“Everyone was going to overheat,” Deena says. “I just wanted to be the last one to do so. That was my big thing—to just try to postpone the overheating.”

Just prior to the race, Deena and her teammates wore special cooling vests, remained indoors for as long as possible, and continually sipped on iced fluids. Once the gun went off, Deena focused on doing all the little things she had learned to stave off dehydration, including keeping her head and wrists as cool as possible.

“T did not pass up a single water station or sponge out on the course,” she says.

Deena’s approach was so conservative that for most of the race she was just an afterthought as the commentators and camera operators focused on Ethiopia’s Elfenesh Alemu, Radcliffe, Ndereba, and the eventual winner, Japan’s Mizuki Noguchi. But that’s precisely the way Team USA had planned it.

“It was just one of those days that unfolded the way we had trained for,” Deena says, adding that she never did feel the effects of the heat during her run.

Meb, who watched coverage of the women’s race from Crete, didn’t have to second-guess the advice he had been given. The evidence was right there on the television screen, as one talented female marathoner after another, including Radcliffe, faltered. Being conservative, he realized as he watched Deena pick off one fading runner after another in the latter stages of her race, would be the key to his success as well.

By the time Meb, Culpepper, and Browne reached the Olympic Village in Athens, most of the competition over the 16-day schedule had already been concluded, and with the closing ceremonies just hours away, the ambiance had turned decidedly festive.

“People were actually exchanging their singlets and uniforms and things like that,” Meb says, laughing at the memory. “But I still had a 26.2-mile journey ahead of me.”

On August 29, moments before the start of that journey, he was still uncertain whether the injury he had sustained in Crete was behind him.

“T called my brother while I was on the bus to the start,” Meb says. “I told him, ‘If things don’t go well because my knee is hurting, I might not finish. Don’t be worried.””

Once the gun finally went off, Meb, like Deena, forced himself to keep his nerves and excitement in check. He was in last place for the first mile of the race. He carefully worked his way up through the field, growing more comfortable and confident with each passing mile.

Forty-eight minutes into the race, he realized that he was on, and on in a very big way.

“At 15K, I gave Coach Larsen a thumbs up,” Meb says. “I executed the plan that was formed by the physiologists, Coach Larsen, and Coach Vigil. I was told to be patient, and the plan paid big dividends for both Deena and me.”

The elusive art of perfection

The competitive athlete’s mind is wired to strive for perfection. And it’s this quest, whether attainable or not, that gives purpose to all the mind-numbing hours of training.

Deena and Meb dreamed of crossing the finish line first in Athens. It’s why they made all the sacrifices they did, it’s why they put thousands of miles on their legs year in and year out, and the notion of winning was no doubt a major motivator for persevering through sickness and injury.

Though they were both more than thrilled to have earned podium finishes, it’s understandable, and perhaps even inevitable, that they later questioned whether there was something more they could have done during the race to have instead earned gold.

Deena confesses that she will always wonder whether she should have made her push earlier.

“Tt was the only marathon I’ve ever finished where I felt as if I could have gotten a lot more out of myself,” she says.

At mile 19 she was still in eighth place, more than two minutes out of the lead. By the end of the race, she had managed to cut that deficit in half as she passed everyone except Noguchi and Ndereba.

“Maybe I was a little too conservative,” Deena says. “Afterward I had that pat on the back for a job well done, but I also had the insatiability that any athlete has—that it still wasn’t quite good enough.”

© Victah/www.PhotoRun.net

A Meb with his life mentor, Bob Larsen, after the 2004 Olympic Marathon Trials.

Meb’s postrace analysis a decade later is just as insightful.

In a move as surprising as it was bold, de Lima had broken away from the pack at 20K and had run all alone for nearly an hour. At 30K, the chase group, which had been whittled down to eight and included Tergat, Baldini, and Meb, was still 46 seconds behind.

When none of the other runners seemed interested in trying to catch de Lima, it was Meb who finally began to force the issue.

“I was the one who initiated the move, and then we got it down to four or five people,” Meb says. “That’s what racing is. I had to make a decision based on how I was feeling at that moment.”

Sensing an opportunity when he saw that Tergat “was a little heavy on his feet and not being efficient,” Meb threw in another surge that dropped the Kenyan superstar. Now the race for the top three was in full force.

De Lima was still leading, remarkable considering that a deranged spectator had momentarily plucked him off the course, but Baldini and Meb were quickly closing in on him. And then, with less than 10 minutes left before they reached the stadium, Baldini blew past de Lima and managed to put some distance between himself and Meb.

Meb will always wonder whether he should have tried harder to cover Baldini’s brilliant move, even though he realizes that doing so may have meant blowing himself up and missing out on the medals altogether.

“He made a move when it counted,” Meb recalls. “Sometimes people can do it in their first one and make it count. For Baldini, it was his 16th marathon and for me it was only my fourth.”

Of course, it’s always easy to dissect a competition after the fact. And it’s a given that each of the 65 women who finished behind Noguchi and each of the 80 men who finished behind Baldini all did their fair share of second-guessing and soul-searching after their races.

