INDIAN TRAILS WILL PREP FITZHENRY FOR BOSTON
In
2004 when the marathoners at Boston cooked in the 80 plus heat, Doug Fitzhenry,
44, of Edison, was dealing with another challenge with the famous race.
“I forgot how tough that course is,” said Fitzhenry. “I hadn’t done the course in four or five years and it surprised me how hilly the course is. It’s rolling, it’s not flat anywhere.”
Fitzhenry will be racing this Sunday at the challenging Indian Trails 15K in Middletown, seeing it as a perfect prep for the hills at Boston, two weeks later. Ordinarily he might have tapered a bit longer for the marathon but he was off sick for three weeks right after Christmas and didn’t start training again until mid January. His first three weeks back were 60 milers, and he is now at 80 miles per week.
“I’m just going to keep training hard right up until Boston and go from there,” said Fitzhenry. “It will be good for me.”
He’s been concentrating on hills in preparation for Boston, but with no real hills in Edison Fitzhenry has found a unique hill repeat course.
“I was running along the new Route 35 Bridge from Perth Amboy to Sayreville. It’s about 120 feet high and it’s about four tenths of a mile long,” said Fitzhenry. “I did about ten repeats of the bridge.”
On March 12 th, Fitzhenry did a long training run and then on March 13 th he ran the Freehold ten miler. While it would appear he sabotaged his race it was done for a purpose.
“I don’t know how to go into a race and not race,” he said. ”I didn’t want to race it. My plan was to do 6:40, 6:30, whatever I could, and not really race.”
At three miles Fitzhenry was ten or eleven places back, but he began to feel good and his game plan was tossed in favor of picking up the pace. He finished in sixth place in 1:00:09 for a 6:01 average.
Two weeks later he finished seventh at the Equinox 20K with a time of 1:12:11 for an average of 5:49 pace. Equinox is nearly flat so Indian Trails with it’s extreme hills will be a decided contrast.
“I’m not a super fast flat guy, so I like to have some hills breaking it up.”
“It’s definitely unique,” he said. “The first time I did it I didn’t knew what to expect. That last hill I was almost just crawling – with my hands on my thighs. Now I know what to expect.”
Two years ago, Fitzhenry trained on the course several times in the weeks preceding the race.
“So that I would remember it in my head,” he said. “I think it helped me because I knew where it got hard.”
The most extreme hill comes late in the race and it culminates with a swooping downhill into a golf course. Most people cannot handle the extreme grade.
“One year I did actually fly down,” he said. “I didn’t realize - I just came upon the hill and I was being chased. Roger Price was right on me. I was just trying to run as hard as I could and the downhill came. It was like I was on a bicycle that was out of control and I just couldn’t stop.
“Roger said that by the bottom of the hill I had put 30 or 40 seconds on him,” said Fitzhenry. “He managed to close some of that back up but he said it was unbelievable. But it was because I was caught completely by surprise. If I had slowed down I would have fallen and hit my head.”
“I like to run the downhills but I’m not as fast now,” said Fitzhenry. “I’m more controlled. But that’s the fun part of the course. You suffer enough going up, you get the fun part of going down.”
Fitzhenry has run only six marathons. The first was only eight years ago. He treated it as a training run for the first six miles and then ran hard for 20, finishing in 2:46.
He has lowered that time by a few minutes and is hoping to hit mid 2:40’s in Boston, weather permitting. While Fitzhenry can’t control the weather he has done the other part and will be well prepared for the hills, in part thanks to the Indian Trails 15K.
Registration for the 15K and 3 mile run begins at 7:15 a.m. Sunday at Croydon Hall on Leonardville Road in Middletown. Both races start at 9:00 a.m. More information is available at www.sandyhookers.org/it.
First Published in the HOME NEWS TRIBUNE on Thursday, March 31, 2005
Copyright 2005 Madeline Bost