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For
a runner, fate can take unexpected forms. Brian Clas, best known
for his 1997 U.S. Men's 20k Road Race Championship and his fifth
place in the 10,000 meters at the 1996 U.S. Olympic Trials, had
hoped to make his debut in the marathon last fall. But he struggled
with a hamstring problem at the end of 1999 and the first half of
2000, and he couldn't get in enough quality training to prepare
for the major 26.2-milers in New York City or Chicago.
The Philadelphia
Marathon, later in the autumn, made more sense for Clas. "I wanted
to be able to run pace for 2:20 and be competitive," he explains.
"If I were to go to Chicago or New York, I'd be caught in No Man's
Land. If I'm not going to keep up with the rabbits going 1:04, I'm
going to be left behind."
In Philadelphia,
Clas "just wanted to put one under my belt, to be able to run my
pace for the first half and be pretty conservative at the end and
finish pretty well." He sailed through 13.1 miles in 1:08:22 --
and ended up winning by more than five minutes with a 2:18:03. In
this era, that makes Clas, at 28, an American marathoner with a
very bright future.
Clas,
who broke Gavin Gaynor's Philadelphia course record of 2:19:03,
wasn't sure he'd come out of the race thinking of himself primarily
as a marathoner, but hoped to "see if there was any potential there.
I feel there is, and it will certainly be something I'll look to
focus on a little bit more."
After
attending Union High School in Endicott, New York, Clas became the
premier distance runner in the Ivy League as a Cornell undergraduate,
winning the Heptagonal Cross Country Championships in the fall of
1993 and the outdoor 5,000- and 10,000-meter crowns in 1994, his
senior year.
For a
short spell after college graduation, he was part of The Enclave
in Washington, D.C. But he soon "needed a change of lifestyle. I
was getting tired of the starving runner type of act." After running
what he calls "the worst race of my entire life" at the 1996 USATF
Cross Country Championships, he decided "I needed to get some things
sorted out with my life, and if running could fit in after that,
so be it." He moved to New York City and became a lab technician
at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Rockefeller University.
"It's full-time," he noted while he was there. "I don't have to
worry about health insurance. It makes things easier."
His one
national road race title, defeating Mike Mykytok by a single second
with a 1:00:43 at the New Haven 20K Roadrace in September of 1997,
left Clas, in his own roads, "shocked." He went into the competition
"soaked with a lot of doubts," having never raced longer than 15k,
and figuring he might be one of the top ten Americans and "come
home with a couple of hundred bucks." For awhile, he was just trying
to hang on, but "in the last 600 meters, it was almost an epiphany.
I saw the finish, and I knew no one was going to catch me from behind.
I felt 'jeez, I can win this thing.'"
The 20k
title was a stunning accomplishment given the "freak running accident"
Clas had sufferred in Central Park at the Midnight Run on New Year's
Eve, as 1996 ended and 1997 began. "I had to have emergency surgery
on a fractured spleen. I fell into a wooden guard rail," he recalls.
"I was running with a bunch of friends and we started goofing around
and I ended up in the hospital." The subsequent surgery was "very
serious," and Clas stayed away from running for five months. He
went to New Haven figuring "if I blew up, I didn't know how much
I'd pursue running anymore."
A successful
encore to that New Haven triumph was not, alas, soon in coming.
Clas admits that in 1999, "I kind of broke down" as a runner. "I
don't know if it was overtraining or that mentally, I wasn't focusing
on racing the way I should have been." Physically, he was healthy
enough, but he "would come to a competition and just fall flat for
whatever reason." Clas felt "frustrated" in the wake up of his fifth
place in the 1996 Trials 10,000, "seeing a lot of people who
I had been on an equal level with, or higher, develop into solid
competitors. I was on the outside looking in. But to be honest,
I think I put a bit of focus on my other career" in science.
Clas
is now back in Ithaca at Cornell, as a technician in the university's
molecular biology department while his girlfriend attends business
school. "It was a great opportunity to get back and work with my
old coach, Lou Duesing." "I really adapt well to Ithaca," Clas has
found. "It's a little tough through the winter, but there are a
lot of trails and great places to run."
A spring
marathon is a strong likelihood for Clas, but he warns "I usually
tend to take things one day at a time, so we'll see. The next thing
I'm looking to run is the USATF Cross Country Championships in February,
the 12k. If the training's going well, I'll probably think about
Boston. If you look at my 20k time (the 1:00:43), you predict something
in the 2:12, 2:13 range."
Peter
Gambaccini is a New York-based freelance writer. He is a frequent
contributor to New York Runner, Runner's World, MetroSports, The
Village Voice, and other periodicals
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Brian
Clas crosses the finish line at the 2000 NYRRC Club Team Championships
in Central Park.
(Photo by Parker Morse)
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