IAAFor crying out loud!

My NYC Dream is dead.

Yup. No matter how much I push myself during speed work, if I lose five or fifty pounds before race-day or if I double my weekly mileage, I won’t be setting a world record in November’s marathon.

I know you’re shocked. Me too.

What’s perhaps most shocking is that it won’t be because, well, I’m slow.  It’ll be because I’m a woman.

All these elites? They have to get out of bed half an hour earlier for a “special” start or they’re S O L  too.

Turns out, last month the IAAF voted to discount any female world record set during a mixed gender race. Translation — who cares if you’ve dedicated your life to the sport, if you’re a woman you can only set a world record at the Olympics, World Championships or races that have “special” starts for elite women.  Forget Boston, Chicago, Berlin etc. Only men can do that.

What’s more, world championships and Olympic games are held in the middle of the summer. Sure, us chicks are tough – but even we run faster when it’s not brutally hot outside. So surely a world record at these events would be compromised.

Last Thursday, Canadian Female Marathon record holder Silvia Ruegger came to give my run-group a pep talk (and boy did she ever! No more excuses for this former couch-potato. More Ruegger-inspiration to follow in a future blog) and I asked her what she thought about the whole thing.

Not surprisingly, she was less than enthused.

“They are basically saying that all of the training, all of the sacrifices, all of the investment that you as a woman have made, is actually secondary to the fact that there was a man in the race,” she told us.  “It doesn’t give any credit to any other part of the preparation.”

Perhaps most importantly, Ruegger asks what message the IAAF is sending to girls.

“What if a young girl [or a super-fab blogger] says I want to run New York and I want to try for the record? She’s not going to be able to get it, because it’s a mixed race. It just dampens the whole concept of sport — that if you work hard, you will be acknowledged for it. Not anymore.”

And I have to ask why it even matters who’s doing the pacing? As long as pacing itself is condoned (and it is) what difference does it make if  the pacer is man, woman, animal or machine? The pacer doesn’t carry the runner – he/she runs slightly faster in front of him/her for a period of time. It’s still the runner’s own legs pushing him or her to the finish line. Now if you trained a flock of geese to form a V around a runner, that would be an issue. Not least because the footing for the runners behind would be messy.

On the bright side, Athletics Canada is letting Ruegger’s Canadian Record stand. Perhaps more importantly, that means I still have the chance to smash it whether there’s testosterone on the course in NYC or not. Keep your fingers crossed.

Speaking of World Records – Did anyone catch Patrick Makau of Kenya breaking the men’s marathon world record in Berlin last week with a blistering fast 2:03:38? Simply, awesome.

Is now the time to mention that I paced him?

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