Next Sunday, Elva Dryer will run her third marathon, and try to make her third Olympic team. After debuting in Chicago in 2006 in 2:31:48, she ran 2:35:15 at New York City last fall in what was essentially a solo run, because of the elite women start. Elva’s Chicago time makes her the second seed in Sunday’s Olympic Marathon Trials. A little appetizer to start an exciting week for us here in KIMbialand.
Your last race was the half marathon championship in January, where you dropped out. What was the issue there?
Looking back, it’s easy to see now, but at the time I was doing a very good job of ignoring it. I think just, in general, fatigue. The couple of months before it was a busy time, with lots going on. I felt like I had recovered well from New York, and just ended up doing a little too much too soon, not necessarily training, but a lot of other stuff I felt like I wanted to catch up on, and my body just said, “This is it,” and just kind of crashed. So it was a bit of a reality check.
With running New York, and then having to recover and turn around and get ready for the Trials, did you feel an impetus to rush things?
Not necessarily. That first week following New York, my body just felt so much better than it did after Chicago, so I didn’t think I would have a problem coming around to get ready for the Trials, especially in that I already had that big base from the fall marathon. So I felt comfortable with the fact that it would be basically be recovering, then regrouping and starting to train again. But then once I did go out and run the half and that didn’t go well, then I got worried. Then it was, okay, there’s no time for setbacks, it was crunch time and I had to step back and say, “Okay, what do I have to do to get myself back together, because I have no time to figure it out, I have to figure it out today.”
One of the things you’ve done is to not go to another race before the Trials. A lot of people would be looking for another opportunity to get in a good race, just for positive psychological reinforcement.
It was pretty obvious to me to why the half marathon went the way I did, and once I got to feeling good again, I needed that time in training and for the training to go well. We put checkpoints in the training for immediate feedback to measure my progress. I’m confident in the progress I’ve made and that that’s going to have to be good enough. Coming into the Trials, I feel better prepared and more confident that I’m ready to race the marathon distance, compared to where I was going into Chicago and New York.
Can you give an example of those checkpoints in your training?
We have, every other week, a progression run of roughly 18 miles. It’s starting off the first 8 miles comfortable, then the last 10 miles progressing until the pace comes down to below marathon race pace. It’s always on the same course, so throughout the training I can see how I feel going into it, how I feel coming out of it. It went really well this time around. I felt like before my other marathons, those were the workouts I struggled with. Especially at altitude, the longer you go, sometimes it’s really difficult to get that pace down below marathon race pace. And this time around I was able to meet a lot of what I set out to do in training.
That was at around 5,000 feet in Albuquerque?
Right. It’s very flat with a few turns, so it really mimics the course for the Trials—long stretches, then sharp turns.
Do you have other experience with no racing for a long time before a key race?
Actually, going into my 10K PRs, I don’t believe I had raced for awhile before those. Usually I would run the 10K at the Stanford Invite, and that would be my first track race of the season. Last year I raced quite a bit in my training before New York, and looking back now, I think maybe that left me a little sluggish for the marathon, not only because of the physical challenge, but the emotional energy to get up for the race each time. You want to do well, regardless of how important the race is, you still want to have a good performance. This time around I used that energy in my training. I didn’t have to travel, I just felt it gave me more time to really fit in the recovery and all the other things that are so important to come together in training to prepare for such a big race.
How do you think the race will play out? If nothing else, it will certainly be different than your experience in New York, which was basically a 25.5-mile time trial, right?
Yeah, I don’t think it will be like that! I think whoever makes the team will have really earned her spot. I think it’s going to be a really good race. I think there’s enough women who feel they have a shot at it. The way the course is laid out, people will have an idea of where they are at every point of the race, and that will help everyone stay focused.
When you look through the list of the top qualifiers, one thing that’s striking is the age of most of the top qualifiers, relative to what was the case in the men’s Trials. Why do you think that is?
I don’t know. I think with the last Olympics, between then and now, the men drew great inspiration from Meb and Alan Culpepper and the other men that were having such good success in the marathon. Maybe that gave others the idea that to take it on earlier. I think we have a lot of young women who are starting to focus on the marathon, but still, it seems like a lot of our young women still have a lot to achieve on the track. I’m sure that we’ll have a future of great marathoners, but right now the women in it are the ones who have already gone through the track and progressed to this end of it.
Let’s say you make the team and aren’t out-of-the-ordinarily hobbled. What occurs between the Trials and the Olympics?
Well, there’s not a lot of time. So I think immediately will be recovery. I’m scheduled to come back to Albuquerque and get into therapy right away. And then I’ll be going down to Milwaukee, Wisconsin to visit my friend Jenny Crain, who would have been at the Trials but, unfortunately, got hit by a car and got sidelined. And then closing up shop here in Albuquerque, moving out of this apartment that we rented to have a place to train for the winter, and back home to Gunnison, Colorado, where the weather is beautiful to train for a marathon later in the year. Whether I run the Olympic Trials in the 10K, I’m not sure. I haven’t ruled it out at this point, and maybe I’ll do a race or two in between, but other than that, not much is planned.
