Benita into the light, Forrest in twilight zone: By Len Johnson

Over the past few horrible years it has been easy to forget that Benita Willis is a world-class athlete. She reminded us with her resounding run in the Houston marathon on 15 January.

Running with the aim of achieving a qualifying performance for the London Olympic Games, Willis almost certainly secured a place in her fourth Olympic team, producing two 74-minute halves for a 2:28:24 and second place.

The result put Willis just ahead of Delhi 2010 Commonwealth Games bronze medallist Lisa Weightman (2:29:23 in Frankfurt last October) on times. It is hard to see two more women achieving the Australian qualifying time (2:32:00), much less running faster than the two W’s.

Shawn Forrest, the other Australian running in Houston, left himself in the twilight zone, his 2:14:37 for fourth place putting him in the area between the IAAF’s version of what qualifies an athlete to run the Olympic marathon (2:15:00) and Athletics Australia’s version (2:12:00).

Forrest now joins Jeff Hunt and Martin Dent in being an Olympic A-qualifier as far as the international body is concerned but nobody in Australian selection terms. So let’s acknowledge him here and continue to acknowledge all those who achieve the marathon standard (and the IAAF B-standards across all events, which are likewise ignored by AA).

‘The Twilight Zone’, by the way, was a 1960s television drama series which began with the voiceover:

It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.

Times between 2:12:01 and 2:15:00 (2:32:01 and 2:37:00 for women), and B-standards in general, are certainly in “the dimension of imagination”. You imagine you are qualified to be selected for the Olympics, but you’re not.

Back to Benita Willis, though, whose performance may signify a revival in a career which seemed stuck on the downward slide.

Willis’s troubles are well-known and don’t need repeating here. For most of the past four years it has seemed like they were dragging her down, too much even for her famed resilience to overcome. Occasional good runs – 11th in the 2008 world cross-country, her win in the Australian selection trial and then 17th in the 2010 race – were out-numbered by mediocre ones.

Doggedly, though, Benita stuck to her own plan, looking for the stability in training and lifestyle which would enable her to have a decent crack at the London Games. It seems that she may at last have found it in Boulder and a new coach in Brad Hudson.

As I said at the top of this column, the struggle of the last few years has made it all too easy to forget what a class athlete Willis is. She is certainly one of Australia’s most versatile middle and long-distance runners ever.

Willis has an impressive set of times, holding the Australian records for 2000, 3000, 5000 and 10,000 metres and the marathon as well (the late Kerryn McCann still holds the half-marathon record).

Times, though, are not the whole story. In line with the three-fold criteria Track & Field News magazine uses for its authoritative annual rankings, honours won and competitive record also come into it.

Willis has a world cross-country gold medal – one of the few to challenge, and beat, the all-conquering Kenyans and Ethiopians in recent years – and a world half-marathon bronze medal. She set her Australian 10,000 metres record in finishing eighth in the 2003 world championships final and her 5000 metres mark in third place in the Berlin Golden League meeting.

The national marathon record came from another third place, this one in Chicago - so all three records in Olympic events came in big races against quality opposition.

Willis has also been able to string a series of wins together against class opponents, notably in 2005 when she won five out of six races in a cross-country tour of Europe, the one loss to Tirunesh Dibaba in a race in which both ran the same time.

The past few years should not overshadow what a great athlete Benita Willis is. It is to be hoped Houston 2012 indicates there is still more to come.