I wanted to start with the National Club Cross Country Championships, which were a couple of weeks ago. It looked like you had a really good run there.
Yeah, I did.

Can you talk a little about that race? Had you expected to do that well?
It’s only the second time I’ve ever done cross country in my life. I didn’t do it in high school. I didn’t do it until I joined the team last year. They were talking about it and, you know, I’m always up for something different. I love racing. I just love to race. I thought, “Oh, this will be something fun. Something to go [do] with my team.” When you had sent out a notice about any races coming up for us, I didn’t even think to mention it. First of all, I didn’t expect to do that well. Secondly, it was just kind of, “Eh, I’m going to go with my club and do it.” But it unfolded really well.

I felt great. I got a really good start. I got some feedback from my oldest daughter, who did cross country in high school and had a scholarship. I said to her, “What would you recommend?” And, of course, Darren tailored my workout for, maybe, three weeks for cross country training. He gave me the workouts, my daughter gave me advice, and a local guy who I highly regard in cross country training said “Do 600 meters all out — hard — for that start.” And then I’d do the intervals that my coach set up. And then at the end — we live out in the mountains — I’d go out and do 10 x 30 second hill repeats, just to end on a good note with a hill. It worked out well. I got out there with the lead girls and us three pretty much gave each other a really good race. Even toward the end I thought, “No matter how this unfolds, it’s a good race.”

The woman that actually won it [Lyudmila Vasilyava], I didn’t know anything about her and thank God I didn’t. When I go into races I don’t typically look at who’s up against me. I’ll recognize names, or see people and know they’re really good. But I’m not one of those racers that look at the names and what their current status is, you know what I mean? I want to do my own races and not worry about who else is there. Plus I can get myself…like, “Oh, she just ran a 16 minute 5K…” So when I finished, this elite coordinator came up to me and said, “Did you realize?” She’s from Russia, but she became a US citizen. She held the [outdoor] 1500m world record at one point; she ran a 4:02.

Wow.
So she beat us in the last 400m, which is understandable.

Yeah, I think with that piece of information, you should feel a little bit better about that!
Yeah, I did. The three of us came in pretty close together. I looked at both of them and said, “Thanks for a great race.” It was fun.

You came in second in the 40-49 AG and you were only about 10 seconds behind Vasilyeva. But there was a great series of pictures that someone took, and I don’t know what point in the race this was, but all three of you were running together up a very steep hill. What’s so notable about them is that you look really calm. You don’t look like you’re straining. You look completely in control.
Yeah, I felt that. I did. I never felt that I hit that lactic acid — you know, you get that burning. The second time we hit that hill, I did feel it — I knew my legs had worked. And then in the last 300m, I came down into the chute and looked at my watch, and it said I was running a 4:16 pace. So I knew that in the last few hundred meters, I just pushed really, really, really hard to try to hold second place overall. So, yeah, it was fun!

I’ve never done a cross-country race. I want to try one this year.
It was fun. In the last few years I’ve been trying to get myself to do different stuff, just to keep it interesting, not stagnant.

Will you return to this race next year?
It’s out in Washington, so it depends on the team. Some of them would like to go. I told them I’d like to go. The four of us who went there are the top four runners on the team, so that does help. One of our runners — who’s 45 and runs in the mid-18s, so she’s a good 5K runner, even though that course is 6K — she came down with the flu that morning. My other teammate came in fourth and she’s the one that won the 5K US Championship.

So your team is well-placed in second overall for the masters category.
Yeah, great team.

Let’s talk about your athletic background, as it were. It sounds like you didn’t have much of one before you started running.
[Laughs] It’s kind of sketchy and not good.

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“There was a race up here, a Race for the Cure, where if you won you’d win round trip plane tickets. I would read the winners’ times and think, ‘There’s no way I could come close to that.’ They were running in the 17s and I’d think, ‘Oh, my gosh, that’s crazy fast!’ I never even fathomed the thought of being in that league. It took me awhile to get to that.”

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Well, it doesn’t seem to have mattered that much.
I smoked in high school. I went out for track for something to do. We moved to this area and it’s a small, rural area. I went from living outside Indianapolis with a class of a hundred or so students in my class alone to 120 in the whole school. It was such an adjustment. You know how you try to find your way in? I found that athletics could be my channel in making some social connections. It’s just very hard to move to a small area when the groups are gelled up pretty well.

That’s a hard age to do that at too.
Yeah, it was. Basically eighth grade through my senior year. I knew when I was a kid they would do those field days. For the running events we’d typically do the 600m run. I could beat all the boys. So I knew with running, there was something there. So I went out for track but I also took up smoking in that time too, which was stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. My senior year, I won the district title in the mile, and I don’t even know what I ran in. I begged the coach to let me run the open 800m, because that where I wanted to go to state then. But he wanted me to run the open mile, so I did that and won it.

And then after high school I waitressed. Didn’t go to college. Smoked more. And then had children. I did everything backwards! Went to college in my mid-20s, got my masters degree by my early 30s, when I also quit smoking. In my mid-30s was when my oldest daughter started running, so I went out with her a little bit. I got bit by the bug when I started winning local races. There was a woman who was certainly a cornerstone in my life in running, Diane Sherrer. But she’s passed away. She was a journalist, a phenomenal woman who knew running inside and out. She introduced me to a whole new world. I had no idea about elite comps and and stuff like that. I’d won their local marathon, the Wineglass Marathon, and she told me, “We haven’t had anyone ‘local’ win this for a long time.” She was right. They put it on the front page — “Local Wins” — and it went from there.

Was she a runner herself?
Yes, she was.

Because there’s a gap in the story here. You say, “Well, my daughter started running cross-country…and then I started winning races.” I want to know how you went from being a monitor for her while she was running, to keep her safe, to actually entering local races and doing well in them.
The kids would do local races just to stay in shape over the summer. So I would enter with my kids. I didn’t win them at first. I was lucky if I finished in the middle of the pack. I was overweight for my body size and frame. As I got in shape and the weight dropped off that’s when I started winning local races. At one of those races was a flyer for a race that was close by, but maybe an hour’s drive.

That’s where I met Diane. You could probably relate more to this than others. She was one of these journalists that’s very informed about what’s happening from the micro, local level to the macro level of running. She just had that knowledge base. There was a race up here, a Race for the Cure, where if you won you’d win round trip plane tickets. I would read the winners’ times and think, “There’s no way I could come close to that.” They were running in the 17s and I’d think, “Oh, my gosh, that’s crazy fast!” I never even fathomed the thought of being in that league. It took me awhile to get to that. But she helped connect me from there and talked me into doing the Wineglass Marathon. I did that and got fourth, but then won it the following year.

What’s driven you to get better? Are you competing against the clock? Or against certain local people?
I like competing against the clock. There are good runners around. But I have to travel to get the competition that I want to get. I do like the competition.

You don’t have the benefit that a lot of people have. You have to travel fairly far to find a competitive race, you have to travel far just to meet up with your club, and you train alone, which a lot of people don’t like to do. Maybe you do. But I’m curious to know what the internal driver is for you to do all this.
I don’t know. I’ve been asked that in interviews before. I love it. I love that feeling of competition. I like the fact that we’re all doing the same thing and giving each other a good race. I’m one that likes to go to the races where there’s going to be really hard competition. So I’m willing to travel because I like that. This is probably one of the only things I do for myself. I’m a mental health therapist. I’m the mother of three girls. I’m a wife. I’m a sister, a daughter. By nature I’m a caretaker. If someone’s having difficulties, meaning friends or family, they reach out to me because that’s what I do for my profession. Running is the one thing I do for me, and I’m the only one who derives satisfaction from it. Does that make sense?

Yes, it makes total sense. It’s not the first time I’ve heard it. It’s not that it’s an escape, but running becomes something that no one cares about more than you do and something that you can develop in yourself. It’s kind of limitless in that way.
Yeah. It’s mine. I mean, I get depleted at times. [Laughs] But you have all these great runners out there kind of stroking each other’s egos — “Hey, you did great!” — and it just feels really, really good.

And when you’re depleted, you’re always depleted on your own terms.
Yeah.

You make the decision to deplete yourself.
No matter what happens in my life, I can pick up my sneakers and go find my solitude in my running. I work with people who have buried children. I work with people who have endured incredible losses or terrible traumas. So that requires a lot of energy. The running keeps me very, very balanced. I typically run at lunch: “Okay, time to fill my emotional energy back up…” You can’t hear things like that day after day without it affecting you to a certain extent, even though I do meditation and other things to keep me balanced.

You’re mostly training alone, right?
98% of the time, yes.

I would say that’s mostly. And you’re running on your own property most of the time?
We live on what they call a cow path. It’s a one lane dirt road.

Yeah, I’ve run on those in the UK.
That’s what I live on. We have 200 acres. It’s mostly wooded and there’s a pond and creek. I’ve talked to my husband before about adding some paths, but we haven’t gotten to that. So I do a lot of running on the dirt road and on my treadmill. I go up on top of my hill and I have a chocolate lab, and he’s my best buddy out there on the road. I let him loose because there’s nothing up there. I just run back and forth, an out-and-back one miler.

So you do several of those?
Yes, unless I’m doing long, long miles. Then I climb the mountains. That’s what I think my coach has determined is why I do pretty good on hills. I live in the valley of a mountain — I know that sounds like a religious song — but I live in the valley, so no matter which direction I go I’m going to be climbing up.

Are you at any kind of altitude there?
Not really. I don’t know what it is here. But I went up to my brother’s in Eugene, OR and they took me up to the mountains because I wanted to run at elevation. Maybe I wasn’t up high enough. But they took me up as high as they could take me without needing winter tires. I loved it. It felt really good on the lungs. It didn’t seem to affect me. I’ve never trained at elevation per se, so I wouldn’t know if I stayed at a place for a long period of time how it would affect me.

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“[With self-hypnosis] I’m able to go into a zone where I can almost dissociate from discomfort; focus on other things rather than on how I feel. I don’t seem to hit that psychological wall while I’m racing. I do that every single day.”

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Do you have a track nearby or are you doing your track workouts on the treadmill?
It’s on the treadmill. We have one track in our area and it’s not good. [Laughs]. It was state of the art back in the late 80s/early 90s. It’s that black, foam-type of material. It’s coming off. That’s what we have. I can only get to it on the weekends. Now it’s covered with snow for the rest of the season. You can’t use it during school hours. I probably get to a track maybe twice a year. But I take spray paint and go out and measure the roads. A few other serious runners in the area have marked out some distances that aren’t really flat, but they’re flat for us. They’ve measured out 200m, 400m, 800m, so I’ve used that before.

Sometimes I think it’s nicer to run 400m on a path anyway. You’re not dealing with the turns and you’ve got something to look at. And it’s more similar to road racing.
I agree, Julie. I’ve gone up to the high school’s track before when there was a football practice. Me and this other guy. The kids’ coaches were yelling at them for looking at the runners. They were busting on the guy because I was faster than him. And I was like, “Okay, I’m out of here.” I don’t want someone looking at me. [Laugh]

Right. You don’t want a simple workout to turn into a theatrical performance.
Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it.

Overcome after a 2:46:45 at Boston.

You mentioned meditation. How does that fit in?
I love my meditation. Also, I know how to do hypnosis and how to hypnotize myself. I’ve put together my one little programs and put myself into a hypnotic state and done those affirmations that you need when you’re in a race. I think that’s what got me through the Twin Cities race. I’m able to go into a zone where I can almost dissociate from discomfort; focus on other things rather than on how I feel. I don’t seem to hit that psychological wall while I’m racing. I do that every single day. When I’m not training I do lots of regular meditation. I like a lot of the Buddhist meditation practices, so I use some of those. It’s something I really love.

From a practical standpoint, how do you go about hypnotizing yourself before a race?
Actually, I don’t put myself into a hypnotic state when I get ready to run. It’s just that I’ve done it so much at night time — I do this for the three months before I race. So when I get ready to race, I’m already tapped into that unconsciousness — when you start to feel pain, the brain is automatically thinking things like, “You’re strong. You can do this.” I can literally go through where I am in the race: what I’m thinking, how I’m feeling. It naturally happens while I’m racing. It typically kicks in around the 17th mile, when your body is really taxed. It’s hard to explain, but it’s like the brain just automatically goes to that positive stuff.

So you’ve prepared a recording for yourself that contains messages that are meant to address the kinds of discomfort that you’d feel at different points in the race. And you just absorb them and they kick in automatically.
Yes.

How did you figure out how to do that?
Through my practice. I’ve done meditation with clients for so many years. Then I took my meditation into hypnosis with myself, which took me a long time. I don’t hypnotize clients because that’s a really delicate place to go. So typically I just stay with meditation, where they’re in a conscious state; they know they’re there, but I take them into a visual place while they’re conscious. I learned to put myself into a hypnotic state, and it’s a weird sensation. It took me probably five years to get there. You have to be really relaxed. But, Julie, it’s not that “acting like a chicken” stuff out there. I’m like, come on…

I know that. [Laughs]
You see that and it’s like, “Really?”

That’s also not very helpful in races. Acting like a chicken will completely screw up your form.
[Laughs] Yeah!

What other supplementary things do you do? For example, many people do yoga for flexibility, strengthening, sports massage…
I teach a strengthening class twice a week at a gym, which I’ve been doing voluntarily for quite a long time. I do weight training. On days I do speed or tempo, that same day I’ll go to the gym and do heavier weights on my legs. My stretching is probably my weakest link; I try to do that every day. I should do yoga, but I don’t. And I take my vitamins, supplements, vitamin D. Maybe because I’m on soft surfaces, but thank God I’ve been able to avoid major injuries like other runners have, like stress fractures. I do a little aerobics. And pylometrics once a week.

I’m surprised that you do the heavy weight work on your harder running days. What order do you do things in?
I do the weights after the running.

Don’t you find that your legs are already kind of dead by then?
No. They are tired, but I’m not so fatigued that I’m unable to do the reps. I do two sets of 20. And when I say heavy, it’s not really heavy. It’s probably mid-weights for someone else. I’m not trying to bulk up.

That’s also a lot of reps.
Yeah. I rarely do a workout and walk away thinking I cannot do another one. I usually walk away thinking, “I could do another set.” But I don’t.

That’s how they say you’re supposed to feel.
It’s working out well. Darren knows what he’s doing.

What’s your weekly mileage like these days?
Right now I’m only doing about 60. Typically I like to average 70. It’s not until I do marathon training that I bump up the miles, and that’s only for four weeks.

What do you typically top out at in those peak weeks?
90-100.

Are you splitting things up into doubles?
Oh, heck, yes. Definitely.

You’re not running 15 miles at a time a every day.
No, only twice a week. That’s worked out well for me. I was having difficulties and Darren asked after the 2009 Twin City race what my weakest part was. I said it was the last four miles. It’s hard to explain. Have you run marathons?

Yes, I have.
Okay. You know when you get that feeling in your legs, like it’s little pricking knives?

Yeah. I know exactly what you mean.
That’s what I felt in the last four miles. So Darren said, “Let’s bump up your midweek long run.” Now, probably 2-3 times a month, I’ll do a 15 mile run in the middle of the week. That seemed to be the staple I needed to make that Boston run happen the way it did. My mileage stayed the same, but that midweek longrun was new. So now it’s twice a week that I’ll do a long run.

I first came across that concept a few years ago in Running Times. Greg McMillan had written an article about “fixing the fade” in the marathon. He had different kinds of workouts you could do if you found you were having trouble in the last 10K of a marathon. One of them was a midweek run of 15-16 miles. I did find that to help in not falling apart at the end.
I agree. But most days it’s doubles or triples. If I have a client cancel I’ll just run out and do a five miler real quick.

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“I was self-coached and looking up stuff online. A few years ago I came across an article about how to run a marathon under three hours. The recommendation was to run a 20 miler at marathon race pace. In hindsight, I can’t believe I followed that.”

