This month's Boston Marathon will be Shalane Flanagan's last race at 26.2 miles before next February's U.S. Olympic marathon trials in Los Angeles. As usual, America's top distance runner is heading to the starting line in Hopkinton with aspirations she's not afraid to share.
"My primary goal is to make it onto the podium because I've never done that before," said Flanagan, who finished seventh last year and fourth in 2013, and has never made secret her desire to win.
"If I know I'm in the top three, then I'll get greedier from there. I want to secure the mentality of aiming for the top three because that's important in the next year -- it's important to make the Olympic team and at the Olympics, too."
Flanagan usually describes some grueling combination of mental and physical fatigue leading up to race day, but this time around a shortened training cycle has her feeling less like she's hanging on and more like she's still building momentum as her taper begins.
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In January, Flanagan scaled back on running while recovering from glute and back pain caused by using heel lifts. Normally, her marathon training cycle is 12 weeks, but by the time she gets to Hopkinton, she will have put in 9.5 weeks.
By all accounts, the abbreviated schedule hasn't hampered her buildup. Flanagan ran 31:09.02 last week to finish second in a 10,000-meter track race at Stanford University. Her coach, Jerry Schumacher, called it "a solid, hard effort" on a day he would have scheduled a workout anyway.
Not always a fan of interrupting training for a race, the coach said it probably helped Flanagan get back into the routine and mindset of competition. She hadn't raced since setting her personal best of 2:21:14 six months ago at the Berlin Marathon, where she had hoped to break the American record of 2:19:36.
"The 10K gave her something to shoot for and look forward to," Schumacher said. "It breaks up the monotony of training, although you don't need to race beforehand in order to run well at the marathon."
Flanagan has also focused more of her Boston training on speed rather than mileage this time. Every two days she's been putting in a hard workout while scaling back on easy miles. The hope is that she is able to sustain her turnover and pace over the last 10K of the marathon, rather than slow down as she's done in previous races.
"We put more moderate and quality running into the schedule. She's a veteran athlete with a lot of miles in her career," Schumacher said. "We're hoping it benefits the later stage of the marathon and helps reduce the decay in her pace."
In previous marathon buildups, Flanagan ran up to about 130 miles a week. This time she's put in about 110 miles per week."I feel like I have a little more spunk in my legs, which is fun," Flanagan said. "If you're going to be running championship-style races, your ability to close is really important. It's the difference between a podium finish or a win for me."
Last year in Boston, Flanagan went to the lead from the gun and remained there until 30K before finishing seventh in an American course record of 2:22:02. Her strategy, albeit failed, was to try to take the finishing kick out of defending champion Rita Jeptoo, the Kenyan who broke away from the pack decisively at 35K and won in a course-record time of 2:18:57.
This year the picture is much different. Jeptoo is serving a two-year doping suspension, and while Flanagan faces another formidable field, it's one without a clear favorite. Her personal record ranks fourth in the field behind Ethiopians Buzunesh Deba, Mare Dibaba and Aberu Kebede.
"There are no softballs whatsoever from Boston," Flanagan said. "People want to be there. Everyone knows you can go to London and run really fast. That's enticing for a lot of athletes, but obviously there's a draw to the prestige of the Boston Marathon."
Schumacher agrees that even without Jeptoo in the mix, Flanagan is going to have a lot of company on the way to Boylston Street.
"It's always super-hard and super-tough there," he said. "It's just never, never easy."
On the American side, Boston may serve as a sneak preview of the 2016 Olympic team. On paper, at least, Amy (Hastings) Cragg and Desiree Linden are top contenders alongside Flanagan. At the 2012 U.S .Olympic trials, Flanagan finished first, Linden second and Cragg fourth. This will be Cragg's debut on the Boston course, but Linden came within two seconds of a Boston victory in 2011, finishing as runner-up to Caroline Kilel of Kenya.
"It'll be good to see how we all run against each other. However, Boston is a complete anomaly to me. Someone could run a completely different way in L.A. [where the trials for the 2016 Olympics will take place] than they do in Boston," Flanagan said. "Desi is a really great Boston runner. She probably has her best performances on that course. It'll be interesting to see how Amy likes it. Knowing that she's a good cross-country runner, I think she'll do pretty well, too."
Come what may, in two weeks Flanagan is going to regroup after she crosses the finish line. After spending so much energy in the past year on two Boston Marathons and an attempt at the American record in Berlin, it'll be time for a break.
"I don't want to go into the trials being tired in any way. I want to be fired up to do the work," Flanagan said. "I tend to be very emotional with my training. I'm very into it and very passionate about it."
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