A bit of tribulation for marathon trials

Itching to get back on the road after her near-miss in Boston, Kara Goucher has changed her mind and decided to run another marathon this year before trying to start a family. So she's on the US team for the August World Championships in Berlin, along with Desiree Davila, Paige Higgins, Zoila Gomez, and Tera Moody. The men's squad includes UMass-Lowell grad Nate Jenkins, former Olympian Dan Browne, Justin Young, Fernando Cabada, and Matt Gabrielson . . . Impressive re-entry by Deena Kastor, who had been on the mend since dropping out of the Olympic marathon with a broken foot. After winning the Shamrock Shuffle 8K in the Chicago slush at the end of March, Kastor blew away the field at last month's Great Edinburgh 10K in Scotland, beating two-time New York marathon winner Jelena Prokopcuka by 36 seconds. On Sunday, she'll take on four other Olympians - Beijing silver medalist Catherine Ndereba, US teammates Magdalena Lewy Boulet and Amy Rudolph, and South Africa's Rene Kalmer - in the New York Mini 10K in Central Park . . . You won't have to go the marathon distance to run with Bill Rodgers tomorrow evening. As part of the inaugural National Running Day, the four-time Boston champ will lead an all-comers warmup at MIT's outdoor track on Vassar Street, then pace a 6-minute mile as part of the mini-meet. Check usatfne.org for details.

Solid showing by Michael Phelps in his first competitive meet since the Olympics. Swimming's golden guy won two events and finished second in two others at the recent Charlotte UltraSwim. Phelps, who'll likely be competing in this summer's World Championships in Rome, won the 200-meter freestyle and 100 butterfly and was second to Olympic champ Aaron Peirsol in the 100 backstroke and France's Fred Bousquet in the 100 freestyle. "I was just excited to race," said Phelps, who was coming off a three-month suspension for his party bong incident last fall. "That's what is important - that I still have that passion to race." . . . Though US arbitrators reduced swimmer Jessica Hardy's two-year drug suspension to one, the World Anti-Doping Agency has appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport to make her serve the full term and also to keep her out of the 2012 Olympics. Hardy missed last year's Games after testing positive for a banned stimulant contained in a tainted supplement. Hardy, who would have competed in three events in Beijing, was granted the reduced suspension because she accepted responsibility for the positive test and had done sufficient diligence in checking out the supplement's contents. In any case, Hardy will miss the world meet because even her shortened ban ends July 31, too late for her to make the team . . . Figure skater Sasha Cohen, who hasn't competed in three years, will be making a world-class reentry in her bid to make her third Olympic squad. The Turin silver medalist will compete in the Grand Prix opener in Paris in October, then at Skate America in Lake Placid in November. Since Cohen competed at the 2006 Games, she won't have to qualify for the January national championships in Spokane, which will determine the two-woman team for Vancouver.

The US Olympic Committee filled a key position yesterday, naming former shooter Mike English chief of sports performance. English, a two-time Pan American Games champ who formerly directed the USOC's three training centers, has held the sports performance job on an interim basis since Steve Roush departed after Beijing. The committee also named Desiree Filippone director of government relations in Washington and John McWilliams chief human resources officer. "I am determined that we hit the ground running," said Stephanie Streeter, the acting CEO who took over after Jim Scherr stepped down in March . . . The primary task for Olympic hurdles champion Benita Fitzgerald Mosley, USA Track & Field's new chief of sports performance, will be to jack up the medal count to 30 at the 2012 Games in London. That's the goal set by Logan, who felt the Americans underperformed in Beijing despite topping the table with 23 medals, albeit only seven golds. More telling was that US athletes posted their year's best efforts in only 18 of 131 performances at Olympus. Fitzgerald Mosley, who won the 100-meter event in 1984, will oversee everything from athlete development to sports science to coaching education.

While there's always a flurry of coach-changing by figure skaters going into the Olympic season, this year's names are unusually high-profile: men's champion Jeremy Abbott, pairs titlists Keauna McLaughlin and Rockne Brubaker, and former women's champ Mirai Nagasu. Abbott parted ways with Tom Zakrajsek after a decade to go with Yuka Sato while McLaughlin and Brubaker switched from Dalilah Sappenfield to John A.W. Nicks, and Nagasu left Charlene Wong for Frank Carroll, who coached Michelle Kwan and now works with Evan Lysacek . . . Tom McGinnis, the legendary Skating Club of Boston coach who has been a fixture on Soldiers Field Road since 1961, was inducted into the Skating Coaches' Hall of Fame last month. McGinnis joins the likes of Nicks, Carroll, Carlo Fassi, Evy and Mary Scotvold, and Maribel Vinson Owen . . . Decent Olympic draw for the US men's hockey team, which will avoid both world champion Russia and Sweden, which knocked the Americans out of the medals at last month's tournament in Switzerland. The Yanks, who finished a brutal eighth in Turin, will face the host Canadians, the Swiss, and the Norwegians in the prelims. The US women, who'll go in favorites after retaining their global crown, will face Finland, Russia, and China. The men will perform on an even bigger stage in next year's world tournament when they take on host Germany at the 76,000-seat Veltins-Arena in Gelsenkirchen, the same venue where the US men's soccer team played its World Cup opener in 2006. If the place is full, it'll be a global record for a hockey game.

Bad luck last weekend for US sculler Brett Sickler at the World Cup rowing opener in Spain. Not only did she miss the medal stand by just 15-hundredths of a second, she missed an automatic spot on the World Championship team after the field was reduced from nine entrants to six. Since Sickler only needed to finish in the top half for her global ticket, fourth place would have been good enough with the original field. So both Sickler and men's sculler Warren Anderson, who placed ninth, will have to earn their spots at open trials this summer . . . Gymnast Carly Patterson, the first American woman to win the Olympic all-around at an overseas Games in 2004, headlines the new inductees for the USA Gymnastics Hall of Fame. She'll be joined by fellow Olympians John Macready (1996), Steve McCain (2000), and rhythmic athlete Mary Sanders (2004).