Chris Graff hit the wall last spring. The demands of a full-time job and a family replaced competitive running on the 33-year-old’s priority list, so he retired from the sport.
“We bought a townhouse in Crofton, [Md.], my son Owen is 2 1/2 and my daughter Emily is 11 months, so we got a lot going on there,” said Graff, who won the 1998 Big East 10,000-meter title at St. John’s University.
Now, though, Graff feels fit and hungry enough to make another run at his personal-best marathon time Nov. 2 in the New York Marathon. After his 2007 struggles, Graff considered his competitive career dead.
“Go back to last spring, when I wasn’t going to race anymore,” said Graff, who has twice qualified for the U.S. Olympic marathon trials (2004, 2008). “I just couldn’t get going anymore. I felt like I was always forcing it. I went out to Stanford [Cardinal Invite on May 4, 2007] and didn’t have a good experience out there.”
“I took some time off and I always assumed I’d run every day forever,” he said. “I took two weeks off, then a couple of days after I started running again, I still felt really bad.”
What he did next changed the course of his running career. He spent less time on the roads and worked on his core strength and stretching. Graff, an assistant coach at the University of Maryland, also started running with the team’s distance runners.
“In the summer, I just started feeling better and better and I wasn’t running much but doing a lot of the strength work,” Graff said. “By the end of the summer, I started feeling great on my two-hour runs. I was running two to three days briskly, easy on the others. By Labor Day, I put a watch on a 10-mile run, and I did 55 minutes or so. I was running pretty fast workouts without a lot of effort.”
He gradually worked up the weekly mileage from 80 to 120.
“Workouts were getting faster and faster than I ever did when I was supposed to be in great shape,” he said. “I knew I was training for something but wasn’t sure what that was.”
Graff said he marked Oct. 1 on his racing calendar to focus on the one part of his resume he considered weak - the marathon. He then decided to run the New York City Marathon.
“I usually ran a good marathon during the track season,” the New York native said. “But every time I really gear up for a marathon, I’d feel terrible and wouldn’t make it past 18 miles.”
He debuted at the 2003 USA Marathon Championships in Birmingham, Ala., with a 2:18:44, then after the 2004 U.S. Olympic track and field trials, he sought to improve at New York. He dropped out after 16 miles.
“The worst thing about that is that I know so many people there and I dropped out, and 15 people I knew were right there and there was nowhere to hide,” Graff said.
A year later he produced the same results at the event.
But in 2006 Graff ran a 2:18:18 at the Twin Cities Marathon. Then he returned to New York last November for the 2008 Olympic trials, and he dropped out at 18 miles.
For 2008, will he nail a 2:18 or bust?
“Hopefully neither one - hopefully faster than 2:18 and feel great after 18 miles. In the dropouts, I was running 1:05 or so, looking for 2:11.”
And the future?
“I don’t know,” he said. “My running plans don’t go past Nov. 2 right now. I’ll still be running, good or bad, after Nov. 2 but I don’t have any racing plans. But definitely I am not dropping out of this one.”
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