Gelana sprints to record time, blazing finish

Teyba Erkesso stunned nobody by defending her title and lowering the women’s course record again Sunday morning. Anything else would have been a surprise.

But there were plenty of reasons fellow Ethiopian Teshome Gelana shouldn’t have found himself in the George R. Brown Convention Center sporting a new cowboy hat and pointing his index fingers high in the air, having just run the fastest 26.2 miles in Texas history to claim the championship of the 38th Chevron Houston Marathon.

For starters, marathon officials originally had told Gelana’s agent, Hussein Makké, that all the deadlines had passed and there was literally no more room at the inn. After all, it was early January and the elite field is generally set by mid-December at the latest.

Gelana, 25, didn’t pack much clout, either. Not well known here with a personal best of barely under 2 hours, 12 minutes — more than four minutes slower than Deriba Merga’s sizzling course record of a year ago — he hardly offered a compelling reason for special treatment.

But Makké refused to take no for an answer when he spoke with David Chester, the race’s longtime elite athletes liaison, saying: “David, just put his name in your computer. I will take care of everything else.”

Which Makké did, with one nearly disastrous exception. Nobody, Gelana included, realized his passport was on the verge of expiring. Had the letter of the law been followed, he shouldn’t have been allowed to fly to the United States from Addis Abba, Ethiopia. And, once he arrived, he could have been refused entry.


Difficult entry
But the slender Gelana looks like a world-class runner, so common sense prevailed and customs let him through. After checking into a room occupied by two other Ethiopian runners, he made it to the starting line with no further obstacles.

For the first 22 miles, nobody paid much attention to him. He was just one of a half-dozen East Africans bunched at the front of the field and, although the pace was swift, it wasn’t expected to threaten Merga’s 2:07:52.

Then … whoosh!

Approaching the Shepherd Street bridge to cross Buffalo Bayou and start the Allen Parkway homestretch, Gelana took off like he’d suddenly commandeered a motorcycle. With a 4:40 mile there, he exploded from the pack and churned home unchallenged. His 2:07:37 beat countryman Zembaba Yigeze by 50 seconds and erased Merga’s mark by 15.

“I was laughing to myself,” Makké said. “I’m thinking he is the luckiest runner in the world this week.”

Said Chester: “I’d done some research on (Gelana) and I wasn’t sure he’d be (competitive). I’d seen what he’d run before. But Hussein and I have a terrific relationship and he insisted, so I said, ‘Why not?’ We can always find room for one more.”

Why was Gelana a late entry? The original plan, Makké said, had called for him to compete in the Phoenix Marathon on Sunday, but his coach had a gut feeling Houston was where he belonged after he prevailed in the Addis Abba race in early December.


Pushing the limits
That’s another thing. How many runners win two marathons six weeks apart? And, in the second, lower one’s personal best by more than four minutes? His previous fastest time was a 2:11:50 in Reims, France, in 2008.

“I did not expect this,” Gelana said through an interpreter.

He wasn’t alone.

Amazingly, six runners wound up breaking 2:10, which only Merga had accomplished in the previous 37 Houston Marathons. And Merga obliterated a 20-year-old record.

Brett Gotcher’s excellent 2:10:36 in his debut marathon was tops by an American in the race’s history, yet all it earned was seventh place.

“They showed they’re the real deal today,” Gotcher, 25, said of his African rivals, who included the pre-race favorite, Kenyan Jason Mbote, who had to settle for third (2:08:58). “I thought they were going out too hard, but I was staying in contact with them about halfway through — ‘All right, I told myself, I’m back in the race’ — but they put the pedal to the metal and they were gone. That second half was ridiculous.”

Gelana ran a 1:03:09 over the final 13.1 miles, competitive with the 1:01:54 Antonio Vega put up to win the Aramco Half Marathon.

Erkesso, 27, subsequently ensured a clean sweep by Ethiopians for the second year in a row when she came in about 15 minutes later, pushed to near perfection by her husband, Kasime Adillo, the runner-up in the 2008 marathon.

But Adillo’s only mission this cool, sunny day was to be her “rabbit,” keeping Erkesso focused and motoring along. Her 2:23:53 bettered the 2:24:18 she ran in 2009 and was nearly five minutes faster than the 2:28:44 posted by runner-up Margarita Plaksina of Russia.

“Everything went according to plan,” Erkesso said, also through an interpreter.

Erkesso prevailed despite having raced this past weekend in the lucrative Abu Dhabi Half Marathon. She finished ninth there, using it as a trainer for Houston.

In retrospect, she admitted it took enough of a toll to cost her a chance to run a hoped-for sub-2:23 time Sunday.