Reigning New York City Marathon champion Hellen Obiri has explained why she sometimes feels bad about switching from the track to the full marathon.
Reigning Boston Marathon champion Hellen Obiri has opened up on why she feels the current track runners have more advantage of running faster times and breaking records, unlike her days.
Obiri explained that sometimes, she feels sad to have missed the opportunity of running with pacemakers and wave lights to enable her to run fast times. Obiri retired from the track with a 5000m Personal Best time of 14:18.37 while her lifetime best in the 10,000m was 30:10.02.
She believes that she would have run faster times if she was still running the track and explained that women have higher chances of running fast times.
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“For me, sometimes I feel so bad because when I did 14:18, there were no pacemakers since the pacemaker would drop at around 2km and let you do the rest.
“I feel like I would have done better, maybe a sub 14 and I feel like we missed the opportunity of doing great things. But now we can’t reverse and I feel like this year, ladies can run sub 14.
“Sometimes I feel bad but there is nothing I can do since I can’t go back and change how things used to be,” Obiri told Citius Mag.
She added that with the coming of technology and super shoes, the potential to run faster times is more achievable like Dutch woman Sifan Hassan and world record holder Tigst Assefa.
Hassan currently holds the second-fastest time in the marathon, clocking 2:13:44 to win the race at the 2023 Chicago Marathon. Meanwhile, Assefa clocked the world record time of 2:11:53 to win last year’s Berlin Marathon.
“They ran incredible times and it gave me a lot of motivation and hope and reminded me that one day, I can also run like them. I have been running with Sifan for more than 10 years.
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“I believe that when I get the right chance, I can do much better. I’m not even thinking of a world record but I want to run a good time,” Obiri said.