Flashes of Panic

If you haven’t been reading the running news sites lately, you might not be aware that it’s only ten days until the “2008 Olympic Team Trials—Women’s Marathon”, the stumblingly inelegant name forced on an event most of us just call the Women’s Marathon Trials. Earlier this week, I was asked to come up with my picks for the top five, a similar survey to the one I missed for the men, and it took a bit of thinking.

Like the men’s Trials in November, the women’s Trials will precede by a day a major international marathon, in this case, the venerable and historic Boston. I suspect much of Boston is still unaware of this fact, so here’s the quick summary: there’s another marathon this year, on Sunday the 20th, on a different course downtown, and the first three women will go to the Olympics. So it’s a Big Deal.

Unlike the men’s Trials, where we selected a pretty astounding team even though none of the ‘04 trio—including the Athens silver medalist—made it, the women’s field is not terribly deep. Of the ‘04 team, only Deena Kastor is even running; Jen Rhines has decided, with some justification, that the marathon isn’t for her, and Colleen De Reuck pulled out earlier this week, citing lack of fitness. (At 43, De Reuck can be excused for not bouncing back from having her second child as she did from her first, and after a career like hers, it’s also understandable that she wouldn’t want to race a hard marathon unless she felt she could compete for a spot on the team.)

Even after that, there are missing names. Kate McGregor, one of the top 10,000m runners in recent years, has opted out of the marathon trials, following similar reasoning to Rhines’. Marla Runyan, a U.S. champion in 2006, and an Olympian twice already (at 1,500m in 2000 and 5,000m in 2004) has been plagued by injuries and also won’t compete.

Kastor is still one of the world’s best, but the hole behind her in the U.S. list is yawning.

This is not to say there aren’t good marathoners in there. Elva Dryer and Kate O’Neill have both had credible runs at Majors marathons in 2007, and Blake Russell, who was 4th in ‘04 and essentially made the race that day in St. Louis, is both tough and determined. Magdalena Lewy Boulet, who was 5th in ‘04, is also back.

But none of these women are the kind of reliable international competitor that Kastor (or, for that matter, Ryan Hall and Dathan Ritzenhein, the first two at the men’s Trials) is. There’s still a lot of room for a dedicated outsider, like Jenny Spangler in ‘96 or Christine Clark in ‘00, to show up and steal a spot on the team. This should actually make things more exciting; not only does it promise surprises, it puts pressure on the pros to settle the team spots early, which is extraordinarily difficult to do.

It’s also possible that one of these women will make the Trials their stage to make the step up to international class, the way Hall did last November in Central Park.

It’s also worth noting that Emily LeVan, who could reasonably be expected to get a top-20 finish at the Trials, is still over $7000 away from her goal at twotrials.org. One hopes that marathon hasn’t hit the wall.

More on the Trials next week, no doubt…

Now Playing: Slowly Sinking by Leeroy Stagger

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