A lot rides on the last big training session before a marathon. It’s as important to a runner’s confidence as it is to his physical preparation for the 42.2-kilometre distance.

That’s why Eric Gillis picks the road around a park in Guelph that he knows well for a series of difficult mile repeats.

He knows he needs to hit the first speed bump in 53 seconds and the second corner by 2:28 to complete each mile in four minutes and 22 seconds. And, despite the landscaping truck he dodges on one loop, he more than makes his times.

The two-time Olympian feels ready for Sunday’s marathon in Toronto.

“My training is telling me that I’m ready to go, my head is telling me I’m ready to go fast,” says Gillis. “The only question is, on the day, how fast it will be?”

That is one of two questions that get asked every time an elite Canadian male marathoner steps up to the start line.

Will he be faster than two hours, 10 minutes and nine seconds and finally take down Canada’s longest standing athletics record?

Here’s the other question: Why on earth haven’t any of these guys, with all their modern training advantages, managed to better a record set by Jerome Drayton in 1975?

RELATED:

Comparing training methods from two different eras

There are three Canadians with times that suggest they have the ability to update that 39-year-old record but the two fastest, Dylan Wykes and Reid Coolsaet, are both injured.

That’s leaves the burden of producing a Canadian headline at the nation’s largest marathon — where it’s all but certain that an East African runner will break the tape first — on Gillis’ bony shoulders.

So bony, in fact, it looks like his skeleton is trying to escape his skin altogether. Luckily for him that’s an advantage in distance running.

Taking one minute and 20 seconds off his personal best, which is what he has to do to set a Canadian record, is a big ask but the 34-year-old is in a great place right now.

“When he’s on, he’s tough as nails,” his coach Dave Scott-Thomas says.

That’s how people used to describe Drayton who won the 1977 Boston Marathon on a sweltering day — without any water on the course.

Drayton, now 69, still wakes up at 5 a.m. every morning. But his days of running 16 kilometres before a full day’s work in a government office followed by another 27 in the evening are long over.

These days, he walks — gingerly, given the osteoarthritis that has invaded his left knee — to the McDonald’s near his Mimico-area home for his coffee fix and a blueberry muffin.

He chuckles at the notion that his time — set under amateur rules when he wasn’t allowed to make a cent — is worth $39,000 to any Canadian who can break it at the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon on Sunday. If it stands another year, it’ll be worth $40,000.

At this race last year, Lanni Marchant ran 2:28 and claimed the Canadian women’s record, which, set by Sylvia Ruegger, had stood unchallenged since 1985.

“It’s not even fast anymore,” Drayton says of the men’s record.

When he set it in Fukuoka, Japan, it was the fifth fastest time ever run. Now, it’s fallen to 2,149th in the records and it will keep dropping as East African runners post times unheard of in Drayton’s era.

But Canadian men still haven’t reached him. Dylan Wykes is next at 2:10:47 in 2012, almost 40 seconds behind the mark.

“Between then and now you’d think the coaching system, doctors, chiropractors, physiotherapists, psychotherapists — you’re running the marathon, are you nuts? — would have everything in place” for fast times, Drayton says.

“But it’s not enough to know about the human body. You have to learn about your own body. It can take years of experimenting with training programs to get the right one.”

Drayton had the resolve and the time for trial and error with training programs. There was never any pressure for him to move on and get a real job; he already had one of those.

That combination of incredible physical ability and stick-to-itiveness is quite rare in distance running in Canada and accounts, in part, for why Drayton’s record has lasted so long, says Scott-Thomas, one of Canada’s top distance coaches.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Long distance running isn’t like hockey in Canada. It attracts a small pool of people to start with and few of even the most talented stick with it past their collegiate track days.

Beyond that, after Drayton’s era, there was a move to what was considered quality over quantity training and that proved to be an utter failure.

“For a long time we lost the plot with training,” says Scott-Thomas. “We learned a lot about recovery, regeneration and refuelling and sometimes there’s a certain mindset that thinks you can overcompensate with that stuff, to avoid this stuff,” he says, pointing to Gillis running.

“But nothing beats being out there. You’ve just got to do the miles.”

Now that training is back on track and a handful of top runners are sticking with the marathon means breaking Drayton’s record won’t require a super human effort, just a bunch of things coming together at the same time, Canada’s elite runners say.

A good day is what Drayton had when he set the record. He dropped over a minute off his previous best time, set six years earlier. And for the rest of his running career he never came within two minutes of his own record again. But he did win races.

To update the record will take timing an athletic peak to a fast course and being blessed with good weather, runners say.

Sounds relatively easy but marathoners of this calibre can only give their all once or twice a year. So, to reach peak fitness, without a lingering injury or a cold picked up on the plane on the way to the race, and getting good weather on a single day in a year, is actually a lot to ask for.

Gillis’ training partner Coolsaet made a joke about that very thing on his running blog.

“What I need is the weather from Toronto 2010, the pacer from Toronto 2011, fitness from Fukuoka 2013 and the group (of runners) from London 2014,” he wrote. “Too much to ask?”

What Gillis and Coolsaet envy most about Drayton isn’t his time but the racing context of his era.

In the ’60s and ’70s a marathoner with a 2:10, 2:11 or even 2:12 time could win major races so Drayton was often racing against others in the lead pack.

“Time really flies when you have someone on your shoulder and you’re wondering on the day who has a better kick,” says Gillis. “It’s more difficult and it’s not quite as fun on your own.”

But that’s probably where he’ll find himself for much of Sunday’s race.

There are four Kenyans and Ethiopians who can all run under 2:07 and two of them have even run under 2:06 in the Toronto race. Unless they are having the granddaddy of off days that’s not a group Gillis can run with.

When Drayton set the Canadian record in 1975, he was in the lead with five kilometres to go when the arch support in his shoe came unglued and drifted under his toes.

He slowed down to work it back in place and Australian David Chettle passed him with a smile. He thought Drayton was fading and the competitive Canadian wasn’t going to let that stand.

“I ignored the arch support and went after him and won it,” Drayton says, still smiling at the memory 39 years later.

But his time — the Canadian record, still — “could have been half a minute faster,” he says.