Svetlana Zakharova (Russia) crosses the line to win the 2003 Boston Marathon (© Getty Images)
After victories in this year’s classic Boston and Chicago city races, the leading Russian marathon runner Svetlana Zakharova is planning to finish her outstanding 2003 by retaining the Honolulu Marathon title which she won in 2002 for the second time (2:29:08).
It will be her fourth Marathon this year though usually she runs no more then 2 or perhaps 3 races at this distance.
The World Championship race in August was the only ‘low’ spot for Zakharova this year, and a win in Honolulu along with that already achieved in Chicago will go someway to compensate for her failure in Paris where she managed only ninth place.
The race in Hawaii has a special significance for Zakharova as she first won there in 1997 and was second for the following three years too.
At the age of 33 years, great international success has come relatively late in the career of Zakharova who is from the Russian Republic of Chuvashiya. However, says confirms that it is in the nature of her people especially from the villages to work very hard with a great patience. That is why athletes from Chuvashiya are so good in endurance events.
Zakharova’s first marathon was in 1994 in 2:46 but she says that was just a ‘test’ so she could decide how hard the distance was to tackle, and she was not immediately convinced that the event was for her after she struggled in the last kilometres. However, the next year she tried the distance again and produced a 2:40 clocking. Step by step she was learning to run the marathon. She was making steady progress with each year.
Finally in the autumn of 1999 came the major breakthrough when she achieved 2:27:08 in Berlin where she was third. It was her time and performance there which convinced her that the event was really for her and that faster times were possible.
World Championships bronze
A 2:28:11 time for 10th place in London in 2000, was followed by second place the following year with a huge reduction of her personal best to 2:24:04. Though she got no faster that year, better was to follow later in the summer at the World Championships in Edmonton as Zakharova took the bronze medal (2:26:18).
She had firmly made it into the world’s elite, and this was re-emphasised when she strode across the finishline for third place in New York that autumn (2:25:13).“I always run the first part of the race a little bit slowly and begin more active running in the second part”, says Svetlana, “ and after any competition I always make an analysis of my running to find out the mistakes I made.”
Two Russian records in 2002
After such a significant step-up in 2001, Zakharova twice improved the Russian Marathon record last year with 2:22.31 for second place again in London, and a 2:21.31 fourth place in Chicago in the wake of one of Radcliffe’s epic runs.
Despite her third place in Edmonton in 2001, Zakharova acknowledges that she so far has had major problems at the big international championships. She failed to use her full potential in Edmonton and found the race a real struggle. Again she could not show her best form in Paris, and she accepts that her performance was effected by the pressure on her shoulders as everybody in the team was expecting a medal of some colour from her.
Cross Country Skiing at the heart of her training
Her coach and husband is Nikolay Zakharov, a former world class cross-country skier who has incorporated some of the methodical know-how from skiing into her Marathon training.
“Before I began my work with Svetlana she was training together with 1992 Olympic champion and 1996 silver medallist Valentina Yegorova (2:23:33 PB) and I saw how many mistakes she was making,” says Nikolay. “That is why I decided to work with her by myself in our own way.”
”First of all I was just trying the basics of preparing her to overcome the stress that builds during running. We began that preparation with a month of slow running (7-8/km) twice a day. She runs about 240 km a week, and step by step we achieved the speed she needs in a Marathon.
Svetlana and Nikolay live in the capital of Chuvashiya, Cheboksary. They prefer to spend winters at home rather than in warmer weather locations. Now they are waiting for the first snow of the winter, because slow running on the snow strengthens the feet. Very often in her winter training instead of running Zakharov will do 3 to 4 hours of cross-country skiing.
As for so many, her main task next year will be the Olympic Marathon, and she hopes for the first time in a major championships to able to run to her full potential in that race.
