How did Marcia Zhou set a marathon personal record five years after her previous best?
- Top runner puts her success down to a lack of time forcing shorter, sharper training sessions
American Hong Kong resident Marcia Zhou is one of Hong Kong’s strongest distance runners with an excellent record in both road and trail races.
At the end of March at the Wuxi Marathon in China, Zhou set a new marathon personal best time of two hours, 51 minutes, a mark which placed the 30-year old amongst Hong Kong’s top female marathoners and put the sub-2:45 Olympic trials qualifying B standard within reach. Her previous PB was 2:54 set at the Berlin Marathon in 2015.
Marcia’s new personal best was achieved on reduced mileage and “shorter, more intense, faster workouts, done whenever I could squeeze them in” as a new job ate into her free time . She used to run between 160 and 200 kilometres a week but now her mileage stands at a more modest 70km.
Running unburdened by expectations may also have contributed to her breakthrough. Wuxi marathon was a last-minute tune-up to one of the year’s major targets – the Boston Marathon: “I booked my flight to Wuxi a week before the race. Forecasts predicted perfect race weather and I knew that I was fit. I did not tell anyone I was doing this race.”
She had competed in Wuxi last year but said, “I ran a 3:02 – I just wanted it to be over. I raced way too much that year.”