Photo above of Michael Wardian at the 2007 DARCARS Pike's Peek 10K, where he ran 31:46.

Arlington native Mike Wardian, 33, is one of the most consistent and prolific sub-elite marathoner's in American history. Since 2004, he's averaged at least nine marathons a year--most of which have been victories that are run under 2:30. He's peaked on a few that have qualified him for the 2004 and 2008 Olympic Marathon Trials. And he even recently ran one that got him in the Guinness Book of World Records: a 2:42.21 in blustery conditions at the Frederick Marathon in 2:42.22 while pushing his nine month- year-old son, Pierce, in a jogging stroller.

When not training, racing, or parenting, Wardian works full- time for Potomac Maritime International (PMI) as an international ship broker.

Washington Running Report: Before I ask you about the upcoming Olympic Trials, I'd like to know what was it like pushing your son at a 6:10 per-mile pace in a marathon? Tell me about that Guinness Book of World Record experience.

Mike Wardian: It was fantastic. It was actually a pretty rough day, a windy day. The stroller that we used has a cover, so we put him under that and he was all bundled up. I was more worried about him being ok the whole time than making the time. I actually wasn't too worried about making the time: I had to beat 2:49 and I was pretty sure I could do that, just pushing the jog stroller. I was more worried about him needing to go to the bathroom, or needing food, or starting to cry.

WRR: Was Pierce good for you?

MW: He was terrific. I took my cell phone with me in case of an emergency. He started to sleep after about five or six miles. My brother woke him up by calling me to see how I was doing at about 11 miles. I was a little worried that he was going to have some kind of issue, but he was terrific; I couldn't have asked for anything more. It was a good day. The gusts of wind made it really difficult with the stroller. It was blowing us around. People were tucking in behind me [drafting]. I was like 'Come on."

WRR: How did you place in that race [the Frederick Marathon]?

MW: I was third overall. It turned out pretty well. I wasn't able to hang with the first guy who ran a 2:27, but I could have hung with him had I not been encumbered. Still, it was a pretty cool thing to share that with my son and my wife. She was pretty accommodating to let me try that. I saw the guy break the original record at the Toronto Marathon and I was like, "Man if I have a kid, I'm going to see if I can do that." My wife was cool enough to let me indulge my fantasy.

WRR: Did you train at all for it?

MW: I took him out on some training runs and my wife took him out on some really long walks. I knew that he could be in the stroller for that long, especially if we fed him before we left. He is only nine months old so he is really young. I made sure that he could handle the stroller and the time in it, but I didn't go out and run a lot of training runs--maybe two or three with him actually. It was in May so it was cold out. I made sure I knew how to use the stroller and he was comfortable in it. I was more worried about him than me. He was perfect. He was a good little guy. I'm a little biased [laughing].

WRR: Tell me about your training for the trials. What kind of mileage are you running? What have your workouts entailed?

MW: It's been going fantastic. I really feel fit. I hope to hit a PR at the Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon in a few weeks. That's going to be my last hard effort before the Trials. The last couple of weekends I've been doing some intense racing. Like last weekend, I did a 5K and then a 20-miler and then a half-marathon--all over Labor Day. I ran like a 15:30 5K and then a 1:49 in the 20-miler and then a 1:13 half-marathon at the end of the weekend and that was all on top of a 100-mile week. I was pretty pleased with that, since I also did two workouts during that week. I work out with another guy who qualified for the Trials, Chris Raabe. He beats me down on a weekly basis, which is good. He's fit. It's good to train with him. And then there's another guy, a Kenyan, Wilson Komen that has been hurt for a little while, but just came back and started working out with us again. Tuesday mornings I do speed work and then Thursday I do a tempo run--like this morning, it was more of a fartlek, I did five at 5:00 pace and then incorporated that into a 12-mile run. Every day I run again at lunch. I go out around 11:10 and get another seven or eight miles.

WRR: What's your speed work comprised of? Are you doing mile repeats?

MW: Actually it varies every week. This last week, we did 3200- meter repeats. The week before that it was 10 x 1K. The week before that, I did 7 x 1400-meter repeats which I had never done before.

