She doesn't know how much time she spends running, either, because she doesn't wear her running watch. Frankly, she's not even sure where the thing is.

She doesn't keep a training log.

She doesn't crank out 20-mile-long runs or 75-mile weeks. She doesn't endure punishing tempo runs or grimace-inducing intervals. And the only race she has run lately was the 3.1-mile Heart Run in April. She jogged it with her 10-year-old son.

Everything is perfect.

Four years removed from finishing 19th in the 2000 Olympic women's marathon, Chris Clark runs simply for the sheer joy of it these days.

"It's real liberating,'' said Clark, 41, sitting in her kitchen and enjoying a glass of wine one recent evening. "I have no specific times or workouts, or mileage I have to hit. I run because I love it.''

She loved running back in 2000, of course, and why not? She was an unlikely candidate for glory, but she shocked the running world -- twice.

She was a 37-year-old pathologist, a wife, a mother of two young boys, a marathoner from the running hinterlands of Alaska, a virtual unknown. The national media referred to her as Christine Clark, which was hilarious because the only person who actually called her Christine was her mother.

She didn't have a sponsor -- well, if you don't count the righteous folks at Skinny Raven Sports, who slipped her shoes. She didn't have an agent. She wasn't a professional runner.

She was talented, sure, and tough, but she was just regular folks too, a gal who liked to have a beer with her pizza and didn't take herself too seriously.

She spent the winter heading into the 2000 U.S. Olympic Trials women's marathon training largely on her home treadmill because sloppy weather iced the bike trails that knife through Anchorage and turned them into luge tracks. She was Everywoman, as much as anyone can be when they can blast out sub-six-minute miles like a metronome.

Yet all Clark did at the trials in the stifling heat of South Carolina was slash seven minutes off her previous best time for 26.2 miles and win despite being ranked 22nd in the field. She was the only American woman marathoner to qualify for the Olympics in Sydney, Australia, yet joked that coming from relative anonymity made her feel as if she were the summer version of the Jamaican bobsled team.

And in Sydney, on the biggest day of her competitive life, all she did was pop the greatest race of her life. She lopped another two minutes off her best time to finish 19th in 2 hours, 31 minutes, 35 seconds, despite being the 30th-ranked runner in the field. Her performance was the third-fastest by an American woman in the five women's Olympic marathons that have been contested, surpassed only by Joan Benoit's 1984 victory in 2:24:52 and Anne Marie Lauck's 10th-place finish in 2:31:30 in 1996.

"I wanted to see how good I could be, and I did,'' Clark said. "I didn't leave anything on the pavement that day.

"I didn't want to be one of those people who didn't perform up to the level they could on the big day, especially being the only American.''

And that was that for Clark's hard-core running career. She and her husband, John, a pulmonologist, and their boys Matthew (now 14) and Danny (now 10) enjoyed some time in Sydney with relatives who made the trip Down Under. Then Chris Clark went back to being a wife, mother and pathologist.

Oh, she thought about running in the 2004 U.S. Olympic trials, just to quiet anyone who thought she was a one-hit wonder. Never mind that there is no such thing as a fluke 2:31 marathoner. Still, the thought of training at that intense level again was about as appealing as another bout with the bloody heels she suffered in the 2000 trials.

"To train through another winter and make that effort again wasn't going to happen,'' Clark said. "I couldn't do a winter like that on the treadmill. I don't know if I could ever be that anal again.''

Besides, life is good.

Well, Chris said with a laugh, except maybe for Matthew being a teenager, which makes him "unbearable.'' Of course, mom gets in her licks. She gets her kicks dropping Matthew off at school, rolling down her window and yelling for all to hear: "I love you, muffin! Make good choices!''

The Clarks just had their home, which sits near the Chester Creek bike trail, expanded and remodeled. Chris has a sewing room where she can make quilts, which is infinitely more soothing than a 20-miler.

Earlier this summer, the family picked up a 37-foot boat they had built in Anacortes, Wash., and sailed it up the Inside Passage under the stewardship of John, a former commercial fisherman.

John and Chris had looked for a cabin in Seward but failed to find one they liked, so now they moor their boat in Seward and spend some weekends on it.

Chris Clark has time for her family and her job. She has a lovely home and a new boat. And when she heads out onto the bike trail most mornings to run, she doesn't care how far she runs or how long she runs.

Everything is perfect.

This column is the opinion of reporter Doyle Woody. He can be reached at dwoody@adn.com.