Highlights from the Deena Kastor Boston Marathon teleconference

John Powers (Boston Globe): Hi, Deena. I wonder if -- this is the Boston debut for you. What induced you to run the race this year and what role, if any, does the World Marathon majors play now in how you select your races?

Deena Kastor: Yes. I guess every time I have a goal of running a marathon, the goal itself seems to dictate which races I run. I, for so long, wanted to break the 2:20 barrier and other spring marathons, the London Marathon being the other World Marathon major held in the springtime seemed a better choice to be able to give myself the opportunity to break the 2:20 barrier.But Boston has always been in the heart and soul of probably every marathoner out there. It seems that it's the icon in this sport, the race that everybody strives to get qualifiers for, to be a part of. So it's always been in the back of my mind. And this year after -- after last year breaking the 2:20 barrier it seemed very easy to choose -- to choose Boston this year and in hopes of trying to win that.

Larry Eder (Running Network): A quick question for you. The downhill at Boston, did you have to add certain workouts, did Terence (Deena's coach) and you discuss certain workouts just to give you a good feel for that?

Deena Kastor: We have been training -- I mean we live in the mountains in Mammoth Lakes, California, and it's -- our whole team is able to prepare, no matter what their races are coming up, be able to prepare for specifics of uphills and downhills and getting in the pounding of a downhill when your legs are tired in the middle of a long run. So we've definitely incorporated that into our training.

Larry Eder: Okay, and can I just ask you another quick question? You were talking about kind of your basic training schedule, where you have a couple long runs each week and then is it one hill and one speed workout a week?

Deena Kastor: We incorporate hills into tempo runs -- into our tempo runs as well as our long runs, and then the rest of the week we have short interval sessions and then longer interval sessions on another day. So we get a whole buffet of workouts.

Operator: Our next question comes from Jim Gerweck from Running Times.

Jim Gerweck: Hey, Deena, just wondering how much -- this is sort of following up on Larry's question -- how much specificity of training you've done for the Boston course and how much study of the hills, the ups and downs and where they come and how that's played into your training and your strategy for the race?

Deena Kastor: Yeah. I will emphasize that we did train specifically with this course in mind and not just in hopes to run fast and persevere over this course, but to also recover well afterwards from it. We've done 21-mile runs that -- that maybe six of those miles were uphill and followed by a few miles of downhill running. We've been trying to get in downhill pavement running to pound -- pounding the legs a little bit.

So the fact that we've been doing these -- these runs, also and tempo runs, 12-mile tempo runs with two miles uphill and the last two miles downhill. So all-in-all I've recovered exceptionally well from all of these workouts and being able to come back a couple days later to be able to do another hard workout.So we have gave gotten in the hill work. I feel very confident. I've always felt confident on hills, but more so now that we've run them on pavement with this specific course in mind. Trying to put them in, put the hills in the workouts at points where I'm already feeling a bit fatigued and trying to run strong over them. So I feel good, I've definitely done some visualizing out there when we're out on our Green Church Road, doing tempo runs, but visualizing myself on the Boston course itself.