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Saturday, May 06, 2000 By Lori Shontz, Post-Gazette Sports Writer
It's likely that at 4 yesterday afternoon, David Morris breathed a deep sigh of relief.
Morris, the American record holder and top-seeded runner in tomorrow's Olympic men's marathon trials, said he is not a morning person. He lives in Montana, so when the trials start at 7:55 a.m., his body will think it is 5:55.
While high temperatures aren't necessarily a problem for elite marathoners, they can be dangerous for the runners taking part in the UPMC Health System/City of Pittsburgh Marathon, which starts more than an hour after the Olympic trials.
With the National Weather Service predicting a high temperature of 80 degrees tomorrow, UPMC and the Dr. Ron Roth, the marathon's medical director, offer the following advice for marathoners:
Coogan might benefit from Bloomfield ties
He practically shuddered thinking about that, let alone what he would have felt had the starting time for the trials been moved to an earlier time because of warm temperatures.
"That would be like 4:55 a.m.," Morris said. "That's a little early."
But yesterday afternoon, after discussing the issue with USA Track and Field officials as well as the other local agencies involved in putting on the Olympic trials and the UPMC Health System/City of Pittsburgh Marathon, race director Larry Grollman decided to leave the starting time alone.
Said Grollman, "It's not logistically feasible to make the move."
Some of the runners, led by 1996 Olympian Mark Coogan, approached USATF officials about having an earlier starting time because the weather forecast calls for temperatures in the low 60s for the start and 70 degrees at the finish.
"It seems to make sense if you start an hour earlier, then it's 60 when you start and 60 when you finish," Coogan said at a news conference before the decision was made. "And the humidity, Larry said, is going to get higher as the morning goes on. It has to be an advantage to us. We might even get a little shade.
"I ran at 7:30 this morning, and sun was already on most of the course. If we could get maybe a half hour, 45 minutes in the shade that would be nice. We also understand the logistical things, too. Nobody's an idiot up here. Sometimes we can't change things."
The concern over the starting time shows how much pressure the runners are under. In addition to the typical stress over wanting to make the team, the runners need to worry about meeting a specific time, and as the weather gets hotter, running faster gets harder.
"The best times are run when temperatures for the entire race are in the high-40s or mid-50s ," said Dr. David Martin, one of the country's experts on the physiology of marathoners. "Then runners start hearing 60 degrees, they cringe because they know they're going to be sweating a few miles into it. They start getting scared when temperatures are in the 70s or 80s because they know they'll be sweating when they're warming up."
The only way the United States will field a full, three-man Olympic team is if the top three finishers tomorrow finish in 2 hours, 14 minutes or faster. On a wide, flat course on a perfect marathon-weather day -- 50 degrees, low humidity and overcast -- the time would be easy.
The trials, however, aren't being run under laboratory conditions.
"They're saying 60 degrees, but it felt like 75 degrees at 10 a.m. when I went running," said Joe LeMay, who with Morris has already achieved the A standard. "There's a good chance of a one-man or two-man team. A three-man team is looking kind of unlikely."
Making the start time even slightly earlier might have made a difference. At a five-minute mile pace, the elites can cover six miles in a half hour. Running the final 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) in even slightly cooler temperatures could be the difference between making the A standard and missing it.
At the women's marathon trials, for instance, temperatures rose into the mid-80s by the end of the race, and winner Christine Clark missed the A standard -- and a three-woman Olympic marathon team -- by 31 seconds. That race started at 9 a.m., more than an hour after the men's race will start, and it's possible that an earlier starting time would have made a 31-second difference.
But changing the start time, especially on such short notice, would have been what elite runner coordinator Joe Sarver called "a logistical nightmare for us."
There would have been volunteers to round up, many of whom are already reporting to help at the crack of dawn, and the organizers would prefer not to have dozens of people working on the course before daylight. The fire department, police department and public works department would have needed to change their working hours, too.
And everyone from residents who might already have made plans to be out of the marathon's way before it starts to people who live along the route and need to move their cars to churches that schedule services around the marathon would have had to have been notified.
Martin doesn't believe a starting-time change would have made a difference. He said that given a course with a large hill between miles 11 and 12 and a handful of windy sections, and the forecast temperatures the runners will be "caught between a rock and a hard place ... or let me modify that and say rock and a hot place."
The problem is that the runners must keep that time in mind. When they run faster, runners accumulate heat more quickly, Martin explained, so they must balance the need to run fast with the need to maintain a steady pace and reduce the risk of heat-related problems. Martin said the elite runners aren't facing health-related issues, but performance ones.
Some of the runners preferred not to worry about what they can't control.
"It's a tough race, but with great people it's not going to be very difficult," said Alfredo Vigueras, who won the 1999 national championship on this course. "Last year I ran 2:14:20, and I was by myself for the last eight or 10 miles.
"When you prepare for a marathon, you know that the weather can be anything that day. Sometimes it's horrible wind. Sometimes it's cold. Sometimes it's a hot day. You need to put yourself in position to run in any kind of weather."
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Begin the race well hydrated. Drink about 18 ounces of fluids at least two hours before the race.