WRR: What kind of rest are you doing between your repeats?

MW: On the 10 x 1000 it was 100-meter jog, basically around the corner.

WRR: That sounds tough.

MW: Yeah, it's good. I'm getting my butt kicked too. I'm trying to catch up to [Chris Rabbe] to start my next one: I love it.

WRR: You ran in the 2004 Trials; the 2008 Trials are your second one. Do you feel like you are fitter this time around?

MW: Oh definitely--much fitter.

WRR: You got the criterion course in NYC this year--probably going to be very challenging. But the weather should be better than it was in Birmingham in 2004. Along those lines, how do you feel the experience is going to differ this time around than in 2004?

MW: Birmingham was fantastic. They did a bang-up job. New York is going to be a bigger stage just because it's New York. It's the same weekend as the New York City Marathon. The media is going to be there; it's going to be metropolis basically. I think that's a big factor for me. I've got a ton of people coming up to cheer--like 30 people. I don't want to embarrass myself on a big stage. I think a lot of people are going to step up. I think the course is going to help me, because it's harder. Everybody's going to be in tip-top shape. The course is not going to be dead flat like Chicago which should help me.

WRR: The field at the Trials this time around is very impressive. You've got the Olympic silver medalist, Meb Keflezighi; you've got Ryan Hall the American Record holder in the half-marathon; you've got Khalid Khannouchi, the former World Record holder; you've got Brian Sell who logged a 2:10 at Boston last year. It's a much deeper field isn't it?

MW: Definitely. I think it's going to be one of the deepest Olympic Trials so far. Everybody's running really fast times and getting ready. They [the USATF] also have that component where if you have a fast track time you can qualify. Maybe some of those guys will give it a shot and see if it happens. I just did an interview with the New York Roadrunners. Like I told them, I work full time, but I still get the chance to man up against guys who are doing this professionally. It doesn't matter: If you are doing it professionally or just doing it for the love of it, you both get an equal shot at it.

WRR: I've always looked at it as one of the great parts of our sport. It's like being able to play basketball with Michael Jordan.

MW: Exactly. I've said that before too. It's pretty amazing. Take football for example, in college: You could be the best team in the country, but you might not get a shot to play in the championships.

WRR: Along those lines, you played lacrosse at college in Michigan State. How did you go from a team sport to an individual sport?

MW: I was playing lacrosse and got disenfranchised a little bit. I had one more season to go and was unsure if I wanted to do it anymore. I couldn't be a professional at that time. I was ok. I wasn't great. I was used to working out three hours a day. One time I went to a friend's house for Easter and his mom had these pictures of her running the Boston Marathon. When she showed them to me, I was like, "Man that looks awesome." I'd always been pretty good at running. I wasn't super fast, but could run a long time. I told her that I wanted to try that. She was like, "Really?" So she gave me a little book that she had; it was a training book. It would be like picking up Jack Daniel's book. It was the type that said, "If you've never run before, do this." I did everything it said. If it was snowing two feet and said run six miles, I'd still do that. My first marathon was the Marine Corps Marathon and I ran 3:08 which qualified me for Boston. I went to Boston and got out to the [athletes'] village and was like, "This is freaking cool." And when I ran the race I knew that I had found something that I really liked. I did ok there. I ran 2:54 and it was my second race and I realized that I wasn't half bad at it and kind of stuck with it and got better and faster. I kept after it and then got into ultras a little bit. I was doing those for a little while and figured out that I was pretty decent at those. I was doing an ultra in India and had been toying with qualifying for the Trials, but was intimidated because I was kind of slow. I was in this place called Sandakphu and thought, "If you never try, you'll never know." So I decided to stop doing ultras and trying to get faster in the marathon. Before that, my fastest marathon was 2:31. I could roll out of bed drunk and hit a 2:31. But I couldn't run any faster than that. So I started working on that and got it down to 2:28 and eventually hit the qualifier.

WRR: So how did you break that 2:31 plateau? What did you do differently in training?

MW: I was doing a lot of miles before that, but just did more. I was doing like 80 to 90 miles and just did 100 to 110 and started doing tempo runs and more speed work--stuff that's not fun, but for me, worked. I always liked to race and so I used that to help with my training.