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You say that you love tempo runs.
I love them. I like to do 6-10 miles at a little faster than marathon pace. It’s like my comfort. I don’t know why, but I love to just hold that pace. There’s probably a psychological piece; it gives you that confidence: “I can hold 6:10 pace easy for 10 miles.” It seems to be the pace that my legs like best. I feel that I have an advantage in longer distances. The shorter stuff, like in that cross country run, I was thinking, “Oh, my God. This hurts!” the entire time. Even though I was enjoying myself, I was working the entire time. I like my comfort zone.

You can always tell who’s slanted toward the slower vs. faster end of the scale in terms of how they talk about race distances. I don’t know if you’ve ever done a really short race, like a 1500m or a mile?
No.

You should try it. If you tend toward toward the slow twitch end of the spectrum — which I do; I have no natural speed — try some track races. I did some over the summer just for fun. But, let me tell you, it is such a shock! It’s a kind of pain that you can’t even conceive of. Marathoning is its own kind of pain when it goes badly, and it’s very long. But this was just…everything hurts at a level you can’t comprehend in a longer race. But I recommend it. It’s a gas. Plus it’s over with very quickly.
Isn’t there a track championship at the beginning of March? But I didn’t see where they had my age group. I turn 45 in February. Woo hoo!

Yeah, there’s a national masters track championship. I think Running Times usually does a feature on it. I’m sure you could get invited to that with your times.
I’m always looking to mix it up. But that would be a different pain, huh?

Oh, yeah.
[Laughs] “Give me my lungs!”

How did you find your coach, Darren De Reuck?
Oh, this is a good story. I was training on my own, and anyone reading this is going to think, “What was this woman thinking?” But I was self-coached and looking up stuff online. A few years ago I came across an article about how to run a marathon under three hours. The recommendation was to run a 20 miler at marathon race pace. In hindsight, I can’t believe I followed that. But, okay, fast forward to Houston in 2008, where I was trying to get an Olympic Marathon Trials qualifier the first time around. I’d done my 20 miler at marathon race pace. And, well, of course, three weeks later I’m running the marathon and around 9 miles into it, I had nothing. Nothing. I stopped. “My back hurts, I don’t feel good.” I ended up dropping. And what had happened was that I’d run my race three weeks before that, doing that 20 miler at race pace.

But by the grace of God, and I really believe this, I went over to catch the sag wagon [Laughs], and Elva Dryer was there. I don’t know if she came down with the flu, but she’s sitting there shivering. I’m sitting down at this medical tent, wrapped up in a mylar blanket, and I’m sitting next to her. I didn’t know at first who she was because she was just shivering and all wrapped up. Me being me, I struck up a conversation and, when she looked at me I thought, “Boy, she looks familiar.” I asked her what her name was and she said, “Elva.” I said, “I knew it!’ And I was just gushing all over Elva. What a nice woman. We were stuck there for three hours because it was so early in the race. She was in the Half Marathon Championships. We had to wait quite awhile before things cleared out enough so that the sag wagon could come pick us up.

One of the things I said to her was, “I think I’d better hire a coach. I think I need someone who really understands working with somebody my age.” I do believe the training is different. She lived near Darren and Colleen and said, “Well, Darren coaches his wife, Colleen, who’s a masters runner. I can ask Darren.” We ended up exchanging emails. And I thought, “Well, maybe she was just being pleasant.” But a few days later I get a call from Darren and he talked to me a little bit on the phone and said he’d be glad to coach me. So that’s how that started. So every so often I’ll send Elva and email to check in on her and tell her how I’m doing. But, what a nice woman, Julie.

If you knew who Elva Dryer was, you must have known who Colleen De Reuck was.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. When she said she lived by them… “Colleen?” I’m still in awe. Let me tell you, Julie, the first time I met Darren, we were down for the Melbourne Half [masters championships], and he’d flown down there with Colleen. They walked into the dinner and I’m sitting there with my husband. I’m not a person who gets starstruck. But he walked in with Colleen and I’m thinking, “Oh, my gosh. There’s Colleen.” By this time he’d been coaching me for several months. I knew he was going to be there, but I was just in awe. I wouldn’t go over there and talk. My husband said, “Go over there and say hello to your coach.” And I was like, “But it’s Colleen. Colleen. She’s amazing…” So my husband, being who he is, got up, walked over and sat at their table. So I got up from my table and went over. He knew that, eventually, I wouldn’t sit there by myself. [Laughs] I walked over and I was like, “Ah…” I couldn’t say anything!

I’m sure it got better after the first 30 seconds.
It did. But I’m still like that with Colleen. When I saw her at the club championships she said, “Hi, Lori. Good job!” And I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, Colleen told me I did a good job!” [Laughs] So I’m still starstruck by Colleen. She’s just absolutely amazing.

I have yet to have met her. I tend to meet the runners who come through the New York Road Runners events. And they’re usually the younger runners, meaning 20s and 30s. But they’re world class runners. I often have the same reaction. I’m not intimidated by them, but they walk into the room…
You’re just in awe.

Right. This person’s been in the Olympics three times, they’ve won medals and world championships. It’s hard not to be taken aback.
I was standing next to Ryan Hall in the bathroom line at Boston. I’m like, “Oh, my God. That’s Ryan Hall. We’re waiting in line together. Ryan Hall!” I didn’t say anything, because you want to be respectful to the other runners before they’re doing a big race. But I was gushing about that. And my husband finally said, “Enough about Ryan Hall.” And I’m like, “He’s so cute!” [Laughs]

I know a couple of months ago when we did our Houston Hopefuls roundtable podcast you’d mentioned that you might be going out to Colorado to train with Darren and Colleen. Is that still in the offing?
I’m going to! I’m going to go in the summertime. Darren has invited me to come out for 7-10 days. I don’t know how I would fare, 10 days away from my kids and my husband. But seven days certainly would be more reasonable. I am really excited about that.

You can learn a lot in seven days. Plus you’ll get a good taste of altitude training.
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Yeah, it’s going to be interesting to see how my body will respond.

You have an interesting story about Paula Radcliffe.
I admire the American athletes, of course. But what caught my eye about Paula Radcliffe was that she was so against doping. She was very vocal about that. I thought, “What a great role model for the younger generation of kids coming up into the ranks.” EPO was a big issue, and I’m sure it continues to be. Anyway, she caught my attention then. And then, of course, after that she went on to set world records. But when she was in the 2004 Olympics and she dropped out of the marathon, I felt so bad. So I wrote her a letter and told her that I still admired her and her ethic and everything. She’d written me a letter back and it was real nice, thanking me for the kind words and how difficult it was, and that she knew it would pass, but it’s still really hard — I’m sure you feel like you let your entire country down.

So with all of that she just sent me this nice letter with a picture of her setting the world record and an autograph. I have it framed, in front of my treadmill. My husband took it to the Wineglass marathon. I was battling it out with another gal for first place and in the 17th mile, where things can get tough, I came around the corner and my husband was holding up that picture of Paula Radcliffe, and he read it out loud to me. He said, “Paula Radcliffe said you can do it! Go for your dreams! Good luck!” I’d told her I was getting ready for a marathon. And I won it. It was a difficult period, but I remembered him reading that off and holding up that picture. My husband wanted me to write back to her to let her know I’d won a marathon, but I didn’t get around to it. I know it’s not the London one, or anything big, but…

With Kathy Switzer at the Utica Boilermaker.

And with a visual aid from her.
Yeah, that’s the thing about runners. I met a young man in the subway, it was before Utica, and you know how you get into conversations about what your times are. I told him mine and he said, “Are you an elite athlete?” And I said, “Well, I start with them.” So, anyway, he had blogged about meeting me and had said, “This is the thing I love about athletes. They’re just down-to-Earth people. They’re not overpaid. Big egos.” And he’s right. I consider myself a “sub.” To me, the Paula Radcliffes, the Deena Kastors are the elites. But to meet them, they’re just very down-to-Earth people.

That’s been my experience too. I think part of it is that there is so little reward in terms of the public recognition. They’re not football players or baseball players. Really, nobody in this country, aside from a small core fan base, cares about competitive running. So I don’t think they get recognized on the street. I always say this to people after talking to elites: runners work harder than any other athletes. And for very little reward in most cases. They all just work incredibly hard; their whole lives are about training and recovering. I haven’t met any duds yet.
I don’t think I have.

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“I had posted on Facebook to friends, family, anyone who wanted to send me a personal message, to do so and I would tape those to my water bottles on the course. It ended up being a saving grace for me at Twin Cities…I vowed that I would get to every single one of those water bottles. Most of the ones along the course were from my children. I just didn’t want to leave one out there that I didn’t pick up and read. I felt it would be like leaving my kid there.”

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A lot of times you have your family stationed along the course, like you’ve just described. I know that helped you through your difficult race in Twin Cities. Your family was either there physically on the course or they were virtually there with messages they’d written on your water bottles.
Yeah, I came up with this idea since I could put out my own water bottles. I had posted on Facebook to friends, family, anyone who wanted to send me a personal message, to do so and I would tape those to my water bottles on the course. It ended up being a saving grace for me at Twin Cities. Even though I had that mental discipline, I didn’t even know if I would break three hours. After awhile I was thinking, “Well, if I break three I’m just going to have to be good with that.” But I vowed that I would get to every single one of those water bottles. Most of the ones along the course were from my children. I just didn’t want to leave one out there that I didn’t pick up and read. I felt it would be like leaving my kid there. [Laughs] So, the last one was the 23rd mile, and I was thinking, “Okay, I’m a little over 5K from the finish line. Why stop now?”

Do you notice a difference when your family isn’t there?
Not really. It’s nice to have them there. But because I travel so much now [for races] they don’t get the opportunity to be there. In other cases, like at the Niagara Falls marathon, they weren’t able to get to me until the 17th mile. The minute I hear their voices, I’ll start crying. “Oh, it’s my family!” I just want to stop and go home with them. [Laughs] But for the big races, I do have my husband go with me. Sometimes he doesn’t know how to get around, so he’s at the finish line. At Boston, I’ll look for him at the grandstands, right before the 26 mile mark. He’s basically the only one that goes to a lot of the big races. I drag him. [Laughs]

It sounds like he’s been at the right races. The ones where you’ve really needed family there.
Yeah. One thing I thought was absolutely amazing was at Twin Cities. They all follow me at home — they all get the updates. But he said that at Twin Cities, he knew at the halfway point I wasn’t where I should be. So when it got into the 2:40s, he moved from the grandstands to the finish chute. He said he felt like I needed him more there than in the grandstands hollering and taking pictures. He was right!

You tend to run really well even when you’re sick. In some ways that just reflects bad luck you’ve had with these badly timed illnesses. The first time I took notice of you was after the Boston race last year: “Who’s this woman? She just missed a Trials Qualifier by 45 seconds.”
Yeah, that was completely not planned at all.

That’s what you said. You had a much more conservative goal — because you weren’t feeling 100% — but somehow were on fire anyway for the second half of that race.
That’s exactly right. I felt so good that I thought, “Well, I might as well push.” When I came over Heartbreak Hill, I was at a 5:53 pace. I was dipping below 6:00 — the majority of the time I cut off was in those last 4.5 miles, after Heartbreak.

Wow. You had about a two minute negative split in the second half.
Yeah. And the weird thing is, I’d raced a half marathon about a month before that. And I raced almost the same time in the second half of Boston as I did at that really flat half marathon. [Laughs] I’m like, “What’s up with that?” I was in the peak of that training for Boston when I ran that half, so my body was just tired.

Do you generally favor a certain kind of course type, meaning flat vs. hilly?
I don’t know. My coach is beginning to think that I’m better at the hills. When I do my long runs, I do pickups in the second hour just to keep it interesting. Like 5 minutes of picking it up to under 7:00, and then back to 10 minutes plodding along at my 7:30 pace. I do a lot of my intervals running on hills. I just do it to mix it up, to make it fun. Some people are really great at consistency; they can stay right at 6:20. Me, I’m all over the place. But that’s typically how I race. I can run a consistent pace if I want.

I only do two marathons a year. After Twin Cities, I had a good old pity party for about five days. I was driving myself nuts. “Come on, Kingsley, snap out of it!” I was just down. Then I was getting mad. “Knock it the hell off.” I don’t know about you, but you almost get neurotic afterwards, when you don’t have a race, or you didn’t race what you wanted to race. That neurotic part of the racer in me says, “Go jump into another one.” I was going to go do Houston in January. I wrote to my coach, “What should I do? I’m really fit. I hate to throw away all this fitness.” I was not well at Twin Cities, but I still raced a 2:51. What could I have done had I not been sick?

I ended up getting out of that neurotic phase. Picking a marathon is a really big deal. I only do two a year and don’t want to do any more than that because I don’t think it’s good for me. Some people can jump into one after another. But I think I would race worse. I need that three month downtime, then gear back up into marathon training. So picking Boston in 2011 to try to qualify was really hard. But I guess I’m going to have to go into it and look at it as I did before. “Okay, if I qualify I qualify.” But I can’t put all my eggs into that basket. I just need to do my marathons the way I’ve always done them. I really didn’t plan on another try at qualifying. I didn’t like the mental toll it took.

You mean after Twin Cities?
No, after trying to qualify for the 2008 Trials. I didn’t like that. You put so much into it. I want to enjoy it, not make running into something else, like, “Oh, my gosh. I put everything into this qualifier.” So I’m going to go back to Boston. I’m doing it with my team. And that will make it nice.

Well, let me just say: you’re so close! I don’t want to tell you to put your entire life on hold. But you’re so close. I hope you go for it.
I’m going to. I would be lying or trying to minimize something or make everybody think otherwise if I were to say, “I’m not going there to try to qualify.” My goal is to do the first half around 1:23, and then try to get over Heartbreak. And after Heartbreak’s done, try to bring it back down again.

You know you can fly on the second half of that course.
You really can. You know what else I did? I had somebody record coverage of the Boston race a couple years ago, when Colleen was running it. The commentators were saying, “She’s running over on the softer part of the surface.” I thought, “That’s actually a good idea.” So I watched it when Colleen raced it and that was the year — it drives me nuts that they kept saying the women were running a “pedestrian pace,” even though “pedestrian pace” is burning the road up for somebody like me — Colleen was with the top women for 20 miles or so.

I remember that race. Actually, she and Elva were leading the race for quite a few miles.
Yeah! So, being older, I watched Colleen, how she did it. How she stayed over toward the berm of the road, and trying to stay on the softer parts, and running toward the crowds. It’s kind of fun at Boston. It didn’t bother me to start in the back — I was second to last [in the women's elite start] this year. The women went out a lot faster. I came through the first mile in a 6:02 and was like, “Whoa!” I put major brakes on. There was one person behind me. The fun part of that race was that nobody passed me during that entire race except for the first few elite men. And then I passed a few of the elite men, toward the end of the race, that had cramped up because they were pushing it in that red zone the entire time.

You’ve raced well at a lot of shorter distances this year. I don’t know if people know this, but you won a couple of USATF masters championships: the Half Marathon Championships in February in Florida, and then in the spring you won the 15K Championships in Buffalo. You’re really good at a range of distances. Are you able to just go out and race these shorter distances well naturally, or are you doing training for those specific distances to prepare, within the larger context of your marathon training?
I’m glad I have a coach because I don’t like thinking. It’s really a science, in terms of when you tap into what muscles, anaerobic and aerobic, all that stuff. The bigger picture is obviously the marathon. By the time I go to Florida for the half, I’m starting my spring marathon training. For those shorter races, Darren will have me do some specific workouts. The speed workouts are geared more toward that shorter race pace. My tempo runs are typically focused on the marathon, but a little faster than that pace. My Tuesday speed workouts are geared more toward anywhere from 5K-15K pace. I do about 4-6 miles at that pace.

