Lance Armstrong announced that he's going to train for and run New York this year. I took me a moment to decide how I felt about that, but I think it's actually pretty cool. I've read articles before about his amazing VO2Max and how he's ranked higher on some scales of athletic potential than various professional distance runners, so it will be interesting to see what he can put together for what I'm pretty sure will be his first marathon. It is a little like Michael Jordan trying to switch over to baseball in 1994, but I don't think the pressure is as high on Lance to immediately be superhuman right off the bat.
I hope he writes about the experience and shares what it's like to switch from one serious training regime to another. I'm sure some parts of it will seem like second nature for him, but I can see where he might be at risk of overtraining since his brain knows how to work hard, but the new movements and stresses are going to be a bit of a shock to his body. He says he's doing it just as a distraction while he transitions to the next stage of his life, but I don't know how easy it is to just turn off the intensity when that's what you've lived for years and years.
I ran a New York 10K in the late 90's and halfway through the race I was suddenly flanked by a couple of motorcycles with cameramen, awkwardly perched backwards on the bitch-seat, jerking and weaving along, shooting footage of the woman running next to me. I vaguely remember her beating me that day, but not by all that much. It turned out that she was Summer Sanders, the Olympic swimmer. If it's the race I think it was, I ran at about 7:12 pace that day, respectable certainly, but nowhere near Olympic caliber. Obviously it wasn't her sport and she ran how you'd expect a extremely fit, casual young runner would run. It made me wonder though, how fast she might be if she really trained hard. Or maybe she wouldn't have been that fast...it's just not her sport.
Unrelated, I also saw cameras that day documenting the race of a girl who was about twelve. She was a tiny thing, just gangly skin and bones, and she reminded me a lot of myself at that age. She did not end up beating me and afterwards I chatted with her a little bit, graciously bestowing words of encouragement from an older, more experienced runner. It was truly humbling to find out later that the reason she was getting media attention was because she'd had a heart transplant at the age of two. Woo woo...I outsprinted the preadolescent heart transplant patient, bully bully for me!