KEY POINTS:
On the sapping last kilometres of a long-distance road race, it's bad enough to have to look over your shoulder to see who is breathing down your neck.
For elite runners, the ignominy is compounded when they have to do a double take, asking, "Who the hell is that?" It's an experience Nina Rillstone's getting used to inflicting on some of the world's best road runners.
Charging through Central Park on her way to seventh in November's New York Marathon, she passed several top-ranked runners in the last 5km, including world cross-country champion Lornah Kiplagat and Susan Chepkemei from Kenya.
Last weekend, in New York again for the city's prestigious half-marathon, Rillstone surged from sixth into the leading group with 1km to go and ended up third, much to the surprise of stunned race organisers.
Rillstone admits that tearing past elite runners has been an odd feeling for her too. As she caught Kiplagat at the marathon last year, Rillstone says she was unsure how to pass her. "It just didn't feel like the natural order of things."
In the end, she overtook Kiplagat without acknowledgement and with a wide berth. "Those girls didn't want to talk just then and to be passed by some little-known Kiwi girl probably didn't help [how they were feeling]."
Rillstone, 32, lowered her New Zealand half-marathon record by 14 seconds to 1h 10m 35s with her run in New York on the weekend, finishing right on the shoulders of Kenyans Hilda Kibet and Catherine Ndereba.
It was the perfect tune-up for the world championships, which begin in Osaka this month. Rillstone will compete in the marathon on September 2, her third race over the 42.2km distance.
In 18 months, Rillstone has turned despair on the track into success on the road, emerging as one of the country's best hopes in women's marathon running for decades.
In January last year, she stepped off the track at Inglewood where she had failed to record a qualifying time for the Commonwealth Games 10,000m and said to coach John Bowden, "I don't want to waste all that training I've done. Let's find a marathon."
Three months later, she blitzed a New Zealand marathon debut record with 2h 29.46m, the fifth fastest by a New Zealand woman and the fastest in 20 years.
"It was really nice to be able to back that up in New York so it wasn't a complete fluke," she says of her 2h 31m 19s performance in November, the best placing by a New Zealand woman at New York for 21 years.
"I seem to be well-suited to the endurance of the marathon," says Rillstone, who admits she's fallen for the romanticism of the event.
"There's something different about them - I guess there's so much history attached to them and there's a hype behind them like no other race. If you're a distance runner, a half doesn't really cut it. I'd done one marathon and people would ask me, 'What running do you do?' and I'd say, 'I'm a marathon runner'. It's a defining moment."
She certainly doesn't run for the money. There's some prizemoney from road races, and sponsorship from adidas, Comvita and AMP, but Rillstone says "it's not cheap living overseas with no income".
In her short career so far, her trademark has been her ability to run strongly through the second half of the race, a trait of mentor and Olympic bronze medallist Lorraine Moller.
For the past few months, Rillstone has been staying in Boulder, Colorado, where Moller lives, soaking up the former great's wisdom and making the most of the high altitude.
She'll spend the next few weeks at the New Zealand athletics training camp in Cairns, acclimatising to the hot, humid conditions expected in Osaka, where she is aiming for a top-10 finish.
Her ambitions for Beijing (which she's already qualified for) are even higher - a medal. And her ambitions go beyond that too.
"I would very much like to run faster than any other New Zealand woman has. I've got Allison Roe's record [2h 26.46m, Boston, 1981] in the back of my mind."
She's always looking to chase someone down.