So on race day you’re hoping that the two ends of those extremes come together?
Yes, it seems to work well. I figure if I can do 6 miles at a 5:50 pace, then I’m good for 15K at 6:00 or slightly faster, which is what I ran at Buffalo. The last few races I’ve decided that I’ve got to get out there with the lead women. Typically I hope to slowly pull people in. I think Darren does put a few in there just to get those muscles ready for the 15K or the 5K or other distances. I like doing a lot of different distances and I find that the shorter speedwork I do for those helps my marathon.

That’s something I noticed about your racing history. Pretty much every year you’ve raced at all distances: anything from 5K up to the marathon. It looks like that’s worked really well for you.
I like to show that I can race any distance. It’s nice to establish yourself in many areas, to be able to say, “I’m not just doing the marathon. I can do a 5K at 17:00 or whatever.”

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“When you’re competing with a team, no matter how I feel that day, it’s just a different drive. At the Cross Country Team Championships I wasn’t racing for me, I was racing for Willow Street.”

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Let me ask you about your club, the Willow Street Athletic Club. I loved the way you described them: “Moms who compete.” How did you end up joining them?
I’m actually Mid-Atlantic, in terms of my area association, but they compete, typically, in New Jersey, Philadelphia. I don’t travel, unless I’m flying to a race. It’s more natural for me to head north to the Rochester area, which is where I’m originally from. So I went to all these races and ran into Emily [Bryans, team captain], and she is a phenomenal masters runner, which I didn’t know at the time. But her husband was standing there with a chocolate lab. And I love my chocolate lab. And me being me, I go over there, “Hey! Chocolate lab!” and I’m petting the dog and visiting with them.

And then I ran into them at another race. And then I ran into her again at the 5K masters championships in Syracuse, where she had just beaten me by 3 seconds. She was very nice and invited me up to a 15K that her husband puts together. I thought, “Well, that’s nice. Here’s this woman who just barely out-edged me — and that I beat in another race — and she’s invited me to come out and compete.” Then the team invited me to do a cooldown. I didn’t know she was on a team, I just saw her at races. But at the time I was thinking about a team to compete with because I wanted to mix things up. I joined the USA Track & Field Association and would look around at their races to see if there was a team I could join, just to compete with. I didn’t realize how good they were. I knew Emily was good. But they’re a really good team. I get along with them very, very well. They’re down-to-Earth moms. We’re all working. No matter how anybody does, there’s never any pressure on me. They just fit my moral base.

I know that they’re nearly three hours away from you. How do you make that work? If you’re not training with them on a regular basis, how do you sustain that relationship?
I probably went up to see them six times this year. Sometimes I’ll just go up, have dinner and stay with them. It’s really not that far. It’s three hours, but that’s a drivable distance for me when I do races. Because of where I live, I’d normally drive 1.5 hours to a local race, so three hours isn’t far for me.

How has being a member of Willow Street enriched your experience as a competitive runner?
It definitely has. When you’re competing with a team, no matter how I feel that day, it’s just a different drive. I want to do really well for my team. At the Cross Country Team Championships I wasn’t racing for me, I was racing for Willow Street. I owe it to my team to give them everything I can for the day. When you’re running for a team you don’t go, “Eh, it’s not there…” I’ll push myself because I want to give them everything I could. I want to walk away exhausted. It’s one thing to let yourself down. It’s a totally different thing — they wouldn’t even be let down — it’s just different if you walk away when you finish feeling like you had more to give. “I didn’t give it all for them.”

That’s exactly why I joined a team about six months ago.
Oh, so you just joined one yourself.

Yes. I wanted another motivator to do well in races.
Yeah. It’s something different. I’m down here training by myself, so I’ll drive up there and spend a weekend running with them, even when I’m not racing. But I think I did five races with the team.

What are some of your favorite little local runs?
10 years ago I started up with the Santa Hat Run. A friend and I thought, “Hey, why don’t we dress up like Santa Claus and run around Towanda, our little rural town, on Christmas Eve?” Every year…now we have, like, 30 people. It’s not a race. We just all dress up like a bunch of Santa Clauses. The community loves it.

This is one zombie you can't outrun.

That’s not a race. That’s a happening!
[Laughs] Yeah. And then there’s the Zombie Run. Back when I was in high school, in 1984, the art teacher wanted me to go on to art school because she really liked my artwork. Doing things like makeup art, I love. So, it was pretty gross looking, but it was fun. I’m always proud of my artistry.

You have a couple of interesting hobbies.
[Laughs] Hunting and motorcycles?

Yeah! Let me ask you first about motorcyling. Do you actually own a motorcycle?
Yes, I do.

What do you have?
I just have a little 250. My husband wants to buy me a Harley, but I put the brakes on that. The 250 looks ginormous compared to me, even though it’s a small bike. I have to say the primary motivator for both my interesting hobbies are basically…I feel as though my husband has really sacrificed a lot for my running. He really has. He does the majority of the cooking. He does the majority of everything around upkeep of the house. He does a lot so I can travel. He’s wonderful. I’m very blessed with my husband. But I felt like I really needed to get back to him.

He loves riding and he’d been asking me to get my license. And I was like, “No, I’m happy sitting on the back of your motorcycle.” Then we went to Washington D.C, for their annual ride over Memorial Day weekend — Rolling Thunder — and I decided then that I’d get my permit. I did and he got me a little bike. I buzz around this area and go for rides with my husband, and he loves it. So, really, it’s for him. I mean, I like it. I like my bicycle [Laughs] — I like physical exercise — and my husband’s not a physical exerciser. Everybody asks him, “So, do you run?” And he’s, like, “Do I look like I run?”

Sometimes it’s better if two people in a marriage don’t have everything in common with each other.
Amen, Julie. I couldn’t be married to me. Hunting’s the same thing; it’s something that he really loves. We have 200 acres. I will say, though, that the one I do by myself is turkey hunting. I can go out by myself and do that, and I do. Or I’ll go out and call. It’s just so cool to be out in the woods. You call and you get the other male gobblers to come up to you, or the females will start chucking. It’s just neat. It’s not so much about harvesting anything. It’s just being out there. It’s a really, really great experience. Most of the food we eat is food that comes from our own land, from our own garden. We literally live off of our own land. My diet is really good.

If you go out turkey hunting, how long are you out there for?
You get up at, like, 4:30 in the morning and you’re out there until around 8:00 or 9:00AM. Then, typically, you come back in. You can only go out until noon in this area. But once the sun rises and — it’s hard to explain — but when they’re done nesting, they’re out of their nests. They “hen up,” meaning they go out with the hens. So you’re basically done because they can see their hens and are with them. But it’s a really neat sport. I know that…recently I was sitting at a table with a bunch of vegans. I’m not against any of that. What I do is very humane. I like meat. I like meat.

And you shouldn’t have to apologize for that.
I know.

I don’t know anything about hunting. I actually don’t have anything against it. I eat meat and I know what animals go through in factory farms is much worse than anything that happens in a hunting situation. So I’d be a hypocrite to criticize it.
I understand where some people are coming from. But we have chickens [Laughs] — we literally eat as much as we can off of our own land. The eggs. I love that because I know what I’m eating. I worked in a cancer center for five years. And, you’re right, after you read about what happens on the farms — they dose them up with hormones and steroids and all that stuff. And then there are all these hormone-based cancers. It’s scary. We have a 2 acre garden. We do a lot of freezing. Basically 98% of what’s in our freezer came off our land.

That’s amazing.
It really is. It’s cool. You should come!

I may have to come see this for myself.
Yes.

It’s also sounds like hunting takes a tremendous amount of patience. Are there any parallels between hunting and training for you?
Yeah, definitely. You have to be very patient. Kind of like a marathon. It’s never won in the first three miles. In deer season you can be sitting out there for eight hours and not see anything. The only thing that I have trouble with is sitting still for a long, long time. Sometimes before I even go out hunting in the morning I’ll run a few miles just to get some of the bugs worked out of my legs [Laughs]. What is that Olympic event where you run and you shoot, and you run and you shoot?

Oh, the biathlon.
That’s it. I probably would have been good at that.

It’s sort of violent, as I remember. Meaning they sort of throw themselves on the ground and shoot. I don’t think you do that when you’re hunting.
No.

That’s right. They ski and then they throw themselves on the ground.
Maybe that wouldn’t work for me.

You told me that in college you created a “bucket list” and one item was to race a marathon, which you’ve obviously done. What else was on that list?
Oh, my gosh. I pulled it out probably five or six months ago and my husband said to me, “You’re going to have to create a new bucket list.” Just about everything was crossed off. The only two things that I haven’t done are to go to Africa and Hawaii. But the other items were run a marathon, get my master’s degree, certain things for my kids, go on a cruise, things like that. Yeah, I’ve done a lot of stuff.

I think you need a bucket list part B. You’re only in your forties.
When my husband said that to me, I said, “Yep.”

Do you have a favorite racing or running memory?
Winning the Wineglass Marathon the first time was an incredible memory: my whole family was there; I broke three hours for the first time; I was near home. I don’t think I slept for two days after that because of the adrenaline. I was completely on runner’s high. But Boston this year, I dare to say, topped it. When I finished it and the guy said, “I think she’s second masters,” I had no idea. I just knew I finished well and I felt so great. When they took me over to the plaza I was literally bouncing around like a rabbit. “Oh, my God!” And they were probably thinking, “Who’s this woman?” [Laughs]. They took me over there, Julie, and it was just so…I was first American and they didn’t know if they’d need to interview me.

So I’m lying there on a massage table and I’m right next to the female winner and she has the gold wreath on her head. Ryan Hall’s standing there. Meb Keflezighi’s standing there. I was surrounded by these incredible athletes. And then you have chatty me, chatting away to everybody. Interpreters trying to explain to the foreigners what I’m saying: “How’d you do?” [Laughs] Then Mary Akor, God bless her soul, let me use her room to shower because I didn’t expect to go to the awards ceremony. I would say that probably topped them all. You know when you race and the end comes out really well? I didn’t expect to do well. The paper wrote that I was coming off of a cold, but actually it was just starting. It had started the day before the race and I told my husband, “I’m getting a chest cold.”

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“When you have a bad race, you just have to remember that it’s one day. Life goes on. There are other important things out there. I enjoy running and I don’t put pressure on myself. I do, but I don’t. I don’t put pressure on that’s going to get me all tied up in my head. I’m a happy runner.”

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Oh, wow. That I didn’t know. I thought you were recovering too.
That’s what they put in the paper. I have asthma and my allergies are real bad in the spring. I’m allergic to grass and trees. I can’t lay down in the grass or I’ll literally break out in hives. So I have really severe allergies to everything outside. I love spring but it doesn’t like me back. So my husband was saying this was something that happened every year, but I said, “No, this is a chest cold.” But it stayed high enough and didn’t drop into my bronchial tubes.

I don’t know if this has been your experience, but I’ve found over the past few years that I can run really well when I’m coming down with a cold. Like the first day of a cold I’ll run spectacularly well that morning and then get sick that evening. I’ve often wondered if there’s some kind of weird metabolic boost that happens at the start of a cold.
That’s a good question because it was when I was first coming down with the cold. By the next day I had laryngitis, it was in my lungs, and I had depleted everything.

It’s a lousy racing strategy, but I’ve often wondered if I should try exposing myself to a cold virus before a major race.
[Laughs] I always complain about [menstrual] cycling. My legs are heavy, I feel blah. But my friends have reminded me that I’ve gotten more PRs then. Unlike other, gifted runners who don’t get anything, that’s never been the case with me.

What advice would you give to women who are also seeking a Trials qualifier?
There’s a multitude of things. But even if you put it all together and do everything that’s been recommended by all these really good athletes out there, the main thing is to keep yourself balanced and don’t put pressure on yourself. The minute athletes put that pressure on themselves is when they start to falter. There’s the hard work. I have that quote up on my wall: “The will to win means nothing without the will to prepare.” I get up and work hard in the morning, while others are sleeping,

I’m putting in the work. But I also listen to my body. If I’m not feeling real well, I’ll shorten the run, I won’t do the speed. I’ll put it off to the next day. I don’t ever try to work through illness, or try to push myself beyond what my body’s telling me it needs.

Recovery is also huge. A lot people go from one [race] to another. The week after I do a race I’m pretty much sedentary. You just have to know what that balance is and not push beyond it. We all have a different level. Masters runners, we have to be very, very careful with our recovery and our racing.

When you have a bad race, you just have to remember that it’s one day. Life goes on. There are other important things out there. I enjoy running and I don’t put pressure on myself. I do, but I don’t. I don’t put pressure on that’s going to get me all tied up in my head. I’m a happy runner. I’m just relaxed and having fun and enjoying the experience. But I’m not afraid to put everything out there too. And if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. But I finish knowing I did what I needed to do, and I’m happy with that.

It sounds like you have a very healthy attitude.
I hope so.

And you developed it in a very short running career. So you’re capable of making observations and learning things.
Yeah, definitely. That’s a good way of putting it. Like after Twin Cities, I was thinking, “What is wrong with your head, Kingsley?!” Once I went on the antibiotic I was fine.

It’s bad when you ruminate after a bad race.
I know. It’s always a hard call to make. I was in the race and wondering, “Should I drop?” Afterwards I told Darren I was debating about whether I should drop. But it was the first time I got my flight and everything paid for. I didn’t want to let them down — they paid to have me come out and race. I didn’t want to drop out of their race. Darren said he was glad I finished and that he was proud of me.

I think you gained the admiration of a lot of people with that run.
I don’t know. You think?

If people know the circumstances, they can’t help but see it as kind of an amazing effort.
You know, we walk that fine line, don’t we, Julie? Especially when you train for a marathon. You walk such a fine line between being healthy and not being healthy. I’m lying there with my IVs and the doctor’s saying, “She’s the epitome of health.” My husband’s saying, “She’s either really healthy or almost dead. There’s no middle!” [Laughs] And I’m saying, “I know! So get me well so I can get running!”

Well, on that note…
I was just going to say thank you so much for taking the time, Julie, with everybody, with all the runners. You’ve given us the opportunity to get to know other people too. So thank you.

Oh, you’re welcome. This has been a great project. What’s really fun is that you all are starting to meet each other at races. I feel like I’ve created this little microcosm of a running society.
You’ve started a little family!

A little virtual running team, and we’re all meeting each other at races.
Yeah. Is anyone doing Houston?

I should find out who’s doing it. I was going to, but decided not to. I don’t know if Jill [Howard] is running it still, but I will send out a note as we get a little closer. I’m definitely going to be there next year, to either run or…I’m extremely doubtful at this point that I’m going to make the Trials myself. But I do want to run the marathon, or at least the half, and just be there and meet everybody. So I’ll be there next year.
You’ll have to wear a shirt: “Hey, I’m the mom! Houston Hopefuls’ mom.”

I need a banner or something. Or a really big hat.
We definitely have to decorate you.

So let’s start with the race [The Chicago Half]. Tell me how it went.
Anytime you win your age group in a major race, you have to happy, right? It was just under 1:28. I was hoping for a little faster time. But, realistically, I honestly didn’t know what to expect because this was my first big race post-injury. I did a 5K the previous weekend. That went okay, but I was having some minor discomfort in my hamstring. I was really trying to stretch and do my physical therapy. So I got on the line Sunday morning and kind of went for it. I was really happy with how it went.

Did the hamstring feel good during the race?
My hamstring felt perfect. I did go out a little too fast, so my splits were a little all over the place, but not too bad. My 10 mile split was 1:06 and then the final time was high 1:27s. That tells you that my last 5K was off. But considering that this was a 10 mile PR for me too, that’s a great thing. So I’ll take it.

Apart from the age group award, which is great, did you have a goal time for the race?
Actually, I didn’t. I just wanted to do this race to get a race under my belt and have something good happen. Just kind of get back in the game. Because I was racing so well in the spring, and then I had the injury. I had to cancel all of my racing plans for the summer. So, while I knew I wasn’t ready to race well, I wanted to get back on the line. I wanted to get that hunger back. I’m running another half [about a month from now], so this was to get a baseline, see where I’m at, and go from there.