But only six of the best marathoners in the world reached the podium in Athens, and no amount of analysis and reanalysis will ever change the fact that two of them were Americans.

A steppingstone for even more great things

As it turned out, the medals earned by Deena and Meb proved to be harbingers of stellar results to come.

“Tused the strength that I got training for Athens to be my platform for another training stint to try to be faster and better,” Deena says.

She won the Chicago Marathon in 2005, becoming the first American woman to capture a big-city marathon since Kristy Johnston won Chicago in 1994. Several months later she ran exceptionally fast in the London Marathon and broke

» Deena captures the 2005 Chicago Marathon.

her own American record with a remarkable 2:19:36—a time that still ranks as the 15th fastest in history.

That year, in 2006, Track & Field News recognized Deena as the top female marathoner in the world.

Deena, for one, has always believed that things happen for a reason. Nese a

“Sometimes it’s just meant to acs” be that way,” she says. “A gold medal would have been nice, but to be ranked number one in the world in 2006 and to have had my a first marathon win be documented during the making of The Spirit Pie of the Marathon, well, it’s been a : wonderful journey.” ==

Meb’s post-Athens accomplishments have been just as noteworthy. Seventy days after 7 the Olympics, Meb again defied the odds and placed second in the ING New York City Marathon.

“T think I could have won New York in 2004, but I just made a tactical mistake,” Meb says. “Hendrick Ramaala became the eventual winner, but he hadn’t done anything yet in the marathon.” Instead of worrying about the South African, Meb ran shoulder to shoulder with the reigning Boston Marathon champion, Robert Cheruiyot, through 24 miles. “He was the guy whose moves I was going to cover,” he says.

When Ramaala broke free at an aid station, Meb let him go. By the time he realized it was a definitive move, it was too late to catch him. Though Meb was

quickly gaining on Ramaala as they made their way through the race’s famous Central Park finish, he simply ran out of room.

“T still felt strong,” Meb says. “But he made the move when it counted, just like Baldini did in Athens. But [that race] gave me even more confidence for what I could do in the marathon.”

© Victah/wwwPhotoRun.net

© Victah/wwwPhotoRun.net

<4 Meb crosses the line first at the 2009 New York City Marathon.

And then it happened. Five years later, Meb became the toast of the marathon world when he won New York in spectacular fashion, becoming the first American to win there since Alberto Salazar 27 years before.

Few could have predicted that four and half years later, lightning would strike again. Meb’s dramatic victory at the 2014 Boston Marathon not only helped make his case for being the greatest American marathoner in history, but in light of the tragedy that took place in the city just 12 months before, it transcended sport.

“T’m a competitor at heart,” Meb says. “I will never know how fast I could have run, bePasics foot lock

cause I was never in 2004 Athens shape or 2009 New York shape on a flat course. But I’ll take titles over time anytime.”

The elusiveness of the Olympic medal

Winning an Olympic marathon medal is no easy task. In addition to Radcliffe, the list of acclaimed runners who tried but never managed to do so includes Salazar, Ron Hill, Bill Rodgers, Steve Moneghetti, Kenny Moore, Antonio Pinto, and Takeyuki Nakayama.

True, earning a medal requires an equal measure of talent and hard work. But it also requires a sprinkling of good fortune, as shown by what happened to Deena and Meb when they tried to replicate or improve upon their Athens results in subsequent Olympiads.

Deena was all set to roll at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Marathon when she broke her foot three miles into the race.

“T was so sideswiped by it because there was no warning,” Deena recalls. “Ten days before, I’d had the greatest marathon simulation run of my running career, and I was thinking to myself, Wow, I really nailed this. I really did it right.”

When misfortune struck, she quickly found herself on a support bus whose job it was to lag behind the women’s field and scoop up all DNF athletes. Deena, who had barely broken a sweat at that point, was forced to endure an introspective two-hour ride back to the stadium.

“Breaking my foot was a slap in the face, and I couldn’t come to terms with it when I was on that bus,” she says. “But I knew that there had to have been a very profound reason why that happened, so I just welcomed the opportunity to learn why while I was laid up on crutches for the next couple of months.”

What Deena discovered, after getting back to Mammoth, undergoing medical tests, and trying to solve the puzzle with her physician, was that even though she was possibly in the best running shape of her life, she really wasn’t all that healthy. She had been treated for a case of giardiasis earlier that summer, a parasitic illness she had contracted from drinking out of a stream, and she had lost 6 pounds over the course of a week. Since she was on the final buildup to Beijing, she didn’t have enough time to regain all the weight she had lost.

In Mammoth, Deena’s doctor prescribed a DEXA scan to check on the health of her bones and was stunned to see how compromised her skeletal system had become. While her calcium levels were fine, she was woefully low in her vitamin D stores. Deena, who has had several bouts of skin cancer, is hypervigilant about wearing extra sunscreen, hats, sunglasses, shirts with sleeves—just about everything she can think of to reduce sun exposure. Because of her diligence, however, she wasn’t getting enough vitamin D into her body.

“Tt was just the perfect storm, basically,” she says. “As athletes, we ride that line and push the envelope and the limits so often. And I went over that limit without realizing it.”