Vancouver Half-Marathon releases elite start list

A star studded field has been assembled for the Scotiabank Vancouver Half-Marathon, but all eyes will be on Natasha Wodak and Lanni Marchant.

The pair have battled all spring on the roads and on the track with a 2-2 score. Vancouver will be a deciding race.

Wodak, the 33-year-old Vancouver resident set a new Canadian 10,000m record at the Payton Jordan Invitational May 2 with a time of 31:41.59 getting the better of her friend and rival whose tenacity was rewarded with a personal best of 31:46.94, the third fastest time ever run by a Canadian.

Most recently they raced at the Calgary Half-Marathon where Marchant put more than a minute on her rival winning in 1:12:17 to claim the national half-marathon championship.

“Natasha and I have had a back and forth all season,” says Marchant, who is also the Canadian women’s marathon record holder. “I don’t think that will change for this race. She is running on her home course and I am defending my title on this course. We both have things at stake but that’s how good competition comes about.”

Wodak will approach the race from a different perspective. Both she and Marchant will represent Canada at the Pan Am Games and then the world championships in Beijing. They will run the 10,000m at these championships. In order to be in peak fitness for Beijing she and her coach, Richard Lee, adjusted her training program going forward.

Reid Coolsaet suffered a rare loss on the roads at the Calgary Half-Marathon finishing eleven seconds behind Kip Kangogo, the Kenyan-born Canadian citizen. He says he will be ready for the Vancouver race.

“After the Rotterdam marathon I took a couple of weeks off and I have just completed six weeks of base training,” he reports. “So the Calgary half-marathon was kind of really early in my build up. Since Calgary, my workouts have picked up and, starting this week, I am going to have a 10K focus. I will be in better shape for a half-marathon in Vancouver at the end of June than I was for Calgary.”

Coolsaet will face Rob Watson and the up and coming Sami Jibril, among others.