Sounds like it was a good test run. Not only to see where you were injurywise, but also as a good confidence builder.
Oh, exactly. I left it all out there, that’s for sure.

That’s what you’re supposed to do!
Yes, that’s right!

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“I’ve always been very driven, kind of an overachiever. That kind of goes well with the racing.”

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I liked how in the background materials you sent, you referred to yourself as a “racer.” A lot of runners make a distinction between being a runner vs. being a racer. How do you define that difference?
For me it’s two things. One, I have to have a goal. I’m extremely goal oriented. Sales is a good example. I had a sales career for many years. Every year, you have to have x number of dollars in sales. So having a goal to work toward has always motivated me. If I’ve got a marathon, or even an 8K that I’m training for, that helps focus me. And, two, I’m very competitive. I’ll compete in just about anything. I love the competition. When I get on the line, I just want to do the best I can. It’s hard to say why I’m that way. I think it’s in my blood.

Did you always know this about yourself?
Growing up, playing games and stuff, I always wanted to win. I think my family would concur with that, as would my husband. I’ve always been very driven, kind of an overachiever. That kind of goes well with the racing.

That seems to be a common theme that’s emerging in these interviews, which really shouldn’t surprise me.
No, not at all.

I wanted to talk about your background a bit. In high school, you were primarily a sprinter more than a distance runner. Although obviously you emerged as one later on, and you refer to yourself as a slow twitcher runner, and have done lots of marathons and triathlons. So it seems like you’re built for distance.
I ran Boston this year with my sister – I think that was my 25th or 26th marathon. But I kind of lost count after 20.

So not only are you built for distance, but you’re obviously very durable too.
Well, my body’s been a little beat up from time to time. You know, it’s really weird, because in high school I just thought, “I’m a sprinter.” I ran cross country, but I was never really good at it. I did it mostly to stay in shape for track. But once I started running marathons I kept gravitating toward that distance. And it didn’t really dawn on me until I started working with Dan Marks, my current coach. He said, “Oh, you’re slow twitch” right away, based on my 5K time being super weak.When first started working with him, I’d just run a 3:13 marathon. But my 5K PR was just under 21 minutes. If you look at that on paper, it makes no sense.

Yeah, that is out of whack. Although not for marathoners. In other words, it was very astute of him to note that.
He figured it out right away based on how I ran my track workouts and the fact that my stride is more of a shuffle. I’ve got endurance like you can’t believe. But my speed is where I really have to work. But the funny thing is, in high school I ran 62 in the 400, and I was on some 4×100, 4×200 relay teams that did pretty well. I was running a lot of 400s in high school and that was fun. I didn’t have to run as many miles as the “distance people” who were doing the 2 mile. So I stuck with that.

Did you enjoy the shorter races? I hear a lot of longer distance runners say (and I include myself in this) that they really hate 5Ks or anything shorter than that, because it’s too hard to run that fast.
One of the things Dan really wanted me to work on [in pursuit of a Trials qualifer] was my speed. So this winter I ran a couple of indoor mile races on the track – 8 laps to the mile – college races that were open races. And I had so much fun and did a lot better than I thought I would. Then at that point my 5K times were coming down and I was feeling better. But right now, I just ran that 5K race last weekend, and I’m not in that kind of shape. It’s a different kind of fitness, I think.

Yes, you really have to train for it.
You do. And I think if you’re not inherently good at it, you have to do a lot of 100s and 200s, a lot of really anaerobic work. Right now I’m afraid to do that because of the hamstring.

There really no reason to either.
Not when you’re doing marathon training. It very different than what I was working on in the spring before I got injured. That being said, I had fun doing the track races. It was just a whole different world for me. It kind of keeps things fresh.

I did the same thing this spring. I had been so focused on marathons and then had a bad year last year that I decided to take a season and do different things. The track racing was really a blast. I’m terrible at it, but it’s fun. It’s a new kind of pain, though.
Ooh, it is. That 7th and 8th lap, when you’re running indoors, is like, “What?! What just happened here?” But then you finish and you can’t feel your legs. But if one day I decided that I don’t want to run marathons anymore, maybe I’ll focus on that for awhile. It wasn’t too bad. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it, actually.

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“I was doing the century bike rides and charity rides on weekends. And a lot of people said, ‘You’re a really good cyclist. You should race.’ And I’m like, ‘Oh, there’s races?’”

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I know you have a history of trying a lot of different things. For awhile you did some competitive cycling and triathlons. What made you move from running to cycling?
I’m a farm girl, so I grew up with my closest girlfriend living about two miles from me. So I always had a bike and rode it everywhere. When I got to college it never dawned on me to keep running on my own. In high school I was always running with my team. After I college I moved to the Twin Cities for a couple years and bought a bike and I started riding, and I loved it. That’s how I stayed fit. It never occured to me to run. So eventually I moved back to Wisconsin and got a job where my coworkers rode a lot. I would ride with a couple of my friends there every day after work.

I wasn’t racing right away. I was doing the century bike rides and charity rides on weekends. And a lot of people said, “You’re a really good cyclist. You should race.” And I’m like, “Oh, there’s races?”

“I can compete against people? Hmm…”
Right! I was in my mid-twenties and that seemed attractive to me. So that’s how I got into it. I wasn’t really doing stuff on my own, but [in this case] was influenced by the people around me. That was what got me into competitive cycling.

A lot of people ran in high school, then stopped for a number of years and then, sometimes on a lark, got back into it. That sounds like what happened to you in 1996 when you got back into it with an 8K.
I was doing a lot of cycling that year and a couple of guys who I worked with were trying to qualify for Boston. There was an 8K run in Milwaukee in the fall. We had a team where the company sponsored us, meaning they’d pay for our entry, and we got shirts. They were looking for a woman for the team because they only had one and they needed two. And they said, “If you can bike 100 miles then you can run 5.” And I hadn’t run since high school. But that logic made sense to me, so I said I’d do it.

It’s a Saturday morning race. So Friday night after work I hop on the treadmill. “Let’s see if I can run…” I ran a couple miles on the treadmill at around 10:00 pace and thought, “Okay, I can run. This is no problem.” I get down to the race and there’s this other girl on the team. In my mind, she was a real runner. And I thought, “Okay, if I can just stay with her, it won’t be so awful.” And I actually ended up beating her. She was a recreational runner and I guess I was fitter than I thougth I was. But I was so sore afterwards. Because I hadn’t used those muscles, obviously. After that I thought, “I can’t run enough miles to be as fit as I am cycling,” so it wasn’t a case where I was immediately hooked on it. But I thought, “Hmm. I could actually beat people running. I’m not too bad at this. Now what am I going to do?”

After your post-run suffering, did it take you awhile to get back into running?
Actually, it did. That was in the fall of 1996. And then these same two guys who were trying to qualify for Boston were going to run a half marathon the following spring. That had a 10K with it. They said, “You should come with us. You should run the 10K and we’ll run the half.” So that’s how it progressed. I ran around 50 minutes for the 10K, around 8:00 pace. At the time I had no concept of pacing. I really didn’t train much for it. And then these guys did end up qualifying for Boston – and of course that intrigued me. So there was kind of this progression: “Okay, there are marathons. It seems far, but maybe it’s something I could do.”

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“When we started to feel crappy after about 20 miles, we walked through the water stops. People would say, ‘You only have six miles left!’ and we’d want to kill them. When we both crossed the finish line my response was, ‘Well, I’m never doing this again.’”

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You ended up doing your first marathon about two years after that 10K, right?
It was less than two years, now that I think about it. I was working full time and was also in grad school, so I had a lot going on my life and didn’t really think a whole lot about it. But then for some reason, one night, driving home from school, I got to thinking about running a marathon. So when I got home I called my sister and I said, “Hey, we should run the Madison marathon.” This was seven months before the race. “I think we could be ready.” She was in college at the time, in Madison, and she was like, “Yeah, why not?”

Ignorance can be a good thing in these cases.
That was the case with us. We were just, “Okay, let’s run a marathon!”

I bought the Jeff Galloway marathon book and looked at what I thought was the beginner program. I just tried to do the long runs. During the week it was really hard for me to stick to any kind of schedule because of school and work. What I had heard was that it was really important to get your long runs in. I started out by doing my long runs on the treadmill in the winter, because this was a spring marathon. I did a couple of my long runs toward the end [of training] outside. I was near rustic trails that were pretty challenging running, now that I look back on it. At the time I wasn’t really running on the roads. We were out in the country and the shoulders weren’t real wide and I didn’t feel safe. So I was doing my 20 milers either on a treadmill or on these trails.

You should have been a trail runner.
I did enjoy that, but after awhile I realized I liked running faster than that. A couple of times my sister came and ran with me and we ran 11:00 or 12:00 pace. We walked a lot. So, at the time, our goal was just to finish, to see what we could do, with no idea of what pace we were going to run.

Running in a chilly winter race.

How did it go?
We woke up the morning of the race and it was pouring rain. Thunder and lightning. But they still had the race. I was wearing a cotton t-shirt and I had never heard of BodyGlide. We just went out there and one of us decided that 10:00 pace sounded like a good idea. My sister had a watch that she could set to beep every 10 minutes. If we hit a mile mark before the watch beeped, she’d say, “Slow down! You’re running too fast!” Then I had a bathroom issue and that was the first and only time that I ever had to go to the bathroom during a race. I had no idea how to eat, no idea about warming up. I just went out there and ran. So of course I had some gastrointestinal issues. I learned so much from that race. First of all, I wasn’t mentally prepared. I think we ended up running a 4:20, which is about 10:00 pace.

That’s really not bad for a first effort, all things considered.
Well, looking back, I still can’t believe that I was the same person that I am now. We had no idea. When we started to feel crappy after about 20 miles, we walked through the water stops. People would say, “You only have six miles left!” and we’d want to kill them. When we both crossed the finish line my response was, “Well, I’m never doing this again.” And she kind of felt the same way. But a couple of weeks later I thought, “I’m going to do this again some day.” But I had a lot of learning to do before I tried another one, so it took me a couple of years to try again. It took her longer than it took me, but that’s a story for another time.

You seem to be a quick study, since you managed to qualify for Boston not long after that.
It was my second marathon, actually. After that first one, I took some time, I had some stuff going on in my personal life. I moved a couple times. And then I met my current husband, and we were dating. It was in June and I said to him, “I’m going to qualify for Boston in October.” I would do my long runs with him biking alongside of me. I stuck with doing two or three 20 milers and runs every day. No speedwork. But in that second marathon I found a pacer and said to the guy at the start, “I’m going to qualify for Boston and you’re going to help me get there.” It was a weird situation because he didn’t know the Boston qualifying standards and thought I needed to run faster than a 3:40. I said, “I’m pretty sure I need to run a 3:40. I was 30 at the time. And I did it.”

You came in well under.
Yeah. So of course my next step was that I had to go to Boston, which didn’t work out so well. I went there without really training and I ran a 3:50.

Well, it’s a tough course. Even if you’ve trained.
It is. But I think my longest run before Boston was 14 miles. So that wasn’t wise.

Wow. You are brave.
Yeah. I cried. I said, “I’m not doing this again.” I decided I was going to go back the following year and run faster. And the following year I ran a 3:30. So then I was happy.

I wanted to ask you about that. Looking at your Athlinks history, you have a whole string of marathons where you’re kind of in the same range 3:20 range, give or take 5 minutes. It looks like you hit a plateau.
At the time, I was going through a lot of changes in my personal life and career stuff. But aside from that, I was more infatuated with the idea of running marathons than actually training for them. I wanted to be able to say, “I’m a marathon runner.” But when it came down to actually training, it never came together for me. I didn’t have anyone to run with on long runs. I ran with my husband, who was running half marathons, in those days. We’d do local races together, like 5Ks.

But for most of my runs, I was alone. It was pretty daunting to me to get up and do a 20 miler by myself. So I wasn’t really faithful to my training. I would go out there without a plan. I did it for the achievement and to be able to say, “I ran so many marathons.” At one point I was looking up the 50 states thing, thinking that running a marathon in all 50 states would be a good idea. But after that I started to get injured.

Let’s talk about that. I know you moved to triathlons around 2003, you said partly because of issues with running injuries.
I didn’t do my first until 2004. But I started swimming in 2003. We’d just moved to Pleasant Prairie, Wisconson, where there’s a thriving triathlon community. They host several big races, like the Danskin Women’s Chicagoland race and their own Pleasant Prairie triathlon. I saw a of that. They had everything set up in my gym there and I started to think, “I wonder if I could do this.” But I really couldn’t swim at the time. But I was starting to have some problems. I had a stress fracture that started in 2002. It was off and on, but I ended up having surgery.

In 2003 I got it in my head that I wasn’t going to be able to run for much longer and that I was going to do triathlons. The cycling wasn’t an issue for me. I did that a lot – hop on my bike and ride 40 miles whenever I felt like it. But for some reason this sounded kind of fun and that’s when I started to have this whole battle between marathons and triathlons.

Were you particularly strong in one of the triathlon disciplines?
My bike splits were always the strongest. I think my run splits would have been stronger if I hadn’t hammered the bike so hard. I never had a good strategy either. I would be midpack in the swim. Then I’d come out of the water and note how many bikes were on the rack. “Okay, about half of the bikes are gone, so I’ve got to really chase these girls.” So I’d get out and hammer the bike. Sometimes that paid off and sometimes it didn’t. When it didn’t I would die in the run.  When it did I would have a decent run and then I would end up winning some of the local triathlons, which was awesome. I had some training and I was working with a coach, but I never pulled it all together. I never did it the right way. If I had, I think I would have been a lot more successful. And I was still moderately successful, but it was more, “This is kind of a cool thing to do.” Again, I liked the idea of it. I met some cool people.

Do you want to do triathlons again in the future?
A lot of my friends would say, “Oh, she’s going to do ironman some day.” It is on my bucket list. But I’m at a point right now where I’m not going to do it unless I can really do well. Now I’ve had the realization that if I’m going to put my time and effort into something, it’s going to be at a very high level. So, yeah, I’d like to do ironman, but only when it’s at a time in my life where I have the time to devote to doing it well. Not just go there to finish, but to race it.

That obviously has to come after this venture.
Well, I’ve recently said to some of my friends that once I stop getting faster at marathons, then I’ll think about [triathlons]. But even if my times aren’t getting faster at the marathon, if I’m still doing well and having fun and enjoying it, then I’m going to keep running marathons. That’s my niche. That’s where I feel I’m most competitive. And I think my results have proven that. So I don’t see anything other than [marathons] in the next five years, anyway.

You’re still in early days yet. There’s that theory about everyone has about a 10 year window in which to improve at the marathon, regardless of what age you are when you start.
Right. Once you get serious. I’m not starting my window until, like, late 2007. Before that, I considered myself a serious runner, but it’s like night and day between that [earlier] time period and once I got serious about it. I’ve been taking a whole different approach.

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“You can’t do both [triathlons and marathons] at a high level, and have a career, and have a life – it’s just not possible.”

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Part of “getting serious” seems to have been deciding that you couldn’t do both marathons and triathlons successfully at the same time.
That is huge. In 2006, I had a decent marathon year. I had a couple marathons right around 3:20. Also, I did my first half ironman, which didn’t go that great, and several triathlons. It seemed like I was just gone all the time. My husband was very kind about it: “You know, Julie, you have to pick. You can’t do everything well. You have to pick one or the other.” At first I was very resistant to that. I didn’t know which to do. And then, at the end of the tri season I just thought, “I can’t give up marathons.” But then my triathlon coach at the time, Willie LaBonne, sent me this sponsorship opportunity for triathlon, and it seemed like a pretty good deal. I filled it out to see if could get it, and I did, so I was sponsored for the 2007 triathlon season by Her Sports magazine. There was all this free stuff, and I was going to be in the magazine – it was just kind of seductive.

