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Tuesday, May 02, 2000 By Lori Shontz, Post-Gazette Sports Writer
Joe LeMay runs almost every day. But he squeezes his training into the rest of his life, which includes working 40 hours a week maintaining the e-mail, the firewall and the e-commerce site for a company called Concentrex, spending time with his wife and their 250-pound Vietnamese potbelly pig named Stinky and maintaining his website at www.joelemay.com, which includes everything from four years of training logs to wedding photos to his favorite cow jokes.
"Once I interviewed for a job at the NBA -- not to play basketball, but in the back office," he said. "The guy there said, 'We consider ourselves to be in the entertainment business. Yeah, we're athletes, but we see ourselves as entertainers.' So you know, people like my web site. It's up there for the people."
David Morris, too, runs almost every day. But he doesn't do much else. He uprooted himself in May 1997 and moved all the way to Hamamatsu, Japan, to join Honda's corporate team, figuring that since other countries were producing much faster marathoners, he had plenty to learn. He spent the few hours a day he wasn't at practice or a competition or sleeping sitting at his desk in the factory, trying to learn Japanese.
"The Japanese work very hard -- whatever they do, they do one thing and work real hard at it," Morris said. "That's pretty much what I was doing."
Total opposites, right?
Not quite.
Morris and LeMay have taken disparate approaches to train for the U.S. Olympic marathon trials, but they are coming into the trials with one important thing in common. They are the only two runners who have already met the A qualifying standard for the Olympic Games of 2 hours, 14 minutes.
Morris ran an American record 2:09:32 in the Chicago Marathon last October. LeMay won December's California International Marathon in 2:13:55. As a result, they are among the top contenders in Sunday's race, which will be part of the UPMC Health System/City of Pittsburgh Marathon.
Morris competed in the 1998 UPMC Health System/City of Pittsburgh Marathon and finished third in 2:15:25, so in addition to having the event's best qualifying time, he has the advantage of knowing the course.
"It seemed that it was always either up or down," Morris said. "What it does is tire your legs out in the first half. Then you're coming down the hills at the finish and poundng your legs, which are already tired, and that doesn't feel very good. In a race like the Olympic trials, you have to go and not worry about hurting your legs and deal with the pain. It's not real fun in the downhill at the finish."
LeMay, however, has never run the Pittsburgh Marathon: "I'm sorry to say I've avoided Pittsburgh for much of my career."
He listed several reasons. He ran the Great Race three consecutive years, the last in 1991, but didn't perform well because he isn't a good downhill runner. "And the very last Great Race I ran, my car broke down on the way out of town, so that was that."
As if that weren't enough, his wife, ultramarathoner Ellen McCurtin, came here to run in the U.S. 100K national championships in 1997, and she dropped out. Said LeMay, "We do have a little bit of a Pittsburgh curse going on in my family. But I'm not going to let it get in my way."
The A standard qualifiers are alike in one other way. Both have done mostly high-mileage training.
LeMay set two personal records for weekly mileage in January. He ran 150 miles the week ending Jan. 22, and he followed up the next week by running 151.
He doesn't do much speedwork because he finds it aggravates his hamstrings. Still, in the past week he has done mile repeats on the track and run comfortably at a 4:40 pace, so he thinks he'll be OK for the long run.
"I know with the grinding out of high-mileage training I'm doing, if I were to get on the track and do a 10,000, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't break 29 minutes," LeMay said. "It's hard to watch people do that, and you get concerned, but you've got to remember that that you're trying to run a marathon."
When he was running with Team Honda, Morris averaged between 140 and 160 miles a week; some weeks, they practiced three times a day. His top mileage: 176.
"You just don't want to run when you run that much," Morris said. "You can't race."
Morris left Japan in February, which had been his plan from the beginning. "I looked at it as a short-term thing to learn about the training and earn some money," he said. "Really, my heart's here." Since returning, Morris has split his time between Missoula, Mont. (which he lists as his actual residence, although he's staying with a friend) and Albuquerque, where his sister lives at altitude, and an even higher site in the mountains of New Mexico.
"I'm kind of homeless right now," Morris said.
LeMay has done all his training near his home in Connecticut, which isn't exactly a farm but has room for Stinky (so named because he is black with a white stripe down his nose), who moved in about a month ago.
"The pig has increased his mileage since he moved in here," LeMay said. "He used to be confined to a small pen, and now he's got a whole one-acre backyard. It's just grass. You really can't grow vegetables or grow anything of that nature with a pig. They'll just eat everything. Uprooting flowers, their snouts do that."
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