Marla Runyan, the first legally blind athlete to make a U.S. Olympic team, went to New York on a mission: Break the American indoor record in the women’s 5,000 meters.
She delivered Sunday with the smashing success of a Broadway hit.
Running the final 2,800 meters by herself, Runyan was timed in 15 minutes 7.33 seconds–more than 15 seconds faster than the previous mark of 15:22.64 set by Lynn Jennings at Hanover, N.H., in 1990.
En route the 32-year-old runner shattered the American best for three miles at 14:56.0 that Jennings ran during her 5,000-meter race. Runyan was timed at 14:40.56 for three miles.
“My focus was going to be on the 5,000 this year,” said Runyan, the eighth-place finisher in the 1,500 meters at the Sydney Games–the best placing by an American in that event at the Olympics.
Three other runners began the race with Runyan, but none went farther than 2,200 meters.
For Runyan, who has 20/400 vision in both eyes, this was only her second 5,000-meter race, the first indoors.
In her first outdoors last May in her hometown of Eugene, Ore., she won at 15:07.66.
Last year Runyan also won the 3,000-meter national indoor title.
– Romania distance star Gabriela Szabo broke the world indoor record for the women’s 3,000 meters, bettering a mark that had stood for 12 years.
Szabo, world and Olympic champion at 5,000 meters, was timed in 8:32.88 at the Norwich Union British Grand Prix meet at Birmingham, England, running virtually alone for the final seven laps.
“Today’s world record is the first step for the summer,” said Szabo, voted the track and field athlete of the year in 1999.
Szabo topped the record of 8:33.82 set in 1989 by Elly van Hulst of the Netherlands in Hungary.The Press Box