Kind of hard to turn down…
Yeah, I couldn’t turn it down. So I said, “Okay, I’m going to do triathlons in 2007.” But the kicker was that I’d planned on doing Flying Pig in 2006, but I got sick. So I already had the entry rolled over, so I thought I’d do Flying Pig and then triathlons. Flying Pig is May. My first triathlon was in June. So, guess what? I did Flying Pig, and I had a huge PR. “Oh, my gosh. I can’t give up marathons…” but then I went into my tri season. I had an okay season, but none of my times improved and we’d just moved to Chicago, and I did not enjoy riding around here. It’s dangerous. I’m not a trainer kind of girl; I want to be outside riding my bike. So after 2007 my decision was made. I was going to stick with running and that was going to be it. But it took a year of much patience on my husband’s part, knowing that I wasn’t being very smart with my choices. But he let me go through the process of finding things out on my own and that was that. You can’t do both at a high level, and have a career, and have a life – it’s just not possible.

Especially when you’ve got things competing for your attention. It’s hard to turn down a sponsorship.
Exactly. And I don’t regret it. It’s all part of what I went through to get to where I’m at today. But in a way I wish I’d started getting serious about marathons a lot sooner than I had. But you can’t go back, so you have to go forward.

Well, it hasn’t been that long. And it looks like once you made that decision, you started to make some dramatic progress.
Oh, yeah.

You got marathon PRs starting in January of 2008 and about 18 months later broke 3 hours in Chicago.
Yeah. My first marathon after following the program I’m following now was the Disney Marathon in 2008. I had run Chicago in 2007, when it was really hot. After doing triathlons all summer I did that race for fun. Disney was my goal race. I wanted to break 3:10. I did that. After that, in my next marathon, I wanted to break 3 hours. The whole year in 2008 I worked toward breaking 3 hours at Chicago in ’08. That day came and it was 85 degrees. I didn’t quite make [sub 3:00], but I stilled PRed.

So last year the plan was that I was going to do one marathon, and it was going to be Chicago, and I was going to break 3 hours. But then I got injured. It was the same injury that I had this year. But I got it earlier in the year. So around March of last year I took a good month off from running. So, again, I struggled quite a bit last year, even before my sub-3, thinking, “Well, maybe this year is shot too.” And then, for some reason, on that day in October last year, it just came together for me. So that gave me hope, that maybe it wasn’t over for me and I could still keep improving. What it told me is that I have a lot left in me.

It sounds like, in some ways, you just needed the right opportunity. The right race and the right timing.
Exactly.

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“It’s definitely a lifestyle change. Trying to get to bed at a decent time…There are lots of choices you have to make that maybe you wouldn’t have made a few years ago. You want to go to that party or have the extra glass of wine. But you have to say, ‘I’ve got a hard workout tomorrow. I’m not going to do that.’”

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When did you start thinking about a Trials qualifier? Was it something you had in the back of your mind to go after once you broke 3 hours? Or was it a new realm of possibility that presented itself only after you passed that threshhold?
Actually, it never occured to me until I broke 3:00. One of my training partners, Suzanne Ryan, had been trying for a qualifier in 2008. So I ran with her from time to time, and I would look at her as this super stud runner. She was so much faster than me. And so it just never crossed my mind. But then my old coach, Willie LaBonne, who I mentioned before – I ran into after she’d gone to Boston in 2008, where she’d watched the Trials, because she was running Boston. She came up to me and said, “You know, Julie, I watched that race and I thought you should be there. You should be in the Trials.” And I just said, “What are you talking about?” She was the first person who told me around six years ago that I could break 3 hours; that was when my PR was 3:20. She said, “No, you can do it.” So that kind of stuck in the back of my mind, but I was so focused at the time on breaking 3 hours.

Then after I broke 3 hours, I had a lot of people saying, “Are you going to go for the Trials next?” I just thought this was kind of a wacky idea. I bounced the idea off my coach and he said, “Absolutely you should try for it. There’s no reason why you can’t do it.” So it was probably last November that I started to think, “I can really do this. What do I need to do to make it happen?”

I know that one of your training partners, Tammy Lifka, had the same idea around the same time, when she managed to break 3 hours in California.
Yeah, she and I came to the same conclusion, but not after talking to each other. It was kind of weird, because we did it separately and then when we both started talking about it, we said, “Oh, we could train together. That would be so cool.”

Is there anyone else in your group who’s training for this?
Yeah, actually – Suzanne Ryan, who I mentioned before. She’s run 2:50, so she’s a lot closer. But she’s had a few injuries since her last marathon; it’s been, I think, about three years since her last marathon. But I think she’s ready to do it now. She’s running really well. She’s the only other person I know well who’s going for it. I know of other people in the Chicago area who are going for it. But I don’t focus on them. I’m focusing on myself and obviously the people I run with. We all really support each other and we want to help each other get there.

It seems that for some people the process of  going for a qualifier involves changing the perception of yourself. Taking yourself seriously in a way that you didn’t before. “I’m going from someone who’s sort of serious about marathons to really getting serious about them to the extent that I’m now trying to get into [a race] that’s incredibly difficult to get into.”
That’s for sure. It’s definitely a lifestyle change. Trying to get to bed at a decent time. Not hanging out that bar – not that I was ever a barfly. But you clean things up. I’m going to do everything I can to reach my goal. It’s not always easy. There are lots of choices you have to make that maybe you wouldn’t have made a few years ago. You want to go to that party or have the extra glass of wine. But you have to say, “I’ve got a hard workout tomorrow. I’m not going to do that.” And even stuff like nutrition – I never paid much attention to that before. “I can eat anything I want, because I’ll burn it off.” Well, that’s really not the way it works when you’re trying to compete at a higher level. You have to really watch what you’re putting in your body.

You also become a lot more efficient as you train. I find you burn a lot fewer calories the fitter you get.
Right. And you actually feel better when you eat well. It’s kind of a cycle. Once you get into good habits, your body does adapt. I don’t even want chocolate anymore, and I used to eat it every day. That’s a good thing. It’s definitely an eye-opener, when you start thinking about all these little things that aren’t that little. Things like strength training. I never did any of that. Now I’m doing pushups every day and doing core work. I have to do physical therapy still for my hamstring. I was doing a lot of upper body stuff over the winter and into the spring. All of that is the little extra sharpening that you do that make you a more well-rounded athlete.

What are you doing for your upper body? Free weights? Circuit training?
I was doing some TRX with one of my girlfriends who’s extremely strong and also an ultra runner.

I don’t know what that is. What is TRX?
It’s suspension training. You stick your feet in these straps and do pushups, so you’re kind of hanging. You should Google it sometime.

I will.
It’s like balance and strength all in one. So we were doing that a lot over the winter. And now I drop down and do pushups whenever I get a chance. You just kind of fit it in. When you’re running it’s hard to find the time to do all of that. But it is really important, especially as we get older, to keep your muscle mass from shrinking too much.

Are you doing any other kind of cross-training?
Right now, I have no time. I was riding my bike a lot when I had my injury. But, to be honest, I really don’t like the elliptical. I don’t like swimming. So, no, I haven’t been. My physical therapy regimen is 30 minutes a day if I do the whole thing, so there only so many hours in the day to do all that.

I do a lot of stuff in front of the television in the evening. All the stretching and strengthening that you can do in the living room.
That’s really smart. There’s a lot you can do there, if you think about it.

Are you getting regular massages?
I haven’t been, mainly because of the time issue. I’m going to start doing that, especially for the high mileage. That’s another thing I’ve heard is really good when you’re running high mileage.

Yes, it can keep small problems from becoming big problems. I highly recommend it.
My physical therapist was giving me massages from time to time, but I’ve only got a few more sessions with her. I’ve got another one who’s been recommended. We’ll see if I can fit that in. It’s one of the last pieces of the puzzle that I need to put into place.

When did you start working with your current coach, Dan Marks, and his group?
Right after I ran a 3:13 at Flying Pig in 2007, I was starting tri season. I went to a little local 5K and saw Suzanne Ryan at that race and thought, “She looks pretty fast. Let me see who she trains with.” So I went up and started talking to her, and she introduced me to Dan. At that point, I was just looking for someone to do track work with, since I was still doing triathlons. I started going to their track workouts and really didn’t talk to Dan much about what I was doing. But once tri season ended that fall and I was going to start training for the Disney Marathon, I asked Dan if he would write a training program for me. That was the first real marathon that I trained for with him. And, actually, it went really well. I learned a lot about how to train right, and how you should do your long runs with faster segments if you want to train your body to run at marathon speeds; training by heart rate; nutrition. That seemed to be working so I thought I should stick with it.

Is Dan a marathoner himself?
Yes, he is. He’s training for the same marathon that I’m training for, California International, in December.

That’s a unique thing about him, that he’s actually training with you. He’s not just standing there with a stopwatch.
Yeah, he does most of the workouts. Obviously, he’s a little bit faster than we are. But he’s there. I go about three days a week, on harder days. He’ll give me feedback about my workouts. For the most part, I know what I need to work out. It’s a solid relationship right now, where I know where I know where I need help from him and where I don’t. I could so some of [the work] by myself, but having that extra accountability and support ties it all together for me.

Are there other aspects to working with him and with a group that are helping you? For example, the structure of the workouts? Or even just things like camaraderie?
When I’m on vacation and have to run by myself for a week, it gets really hard. I don’t like running with people every day. I like to do my easy runs alone. But when you’ve got a hard workout to do, it’s so much easier knowing you’re going to have 10 of your friends show up to do the same workout. We’ve got a lot of really fast women now in our group. We all have our strengths. It’s been really awesome this year. We’ve got some triathletes in there. We’ve got a girl who’s a really fast track girl. We’ve got our ultra girl who comes out and does our workouts with us, and she can do 50 miles faster than most people in the world. It’s just a great group that we have. And, not that the guys aren’t all great too, but these women all inspire me. Most of them are in their thirties and forties, and we’re all super supportive of each other. It’s a great thing knowing that when I show up at the track, there’s going to be all these people pushing me.

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“It just hit me about two years ago – I don’t have a whole lot of time to continue to improve. Just based on pure biology…It’s kind of like a bizarre type of biological clock. And I think it’s different kint of athlete that comes to maturity later.”

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Every year I look at the statistics on road racing in these “state of the sport” reports that come out. And, typically, the most competitive age group for women seems to be the 40-44 age group. I have a theory that some women sort of “wake up” in their late thirties, or when they hit 40, and realize that this is important to them. They want to put something into this. Is that your experience?
Absolutely. It just hit me about two years ago – I don’t have a whole lot of time to continue to improve. Just based on pure biology…

…you realize the clock is ticking.
Yeah. It’s kind of like a bizarre type of biological clock. And I think it’s different kint of athlete that comes to maturity later. For me, I’ve learned so much along the way from dabbling in running marathons. Every PR I get, I appreciate it so much more because 10 years ago, if someone had told me I was going to break 3 hours, I would have said, “Get out of here!” I looked at those women who were running 2:59 as unapproachable. I had no concept. Having been around running all these years – I wasn’t a midpacker, but I wasn’t super competitive. Now, every single time I run a strong race, I think, “I’m 40 and I’m getting faster. How cool is that?”

That’s very exciting.
I think there’s a lot of women who, for whatever reason – they have their kids in their early thirties – for me it was more about establishing my career and putting a lot of effort into that at a time when I could have been maximizing my running potential. But I had other things in my life. Now I’m at a point in my career where I know what I want to do, and that’s going well. Yeah, there’s times when it’s crazy, but I don’t have to prove myself so much anymore. So the timing probably works out the same for a lot of women, for maybe a number of different reasons.

To touch on your career for a moment – it sounds like you have a really supportive employer.
Yes, I’ve been with the same company for 12 years. I started out in sales and when I was ready to move on from that, they enabled me to move into marketing. I did that for a couple of years, and now I’m in operations. But I’ve been working with the same group of people for 12 years. On Monday, after my half marathon, I came into work and my boss had taped my race results to my monitor with “Congratulations” on them. That’s how cool they are. I run on my lunch break. I do a lot of doubles now to get the miles in. They’re very supportive. When I was just starting in my career, I don’t think it would have been possible to do what I’m doing now.

With Dan and crew after a track session.

Can they even fathom what you’re doing? Do they understand what the Olympic Marathon Trials are?
No, probably not.

They just know you’re doing something serious.
“When are you trying out for the Olympics?” They don’t get it that, first of all, there’s probably zero chance that I’ll be in the Olympics. Just the fact that I’m willing to put it out there, that I’m going for the Trials. It’s hard to wrap your mind around it for most people. Five years ago it would have been hard for me to wrap my mind around it too. But now I’ve realized what potential I have, and I really want to pursue that.

Now you’re one of those fast women. And now you know what they had to do to get that fast.
Exactly.

Speaking of that, I was curious to know what kind of mileage you’re up to.
I hit 100 for the first time about three weeks ago. After my injury I started running again in mid-July, around 50 miles a week, then 70. In August I was getting into the 90s. The last few weeks I’ve raced, so I’ve been at 70 for that time. But I’m going to try to get back up to 100 again. But the problem with a 100 mile week is you have no time and you’re tired all the time. When I did that it was with a 20 miler as my long run. It was actually almost 103 miles that week…

…but who’s counting?
Yeah, well, I wanted to count! I’m like that. I download all my data instantly. I like the numbers. So that was my big milestone. I’m most concerned about feeling good and getting in the quality [work]. I would like to be in the 90s at least. If I can hit the 100s, that’s great. I’ve done a lot of reading on high mileage, and as long as your easy runs are easy, it’s a good thing. I try to keep those anywhere between 8:00, even 8:45 pace some days, depending on what I did the day before. I don’t worry about my pace. I just go by feel. So doing the doubles has been working well for me. I go out for 4-6 miles every day at work. That’s how I get the mileage in.

I imagine you can knock those out pretty quickly, given the paces you’re running.
Yeah. Sometimes I’ll come back at 1:00 o’clock. “I just ran 4 miles at 7:30 pace.” That’s probably faster than I should, but some days I just feel really good. It works out well.

Do you ever use your Garmin’s heart rate monitor to rein yourself in on easy days, to make sure you’re not running to hard?
I should. I don’t. I only wear my heart rate monitor for longs runs and workouts. You’re making a good point. I probably should do that more. It hasn’t really been an issue for me, especially having been injured. My easy days have been pretty slow. But I had one day last week where I was supposed to do 10 miles easy, and I was running close to 7:00 pace because I felt so good. That was a day where it helps to have a heart rate monitor on. But some days you just have it and sometimes you don’t. Normally that doesn’t happen to me, but when it does it’s almost too good to pass up. But then you pay for it the next day.

It’s hard to know when to run by feel vs. doing what someone’s told you to do.
Exactly. I don’t want to be totally by the numbers all the time. I guess if I thought I was having a constant problem I would start being more diligent about wearing my heart rate monitor.

You may have found this during your 90+ mile weeks, but I find that once you start hitting triple digits, your recovery pace starts taking care of itself. It’s impossible to run too fast because you’re so tired anyway.
That is true. That week was kind of a blur. There was one day when it was 95 degrees out at noon and we’re going to do 4 miles. After 3 miles I said, “I’m done.” It was too hot and I’d done a hard workout that morning, and I said, “No, this is craziness. I’m just doing this to get up to 100.” But I think the more 100 mile weeks I put in, the less of a big deal they’ll be. My only concern now is that it’s so dark in the morning, so the safety factor comes into play. I’ve started running with my headlamp and have tried to be really careful.

That’s hard.
Yeah, it is. But I think then the pace also takes care of itself because you don’t want to trip and fall.

I know the Chicago area gets very icy in winter, so a lot of people take it inside and use the treadmill.
I take it more to the indoor track rather than the treadmill. I try to run outside in the winter as much as I can.

