Simon Bairu, 27, who set the Canadian 10,000-meter record of 27:23.63 this spring, will make his 26.2-mile debut at the ING New York City Marathon on November 7 along with Tim Nelson, who was his teammate at the University of Wisconsin and is now part of the same Oregon Track Club training group coached by their former college mentor Jerry Schumacher. Chris Solinsky and Matt Tegenkamp also made the Wisconsin-to-Oregon move. While at Wisconsin, Bairu was the NCAA Cross Country champion in 2004 and 2005

Bairu won the Rock 'n' Roll Arizona Half Marathon, just his second career race at 13.1 miles, in 1:02:47 this winter, defeating American marathon ace Ryan Hall. Bairu was 13th in the 2010 World Cross Country Championships. He's the reigning Canadian champion for 10,000 meters and has been his nation's cross country champion seven times. Bairu was born to an Eritrean father and an Ethiopian mother who fled the war between their two countries and ended up briefly in Saudi Arabia, where Simon was born. The family then lived for a short time in Greece before moving to Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada when Simon was three. When we called Bairu, he told us "I just got back from driving Shalane to a massage" (Shalane Flanagan is also part of Schumacher's group and is also doing the ING New York City Marathon).

Are there workouts Shalane Flanagan can do with the guys – long slow runs, for example?
Simon Bairu: Yeah, usually the way we do it is we double almost every day. We'll do our longer run in the morning and then we'll do a 35-minute jog or shakeout in the evening before doing our strength work. So she'll do that with us once in awhile. For the longer stuff, at first her plan was to stick it with us for as long as she could and then blow herself up, but I think that was starting to catch up to her, so we kind of just do our own things on the longer runs and then try and coordinate the shorter runs together.

In this build-up to the ING New York City Marathon, are Tim Nelson and you working out together and doing the same stuff?
SB: Yeah, we do all our workouts together. It's kind of cool. We've been in training camp (together) for about eight years now. Nothing's really changed.