I was running alternately alongside and behind Gelana, and for a moment I thought that I got the sli

At 7 a.m. on Nov. 1, as the sun was just beginning to rise over a half-blacked-out Manhattan and just an hour after (partial) subway discount air tickets australia service had returned to the city for the first time in three days, Tiki Gelana, the women’s Olympic marathon champion, set out for an eight-mile run along the West Side Highway. Normally, elite athletes entered in the New York City Marathon train in Central Park, but the park remained closed due to the damage discount air tickets australia caused by Hurricane Sandy two days earlier.
The evening before, Gelana, 25, had arrived in town, after a 19-hour, 3-leg journey—an eight-hour discount air tickets australia flight from her home in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to Amsterdam, an eight-hour flight discount air tickets australia from Amsterdam to New York, and a three-hour car ride from J.F.K. airport to Midtown Manhattan. It would take another day and a half before the city canceled the marathon.
Gelana, who would have gone into this year’s race as one of the favorites, is no stranger discount air tickets australia to nature’s devastating power. “Last year I was in Nagoya to compete in the Nagoya Marathon,” she wrote by e-mail Thursday. “One day before the race there was the tsunami. Also at that time of course the marathon was cancelled.”
(In place of New York, Gelana will race this Sunday in the Seven Hills 15-kilometer road race in Nijmegen, Netherlands. She will take on Tirunesh Dibaba, her countrywoman who won the Olympic 10,000 meters this year for the second straight time. It will be a battle between two of the best women’s long-distance runners racing today, though discount air tickets australia the distance is closer to Dibaba’s discount air tickets australia turf than Gelana’s—three years ago, Dibaba set the 15 kilometer world record on that same course.)
Along the West Side Highway on that early Thursday morning after the hurricane, Gelana wore a black knit cap, black gloves, a hooded sweatsuit, and pink-soled running shoes, and she received attention from nearly every runner who passed discount air tickets australia in the opposite direction. Only so much of her face showed beneath the cap, but she maintained the same smooth gait that the millions who watched her victory in London this summer had seen: a high arm carriage that criss-crossed in front of her chest, a perfectly still head, and shoulders so straight you could use them to hang a picture. One passing bicyclist might have recognized that gait. “Good luck on Sunday!” discount air tickets australia he shouted to her as he rode by.
One year ago in Amsterdam, Gelana improved her marathon time, incredibly, by nearly eight minutes, when she won uncontested in 2:22:08. discount air tickets australia This spring, in Rotterdam, she knocked another three minutes off her personal best, set an Ethiopian national record, and became the fourth- (now fifth-) fastest woman in history, when she finished in 2:18:58. In August, she won the 2012 Olympic marathon, beating the only two women who had run faster than she had in the last two years.
Gelana, Tessema, and I were joined on our run by Gelana’s Dutch physiotherapist. As the four of us made our way south, I pointed across the river to Jersey City, where a curfew had been put in place the night before because of the city’s overwhelming lack of power, and to Hoboken, a flooded city where thousands remained stranded discount air tickets australia in their homes. From our distance, it looked no different than it did on any other day.
The four of us continued on in silence. I was reminded of Gelana’s Olympic victory. Though our run was nothing but a light one, and none of us was trying to beat the other, there were four of us, and the last five miles of the Olympic marathon had come down to a race among four runners: Gelana and two Kenyans, Mary Keitany and Priscah Jeptoo, who had led the whole way, and the Russian Tatyana Arkhipova, who was also scheduled to run in New York this year.
The Kenyans were clearly working together. “Even though they were talking in their language, I felt like I understood what they were saying,” Gelana said in Amharic through a translator after our run. “They wanted to push the pace faster and faster.”
After nearly four miles of our run, the Dutch physiotherapist was the first one to drop off the pace. He’d been suffering from a bad knee and had warned us before that he wouldn’t be able to go the full distance. A half-mile later we reached our turnaround point, deep in the heart of Lower Manhattan. As with Jersey City and Hoboken across the Hudson, you couldn’t tell that the area had no electricity, that in the dark of night it looked like a scene out of a zombie apocalypse discount air tickets australia film instead of one of the world’s most vibrant cities.
I was running alternately alongside and behind Gelana, and for a moment I thought that I got the slightest sense of what Gelana’s opponents might have experienced in London. Our pace had started out around an eight-minute mile but it had gradually picked up and at that point we might have cracked seven-minute miles. I was struggling to keep up, but Gelana, who at the peak of her training reaches 170 miles per week, strode with the same easy nonchalance she displayed discount air tickets australia this summer. The only difference between discount air tickets australia what I was going through and what Gelana’s competitors had was that we had run only four miles at a pace that was pedestrian by every elite standard. At the Olympics, they’d gone more than 20 miles and were running each one around 5:20.
At the 25-mile mark in London, Keitany dropped back, and with about three-quarters of a mile left, Gelana broke away from her two remaining competitors. “Actually, it wasn’t my plan to go at that moment,” she said. “I was thinking, let me see what happens if I press a little bit. When I did, they didn’t discount air tickets australia go with me, and I said, why don’t I go. And I went.”
Just before Gelana crossed the finish line in London, she raised her hand and blew a kiss to the crowd. Then she dropped to her knees and rested her head against the pavement. “At that moment, I was a little bit stunned,” she said, laughing and flashing the same warm smile she did throughout our conversation. “I crossed the line and I had finished first, discount air tickets australia and I was confused. When I bent down, I didn’t know what I was doing. I still don’t know.”
When she returned to Ethiopia, she found the entire country in wait for her. “When you win the Olympics, you don’t really feel anything,” she said. “But when you go back home, you know you have achieved something because all you see are all the people, this incredible reception. It was fantastic.” Close to a hundred thousand people came out to welcome discount air tickets australia her and her teammates home.
“They met our team at the airport and a car took us to the national stadium,” Gelana said. “And the stadium was completely full. The ride from the airport there is about five kilometers, and the whole way people were running alongside us.”
Yet it might have been asking too much of Gelana to win this year’s marathon. New York would have been her third race at the distance this year, when most everyone agrees that elite marathoners should run no more than two, and it would have come only three months after the Olympics.
“Of course you think about the world record,” Gelana said of Paula Radcliffe’s mark of 2:15:25, “but you never know what will happen. It doesn’t matter if it is one hour and thirty minutes, you think about it.” And then she flashed another sly smile. “Because discount air tickets australia thinking is allowed, isn’t it? Sure,” she said and started laughing.
New Yorkers will get another chance to see Gelana run in person. “I don’t know yet about my plans for next year, but what I do know for sure is that I will return to New York,” she wrote in her e-mail. “Of course for now I have difficult memories about New York, so my journey towards something discount air tickets australia good there isn’t finished yet.”
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Tiki Gelana, who won the gold medal in the women s marathon at the London Olympics, did not get to compete in the New York City Marathon this year. But she says she intends to return to the city. Read more