I know Dan is a big believer in building up in stages, training for a fast 5K and a fast half as part of the initial stage of marathon training. Is that what you’re doing?
I’ve learned that that’s what I need to do to get my marathon time down. He believes that you don’t get faster by running more marathons. You get faster by running shorter stuff. Because I’m so good at burning fat and running long distances, I believe that to be true. Although it would be great to break 18:00 for the 5K, I’m not so concerned about breaking a certain time. I’m more concerned about getting some good, solid races in. I don’t know what a fast 5K for me would translate to for a marathon. I just want to give it my best shot. So I’ve got another 5K coming up next weekend [look this up and see how she did].

And then I’m going with Tammy to Des Moines for a half marathon there. I think it’s October 17. We’re both going to run that as – I don’t want to say “test” for California – but for me it’s a goal race. I’d like to see how much my time can improve from the Chicago Half. By then I will have had a few more good weeks in, and my hamstring will keep getting better. I learned some things [in Sunday's race] about myself that I can apply to the next one. I think it’s good to have incremental goals and not just one or two races a year. Having all these smaller milestones to work toward is really helpful.

Yeah, it’s very difficult mentally to focus on just one or two races a year, especially when something goes wrong. It helps to have other [races] to break things up.
That is so true.

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“For me, the benefits of Chicago aren’t just that it’s a flat course. I can sleep in my own bed. My family can come out and support me.”

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Speaking of marathons, I know you have two goal races for trying for a qualifying time: California and Chicago. These are both fall marathons. How come you’re not targeting any spring races?
If I thought I’d be ready to try again in the spring, I’d probably try. It depends on what happens in California, of course. But I found out after running Boston this year that it does take a lot out of my body, to run a marathon. Even though I didn’t run at my goal pace, just running the distance, you lose a lot of time in training. I want to give myself the best shot at it. So after California [assuming this race goes well], I’d like to work on my speed again, do some more track work, and then see what my half marathon looks like and go from there. I’d like to try at Chicago because I know that course. I’ve run it five times and have had good experiences there. That’s Dan’s coaching philosophy: a slow twitch runner has to maiximize potential with getting that speed work under your belt and doing a good job with that. I’m sold on that idea, so that’s what I’m going to try to do next year.

Chicago is notoriously flat. Do you do well on flat courses as opposed to hilly ones?
Competitively speaking, I do better on hills. I’m definitely a hill runner. Early on, some of my PRs were on hilly courses. Flying Pig is hilly. I had a PR at Boston many years ago. For me, the benefits of Chicago aren’t just that it’s a flat course. I can sleep in my own bed. My family can come out and support me. There’s a lot of plusses to it. I wanted to do California because I’ve heard such good things about it, and I needed a break from Chicago this year. So I thought I’d give CIM a shot. But if there was a spring marathon that spoke to me, maybe I’d consider it. But I don’t think that for me that’s a good option; I want to focus on speed in the spring.

Standing in the appropriate place.

Are you planning on running CIM with anyone?
No. I do better in races if I just focus on myself. We’ve got [quite a few people] from my group going out there to do the race. I have to be very inwardly focused for an effort like that. I’m going to isolate myself before the race and focus on what I need to do. The worst thing I can do is worry about what someone else is doing and get sucked into that. That’s not a good idea for me.

Do you do anything in particular to mentally prepare for a goal race? For example, do you like to preview the course?
I’ll drive the course with my husband. We’ll drive the course a couple days before the race. I’ve heard there are some hills out there. I’ll do a lot of visualization, and say some prayers. At that point I’m going to know what my goal pace is. We do a test on the track about three weeks before the race, by heart rate, to see that the goal pace should be within a few seconds per mile. I’ll just be very focused. That’s when I have my best race: when I’m very calm, and I have a plan. I really can’t worry about what anyone else is doing.

It sounds like having a plan is something you learned…
…the hard way, maybe? Yeah, well, I’m a different runner than I was even three years ago. I have so much more confidence. A lot of it comes from, I won’t say bad experiences, but just dumb experiences. But that’s all part of life, right?

What’s your most memorable racing experience?
That’s an easy one. It was when I broke 3 hours in Chicago last year. I went into that race not putting any pressure on myself. I was really down in 2008 after I didn’t break 3 hours. Even though I know why – the weather was bad. But I didn’t want to put that pressure on myself. So I went in thinking, “I’m going to have the best race I can.” I knew I would PR. My friend Amanda told me, “You will break 3 hours.” And I was like, “Okay, whatever. I’m not going to think about it.” I went out there and knew where my heart rated need to be. Every little bit I’d glance down and it was lower than that, and that continued. I was running 6:40s. By the halfway point, which was just under 1:29, I was thinking, “Oh, my gosh. I really could do this.”

And, you know, you have your moments during the race. But every time I had a bad moment, I would see someone I knew, like my husband was out there, and Dan was out there, and a few other people I know who weren’t racing; my neighbor was even out on the course. So every time I had a bad spot I would see somebody. It was just the coolest thing.

So when I got to the “one mile to go” mark and I saw 2:52 on the clock, I thought, “I only have to run a 7:00 mile.” It was almost like a dream. Everything went perfectly. I’m not big on eating or drinking during races. I took Gatorade maybe three or four times. The weather was perfect – in the 30s, which for me is perfect. I was so emotional when I go done. I looked for my husband right away. It was just an awesome day. If I could have that feeling and just bottle it up I would be happy forever.

It’s really wonderful when you hit a perfect day and you have a perfect race. It’s so rare.
It is! You don’t get a whole lot of them.

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“Don’t sweat the small stuff; focus on your goals; take it day by day; and never doubt that you can do it.”

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I think it’s what keeps people racing, to try to get it back again.
Yeah, you’re right. It’s that elusive perfect race. And even though my splits weren’t quite even, they were close enough to even that I was really happy with the whole day. That’s why I’d like to go back and do Chicago again next year. I’ll see what happens this year – hopefully I’ll have the same experience in California this year as I had in Chicago last year.

Well, it sounds like you’re doing everything to prepare.
I’m doing everything I can, yes. Absolutely.

My final question, which I ask everyone, is if you have any advice for other masters women who are going after a qualifier?
Yes. I would say: Don’t sweat the small stuff; focus on your goals; take it day by day; and never doubt that you can do it. As soon as you start to have doubts, such as when you have a bad day and you start to question things, it’s wasted energy. So have a plan, stick to it, and go for it. Because you only live once, right?

I hope that’s not true. But it probably is.
Well, that’s a whole other topic right there.

Yes. But I think we should plan for that contingency. And race accordingly.
Exactly. I just think this is your time to shine. I wasn’t afraid of turning 40. But I thought 40 was so old. And now, I’ve never felt this good in my life. I feel like I’m finally hitting my stride, know who I am, know what I want to do, and have the confidence to go for it. And so this is the time to do it.

You’re echoing a sentiment that I hear a lot. I tell people who are approaching 40 that it gets a lot better after 40.
So far, I have found that to be true and agree with that. It just keeps getting better. So now that I’ve talked your ear off – am I more talkative than your other interviewees? Or are we all pretty much the same…

This has really been a delightful discovery. You’ve all been very talkative and and very articulate. It’s made this really easy for me, because I just have to come up with questions and everyone just answers them with great answers – and clear answers!
We spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff. We all do. It’s very important to all of us. It’s a big part of our lives. I don’t want to speak for the rest of your interviewees, but I’m sure we all take this very seriously. It’s easy to talk about something when you’re so passionate about it.

What’s been interesting to me is how people’s paths to this have been so varied. You’ve got people with high school running backgrounds, no running backgrounds, triathlon backgrounds. It’s interesting how people make their way to this and it’s very common – and I went through the same thing – where I started racing and I didn’t know anything about racing. I didn’t even know where to pin the number. Nothing.
Right! I pinned it on my back the first time! Can you believe it?

You just think about all the stupid things you used to do. And you soak up so much knowledge by osmosis, that when you talk to new runners, you realize how much you know. It doesn’t seem like you’ve made that big an effort over time, to absorb all this information. But you end up becoming an expert about all these things: nutrition; injury; physiology; weight training. You realize, once you get serious about this, that everyone’s kind of an “amateur expert”…everyone has this incredible store of knowledge.
It’s true. I even volunteered to do a webinar for my coworkers on starting an exercise program. And I’m thinking, “What the heck do I know about this?”

I’m sure you’re qualified at this point.
I know a lot about it, actually. Our HR/benefits director was talking about it on our last conference call: “Well, Julie’s a professional marathoner…” She said something like that, and I was like, “Well, I don’t know about that. But I do feel that it’s very important for people to be fit, so I’ll be happy to talk about it.” But people are going to be intimidated, so I’m going to have to really put it down at that level: if you’re starting from scratch, then this is what you do.

But if you do it the right way, you may plant a seed in someone’s mind.
Exactly. I do think that I’ve inspired some people to do some things over the years that they maybe wouldn’t have done otherwise. I think that’s a good thing. If you can have positive influences on others, that’s just icing on the cake.

That’s what a lot of this series is about. I felt like there were probably some very interesting, inspiring stories out there. And my suspicions have been proven true. I’ve gotten some good feedback on these interviews. So I think you all have managed to inspire a few people.
Good!

Plus I think it’s good to bring people together. You’re training with Tammy, but a lot of people I’ve interviewed are sort of toiling away on their own without anyone else around, and I think they’ve found it valuable to know that there are other people out there doing this.
I can’t imagine. That would be so much harder, to me. Without that support system. All the women I run with are so inspirational to me in their own way. It just gives you that boost that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

One word of warning about the audio version: Skype, in its infinite wisdom, decided to install a software update during the interview. So at the tail end the audio goes haywire as my bandwidth becomes clogged and it’s nearly impossible to make out what Karrh is saying. I salvaged what I could. Also, my apologies for starting things off with mundane chitchat about the weather.

You ran the mile and two mile in high school. Then you say you got burned out after that. Can you talk about what happened to you post-high school?

I was training pretty intensely. Basically, track and cross-country were my life at that point, all through high school from ninth through twelfth [grades]. I went to Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. By the time I got there I was thinking I would be running. I got a few scholarship offers from various schools. But I ended up going to ACU not on scholarship.

But I realized, number one, how nice it was to have a little bit of freedom. I was so regimented during high school – practiced and ran all the time. And I was burnt out. I continued to run. I’ve always run, since I was 13. I’ve never really taken a break except for pregnancies.

I didn’t compete at that point. I would run a couple of little races here and there, just fun things. But nothing competitive. There’s a huge, long stretch of me not really racing – other than going to the little 10K here and there. I would just get up and do my own morning run, but nothing competitive, really, until recently again.

What got you competing again? Your record starts at 2003, with some 10Ks. What happened that year?

I had four children in 5.5 years. So I just started getting back into it, just really enjoying it again. Also for sanity purposes – it was kind of my only moment away. To be real honest with you, I have some natural, God-given talent here. I’ve always enjoyed running. I just decided to crank it up again. And, thankfully, I’m able to do that when I want to. So, it’s kind of been a series of events and a natural progression.

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“It takes a lot of hard work, as you know — as anyone knows — a lot of hours on the road.”

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I started doing a few little runs again, half marathons and stuff. And then I decided that I’d like to compete and that I really should be running a lot faster. I started cranking up the training, just on my own at first. Every race, I’d get a little bit faster, little bit faster. I started moving up the front line there and taking off with the front runners. And just having a nice little long stretch of first, second, third place finishes.

You know how it is. You just kind of get more into it. I thought, “I need to get a coach and get just a little bit more direction here.” So I went with Greg McMillan. So now he is currently coaching me, sending me my workouts and that sort of thing.

So, it’s just been this progression. From the half marathon – I did a long stretch of those. And then I just said, “I’m going to go do the marathon.” That’s when I went out to the California International Marathon in Sacramento. I went out there just to do a sub-3:00. And I was with the three hour pace group and I realized that I needed to go a little bit quicker, and took off and ran a 2:51 out there.

And then I decided I wanted to go to Boston. And they said, “We’d like you to be with the elite group.” And so I got to run that and did a 2:49 out in Boston. And then went to the [USA Marathon] Championship last year. It was a qualifier and I said, “I’d really like to qualify [for the Olympic Trials].”

Thankfully, it was one of those perfect days. Everything fell into place beautifully. I felt great. I was very well trained. Everything was kind of fine tuned. I typically go to these races by myself, with so many people to drag out there with my whole gang. I really did not want to come home without qualifying. It was one of those mindset things. I knew I had all of this year to do it, but I really wanted to do it on that particular day at the Championships.

You had an amazing time, too. The differential just in six months between your Boston time and what you ran that day…did you know that day that you were really “on” and having a good day?

I felt it, and certainly knew it when I crossed that half at 1:18. It was really just a day when it was perfect temp for me. I caught a groove. I ran with a gal named Wendi Ray. The two of us were together for the majority of the race. Everything just clicked. It’s just like anything else – there are days when everything comes together. It was just a day were I caught a groove and felt great. It was perfect.

I thought, “2:45, as long as I’m on this end of the 2:46 mark. But 2:45 would be great.” And everything was right. When I came around the corner and it was 2:40 I was pretty pumped about it. I felt thrilled with the results. I trained perfectly for it. All this being said, it takes a lot of hard work, as you know – as anyone knows – a lot of hours on the road. But that was definitely just a day where everything came together beautifully. So I was very, very pleased, needless to say.

Given how well that race went, do you have any temptation to try for an A standard? You’re only three minutes away.

Absolutely. I’m going back up to Minneapolis in October to the [USA] Masters Championships and I would love to qualify and get that A standard. That would be my next goal.

Are you planning to run with anyone in that race? Or are you going to just go it alone and see if you end up running with someone again?

I don’t know who the field is even at this point. Last time I checked it hadn’t even been published. I don’t know how many masters or who’s going to be there. There’s a couple of them who obviously stand out: Colleen De Reuck…

Ready to run, at a bit later than 4:00 in the morning.

I haven’t really followed the field. I really run for the thrill of it and for the enjoyment. I’m not that really follows everybody else’s careers and what they’re doing. I kind of just go out and do my own thing. I always train on my own. And so I’ll just get up there and maybe catch a groove with someone like I did. Wendi and I obviously didn’t know each other. We just lined up at the start line together. There was a large pack of us for the first half. Then she and I just kind of went off together. But it’s just one of those situations where if you find a groove with somebody, you can take off with them and you’re running stride for stride, it’s great. But at a lot of these marathons, I end up kind of on my own for long periods, like Boston. And I just ran out in San Diego in June.

How was that race for you?

That race was a little tough. I’d previously gone to Nashville. I was going to do Nashville and Minneapolis this year. Those were my two races. I went to Nashville at the end of April and, in a bizarre set of circumstances, I got misguided. I was in third place there, running with a Russian gal. We were running together and we got misguided and ended up with the half marathoners.

Yes, I wondered about that time. It was a strange time. I figured you were pacing a slower runner.

You saw my time there. I hit the half at 1:20 and then I finished at 2:10 or 2:12 or something [2:09:16]. Yeah, we got lost. The person that was supposed to turn us wasn’t there. It was just a fiasco. Anyway, that being said. Greg and I discussed whether I end on that note. I had run 21 hard miles that day, by the time we crossed the half marathon finish line. So it was, “Do I revamp here? Take absolutely no time off an revamp up to 85-90 miles a week and go to San Diego? Or do I just let this lie?”

Mentally, I didn’t want to let it lie. So I turned back around and got ready, which was supposed to be my down time, and went out there. So it was a tough race for me. I was pretty fatigued going into it. I’m glad I did it and I’m glad I completed it. But it was kind of a tough run for me.

I would never recommend that anyone go and race almost two marathons within a six week period. It’s pretty tough on the body. But, anyway, it was an okay run.

How long have you been working with Greg?

I guess it’s coming up on two years. Right after Boston – a year an a half, maybe? He sends me my schedule every day and I’ll give him my workouts daily. And then it’s just a matter of me getting up and doing them.

Are you sharing any kind of data with him? In terms of paces or heart rate information? Or is it more casual communication about how you’re doing?

