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Marathon Will Stay the Course

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

She couldn’t see Svetlana Zakharova ahead, so she didn’t much worry about her. Irina Bogacheva had run about 10 miles, and as far as she was concerned, the race hadn’t really started.

And wouldn’t for another 14 miles.

“Mile 24 is the most difficult of the race,” Bogacheva, the winner of the women’s division of the Los Angeles Marathon, said Sunday through an interpreter. “Therefore, if you can master it, you will probably be the winner.”

Master it she did, passing Zakharova at her left elbow as they ran past white houses and street-fronting garages along Virgil Avenue. Bogacheva quickly opened a 10-yard lead that became 2 minutes 22 seconds by race’s end.

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She finished in 2:30:32 to take home a $35,000 first-place check, a new car that can be turned into more of her native Kyrgyzstan’s soms and a $5,000 bonus for finishing under 2:32.

That was 1:27 faster than Lornah Kiplagat had run in winning last year’s race and 4:08 slower than Madina Biktagirova’s course record set in 1993.

Bogacheva’s day ended somewhat more happily than a Sunday two years ago when she last was on stage at Mark Taper Auditorium in the Los Angeles Public Library.

She had finished third then and was about to be marked up to second because apparent winner Nadezhda Ilyina was to be marked out for taking a shortcut.

“I remember second place, but I don’t remember a problem with somebody,” Bogacheva said Sunday.

She remembered, all right.

“Well, I made the statement to that person that it’s not correct to do it that way,” Bogacheva said of Ilyina’s cutting the course.

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There were no such problems Sunday in what amounted to a three-woman race, with assorted pretenders dropping by the Los Angeles wayside.

The first to go was Nadia Prassad, whose first marathon since the Atlanta Olympics ended in the early miles.

Not long afterward, Kiplagat, a Kenyan who had won the last two Los Angeles Marathons--including the one in which Ilyina was disqualified--showed signs of distress that included vomiting blood. She lay down on a Crenshaw Boulevard curb and her day, which had dawned, she said, with her feeling great, ended in the advance stages of bronchitis. “I’ve seen it and I didn’t want it to be a risk,” she said of her illness and the effect it could have on the rest of her running year.

By then, Zakharova had dispatched early leader and eventual third-place finisher Alla Zhilayeva and was in a different area code than the rest of the women’s field.

“I looked around and was astonished how far in front I was,” said Zakharova, whose lead stretched more than a minute.

She got lonely, ran with a male competitor for pace and company and then left him behind.

“I couldn’t see her, but there are some hills there and you can’t see far ahead,” Bogacheva said.

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And then the lead began to shrink, and hills or no hills, Zakharova moved into view.

And then into proximity.

And then next to Bogacheva, and then behind her as they ran a slight downhill on Mile 24, with an uphill Mile 25 ahead.

“I had such a down feeling that I didn’t know if I had enough to finish the race,” Zakharova said.

Bogacheva, a 37-year-old who was widowed five years ago because of a car crash, was merely following orders from Viktor Boreisov, her coach since 1981.

“He said to stay with the crowd for half of the race,” Bogacheva said, “and then in the second half, when there was some more difficult terrain to run across, that was the time to show myself.”

It was a lesson learned in Honolulu less than four months ago when she won a marathon over a course Boreisov called similar to that of Los Angeles.

And it was a lesson taught Sunday, when the rest of the women’s field saw only Bogacheva’s back over the last two miles.

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