[…] with a time of 27:13.98. He had also captured a pair of U.S. titles, one in the 12K cross-country winter championships and another in the 15K on the roads.

And in 2002, in the months leading up to November, he added five more U.S. titles to his resume, on every type of terrain and in distances ranging from 5K to 15K.

Larsen was all for Keflezighi’s running his first marathon.

“We felt it was a plus,” Larsen says.

The coach had had success with some of his top athletes in the past throwing in a marathon as part of their training, including former college great Steve Ortiz, who ran 2:13 at UCLA.

“We were finding these guys running pretty fast, and it was just part of their track training,” Larsen explains. “We didn’t have any problems with losing anything in track. In fact, we thought it aided what we were trying to do on the track.”

Truth be told, Larsen is hoping that the pendulum is finally swinging back from the thinking that marathons can potentially destroy an athlete’s track persona.

“Yes, the marathon is a tough race,” he says. “But maybe we’ve almost gotten to the point where guys are building it up too much in their minds. All of a sudden it’s, ‘Now you’ve got to become a marathoner.’ ‘It’s so horrendous.’ ‘It takes so much out of you.’ ‘It’s going to change what you do.’ My experience has been just the opposite.”

Keflezighi and Larsen chose New York because they wanted to see how he could do in a race that attracts some of the most talented marathoners in the world.

“T thought I could be competitive at that level,” Keflezighi says.

The caveat, though, would be that since Keflezighi still very much considered himself a 5K and 10K specialist who was in no way making a permanent jump up in racing distance, he and Larsen refused to reinvent Keflezighi’s regular training regimen.

“T was just having fun,” he says. “My thing was that if it comes, it comes, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. I wasn’t going to stress out about it.”

LESSONS LEARNED AND LEARNED WELL

Keflezighi was plugging himself into the marathon distance big time, knowing that such a grand undertaking could either spectacularly succeed or fabulously fail.

He wasn’t traveling to the Big Apple simply to earn top American honors. There would be no personal rabbit commissioned to help initiate him to the distance. Keflezighi was going to New York to try to win, pure and simple. He would go out with the lead pack and latch on to it for as long as his uninitiated body could tolerate.

The group rolled through the first 10K in 30:25 and passed the half in 1:03.50. Keflezighi was well on his way to running the fastest debut ever by an American.

That mattered little to him. He was instead focusing on trying to control the race, periodically throwing in surges that included 4:36 and 4:37 miles.

“TI was competing,” he says. “I was just trying to be competitive.”

Eighteen miles into the race, Keflezighi was in the lead. He was exhibiting precisely the type of courage that American distance fans had craved since the days of Bill Rodgers, Frank Shorter, and Alberto Salazar. He was acting, instead of reacting. He was making an impact—emphatically stating with his legs that he belonged in the front, whether anyone expected him to be there or not.

The lead pack began to disintegrate under the relentless pressure.

Keflezighi and just a handful of others, who included eventual winner Rodgers Rop from Kenya, crossed mile 20 in 1:37:27. They were averaging 4:52 miles and on pace to post a sub-2:08. Less than one month earlier, Culpepper had recorded a 2:09:41 in Chicago, a mark that tied the great Salazar for the fastest American debut.

During the last 10K, however, Keflezighi’s marathon inexperience and the chilly weather finally began to catch up with him.

“Unfortunately I threw my beanie away, and I got cold,” he explains. “The combination of the fatigue and getting cold made me start having to work really hard.”

He watched in frustration as not only Rop and the others pulled away from him, but more runners began to catch him from behind. Keflezighi crossed the line in ninth place with a more-than-respectable time of 2:12:35.

“They put three to four minutes on me in the last five miles, but I made it through and learned a lot,” he summarizes. “It was a great experience for me. It wasn’t my best race, but I gave it my best shot.”

Larsen chuckles as he recalls how afterward, when he finally found Keflezighi in the athlete’s tent, the first thing out of his runner’s mouth was, ‘Well, that was my first and last marathon.’”

Eleven months later, though, Keflezighi went to Chicago in pursuit of the Olympic marathon “A” standard, and he banged out a 2:10:03. This time, unlike in New York, he let the leaders go after 11 miles, a decision, he admits, that was difficult to digest.

“But you have to do what works for you,” he says.

Keflezighi was forced to run much of the last half of the race alone, but sticking to his game plan ultimately paid dividends as he passed several runners in the homestretch to earn a seventh-place overall finish.

A few weeks later, the Olympics “A” standard was raised from 2:12 to 2:15, which essentially meant that Keflezighi didn’t need to run a hard marathon before the Trials. And then, to add injury to insult, when he tried to resume training in the weeks after Chicago, he found himself having to combat a string of lingering physical ailments that would plague him all the way up to Birmingham.