It’s definitely more casual. I will give him some feedback and he’ll ask if I feel like I need more in one area. Or how things are going. But it’s very casual. It’s more just him kind of giving me some guidance on ways to be stronger and to be prepared for these races, and then I go do them. It’s usually me and the possums out at 4 o’clock in the morning. A few rodents and myself are about the only people out.

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“Most people probably wake up with a cup of coffee. I wake up with that first mile or two.”

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I hope you’re a morning person, getting up and training at that hour.

I have become one, certainly.

You must be tired later in the day. Just looking at the training schedule that you sent, some of these days are not only high mileage days, but they’re high intensity in the middle of them. Do you need to do anything later in the day, like take a nap to help recover from it?

I’m sure it would benefit me. But it’s not an option. I crash pretty hard when I finally lay down. Thankfully, I’m high energy and somehow I’ve adapted to the schedule. And I’m not going to say that there’s not a little tiredness. When I have a 20 mile day, or even more, there’s certainly some time when I would probably love to rest. But my oldest child has just turned 11 a few days ago, and my youngest is 5. So about the time when a nap would be really appealing is when the chaos of homework and everything ensues. So it’s just not an option.

So we go from there to all activities to, as fast as we can, the dinner hour and baths and all that kind of craziness. And then the day ends and I crash after I get my little jobs done. But, thankfully, at this point I don’t need a lot of sleep. Every once in awhile it catches up with me and I’ll get a good, solid night. But I don’t need a lot.

And I absolutely look forward to my runs. I wake up several times during the night. I lay out all of my stuff before I go to bed. It’s all laying there. I put my stuff on. The majority of the time I walk out kind of half asleep. Most people probably wake up with a cup of coffee. I wake up with that first mile or two. That’s just been my routine for so long that I really don’t know any different. It just works, for whatever crazy reason.

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“I don’t do a lot of cross-training. I just hit the road. And run. That’s kind of what I’m built for, I think, and it’s all I really know. Me and running.”

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It’s just amazing to me that you have kids that young, yet you’re able to keep up this kind of schedule. Especially on your double days. How do you fit in the PM workout?

A series of ways. There are many, many days I end up on the treadmill despite the fact that I would rather not. But just because they’re all there. There are some times when a neighbor will say, “Hey, I know you’ve got another run. Go on out and do that.” I only really do the two-a-days for an 8-10 week period before I run a marathon. So it’s not a long period of time. And 5 or 6 miles, I can knock out pretty quickly. So if I’m fortunate and lucky and a neighbor happens to volunteer to take them, then I get to go outside. But a lot of times it’s on the treadmill.

Are you doing any cross-training, or making other concessions to age? To get the work in but maybe not with so much time on your legs? It sounds like you can handle high mileage, so maybe you don’t need to do that.

I probably should be. But I’m just a runner. People have asked me about triathlons and that kind of thing. I don’t do much else. I do a lot of weights, and pushups and situps and that kind of stuff. But I don’t do any swimming or biking or anything like that, other than just jumping in my pool in my backyard. Recreationally swimming some laps just because it’s fun.

But, no, I don’t do a lot of cross-training. I just hit the roads. And run. That’s kind of what I’m built for, I think, and it’s all I really know. Me and running. We’ll see how long that can go. For the first time, after those back-to-back marathons, I’ve had a little bit of a longer recovery period than I typically am used to. So hopefully I’ll continue on for a few more years. Recovery is definitely part of the equation that I’m needing a little bit more of. And I’m sure I’ll continue to need some more of as I get older and start to feel things a little bit more.

Besides the Masters Championships in October, do you have any other races planned leading up the Trials? Full marathons? Or are you going to play it by ear?

We are. At this point, I’m going to go up and hopefully have a great race in Minneapolis. Then I may, next year…I really enjoy half marathons. Number one, because the training’s a little less. And number two, the recovery: I can run a half marathon and be back at home that afternoon and taking care of everything I need to instead of needing the next couple of days just to recupe.

I may go back to running a few of those. I’d like to race a few of those again and get my time down even a little bit more. So I’m thinking I’ll probably do a few of those next year. I haven’t even planned them. I may squeeze in another marathon. But the marathons I want to do are probably too close to the Trials. I’d love to go up and run Chicago at some point. But, I don’t know. We’ll play that by ear and see what ends up happening.

I keep on saying to myself that next year’s going to be a down year, and just enjoy some fun 10Ks and halfs. I’m not much of a 5K gal, because they’re a bit too fast for me. I’m not fast. I can just kind of go the distance. But, that being said, as much as I’m resisting running a marathon, my guess is I’ll be signed up for one and be there. It’s a slight addiction.

Yes, you talk about it as thought it’s something that’s not really under your control. Which I certainly understand.

You’re right. At this point sometimes I feel like that. You just kind of get sucked up in it. And then it’s, “If I could just get my time down a little bit more…”

A lot of it is just the love of it. I love the training. I love getting up to the starting line. Of course, I love crossing the finish line. The whole process to me is nothing but enjoyable. Obviously, people talk to me on a daily basis. I live in this little bubble here in Atlanta. So I’m known as the runner that’s out all the time. People are just amazed and probably questioning my sanity often. “Four kids? What’s going on?” And all this racing. Obviously it’s for the love of it. You don’t do things, especially ones that take as much time as this, if you don’t thoroughly enjoy every bit of it. That’s my story. That’s kind of what it is for me. It’s something that I thoroughly enjoy and look forward to each and every day.

Just going back to the half marathons – I’d be really curious to see what you could do if you just trained toward that, given the fact that you hit the half last October in 1:18. I’m sure you’ve got a lot of [potential for] downward movement.

I’d really like to see what’s there. It’s such a fun race, the half. You can really give it all you’ve got.

I love seeing the downward progression you made. It’s so steady. Your times came down in almost every race.

That’s part of this whole deal for me: “I know I can go a little faster. I know I can go a little faster.” When I say faster – I surely am not a fast person. My 5K split in the marathon is going to be the same as when I just go out and run a 5K. I don’t have a lot of speed. But, yeah, I would really like to get that half marathon time down just a little bit more. Obviously that would benefit my marathon time too. So that’s definitely something I’ll focus on next year.

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“I don’t believe in this whole age thing in the running world. I do think that you can go out there an compete with some of the younger gals and do really well.”

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Do you have a particular goal for the Trials race itself?

Just being there is something. I just wanted to get there. I don’t even really know what to expect. When I look at that list, there are so many gals that are significantly younger than myself. I really don’t believe in this whole age thing in the running world. I do think that you can go out there and compete with some younger gals and do really well. But there’s a lot of gals that are running some incredibly strong times.

I would love for that to be the pinnacle. Whether I go up and do really well in Minneapolis – I hate to compare it, because I feel like maybe between now and then [the Trials] I’ll even run faster than 2:40. I’d like to do a sub-2:40 before I get there. But I would love for that just to be the race of a lifetime. And what that number is, I don’t know. But I’m going to give it all I’ve got. I’m going to be fine-tuned and trained to a point where I know I couldn’t have done anything else. I couldn’t have done any better. That’s the goal there.

Not to get too far ahead of things, but you’re only 40. Do you see this as something you’d like to pursue for 2016?

Gosh, if it continues, I certainly could. I’m kind of taking it one race at a time. And obviously the goal is to stay healthy. It [running] becomes more important as I age. I appreciate it and I relish it. I can’t say for sure, but it would be something to shoot for.

Do you have any advice for other masters women who might be shooting for this goal?

If somebody can put the miles in and they have the desire, put age aside. You know, it’s not easy. But you can do it. I would encourage them to go for it.

When we were first in touch a few months back, you’d put your chances of qualifying at 15%. Do you still think your chances are that slim, or do you feel any sunnier about them?
I’m going to hold out on being sunnier until after Twin Cities [October 3, USA Marathon Masters Championships]. Right now I’d still put it at around 15%. And that’s for a variety of reasons. One is that I have a very limited personal window. And it’s gotten shortened by the knee injury last year. The timing on that couldn’t have been much worse. I had in my head that I would train through the rest of 2008. I had hoped to chop a little time off [of my marathon best] at the end of that year, but that didn’t happen.

So I decided to have one last blowout of running before I went into nine months’ straight of directing. When I’m directing I’m not only teaching two classes, advising students, sometimes doing independent studies — but I’m also in the rehearsal hall from around 6PM-11PM six nights a week. I do run. I think I probably managed 40-60 miles a week during that time, but it’s definitely not organized, structured training. It’s more to just stay sane.

Knowing I was heading into those other commitments, I did two marathons back to back and then in May I did my first (and possibly my last) ultra. It was barely an ultra; it was a 50K on trails. I’m a horrible trail runner. In fact, my funny story there is that I fell four times during this ultra. I’m told that the trails were not that technical. But they felt quite technical to me. I hadn’t trained for it, I didn’t have trail shoes, I didn’t know what I was doing. I wound up taking over first place sometime after halfway and of course at that point the competitive juices kicked in and I was like, “I can’t possibly lose first place. That would be horrible.” And apparently the woman who came in second — who, had that race been 800m longer, probably would have caught me — I had no idea she was there. She wasn’t either of the two people I’d passed. She came from way, way, way back and went on a tear. But apparently when she hit the last group of guys that I’d run quite a bit with, she asked if there were any more women. They said, “There’s one, but you’ll catch her. She falls all the time.”

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“With the marathon, everything can go wrong. There’s something alluring about a race in which you control your training so much — you have to really put a ton of training in. And then you have one day and one shot. There’s something very appealing to me about that.”

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So I’d said that that was my year to do [an ultra] — May 2009 — because if I got injured it would be fine, because I was [going to be] taking all this time off [from hard training]. Well, unfortunately, I’m pretty sure [that race] caused the injury. Or at least started some problems that I didn’t know were there. And then, literally the week before my third of three shows closed, when I was planning to start training at the end of September, early October for Grandma’s Marathon in June of this year, my knee blew up to three times its normal size.

It was a meniscus tear that precipitated the surgery?
Actually, we didn’t find the meniscus tear until we went in. I knew I was having a lot of synovial fluid problems with the plica, so I had a lot of scarring on the plica. That’s what we thought was causing all of the problems. So I went through about six weeks of physical therapy because people kept saying, “People run on plica syndrome all the time, it’s not a problem. If you can, you can try to get it back down and run on it. We’ll be happy to do surgery, but you should try this first.” After six weeks the swelling hadn’t gone down in size at all and I couldn’t bend it. So at that point I just wanted to go in and get it scoped.

So your pessimistic attitude about qualifying isn’t related to the knee per se, it’s more about your other demands intruding?
Yes, absolutely. My timeline. Because once I get through Twin Cities, I go into rehearsal the very next day. October 3 is the race, October 4 will be my first day of rehearsal for the fall show I’m doing, and that will open the week before Thanksgiving. So I have, I’d say, nine months next year where, if a basically swear off life, I can train for one shot. At a maximum, I can train for Grandma’s [June 2011] and if I crashed there, hold on or retrain for Chicago [October 2011]. After that point I go back into a heavy schedule for everything else. So basically it needs to happen by early next fall or I just don’t see it happening.

How’s your training going?
It’s going. Yeah. That’s about all I can say about it these days. I think were it not me and I didn’t know how it had gone in the past, I would probably say it’s going pretty well. But I feel out of shape and it’s been really brutally hot here this summer, as it has been everywhere. So it’s really hard for me to get a sense of how out of shape I am, how old I am and how hot I am (I wish that was “hawt,” too, but it’s not).

So it’s been really hard for me to assess what I should be doing. What’s a reasonable goal going into the marathon. I’ve been thinking that I’ll figure it out when it’s getting closer and the temperature’s cooled off. But the other day I had the brutal realization that I was in Alabama — and the marathon’s October 3. So I’m really not going to have a great sense of that in time.

Are you planning on traveling anywhere for a tune-up or test race before that?
I’m not, because I don’t really have the time or the money. I ran a small, low key 10K yesterday. I don’t know if it told me much of anything at all. But it was fun. I’d love to, but anything nearby is going to be hot and miserable. So, again, I’m not really sure how much that would help me out on the assessment part. And I just can’t afford the time or the flight.

Does having your time sucked away for 65-80 hours a week galvanize you to get up and run more than you would have, or does it make running just another chore that you have to get out of the way?
That’s an excellent question. For me, it really depends on the day. There are times when it always forces me to be more structured because I can’t futz around and wait to fit it in. I have to get up and go. But then there are times when my motivation seriously starts to wane. It’s yet another thing that I have to cram into yet another very small window of time.

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“Some days I think, ‘Eh, I could let it go.’ Other days I think, ‘No, I really want to go back.’”

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I’m not great about doing all the things that one should do if they’re going to be a great runner, or even a very good runner. I don’t get nearly enough sleep. Right now I’m running 80-100 mpw on about six hours of sleep most nights. I don’t have the time or the inclination to ice bath most of the time. I’d love to do yoga. I don’t have time for that either. I might want to go out and recount a rough workweek with friends [instead], and it’s that I’m going to bed early so I can try and get six hours of sleep so I can get up at 4AM or 5AM. My time is really structured and sometimes my running doesn’t feel like it’s for me. That’s when I have to step back and refocus on what my goals actually are and what I care about. If my running becomes something where I just feel obligated, then to me it’s not worth it.

You’re the first person I’ve talked to who’s qualified previously. For the others, this is their first shot at a qualifying time, so it’s a really big deal to them. I’ve wondered, since you’ve qualified twice, does that affect your attitude about qualifying for a third time?
I think it does. Although sometimes I think it keeps me more motivated. The second time [2008], I’d graduated from the doctorate and had my job here. I knew that [my running] could be a priority. Whereas, while I wouldn’t say that when I was working on my dissertation that my running was my priority, I was much more able to slow down the timeline and be okay with that. But now that I’m on the “tenure clock” I can’t do that. So, I knew [those commitments] were coming.

But there’s something so magical and incredible about being there, and that’s not just true of the Trials, but has been true of any of the national championships I’ve had the extreme pleasure to participate in. Being surrounded by that many strong, dedicated, focused, yet really fun and lovely individuals — I’ve met so many wonderful, beautiful people on the national distance circuit. To be in that energized room — at the Trials they always ask, “Who’s here for the first time? Who’s here for the second time? Who’s here for the third time?” and the number of hands goes down and down and down. I remember sitting there and all of a sudden thinking, “I want to come back!”

I’m not in danger of making the [Olympic marathon] team. I’ve never been in danger of making the team. On the one hand, I’ve done [the Trials] twice and it’s not a huge deal. On the other hand, it’s a huge deal to me, particularly as someone who didn’t participate competitively in college or at any time which it might be more expected to get there. So I go back and forth. Some days I think, “Eh, I could let it go.” Other days I think, “No, I really want to go back.”

I imagine that desire sustains you on the days when you’re not feeling so driven.
Absolutely.

How many times have you run in the [USA] Marathon Championships?
I ran in Twin Cities twice. It was my second marathon in either 2000 or 2001, and I don’t think I claimed the time [on Athlinks]. I ran a 3:14, I believe. The other time I ran there was in 2005 and it was the National Championships that year. I ran it because I was directing in Grinnell, Iowa, so I could drive there. The race didn’t go well and then — I didn’t even have time to eat lunch — I got in the car and drove back to Grinnell for a tech rehearsal that I sat in until midnight.

God, that’s awful.
It was horrible, and by far the worst recovery I’ve ever had. Don’t do that at home. I don’t recommend it. But both times [at Twin Cities] I only had a limited idea of what I was doing. I simply went out too hard. The same thing happened again there — I went out at the pace that I think I should have been in shape for. But it was my first marathon after the 2004 Trials.

