Martin Gillingham road running
It must have been difficult for Elana Meyer last Sunday as she sat in front of the television in her Stellenbosch home and watched her oldest rival win the greatest marathon in the world.
The reason for Meyer’s absence from the London Marathon, or indeed its Boston equivalent six days earlier, was because she has opted to turn her back on the sport’s two biggest pay-days in favour of a sustained campaign at the shorter stuff on the American road circuit.
It was only the second time since her marathon debut seven years ago that she had started a year without intending to run in either London or Boston. “Elana’s run at least one marathon every year since 1994 and the time had come to take a rest,” says her husband Michael Meyer, who also acts as her agent.
Derartu Tulu, on the other hand, chose the streets of London to come of age as a marathon runner. She cantered away from an outstanding field in the closing stages even though there had been a leading bunch of seven with just 3km to go.
Until then, however, the two athletes who had come into the Nineties as probably the best female distance runners in the world had run 14 marathons between them without a victory. But for Tulu it was a win well worth waiting for.
The first prize money plus time bonuses her winning time was 2hr 23min 56sec was worth more than R700 000. Add to that her appearance fee, which for a two-time Olympic 10?000m champion would have been at least as much again, and you have a pay packet bulging larger than any of Tulu’s colleagues in the Ethiopian prison service will probably earn in the next 10 years.
Meyer’s running CV boasts marathon attempts numbering in double figures and she realises that if she is to break her duck then she has to get her preparation right. Outpaced in recent times on the track in championship competition she has also found herself wanting over 42,2km. That in spite of the fact that she has run inside two hours and 28 minutes on seven occasions and been the outstanding female half-marathon runner in the world for the best part of a decade.
Once again this week she stepped on to a plane bound for the United States. After two impressive wins on the road in Washington and New Orleans earlier this month, she’ll be in Cleveland this weekend for another 10-miler where she’ll probably start as the favourite.
Meyer’s philosophy this year is a wise one. Without the pressure of training for a marathon, and its physically draining effects, she can get back into the winning habit while picking up handsome cheques in the process. And for a professional athlete that’s a priority not to be sniffed at.
She’ll probably then turn her attention to the track and a run in the 10 000m at the world championships in Edmonton in August before refocusing on the marathon again. That date is likely to come at the end of the year. She’ll run the world half-marathon championships in Bristol, England, before what might prove, one month after her 35th birthday, a watershed marathon in either New York or Tokyo in November.