With just a little encouragement, Chelsea Smith would have stopped at a 7-Eleven along the marathon route for a couple of sips on a Slurpee.

Had she done so, she wouldn't have won the Deseret Morning News/KJZZ TV women's marathon. But had she not won, she admitted at the finish, it wouldn't have surprised her.

This was only her second marathon and the first she finished, "so I wasn't expecting at all to win. I got lucky. But it was fun. Let's do it again," she joked at the finish.

The runner from BYU-Hawaii beat Julie Thomas of Holladay to the finish by nearly two minutes, certainly not enough time to fill-up on a Slurpee.

Smith's time was two hours, 49 minutes, four seconds. Thomas, who has yet to win this race, is now a five-time top 5 finisher in the Deseret Morning News distance run. Her time was 2:50:39.7.

Smith explained her run as "something that hurts so bad at the time, but you love it at the same time. It's really weird. I wanted to stop.

"There was a runner behind me named Scott, pushing me the whole way. I told him that if he wanted we could stop by the 7-Eleven. It was right there. I was so all over getting a Slurpee. I would have stopped if he'd let me."

Smith is the 2004 NCAA Division II cross country champion. Her only other long-distance event was the Ogden Marathon, "which I didn't finish," she said.

Thomas came into this event as Ogden Marathon champion and winner of the 2004 Salt Lake Classic 10K.

In this race, she admitted, the wind was a factor.

"The hardest part for me was the wind," she said as she rested near the finish. "I'll bet it cut everyone's time by three minutes or more. It was right there in your face. It was a big time-killer."

The course, which had been altered from last year's route, started at the top of Big Mountain, wandered down through Emigration Canyon, then finished at Liberty Park.

Bob Wood, race director, felt the course needed to be changed to offset the extreme altitudes racers encountered.

So, now Smith's won a marathon, will she give up distance running?

"Oh no," she quickly said. "I'm going to run one of these a year until I'm 90 . . . and I'll just be plodding along. It was fun."

Top prize in the women's division was $1,847.

Women's marathon

1. Chelsea Smith, 2:49:04

2. Julie Thomas, 2:50:39

3. Kerilyn Hatch, 3:12:00

4. Jamie Donaldson, 3:14:32

5. Melanie Loomis, 3:17:17

6. Molly Behunin, 3:17:44

7. Becky Johnson, 3:21:06

8. Camille Olsen, 3:21:19

9. Emily Brooks, 3:21:30

10. Cathy Bowles, 3:22:06

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E-mail: grass@desnews.com