WRR: When you increased mileage, did you have to go to doubles?

MW: Yeah. I work full time. Sometimes I'd get up and do like 16 miles in the morning. But I usually do 11 to 12 miles in the morning and then I'll go again at lunch and get another seven and pretty soon I've got a decent amount of miles.

WRR: You've noted earlier that you like to do multiple races during the same day and every day the weekend. How do you race that much and still recover. Do you have stretching routines that you perform or special drinks that you drink? How do you rebound so quickly?

MW: I usually try and take one day easy. After that workout that I talked about on Tuesday, I only did seven miles that next day. I did it at a pretty easy pace. That means on another day, I have to do more miles. A lot of people have asked me this. It's not like I drink some nectar of bees. I don't do drugs. I try to stay really well hydrated. I've thought of this too. I drink almost a gallon of water a day. I try to eat healthy. I'm a vegetarian--not that that means anything. I don't know if that matters or not.

WRR: Were you a vegetarian before you started getting serious in your running?

MW: Yeah. I've actually been one for about 12 years. At one point, I was worried about my protein.

WRR: Do you take iron supplements?

MW: No.

WRR: How do you get your iron?

MW: I get it in spinach and leafy green vegetables and get protein from soy and chick patties. Actually power bars have a lot of protein in them. I don't know. I don't have a good answer for the secret to my recovery. I think a lot of guys only race when they've tapered. Most of the time, when I race, I'm not fresh.

WRR: Are you coached?

MW: No I'm not.

WRR: You haven't run under 2:20 have you?

MW: No I haven't. I want to run under 2:20 at Twin Cities. I'd like to run 2:18 or 2:19. I think I could have run that at the Shamrock Marathon if the conditions weren't so crappy. It was brutal--like Boston, big winds. It's not much of a protected course. Everyone could have run faster that day. It was nice to make the Trials time there.

WRR: When you are doing your long runs, what pace do you run them at? What is the distance?

MW: It fluctuates, depending on how much mileage I need, and where I am, or if I'm going to do a marathon as my long run; that's why I'm doing Twin Cities. When I'm doing a long run, sometimes I'll worry about pace. The last time I did one was 20 miles and I went out at 6:10-6:30 pace and the last five miles we knocked it down to 5:25 pace. It's like you go out and get kinda tired and then you jack it to see if you can hold the pace. I also do a lot of running before races. Like the other night I did a 5K. I ran an hour and a half in the morning and then do the race. It makes you nice and tired--you have to go out and perform so you don't look like a chump. I like to test myself and see what I can do, what I can take--what I can handle.

WRR: You mentioned running some things at marathon goal pace; have you ever trained long at anything faster?

MW: Yeah. I do this one workout that another guy, Jacob Frey told me about. It's fantastic. I've done it at faster than marathon pace--working it down to 5:00 pace. You go four miles then three miles ten seconds (per mile) faster then two miles ten seconds (per mile faster) then one mile as hard as you can. I did that working down to 5:00 pace. I thought that was a killer workout. I've done that a couple times. I usually do that once a month. When you finish that you are like "Yeah!"

WRR: Where do you run?

MW: I run all over. A lot of my runs, I start out of my house. I live right off the four-mile run trail in Arlington. I run through Del Ray down to the Mount Vernon Trail and back or I run up the W & OD or I run at Gold's Gym [Gold's Gym is one of Wardian's sponsors]. The 4-3-2-1 workout I told you about, I do on the treadmill there so I know how fast I am going. A lot of my runs, I do from Iwo Jima and run up through Rock Creek Park. I like to run up on the C&O Canal also. I don't discriminate.

WRR: Don't use the mile markers on the C & O canal.

MW: Yeah, those things are spotty! [laughing].

WRR: Best of luck at the Trials.

MW: Thank you.

Michael Wardian was also featured in the Nov/Dec 2003 Washington Running Report's "Runners on the Way Up" column

Michael Wardian: Discovery Channel by Drew Woodrich

See the New York Road Runners' Olympic Trials Official Web site

Follow the Running Network's special coverage at www.runningnetwork.com