Thompson retracing steps of ’74

Press, 29 May 1985, Page 68

Thompson retracing steps of ’74

By

GLENN HASZARD

Two British marathon runners will set out on the 1985 Adidas Moro marathon in Christchurch on Sunday, one trying to emulate a great marathon effort, the other trying to forget a bad one. lan Thompson, aged 36, is the man who won the 1974 Commonwealth Games marathon on the same course in Christchurch as he will run on Sunday, just over a decade later. He ran his personal best of 2hr 9min 12s in that race, and said yesterday that he often reflected on the race and relived it in his mind. Gillian Burley, aged 29, wants to forget a marathon — the inaugural World Marathon Championship for

women, in Hiroshima in April. As television viewers may remember, Gillian was the tall blonde, British athlete who stormed to an early lead before being passed by the Russian team and fading badly to finish fortyfirst in 2hr 49min, her worst marathon time. “I just want another one to forget about Hiroshima,” she said after arriving in Christchurch yesterday. Her best time was in Florence, Italy, in December, when she recorded 2hr 32min 535. I The Hiroshima marathon was held in warm condi- , tions, with a temperature of i about 22deg. C and high I humidity. At one stage she felt like pulling out, but

because she was in a team she kept going. Burley is a civil engineer,, with a B.Eng. and an M.Sc. in hydraulics. She seems to love roads not just academically, for she has completed 36 marathons and she still hasn’t got tired of running them. She likes to go hard for the first 16km of a marathon, then try and hang on. She said that if conditions are good on Sunday she would like to go under 2hr 40min. Thompson also loves the roads. He’s been running on average four or five marathons a year since 1974, though never quite touching the high standard he set back then. He is typical of top international marathon runners,

who seem to run their fastest marathons in the first three or four serious attempts, then tail off to a plateau. “You can do the same amount of training and everything but to get that extra edge and pace takes some remarkable coming together on the day for it all to happen,” he said. His best time last year was 2hr 15:06 when he won a marathon in Manchester. His second fastest ever was in Rome in 1982 when he did 2:12. He won his last marathon, in October, on a hilly Lake District course in about 2:23. He predicts a group of five or six runners will lead the men’s marathon field for the first half of the race

on Sunday at about 2hr 12min marathon pace. It will then come down to who is the strongest and fastest over the last half of the race, he said. Juergen Huesemann, from West Germany, also arrived in Christchurch yesterday and will compete in the marathon. He is aged 27, with a best time of 2hr 17min and hopes to run a best time in about 2hr 15min on Sunday. He is an engineering student from a town near Dusseldorf and has been clocking up to 200 km a week in training through the German winter. He said he had run about 50 marathons over the last eight years, but only in the last few has he run them seriously, and his times have been improving.