Christine Clark

(This piece is for my latest book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from March 2000.)

AN AMAZING ALASKAN. Roy Reisinger, an Alaska-in-winter-exile in Arizona, was out of Internet reach the weekend of the Women’s Olympic Marathon Trials. He asked me to pass results to him as soon as the race ended.

“Just the top four would be fine,” said Roy, “plus how Chris Clark from Anchorage did.” He naturally assumed she wouldn’t be one of the four, since she was seeded 22^nd in this field and had finished more than 50 places below that in the last Trials.

It’s fun to shock someone, as I did by telling Roy that only one U.S. runner will go to Sydney. This is a 37-year-old mother of two boys and medical doctor from Alaska.

“That’s so neat!” exclaimed Roy. “If anyone should have been knocked out by the heat and humidity, it should have been Clark.” This is not only because of where she’s from but because “she works full-time as a pathologist, and running has been very much just a part-time thing for her.”

Coming from Alaska might not be the handicap it seems. Many years ago I traveled there as Roy’s guest at his running camp and came away amazed at the toughness of the Alaskan runners. Only the rugged ones settle there, and the conditions further toughen those who stay.

Notice that the last two Americans to make amazing breakthroughs in the marathon have Alaska roots. David Morris, who broke 2:10 last fall, grew up in Anchorage and went to college in Montana (not exactly a sunbelt state itself).

Christine Clark reversed Morris’s path. Raised and schooled in Montana, she settled in Anchorage.

These Alaskans aren’t just tough. They’re also smart.

Morris recognized that to run his best he had to leave the country. He migrated to Japan.

My first thought as Clark pulled away from the field in the heat of Columbia, South Carolina, Trials was that she must have left Alaska to train. Later I learned that she did, in a way.

She often dodged the winter cold by running more than half of her miles, and nearly all of her fast miles on a treadmill. That training in Anchorage gave her a safe, reliable surface and warm “weather,” and let her make the most of her minimal 70-mile weeks.

“If a gal from Alaska can do [this well] in this heat, anyone can do it,” said Clark at the post-race news conference. Fact is, no one else could do better on this day – and very few in this field could PR by any amount, let alone the seven minutes she did.

Clark and others voiced disappointment that she didn’t run just 31 seconds faster, providing Olympic tickets for two other women. But it wasn’t her job to run their races for them.

I wrote last fall about how David Morris gives hope to American men that they can shed the “national inferiority complex” in the marathon. He dropped from 2:15 marathoner to 2:09 in one race.

Clark went from 2:40 to 2:33 on a day when this shouldn’t have happened. She gives hope to everyone who’s older than the average Trials runner, has much going on in their life besides running and believes in miracles.

UPDATE. Christine Clark improved her PR by another two minutes at the Sydney Games, placing 19^th. She retired from racing soon afterward.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Memory Laps. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Memory Laps, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]