Laurel Park finished the Great Race 10K as first master, fourth overall.
Word came in May from Jennie McCafferty and her regular Michigan Runner e-mail postings that Laurel Park had won another Women's Only 5K Run in Ann Arbor.

It was her fourth win in scenic Gallup Park since 1991. Routine, you might think. Just another lark in the park for Park. You might think, too, that some things come easily to some people, as running must come easily to Park. After all, her 17:58 5K at age 42 was 49 seconds faster than her last win, in 2003, and good for 39-second victory margin.

But you'd be wrong. Nothing routine about it. Nothing easy, either. Park's win, and her return to racing a couple years ago after agonizing months of injury, rehab and recovery, are a testament to her bulldoggedness, attention to detail, and the point that nothing in her recent running has come easily.

By e-mail, she writes: "Basically, I have a leg-length discrepancy (right leg is 1/4" shorter than left) and eventually my body became unable to compensate for it due to a combination of work (years of hard running) and age. As my body lost its ability to compensate, my biomechanics 'adjusted' to accommodate the discrepancy, which eventually led to functional irregularities and muscle imbalances.

"At some point everything started to snowballl. The more my body tried to accommodate, the worse my biomechanics became and the physical system just broke down. At my worst (around 2000) several muscles which are integral to running weren't working at all. I finally got to the point where I physically could not run."

In pain, unable to go out the door, Park told her doctor her goal was to one day be able to run three miles at a time, five days a week, at nine minutes a mile. It was a goal that would seem, for a long time, daunting. She would seem on track, suffer a setback and again have to shut things down.

"I thought I'd never get better," Park remembers. "'My God,' I thought. 'I'm going to be like this the rest of my life.'" It would be the spring of 2003 before she would race well again.

"Compounding the leg-length problem was my lack of muscular flexibility," she continues. "I was the kid in elementary-school gym class who couldn't touch her toes or even come close to doing the splits. Well, I paid for that big-time.

"Flexible, supple muscles are better able to handle the stress of rigorous work, and they don't 'delegate' that stress to ligaments, tendons and bones. My muscles did. (Memo to parents of high-school runners: Get your kids into yoga - now!)" The last five years, Park has focused --- make that FOCUSED -- on physical therapy that undid the damage and taught her body how to work properly.

"I've had a lot of manual manipulation therapy (soft tissue and spinal/ hip mobilization), and often when one problem was 'solved,' another popped up," she writes. "It's been like peeling off the layers of an onion.

"For example, my doctor discovered that my thoracic vertebrae and spinal (back) ribs were essentially 'locked' -- no mobility and the ribs could not expand. When your upper body doesn't rotate, your lower body (pelvis) overcompensates (over-rotates), which causes problems with hamstrings, IT bands and feet. "He worked on 'releasing' the vertebrae and ribs -- just getting them to move a little -- and when he did, I was able to take a full, deep breath for the first time in probably six years. My lung capacity had been restricted because my ribs couldn't expand. The first time I went for a run after the ribs were released, I almost hyperventilated. I had to relearn how to breathe while running!"

Park still gets PT twice a month. She does 30 minutes of stretching every day. She lifts weights and does core-strengthening exercises with a big exercise ball three times a week. She swims for 20 minutes at a crack three times a week -- "that's the biggest sacrifice, because I hate to swim," she says. Mixed in with all that is a liberal dose of caution. No trail running, runs that take longer than 50 minutes, races longer than 10K, nor running more than 40 miles a week. "I wish I could do Crim one last time, but I just can't risk it," she says.

Nonetheless, despite all the work and caution, Park says this year will be her "last hurrah on the racing scene." Not her last appearance, just the last year she expects to do well. It won't come as a surprise to her if her fourth Women's-Only win was her last. Why? She's about to begin her dissertation for her Ph.D. in higher and post-secondary education at the University of Michigan. Once she finishes her degree, she plans to put it to use at a job that she assumes will not allow her the time to do all the training she needs to run sub-18- minute 5Ks.

So she'll go out on top this year, looking to run cool races she's heard about but never had a chance to do, like the Reeds Lake Run in East Grand Rapids. (She hopes some of these events, like the Great Race in Elkhart, Ind., will have bike legs that allow both her and her husband, Rich Stark, to compete. Stark, a former top runner himself, was diagnosed with arthritis in his back a while back and made the smart decision to retire from running and take up competitive biking.)

"I'm really just pleased to be able to race," says Park. "Doing well is the icing on the cake. Actually, my entire career has been icing on the cake. The places I've gone, the people I've met."

~~~

Last summer I wrote about the Great Wall of China Marathon: a feature for Michigan Runner on Michigan runners who conquered it -- well, forget "conquered," how about "survived"? -- and a more-generic piece for Running Times magazine. Greg Feucht read the MR story, and later read about the race again in one of Jennie McCafferty's weekly e-mail missives. Feucht is a top-notch runner -- he ran for the University of Wisconsin- Green Bay, and later with Fred Vanhala's Front Line Racing Team while working for Motorola in Ann Arbor -- and since he was going to be in China on a six-month work assignment, he decided to run the May 2005 Great Wall race. (For more on the race, look elsewhere in this issue or visit www.kathyloperevents.com.)

A hamstring injury limited Feucht's appearances for Front Line, but he was able to start training effectively last year.

Last spring, while training to pace his sister, Andrea, an ultramarathoner in Albuquerque, during part of a 100-miler, he ran Randy Step's Pinckney Trail Marathon. "That was my first marathon and got me hooked," Feucht says.

Last fall, he did three 50Ks: Step's Dances with Dirt, the Glacial Trail in Wisconsin, and the Huff in Indiana. While overseas on his work assignment, he decided that when in China, do what the Chinese do. Or rather, when in Mongolia, do what the Mongolians do. He entered the upcoming Mongolia 100K. And to train for that, he entered the Great Wall race in May.

"For the race, I wore my trainers and went out relatively easy, so in the end I was very surprised at the win," Feucht says. And even more surprised with his course-record time of 3:25:05, good for nearly a 13- minute win over Patrick Li of Switzerland. (A course record of nearly three and a half hours gives you an idea of the difficulty of the course, which includes 18 miles of straight uphill at the 21-mile mark. And if you think 18 miles of uphill in the last five miles of a race is an impossibility, you haven't run the Great Wall.)

"The course is relatively difficult, especially the wall section," understates Feucht. "But aside from all the stairs on the wall, it's quite runnable. The surrounding area and the course itself are actually very beautiful." Feucht, who returns to Michigan in August, is already taking aim at Dances with Dirt, where he says he hopes to "improve on my second- place finish last year."

Gotta be a piece of cake after the Wall. MR