Cool and breezy. Bank holiday weather conditions, the mood of Sonia O'Sullivan. Yesterday saw O'Sullivan, on a whim, grabbing the streets by the scruff of the neck and shaking down the Dublin City marathon.
Sunday evening and the marathon officials get a call. They hear O'Sullivan's voice on the other end of the line asking if she can run in their race. Just a tester, she says. Fun. She's in Dublin to launch Running to Stand Still, a diary of her Olympic year, and wants to feel how the legs react after 20 miles.
"Jeez, has she any respect for the distance?" asks an experienced broadcaster. No respect. Just an impetuous urge, a stubborn streak and inordinate talent that believes that if there is a ready-made race, why not run in it? Cool, a marathon, let's go.
It was O'Sullivan's first time running 26 miles. Her victory, achieved in two hours, 35 minutes and 42 seconds, was assured when she strode away from Theresa Duffy nearing the mid point. Not as a crazy teenager, not as an aspirant junior, not even in her notoriously difficult training sessions had O'Sullivan run for longer than two hours and 10 minutes. She did so for the first time last week. Her coach, Alan Storey, sanctioned yesterday's run but few others knew.
"My mother and father will probably kill me," she said after the race. "They said to me: `Do you know anything about the Dublin marathon? It's on today.' And then Nick (Bideaux, her partner) says: `Yeah, she's running.' "
Belfast runner Duffy, who won the event in 1998 and just missed out on a place in Sydney, heard about O'Sullivan's inclusion only minutes before they lined up.
"It was a shock to hear about Sonia," she said. "I only found out about 10 minutes before the race began. At about nine miles she took off. I was closing later on but I was extremely tired over the last four miles."
Had O'Sullivan not shown up, Duffy, whose second-placed time of 2:37.36 is a personal best, would have collected the winner's prize of £7,800. Duffy now hopes to concentrate her efforts on the World Cross Country Championships in Leopardstown, Dublin next year.
"All I was thinking about was finishing," said O'Sullivan. "I didn't care about a time or anything. I just wanted to get around. It wasn't any experiment to try and run fast or anything like that.
"It was a good course, nice and flat. But it was all new to me. I'd never run a marathon ever so I'd no idea . . . and it will be a long time before I do another one. "If it was anywhere else I wouldn't have run it. It was just because it was in Dublin and I was here for the book launch, so I just called yesterday and asked for a number."
O'Sullivan led Duffy by just 20 seconds at the half-way mark, covering the first 13 miles in 1:16.26 and, for a while, shaping up to Esther Kipagat's 1999 course record of 2:34.24. In the end the debutant was under a minute off the course best time, with Duffy less than two minutes adrift.
"It was great," said the Olympic 5,000 metres silver medallist. "I really enjoyed it . . . for the first 20 miles and then I was saying `Oh God, 2:15, I've never been here before, I hope I'm going to survive this. Before today my longest ever run was two hours 10 minutes last Sunday, and that was kind of putting it in my mind that I was going to run here.
"It's something that everyone asks - when are you going to do it? I've always said I'd love to run one because I'm always around at these big marathons doing things for Nike and stuff. There is always such a big buzz about it that I've just always wanted to do it. It was nice to win."
The men's event, somewhat overshadowed by O'Sullivan's astonishing gate crashing, was won by Simon Pride of Scotland in a personal best of 2:18.49. More used to longer distances, it was a case of Pride re-adjusting for what was a relative sprint.
The Welsh-born 35-year-old ran 2:21 in London this year, but is also the world champion over 100 kilometres.
