Meb Keflezighi approached the finish line of the Boston Marathon, holding off Wilson Chebet, who had whittled Keflezighi's lead from 81 seconds at the 30K mark to 6 seconds in the final mile. The crowds along Boylston Street screamed for him, chanting "USA." Yordanos Asgedom, Keflezighi's wife, stood beyond the finish line, murmuring prayers. Journalists in the press center openly rooted for him. Bernard Lagat, 39, Keflezighi's friend and collegiate rival decades ago, paced around his home in Tucson, Arizona, tweeting his anxiety--and then elation--as Keflezighi broke the tape.

And his coach of 20 years? Bob Larsen was checking out Keflezighi's feet. "His ground contact time [was] pretty good, which is what we want," Larsen says. "He never got sloppy, never lost his form."

Spoken like a true tactician. For all the emotion around Keflezighi's victory--the first by an American man since 1983, coming one year after the bombing at the finish line--his win was proof of training ideas that stand the test of time. Keflezighi has been atop the podium since college and at some of the biggest events in the world, earning Olympic silver in the 2004 marathon in Athens and finishing fourth at the London Games in 2012. He won the New York City Marathon in 2009. Now Boston, where his time of 2:08:37 was a new PR, set two weeks shy of his 39th birthday. How has he been winning for 20 years? The answers range from the mundane to the mystical.