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Favorable conditions Runyan confident of breaking 5,000-meter record
NEW YORK (AP) -- All the conditions appear perfect for Marla Runyan to smash the U.S. women's indoor 5,000-meter record Sunday, and she's confident of breaking it. So are the organizers. "I think it's a soft record, because the distance isn't run often indoors," Runyan said Monday. "If all goes well, I should be well under the record." The record of 15 minutes, 22.64 seconds, was set by Lynn Jennings on Jan. 7, 1990, at the Dartmouth Relays at Hanover, N.H. "It's not a question of whether Marla will break the record, it's a question of by how much," Ian Brooks, co-race director, said. The ideal conditions begin with a lightning-fast track. The Mondo surface at the Armory Track & Field Center was the site this year of Alan Webb's 3:59.86 mile, the first indoor sub-four minute time by a high school athlete, and Amy Rudolph's 4:28.47 women's mile, a career best that made her the No. 4 indoor performer in U.S. history. Secondly, there will be only four women in the race, with three of them dropping out by 3,000 meters, leaving Runyan to run the final 2,000 meters without interference. The plan calls for Danielle Thornal of Britain, who has run 2:08.5 for 800 meters and 4:42 for the mile, to pace Runyan through the first 1,500 meters. Then, Alisa Harvey, a two-time winner of the Fifth Avenue Mile and a former Pan American Games 1,500-meter champion, and Gladys Prieur, a prominent local middle-distance runner, are to take Runyan through 3,000 meters between 9:07 and 9:12, before stepping off the track. That will leave Runyan on her own. "She doesn't want the track cluttered," said Allan Steinfeld, the other race director and CEO of the New York Road Runners Club, the race sponsor. "She is happy to run by herself. She's comfortable with that. She led all the way last year in winning the 3,000 meters at the U.S. Indoor Championships in Atlanta." A third factor in the 32-year-old Runyan's favor is that she has been training for the outdoor 5,000, the race she hopes to run at the World Championships at Edmonton in August. Last year, Runyan specialized in the 1,500 meters outdoors, and finished third at the U.S. Olympic trials and eighth at the Sydney Games, where she was the first legally blind member of a U.S. Olympic team. Finally, Runyan's best time for the 5,000 is 15:07, the only time she has run that distance, in the Oregon Twilight Meet at Eugene last May. With more concentration on the event this year, she said that breaking Jennings' record should not be difficult. "It should be challenging, though," she said. Brooks estimates that the pace through 3,000 meters works out to about 15:12 for 5,000 meters, "and that takes 10 seconds off the record," he said. "I feel I'm ready," the anxious Runyan said. "I thought this would be a nice goal to focus on for the indoor season." While Jennings' mark seems well within Runyan's reach, the world record of 14:47.35 by Romania's Gabriela Szabo at Dortmund, Germany, on Feb. 13, 1999, appears safe. Runyan needs more races at that distance to remotely approach that time. Runyan also has a new coach -- Margo Jennings, coach of Mozambique's Maria Mutola, the Olympic 800-meter champion. Now, Runyan has Jennings to herself, because Mutola is training in Africa. The 5,000 will be run during the Catholic High School Championships and be the second race in the New York Road Runners Club Record Challenge Series. In the first race in the series last year, Regina Jacobs attempted to run the 1,500 meters under four minutes and create a world record, but wound up running 4:07.06.
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