Kiplagat Is Warming Up to Idea of Holding Onto Championship

If this is March and she’s in Los Angeles, it must be cold season for Lornah Kiplagat, the two-time defending women’s champion in the L.A. Marathon.

But as she sits for an interview in the coffee shop at a downtown hotel, sipping tea, Kiplagat is surprisingly clearheaded.

Her eyes are not watery.

Her throat is not scratchy.

Her head is not pounding.

“I’m doing fine,” she says.

If Kiplagat, 24, were superstitious, this might be unsettling.

The diminutive Kenyan distance runner has never tested the demanding L.A. course without also fighting a cold.

And she has never lost here.

Still, she says she’ll do everything in her power to stay in the pink through Sunday, when she tries to become the first three-time winner in the 14-year history of the L.A. Marathon.

“This time, I hope not to be sick,” she says with a smile. “I had always to think about it, and it’s not a nice feeling. . . . I think if I don’t have a cold, then I will have a chance to run better.”

Kiplagat, who grew up in a small farming village in a home without electricity and running water, has already run well enough on the Los Angeles streets to win cash and cars worth $95,150.

She won in Los Angeles two years ago--running her first marathon in her first trip to the United States. Kiplagat finished two seconds behind Nadezhda Ilyina of Russia before learning 30 minutes later that Ilyina had been disqualified for cutting a corner.

No such confusion ensued last year, when Kiplagat got to break the tape as the winner--to her considerable relief.

The taint was gone.

“I must say that last year was kind of a pressure [situation],” she says, “because everybody was just looking at me [and wondering], ‘Did you really win it [the year before]?’ . . .

“I had to show that I can win, so it was more pressure--more than this year. I have done it, and if it’s possible to do it again, I’ll be happy. If not possible, I’ll be happy too.”

This year, she’s up against a women’s field that includes another past L.A. Marathon champion, ’95 winner Nadia Prasad of France, and five other women who have logged faster personal bests than Kiplagat: Alla Zhilyayeva and Svetlana Zakarova of Russia, Helen Kimaiyo-Kipkosgei of Kenya, Aurica Buia of Romania and Irina Bogacheva of Kazagstan.

It seems not to faze her.

“It’s tough competition,” she says. “About the same as last year.”

Last year, Kiplagat beat a group that included Kimaiyo-Kipkosgei, who was third, and Zakarova, who was fifth. Two years ago, she won against a field that included Bogacheva, the runner-up.

Nothing seems to bother this farmer’s daughter.

The fifth of six children whose parents grew corn and raised cattle, goats and sheep in Kipkabus, a tiny village in a region of northern Kenya that has produced scores of world-class runners, Kiplagat had little choice but to take up running at an early age.

Like many of her classmates, she traveled to and from school each day by foot--about 3 1/2 miles each way, including a midday trip home for lunch.

That’s about 14 miles a day--in bare feet, at 9,000 feet elevation.

“If you are getting [there] late,” she says of her introduction to running, “they have to send you back home or they have to [punish] you. So you really should not get late. . . . If you are going to school, you cannot be late.”

Kiplagat played other sports in high school, including volleyball and soccer, “but running was my No. 1,” she says.

Her father wanted her to go to college in India to study medicine, but a cousin encouraged her to try competitive running.

She made her international racing debut in the 1996 world cross-country championships at Durban, South Africa, finishing back in the pack but catching the eye of several top managers who encouraged her to come to Europe to train.

She wound up in Germany and trained for two years with fellow Kenyans Tegla Loroupe, two-time winner of the New York Marathon and the current world record-holder, and Joyce Chepchumba, winner of the London and Chicago marathons.

Kiplagat, who lives in Heidelberg, has competed in only one marathon outside Los Angeles, finishing 10th at Chicago in 1997 after developing acute bronchitis midway through the race.

Her winning times in Los Angeles--2:33:50 in 1997 and 2:33:58 last year--are considered slow by elite standards, but she is thought to have a bright future.

“She has never shown it here because this is a technical race and it’s a pretty tough course,” says her manager, Pieter Langerhorst, “but she can do much, much better.”

Others agree.

“She’s got great potential,” says John Tope, elite-athlete coordinator for the L.A. Marathon. “She hasn’t had that great time breakthrough yet, but she has the qualities of a lot of the great Kenyan athletes, including an ability to accept what they ran that day and not dwell on it. They figure out what they did wrong and they do the training that is necessary to improve. . . .

“Lornah is used to working hard because of where she grew up.”

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Go to The Times’ Web site for an L.A. Marathon course map, a guide to watching the event, an online marathon game and--if you’re running--a calculator to figure your pace times: https://www.latimes.com/marathon

L.A. Marathon

* When: 8:45 a.m., Sunday.

* Where: Starts on 5th and Figueroa; ends on Flower Street north of 5th Street in front of Arco Plaza.

* TV: 8 a.m., Channel 13.