Ironman Wisconsin Champ!

Ironman Wisconsin Champ!

Saturday, December 5, 2009

Memphis Marathon Success!

Bretscher Multisport-coached athletes Julie Lukachko and Dana Riederer competed in the Memphis Marathon this morning. Julie and Dana have both been Bretscher Multisport coached for a year now. Both came away with huge breakthroughs.

Julie came into this race with a marathon PR of 3:50 and a goal of qualifying for Boston, 3:40. Julie executed a great race strategy, and finished in 3:31, over 8 minutes under her goal! What makes Julie's performance even more remarkable is that she came down with a nasty case of the flu less than two weeks from raceday. Thankfully she managed to recover in time to not allow it to affect her race. Check back in a few days for Julie's own race report!

Dana, coming off of a breakthrough triathlon season in 2009 where he improved every single PR, was the 4th overall age-grouper at the Muskoka 70.3, and improved his 70.3PR ten minutes down to 4:10 decided to see how his multisport fitness would translate to a marathon. Dana had a marathon PR of 2:52 and 'claimed' all along that his goal was to run sub-2:50. However after some of the workouts I was seeing I think I managed to convince him that he should aim more towards sub-2:45. Dana too, executed his race plan very well clicking off 6:10-15 splits the first twenty miles. Amazingly Dana did not slow down the last 10k, in fact he sped up. His fastest splits of the entire race came during miles 19-24 where his was clicking off 6:05 miles and even had one at 6:01. He crossed the line in 2:42, a few seconds short of a 10 minute PR and over 7 minutes under his initial goal! I have not heard official splits yet but I think Dana may have negative split his race. And he described himself as feeling "pretty good" at the finish. Based on that I think he has a 2:40 performance in him!

Congrats Julie and Dana, you make your coach look good!
Check results here
http://www.stjudemarathon.org/past_results.htm

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