by David Prokop

Tina Kefalas has already earned a permanent place in Double Road Race  history.

She was the women’s winner at the Pleasanton Double last Dec. 23, the first Double ever held in America, setting a world record in the process.

Now she’s been instrumental in exporting the Double to Europe – on Dec. 1 Tina and her associates in Greece will stage a Double Road Race™ in Marathon, Greece where this whole marathon thing began!

Today in San Juan Bautista, the California native who represented Greece in the marathon at the 2012 Olympics in London, hopes to add to her growing legacy in the Double.

When Tina set the women’s world record in Pleasanton, she ran the 10K in 35:55 and the 5K in 18:07 for an aggregate time of 54:03. However, she had been ill with the 24-hour flu the Monday before the race and was definitely not at full strength when she set that record.

The women’s world record in the Double is now 52:38.06, set by Russia’s Liudmila Stepanova Aug. 11 in the Indianapolis Double, where she ran the 10K in 35:21 and the 5K in 17:12. However, Tina should be stronger, fitter and faster today than she was in Pleasanton – and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that she would love to hold the world record again by the time the Double Road Race™ comes to her ancestral homeland December 1.

“I’m definitely in better shape than I was last December,” Tina said in an interview September 5, “but Liudmila has set the bar pretty high, so we’ll see what happens. I’m going to go for it hard – I’m going to try to run a fast 10K and see what happens in the 5K. I should be in shape to at least entertain the possibility of breaking the record, but I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. It’s still three weeks before the race.”

Liudmila Stepanova ran both the Indianapolis and San Jose Doubles, winning each one, but she is not entered here in San Juan Bautista. She and Tina have never raced each other. If Tina wins here today, she will join Liudmila as the only two-time overall winners of the Double – male or female.

Tina, who lives in Hillsborough, Calif., when she’s not in Greece, just turned 36 last month. Her best times are 15:55 for the 5K, 33:11 for the 10K and 2:40:33 for the marathon.

It is going to be great to see Tina again at the San Juan Bautista Double Road Race Sept 28
Bob Anderson 9/16/13 11:29 am

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A graduate of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication, Tina worked for eight years in LA after graduation, first with a business consulting firm and then with US Trust, a private bank. In other words, she’s American through and through.

However, Tina, who’s 5’6”, 125 pounds and runs 90-95 miles a week at the peak of her training, also has tremendous ethnic pride and loyalty to her ancestral homeland, Greece. When she had the opportunity to represent Greece in the 2012 Olympics, she embraced it, regarding it as an honor verging on actual duty. She’s now the fastest distance runner in Greece, lives there about six months a year, competes for a club in Athens, AEK, which gives her an annual stipend, has a Greek coach Dimitris Theodoridis, and also gets some financial support from the Greek Athletic Federation.

It all seems kind of fitting somehow when you consider that Tina’s grandfather on her mother’s side, Constantinos Arvanetes, was a champion runner in Greece in the 1930s, winning the Balkan championship in the 5000 meters and setting the Greek national record of 15:15 in 1935.  She died in 1965, years before Tina was born, but she was named after him – Tina is the abbreviation for Constantina.

Well-spoken, bright and very dedicated, Tina Kefalas is a person and athlete that both the United States and Greece can be proud of, and now she’s taken an America creation, the Double Road Race™, over to Greece. When Tina traveled back to Athens three months after winning at Pleasanton, she told a friend, Pavlos Kanellopoulos, a marathoner-triathlete who’s in his mid-40s, about the Double Road Race™. The chief financial officer of a large shipping company in Athens, he was so enthused about the Double, he said, “Let’s make it happen here.”

And so they’re in the process of doing. They quickly signed an agreement with the Double Road Race Federation. Result? On Dec. 1 a Double Road Race™ will be held in the Greek coastal community of Marathon, 26 miles from Athens, where the Athenians, with a much smaller army, defeated the Persians in 490 BC and the Greek messenger Phidippides set off on his historic run to Athens (“Rejoice, we conquer!”) which ultimately gave the world … the marathon!

Tina is understandably excited about taking the Double to Greece – this will be the first Double ever held in Europe. She says, “I think it’s wonderful. The marathon started in Greece, and I think it’s great to have the first-ever European Double there. We have a great organizing team and expect to have a very exciting race.”

On Sept 28, however, Tina has a race to run in San Juan Bautista.