PALMA DISCOVERS POST COLLEGIATE RUNNING IS HOT IN NEW JERSEY
Lou Palma, 23, of Peapack is only two years out of Bucknell University, where he competed in track, setting personal bests of 1:53 for 800 meters and 4:07 in the mile. He had no inkling of the racing opportunities awaiting him when he returned to New Jersey after graduation.
“I knew there was something but I didn’t know it was anything too major,” said Palma.
In 2004 he entered the Leprechaun Leap in Mount Olive and enjoyed a duel for first place with Ryan Heffernan of West Milford. Heffernan won the contest in 15:58 with Palma just a few seconds back in 16:06. The two men cooled down together and got acquainted. Later, Heffernan called Elliott Frieder of Bloomfield, team captain of the Fleet Feet racing team and reported he had just met a pretty quick fellow who wasn’t wearing a uniform and didn’t appear to have any team association. Frieder picked up the phone and pitched the team.
“When Elliott called he directed me to the USATF website,” said Palma. “I saw there were teams, and standings, and he gave me the schedule. Elliott is a wealth of information. He had me on the phone listing stuff I had never heard of.”
“What I liked about it was that it wasn’t a team where you had to be here and do this stuff and do workouts together,” said Palma. “If you can make it, great. If not we’ll see you at the races and we’ll hang out and have some fun. We like to be competitive – what’s the point of running races and if you’re not going to compete in them. It’s really more about the fun.”
At last April’s Cherry Blossom 10K in Branch Brook Park Palma showed up to run in his first USATF-NJ Competition for his new team. It might have been an inauspicious start.
“I didn’t have an official uniform,” he said. “Elliott gave me one of his old, very small singlets. Very form fitting. I thought, Oh great, this is what I have to race in.”
Palma earned a fresh uniform when he finished the race in fifth place in 33:02 helping the team to first place. In all of the Open Men’s Championships that he ran for the team in 2004, Palma never finished out of the top ten. In the extremely competitive Midland Run 15K in May he was tenth in 50:44. At the also competitive President’s Cup Night Race 5K he was ninth in 15:33.
Palma would like to be getting in more than the 45 to 50 miles per week that he is doing but he may have hit on a winning formula. While he may manage to run only four or five days per week, each of those runs will be 10 or 11 miles.
“Sometimes on the days that I don’t run it’s because my day is so hectic,” he said. “So I may be getting the rest that my body needs.”
Palma is looking forward to the Cherry Blossom race next Sunday and is expecting that he and his teammates will be able to pack up early on. But with his lack of miles he feels he is at a disadvantage to those who do high mileage.
“Anything over a 10K they can get away from me in the end,” said Palma. “In a 5K I have enough leg speed, with my 800 and mile speed, I can cover myself for that last mile, whereas on a 10K that last mile is tough.”
Despite the earliness of the season, Palma has done track workouts with Frieder and Carlos Martins of Kearny.
“Just to get your leg turnover before a race,” he said. “The week before Leprechaun Leap I did some thousands on the track, just so I wouldn’t have a heart attack when I started running.”
He was far from a heart attack and took 25 seconds off his time in 2004, winning the race in 15:41.
“After school I really didn’t know what to do and what to get in to,” he said. “Had I known I probably would have kept doing some track races. I was pretty uninformed in high school and college. I liked it [track] and didn’t know what was out there.”
“It’s such a different environment between track racing and road racing. For the road races it’s a lot easier to throw something together,” said Palma. “ Any day you can go out there and run a tempo run and it might suffice for a 10K, whereas for the track you have to get some of that speed work and fine tune it a little bit more. That’s why I got into the marathon because it just seemed easier. I could do a bunch of mileage and see what happens.”
What did happen was finishing the Steamtown Marathon in Scranton in 2:33 in 2003 and 2004. It is a remarkable range from the 800 to the marathon and his post collegiate career has just begun.
First published in the DAILY RECORD on Sunday, April 3, 2005
Copyright 2005 Madeline Bost