In Long Run, Elite Runners Have Short-Term Goals

Eddy Hellebuyck watched with interest and more than a little envy as Bob Kempainen crossed the finish line in Charlotte, N.C., 13 days ago, $100,000 richer and with a spot secure on the U.S. Olympic team.

He even watched with envy when Keith Brantley and Mark Coogan followed Kempainen’s time of 2 hours 12 minutes 45 seconds onto the men’s marathon team that will represent the United States in Atlanta this summer.

“To be in the top three and go to the Olympics, I like that system,” Hellebuyck said. “It’s exactly suited for me. . . . It’s a much fairer system, and it was better for me because it was a tactical race. I think if I was an American citizen, I would have made the team, I think.”

He won’t become an American citizen until October 1997 at the earliest, so Hellebuyck, 35, has to run 2:10:45, 65 seconds faster than he has run in his life, in Sunday’s Los Angeles Marathon to make Belgium’s Olympic team, which is selected on a basis of whim and time.

He is part of the elite field for the race within the race, chasing the gold of Los Angeles’ $15,000 first prize but, more important, chasing the gold medal in Atlanta. He will be joined by three Brazilians, five men and four women from the Ukraine, eight men and two women from Guatemala, 14 Mexican women and assorted others trying to earn spots on their countries’ Olympic teams.

Add to that one blast from the past, Juma Ikangaa, once among the top three distance runners in the world, now a 39-year-old man trying to make the Tanzanian Olympic team.

More closely, Hellebuyck will be joined by Peter Fonseca, who is on Canada’s team and has only to show that he is fit to make it to Atlanta. His mission is to win the L.A. Marathon and make some money, and if he brings Hellebuyck along for the ride onto the Belgian team, so much the better.

They are the class of the field of elite runners, all of them foreign.

Fonseca and Hellebuyck have finished third in the L.A. Marathon, Fonseca in 1990 and Hellebuyck in ‘91, and each got something different from the race.

“It was one of my first big successes in America,” said Hellebuyck, who spent 15 years in Belgium’s army before realizing that his career as a runner was going to be supplanted by one as a soldier, probably on a peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. He lives in Albuquerque, N.M., out of harm’s way, and runs more marathons than any elite runner in the world.

He has run 56 in a 13-year career, six of them last year, about four more than most elite runners will try in a 12-month period. One of the six was the Disneyland Marathon in Anaheim, which he won in 2:19:46.

He ran 2:12:27 in October in Chicago then, eight days later, ran 2:16 in France, the first 15 miles as a rabbit for a training friend.

Hellebuyck also points to a 1995 half-marathon he won in Las Vegas in 1:00:49. He beat Kempainen by a second.

“People say that if I didn’t run so much, I would have easily run a 2:09 by now,” Hellebuyck said. “I don’t think so. If I don’t race, I lose my motivation during the week for training. . . . I need short-time goals. I need to think L.A., and then in six weeks I need another goal.”

That goal, he added, is the April 15 Boston Marathon, if he can’t turn in a time Sunday that will impress Belgian officials.

“They are maybe thinking of changing it, but there is nothing on paper,” Hellebuyck said of Belgian track and field standards. “In Belgium, everything is politics. No other country asks such a fast time.”

It’s one of the reasons he has applied for U.S. citizenship. American wife Shawna and their 5-month-old son are others.

“In the last Olympics, there was nobody [from Belgium in the marathon],” Hellebuyck said. “They say they don’t want to send tourists, and if you don’t have a chance to be in the top 10, you’re a tourist. They completely lose the goal that every competitor is a winner. That’s the Olympic spirit. The Belgian federation has completely lost that spirit.”

Canada has it. The country’s federation has already selected Fonseca as part of its team, and a quick time in even a half-marathon in late spring will keep him there.

Los Angeles is for money, and maybe to exorcise a demon. Part of the city’s business is making stars, and it made him. He flashed briefly, then flamed out.

“I was 23, and L.A. was actually the easiest [marathon] I’ve ever run because I knew nothing about the event,” he said. “I jumped in as a neophyte and it worked out great, but in a way it kind of hurt me because I thought it would always be that easy. I did not respect the event for what it was, and my career went downhill after L.A. for a few years.”

He came to Los Angeles after a track career at the University of Oregon, for which he won the Pacific 10 championship in the 10,000 meters.

Fellow Canadian Art Boileau, who had won in Los Angeles in 1987 and ‘89, invited Fonseca to come along in 1990 and told him to try a pace of 2:15 to 2:16 for his first marathon.

“It’s funny,” Fonseca said. “There’s 20,000 in this race, and it takes off and the lead pack goes out at a 2:11 pace and I find myself alone at 2:15. I thought, I’m not running this race alone, so I might as well just go up to the lead pack and see what it’s like.

“We got to seven miles, and I looked over at Art and I said, ‘When are you guys going to start running?’ He said, ‘This is it.’ ”

Actually, the last 600 meters were it, and Fonseca was outkicked by Pedro Ortiz and Antoni Niemczak.

Still, a third-place finish in his first marathon brought attention. Too much attention, as it turned out. Races from Puerto Rico to Seattle called, offering him money to run. He took it.

“I had run so easily that I thought, in a year I would rock the world,” Fonseca said. “I would run 2:09, and it would be great and I had all of these dreams and visions.”

His 2:12:08 in Los Angeles was his personal best for five years, until he ran 2:11:34 last year in winning in Toronto.

“Sometimes things like L.A. happen in your life, but overall, things take time,” he said. “Good things take time.”

Good things for Fonseca or Hellebuyck or any of the other runners on Sunday could take 2:10:19. It’s the Los Angeles Marathon record, and on Thursday, Bill Burke, the race president, said he would pay a $25,000 bonus to the runner who breaks it.

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Los Angeles Marathon

* WHEN: Sunday

* TIME: 8:45 a.m.

* START: Figueroa Street at 8th Street.

* FINISH: Flower Street at 5th Street.

* TV: Channel 13, WWOR.

* RADIO: KACD-FM (103.1).