London Marathon – Lizzy Hawker Has A Good Race

British 100km Champion, Lizzy Hawker was featured in an article in the Times on Saturday. Hoping to finish under 2:50 Lizzy came in as Fifth British lady, 16th lady overall with a time of 2:47.

From The Times
April 21, 2007
Hawker hits the ground running but is aiming for a higher goal
David Powell, Athletics Correspondent

Being the world’s best marathon runner can make you a millionaire, as Paula Radcliffe well knows. Being the world champion of the next title distance up and a rented one-bedroom flat can stretch the budget. Two hours in the company of Lizzy Hawker and you get the feeling that she likes it that way.

Perhaps not the economics of her situation, but the freedom of anonymity certainly.

Hawker is one of only two British senior world champions in athletics at present and, with Radcliffe absent after giving birth to her first child, the only one participating in the Flora London Marathon tomorrow. Yet the full glare of such a high-profile event is far removed from Hawker’s preferred environment. She is a mountain girl at heart and an oceanographer by profession.

The tenancy agreement on Hawker’s flat in Chester prevents her from hanging pictures on her walls. In the one place she is allowed to, on a door, she has suspended a photograph of the Matterhorn. “It is iconic for me, the first big mountain I climbed,” she said. “It is driving me mad not having pictures of mountains around me.”

Down at street level, Hawker is the 100 kilometres world champion — two marathons and keep going for another ten miles — having won gold in Misari, South Korea, last October. Ten days later she was on board a ship heading for the Southern Ocean as part of a British Antarctic Survey study of the ocean ecosystem’s reaction to climate change. Her luggage included a treadmill.

Read the Times article