to be conditioned to create the types of forces needed, but also need efficiency, and to do that repeatedly — 40, 60 times in the game you might have to accelerate, and the forces are even more stressful in a body in a deceleration.”
Completely altering a player’s mechanics would take the kind of time, training and resources that football rarely offers, but there are still gains to be had when coaching sprinting. “You want to make sure that they can get into the positions and postures needed to decelerate, accelerate and to change direction well,” says Dodoo. “That’s the premise you start (coaching) around. In terms of sprint ability, you can make very quick and effective changes to the first three steps that make sure that they know how to create the forces in the right direction.
“If you can accelerate very well on your first three steps and if you know how to stop aggressively in your first three steps of deceleration, then that can have a fundamental effect on your physical qualities and performance.”
The nature of football and its game phases (with so much settled possession, set pieces and 22 players on a 105m x 68m pitch) means players very rarely hit their actual top speeds in matches. It is the reason, at PSV’s academy, their benchmark for first-team level performance in a 30m sprint test also includes a threshold for how fast players need to cover the first 10m.
Faster and more efficient accelerations and decelerations buy players time and space (or reduce it for opponents). “If your gear one is really aggressive, then actually the rest of it can be done scanning and preparing for the next action,” says Dodoo.
United’s academy — in Rashford, Alejandro Garnacho, Amad and Anthony Elanga (sold to Nottingham Forest in July 2023) — has developed some of the best straight-line runners and accelerators in the division. “Elanga is the model,” says Dodoo, who co-owns Speedworks Training, a sprint coaching business that developed a database of athletes “across football, NFL, elite and international rugby. We’ve got 5,000 runs for 3,000 players. What we consider as being very efficient and effective is what he (Elanga) produces in his running”.
Elanga again. 😮💨 pic.twitter.com/aqk1TYLvBI
— Nottingham Forest (@NFFC) December 26, 2024
In the first two months of this season, Rashford, Garnacho and Elanga all made the list for the top 10 highest speeds in a Premier League game — because players rarely hit top speed, calling them the ‘fastest’ would be a misnomer. That Amad did not might be because of his gait. He stands out for taking a lot of short steps with low heel lift (and has a choppy arm style reminiscent of fellow Ivorian and 100m sprinter Marie-Josee Ta Lou) whereas Garnacho takes big strides.
That difference in mechanics may explain their difference as dribblers too. As senior United players, Amad has completed 46.7 per cent of his Premier League dribbles, compared to just 32.5 per cent for Garnacho. “He’s (Amad) closer to the ground and having a high stride rate means he can make adjustments very quickly,” says Dodoo.
Amad (22 years old) and Garnacho (20) are two members of a relatively young United squad. Midfielders Toby Collyer (20), Manuel Ugarte (23), and Kobbie Mainoo (19), plus centre-back Leny Yoro (19) and striker Rasmus Hojlund (21) were either playing academy football in England or have made moves to United from other European leagues in the past two seasons.
Those inside the club feel that the hardest part of stepping up to the senior, Premier League level is the physical demands (more than the technical/tactical ones) and subsequent injury risks.
Dodoo says teams need “a smart rotation system with those young players. Especially, the more of a forward and the more of a speed merchant that player is, even more reason to have some way of keeping them loaded but not overloaded”.
Sprinting coaches are not new within football. Former Team GB sprinter Darren Campbell worked at MK Dons and with Andriy Shevchenko when he was at Chelsea. Similarly, Leon Reid, another former international sprinter, has worked on the running technique of Brighton players. Three NFL sides — the Jacksonville Jaguars, Tennessee Titans and Houston Texans — have all employed ‘directors of speed development’, though there is a more natural fit for a mechanics/sprinting coach there, given the NFL’s combine and 40-yard dash.
Garnacho has demonstrated his sprint ability this season (Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images)
The Premier League is into its era of specialist coaches: hybrid coach-analysts, set-piece coaches and position-specific coaches. The return on investment of a coach who can keep players fitter (and possibly make them move better) has the potential to be huge.
Internally, Amorim has been critical of fitness levels, and United’s high-intensity numbers have dropped off compared to last season.
Running more (and harder) is not automatically a good thing, and requires the context of tactics, game state, opposition style and quality, but as Dodoo points out, “the manager’s model is real high intensity, and the players need to be conditioned for that. If you get conditioned to that way of training with one manager, the next manager bringing a more intensive model (means) the conditioning of the team needs to go up”.
It is not quite the same approach that Ten Hag took when he had his players running many kilometres after an away defeat to Brentford in August 2023 (to show them how much they were ‘outran’ by). Availability, though, is the best ability, and United must improve there if they are to implement the style Amorim wants, let alone turn their season around.
GO DEEPER
How fast are footballers?
(Top photo: Manchester United training this month; by Zohaib Alam/MUFC/Manchester United via Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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