FORT WAYNE – Perhaps, in the end, it was a simple matter of blood finally calling to blood.
Shalane Flanagan grew up the daughter of marathoners in the backyard of marathoning’s signature event, and so the pull of oxygen debt’s Super Bowl has always been a subtle but insistent presence. Flanagan’s mom, Cheryl Treworgy, once held the women’s world marathon record. The place where she was raised, Marblehead, Mass., was 18 miles northeast of Boston, where every April the Boston Marathon had, in a certain wispy blond, one of its most ardent and attentive fans.
“Yeah, I watched it pretty religiously,” Flanagan recalls.
Here’s the thing, though: She had miles to go before she had 26 miles, 385 yards to go.
And so Flanagan, who just won the U.S. Olympic marathon trials and will be the keynote speaker Jan. 29 for the Fort Wayne Track Club’s annual banquet, chose a different path. After making her biggest collegiate splash in the 5,000 meters while at North Carolina, she became the quickest of studies in the 10,000, smashing the American record by almost 16 seconds the first time she ran it competitively.
Three months later, she won the bronze medal in the event at the Beijing Olympics, becoming only the second American woman in history to win an Olympic medal in that event.
That sort of presaged what happened next, which was Flanagan, 30, at last returning to the event that had never truly been out of her thoughts.
“I feel like it’s my calling,” she says. “I just feel like it’s my ultimate race, and so once I kind of achieved some of the goals I had on the track it was definitely a step I wanted to take. The marathon was the next big horizon and the next big challenge.
“It’s just an amazing event. Training for it really does test your human limits. And I like being tested.”
And it suits her, judging from the fact that, again, she was a quick study. A week ago, and little more than a year and a half after committing to it, she punched her ticket to the London Olympics this summer by winning the trials in 2 hours, 25 minutes, 38 seconds, a personal best by more than three minutes and the fastest women’s time in U.S. championship and trials history.
She did it with a surge over the last two miles that did in the early favorite, Desiree Davila, and Kara Goucher, who finished second and third to secure the other two Olympic spots.
“I kind of went in with an open mind knowing it could be really hard from the gun or we could start out slow and progressively get faster,” Flanagan says. “I was prepared for a variety of different styles in my training.
“Once I knew we had solidified our top three and made the Olympic team, I focused on how do I try to win this race. And so the last two miles I felt like that’s when I could attack and kind of try to win the race. For most of it, it’s such a long event and it’s kind of a harsh event, I just tried to make sure I didn’t make any mistakes because my primary goal was just to be going to London.”
Now on it’s on to more training, which has both surprised and intrigued Flanagan.
“It’s really the hardest I’ve ever had to work,” she says. “It’s amazing how fatigued and how tired you can be but you can still go out and run. It’s all about trying to run through a lot of fatigue; you’re in a constant state of depletion.
“But it’s really rewarding. I love the fact that not many people can say ‘Oh, I went out and ran 20 miles today.’ I love how much dedication it takes and how much you learn a lot about yourself, your physical and mental limits. There’s just something about it.”
Always has been.
