Karen wrote:
I never said there was an exact Portland copycat course. But if you follow any of the articles written or interviews the runners have given in the past 3 months, you'd know that they did practice turns similar to what was on the course. But they surely don't run 26 miles at race pace at any point during training, so it's impossible to fully simulate what that will be like.
Rain=poor conditions. You can't honestly say that is ideal over non-wet, especially on surfaces such as cobblestone.
difficult pace doesn't mean it wasn't an ideally slow first half. It means what Shalane mentioned- varying and hard to keep adjusting.
Sometimes cramping just happens when you're exerting yourself fully. They couldn't stop and stretch or massage, or even take in extra salt like they could if they were in practice. If you are lucky enough to have never encountered debilitating cramping that happens unexpectedly, clearly your body is better suited to hard, long distance running than many of the elites out there. You can't attribute all the cramping to not being prepared for the course.
Then please explain, Karen, why the nine women that finished ahead of Flanagan and Goucher were able to do so. Did they encounter less rain? Did they run a more even pace? Did they encounter less turns or a wider course? Did they practice the exact course for 26.2 miles prior to London? If the answer to any of these questions is no then Flanagan and Goucher's excuses are just that...excuses that don't explain why these factors affected them more than any other runner in the field. Personally I would rather just hear them say "I got beat by better runners who were better able to handle all the conditions that were thrown at them!"