Lance Armstrong at New York City Marathon

“The answer now is no, I’ll never be back” said Lance Armstrong in an interview after last years New York City Marathon yet yesterday he ran a solid 2:46:43.

This year Lance Amrstrong came much better prepared. As he says he trained as he should, he lost some 3-4 kg and had a better pacing strategy. He actually managed to reach the holly grail of marathon racing: he had a negative split. He ran the first half of the marathon in 1:23:41 and second half in 1:23:02. Even such a small difference between two halves is significant and those who have raced marathon in sub 3 hours will understand.

Lance says he did it for the sake of fundraising and he was announcing big goals like breaking the world record in marathon fundraising. He did achieve an admirable goal of raising half a million dollars with more than hundred fellow runners from Lance Armstrong Foundation, but somehow he does not convince me as a type that does this for fundraising.

If you fundraise I doubt that you care about going 2:46. It takes a lot of competitivness and training to get to sub 2:50. Even for Lance it is not something that comes easy. He needed to work for it and care about it.

I hope that one day that energy will focus on Ironman. I never met him but after all he might still be a triathlete in heart. He has the whole cycling part taken care of, he is running good marathons now and swimming I am sure he could handle. Is it only a matter of time before we see Lance Armstrong at an Ironman startline? I hope so…

I guess that it would take him a year or two to get into the whole mentality. He has the strength for it but he should be more humble for the Ironman so he would not end up like Chris McCormack in his first attempts in Hawaii. Being so strong can sometimes be the downside in racing ultra distances like Ironman.

I hope we can see this experiment soon. I am thinking and hoping it will only be a matter of time. But until than we (I) can only continue to speculate and pray…

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 8:40 am and is filed under 2007, Lance Armstrong Foundation, LiveStrong, NYC Marathon, New York City marathon, fundraising, ironman, lance armstrong, marathon, running. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.