When I qualified for the 2004 Trials, all of my focus had been on trying to qualify in a very condensed, short period of time, kind of on a whim. So when I got there, I was just enjoying the experience. That was amazing and as a matter of fact that was the first time I was ever in a national anything race. I can remember finding that bizarre — having to go check in my gear, when I’d never been walked through the process before. At the 2004 Trials I was seeded around 125th or 123rd, and I came in 42nd, I believe.

You must have been pleased by that.
I was extremely pleased. I finished in the top third. I felt really good and had started in the back of the field and I don’t think I was passed by a single person after the second or third mile of the race. So it was pretty awesome. So I got it into my head that if I wanted to take it to the next step, I had to stop thinking about what shape I’m in per se, and try to push myself a little more. I’ve always been a much better runner if I run from the back. I would much rather be picking people off. All of my best marathons have been negative splits.

At Twin Cities in 2005, the temperature was a little warm, in the mid-70s, and a little breezy that day, and I don’t really like wind. I wound up going with a group and trying to stay with them when I probably should not have. So, again, I just went out too hard. And I found the placement of the hills at Twin Cities not ideal. At Boston they’re in a perfect place. In Twin Cities I find them too late and too long, and I’ve just not run well.

Are your negative splits big ones?
Probably around a minute or so, most of the time.

So they’ve been by design. Once you realized that going out hard in the beginning wasn’t the right strategy for you, you’ve run in a very disciplined way.
Yes. I would say [that's the case with] almost every race I have run, and I do that in training. The one exception was the 2008 Trials, in which I positive split by two or three minutes. I knew I was going to. I didn’t plan that going in. I had the same plan as 2004: I’ll start toward the back and work my way up. But the race went out so slowly that even I could still see the pace car for a little while, which was terrifying to me. When things started to break up, I could tell that I was either going to be completely in no man’s land or I needed to go with this group that was right in front of me, running maybe 5-10 seconds per mile faster than I wanted to. I just decided that for the purposes of that race, because there was a little bit of a breeze, I wanted the opportunity to work with a pack — something I’ve never really done — and I would just go with them.

Warming up before the 2008 Trials in Boston.

That was probably the race I was most tapped out in ever. I felt great through three laps of that course. I would start to feel a little badly and drift off the back. Then I’d tell myself, “No, go get yourself up with that group. Get your act together. Go stick with them.” It was amazing how much help that was. In the final loop we’d all spread apart and it hit me hard [at the end]. If I recall correctly, my last 100 meters was at 10:00 pace. I’d stayed at 6:30 through that last loop. But in that last 100 I was fried and wound up closing down the med tent. It was exciting. That was probably my most maximal effort race. But otherwise it’s much my preference to go out easy.

Did you know at the time who you were running with in that pack?
What’s really interesting about that is that there’s another woman who graduated from Grinnell. Her name’s Nicole Cueno. She graduated many years after I did. We had met once before at a cross country meet in Grinnell. She’d emailed me before the race to see if I wanted to join a group she was putting together to run around that pace at the Trials. And I said, “I don’t think I can hold that, because I think that’s kind of deadly. Maybe I’ll see you out there and hook up.” Sure enough, I didn’t know it, but I basically ran with her the entire race until she left me in her dust.

It looks like you really didn’t start running competitively until around 2002 or so. Although you’re not working with a coach now, you worked with coaches previously. Did those coaching experiences help you get to your last two Trials?
I’m going to say the first coach I worked with did because I didn’t know what I was doing at all. I probably would have made much of that progress had I picked up a good book. That’s simply because, prior to that, I had unstructured training and then a guy at a running club in Bloomington, Indiana gave me his training program for the second marathon I ran, where I chopped about half an hour off my time. But my mileage was still very low and I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. So he certainly helped me by providing a program.

But the ill effects of that relationship have unfortunately been very lingering. I finally this year was able to convince him to remove my name from his web site, where he continued to claim I supported his training methods and a bunch of things that I don’t. So that’s been ugly. I have a hard time giving him credit now. I used to give him a lot of credit, because I was nice.

To me, there’s the science of running and then there’s the actual physical, lived experience of running. His approach to coaching was basically all science. “These are the numbers you have to meet in order to be able to do x.” And, whereas certainly we are bound by our scientific limitations, I found that, as I became more knowledgeable about myself as a runner, he became very unwilling to listen to my own experience. Even though his own experience was limited to running one in somewhere over three hours. I don’t think to be a good coach you have to have done what you’re coaching, necessarily. But if you’re not going to have done it and succeeded, then you need to accept that the person who has has some some sort of knowledge or insight into themselves.

Right. Every coaching method doesn’t work for every runner, or even at the same rate. You know yourself better than any coach does.
Exactly. It just got very frustrating on the mental side of things. The first time I tried to qualify for the Trials was at Philadelphia in November of 2003. The standard was 2:48 and I ran a 2:48:40. And, really, I laid much of the burden of that [near miss] on his shoulders because his thing was, “You have to get your tempo pace down in order for your marathon pace to ever feel comfortable. Training at that marathon pace when it’s not really there at this point in time is not going to work.”

Again, the science of that is shoddy. It was fine in theory. The problem was, I went out at tempo pace. And tempo pace at the start of a marathon feels really darn good! You know, you’re tapered, it feels awesome, you’re around friends. It felt very comfortable. You feel like you might have a breakthrough and you don’t want to think, “Oh, that’s tempo pace. I’m going to dial it down.”

I started to feel bad at mile 16. I started to think, “Oh, I don’t know about this.” But I was fine through about 20. I was still [on pace for] a minute ahead of the qualifying standard. But in those last six miles I just slowly watched it tick away. It wasn’t until the last mile that I knew I wasn’t going to qualify.

Also, he’d told me two weeks prior to the race that he thought I needed a Plan B because if it wasn’t a perfect day — like if the weather was bad — I should drop out and do a different race. And I said, “Well, what do you mean ‘if the weather is bad’? I’m fine with winds gusting at 20 mph. Are you talking drizzle?” And he said to me, “If it’s a perfect day, I think you can get the standard.”

That’s not so great for building confidence.
No, that didn’t work so well. That was after the marathon I’d run earlier that year — two weeks out from Boston he’d told me I wasn’t ready to go to Boston that year and wanted me to withdraw. I said, “I’ve already reserved a room and have a ticket and I’m going.”  I think I was 19th woman and maybe the 10th American. It was pretty cool. My name was in USA Today. It was pretty exciting.

So you were obviously ready when you got there.
Exactly. I wasn’t ready to run the [Trials] standard, but I was ready to run a good race. So it was just not a good match. I’ve had three coaches and the other two [after that] have been long distance. Those have been much more pleasant experiences, though certainly I do think there’s something to be missed from doing it all through email or phone calls. I think I needed to be told to take some time off after the Trials in 2004. I didn’t and just started working with someone new. I didn’t want her first impression of me to be that I wasn’t willing to work. So I said, “Yeah, I’m gung ho and ready to go and everything’s great!” And then she didn’t want my first impression of her to be, “You need to take time off.” So, unfortunately that was something I had to deal with then and the repercussions of that played out for much longer than I think they would have otherwise.

You’re coaching yourself now. Is that okay with you?
I go back and forth on that. I think if I really were committed to making the Trials, having a coach would be preferable. But it would need to be a coach who was here and willing to spend some time with me. Because otherwise, putting together a plan, I can do. I have a fair number of people who are I can talk to about it. Kevin Beck has been really good about looking over some stuff I drafted in terms of a program. So I can get that kind of feedback. His approach to the marathon is very similar to what I like, so I find him very easy to deal with in that regard.

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“I want my coach to be able to tell me, ‘Heather, you’re injured and you need to do the following things…and that exact buildup will lead to these things. And then you’ll be ready for this exact…’ I mean, come on. It doesn’t work that way.”

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And a friend of mine was a distance runner at Indiana University when I was doing my Ph.D. We were doing some virtual training for marathons together for awhile, so I drafted a program for both of us based on things I’ve done in the past using things from different people that have worked well. So I feel pretty comfortable with that. And I like the fact that if I’m having a really bad day, I adjust. I know what I have to do.

It’s kind of nice not having the pressure of reporting to a coach because I feel much more obliged — if the workout is on paper then I have to make sure it happens, it has to happen at this time, etc. Whereas if it’s my own training, I can say, “This is really a bad week and I need to shift that around.” I’ve been doing a lot of that recently — realizing that the weeks as I laid them out on paper don’t mesh with, say, the first week of classes and having a lot of meetings in the evening that I wasn’t counting on. So I’ve had to cut back on some easy runs. I can do that without any problems.

The downside is that I’m sure that sometimes I’m more likely to cut things back than maybe I would be otherwise. I may not be pushing myself as hard. It sure would be nice to have someone who can say, “Okay, this is what you have. Let’s tweak it in this direction.” But I think what I want is something that there’s no magic coach to fix. I want my coach to be able to tell me, “Heather, you’re injured and you need to do the following things, and they will get you healthy, they will get you back from your surgery. You will do this exactly buildup over the next month or two months, and that exact buildup will lead to these things. And then you’ll be ready for this exact…” I mean, come on. It doesn’t work that way.

Yes. You can’t expect The Amazing Kreskin in a coach.
Exactly! And that’s exactly what I expect. I expect someone to be able to see into the future and who can puzzle out whether I’m just getting older and I’m slowing down. Or I’m out of shape and I could speed up. I want them to be able to tell me that. And, honestly, that’s not a realistic expectation.

Although something that’s emerged in talking to people is that a lot of the time the value of a coach is getting someone to stop being their own worst enemy. To get them to not adhere slavishly to a schedule when they’re tired. Or do things that will prevent them from getting injured. Which I never thought of until I started working with coaches and getting injured myself; you really need someone to stop you from running yourself into the ground if you have that kind of personality.
I think you’re so right. And most of us, like you, who are distance runners — we do have that kind of personality. That obsessive, overachiever, driven personality. I can remember running with a guy who would try a workout and when it failed, he would do 75% of it, and then he’d go out and do it again the next day. You need to coach to say, “No. That’s not good. Don’t do that.”

You describe yourself as “driven.” Are you goal-oriented in other areas besides running?
I think even with my running, I like goals as things to motivate me. But I’m much more interested by seeing what I can learn from things. Which is probably why I’m an educator. To me, the result is not the point. The process is the point. Let me take that back: in theatre, the process is extremely important, but in the end I have an audience and they need a good result, as well as all of us involved, in order to have gained something from it. I guess that’s true in everything. But, to me, if you focus on the process and the learning, the result is always good. It should the best that you can possibly get. So it’s focusing on wringing as much out of my body as I can, or wringing as much out of my brain as I can, or wringing as much out of my play as I can. If I’m just grabbing that and investing myself in it, then the end result follows, which is something I try to teach students all the time. I think in contemporary society this is a little challenging. But the point is to learn, and the result will follow. So the goals are nice, but I think I’m more driven by trying to do what I can.

I think that’s healthy. I’m currently reading From Last to First, an autobiography by the English runner Charlie Spedding. Something he learns after about seven years of decent (but he feels sub-par) performances, is that he needs to focus on just running to the best of his ability rather than using other people as a measuring stick. So much of his story has to do with the process of development and the fact that it can take years to figure out how to train properly for yourself. But that’s part of what’s satisfying about the process, I find — just learning what works and what doesn’t work. It’s obviously very frustrating at times, but it’s satisfying when you learn something that you can use.
Agreed. And often, if it didn’t work, you learn something from having done that.

Probably especially when it doesn’t work.
Yes. I always say, “We learn the most in failure.”

I want to talk about your athletic development. Going way back, you had rheumatoid arthritis as a kid. You were told that you’d never be athletic. Can you talk about that experience?
My family physician referred me to Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis, which is an amazingly outstanding facility for children. When I went there, I believe I had to go through the arthritis ward, where there were a number of children in wheelchairs or on crutches. I do remember being told, “You’re not going to progress to that point. You’re not going to be disabled by this.” But I was told that I probably wouldn’t be a very athletic child.

How did that affect how you felt about yourself, or your experience of being a child with a body that was giving you problems?
I’ll be honest and say that I don’t remember it terribly well. The way it was diagnosed is that one knee was — about how it looked last year — about three or four times the size of the other one. I do have a really funny memory that I was sharing with a physician a few years ago. They drained my knee and in my mind, they were using this huge, turkey-baster sized thing attached to huge tubes going across the building. The physician I was describing this to pulled out a syringe that was probably what they used. Let’s just say that the image in my mind was way, way more terrifying.

So [the arthritis] wasn’t a huge part of how I saw myself because it didn’t drastically affect my daily life. I was always a pretty active kid. I remember exercises I had to do, like swinging my legs around while eating dinner and that kind of thing. But I don’t remember it limiting me all that much.

And you obviously recovered, since you were doing things like tennis and team sports later on.
Yes. I was a total tomboy as a child. We didn’t have a girl’s soccer team as a kid, so I was the only girl on my elementary school soccer team for a couple of years. I was always very interested in sports. I didn’t have a lot of girl friends. Basically a tomboy.

On the soccer team, circa 1980.

I know you were a late starter to running and mentioned a few “false starts.” You used the word “hate” — you hated running. What happened to change that?
Honestly, I have no idea. I was working in an office complex in St. Louis that had a gym. I had danced all through college and a little bit post-collegiately. But I wasn’t really getting to dance a lot. So I need to start working out to stop from getting out of shape. I would go at the end of the workday and mostly do the stairmaster and lift weights. I usually concluded with a little walk on the treadmill. For whatever reason, I remember one day thinking, “I wonder if I could run a mile.” And I did. And then, for whatever reason, it become kind of an obsession, to see if I could run a little further every time I was in the gym. Why I liked it that time, I don’t know. It might have been that I finally didn’t try to run it too fast, so it felt better. That’s a mistake a lot of beginning runners make: going out and running too hard and then it’s miserable and they don’t want to do it again.

I just know that it kind of stuck this time. For the first year I ran on a treadmill all the time because I was convinced that one day I’d wake up and hate it again. So if I was on the treadmill, I could just turn it off. Then I started running on a track at Washington University. I did up to 10 miles there because, again, I was convinced I was going to hate it one day.

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“I was clueless. I had run 10 miles — so what was the point of training for, say, a 10K? I didn’t even know you could do that! I only measured distance, clearly.”

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I wanted to ask you about that, having read something to this effect in another interview you did. I just thought it was amazing that you ran 10 miles on the track. That’s so monotonous for a beginning runner! You really did that because you thought you’d get out in the middle of nowhere and not want to run all the way back?
Yeah. I was convinced. But I will admit that I do a lot of my harder workouts on the track. I’m weird. I wouldn’t want the monotony every day, but there’s something about being able to shut the brain off. I don’t have to think, there’s no traffic. I can just do one lap at a time and I know I’m marching toward that finish. I can just click in and not think about it. I will still do a lot of long workouts on the track — long runs and tempos. Next week I have a 20 mile run with the last 10 at marathon pace and it’s entirely possible that I’ll do those last 10 miles on a track.

Do you reverse direction so you don’t put too much strain on one side?
I would like to and I try to, though recently there’s always been other people on the track with me.

That doesn’t stop me. They just think you’re rude or ignorant. I just explain to them why I’m doing it if they look annoyed.
Maybe I can try that.

You seemed to jump into the marathon pretty quickly, about a year after you started running. You ran a 3:45, which isn’t great but it’s not terrible. Did you run that off of proper marathon training?
Not off of what I would consider proper marathon training now. My sister got me into running. She’d been doing it her entire life and I’d always liked it in theory. We would meet up on occasion and she would run with me, which was pretty cool. She could give me some pointers. But when I was working at summer camp one year, I had a friend who did marathons, and still does. I remember at the time thinking it was crazy and the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. We’d be sleep-exhausted and it would be her one day off — and rather than sleeping in she’d be up at the crack of dawn and going for a 20 mile run. I really did not understand that.

So when all of a sudden I was liking running, I remember writing to her and saying — and most of this is because I was clueless — I had run 10 miles on the track, so what was the point of training for, say, a 10K? I didn’t know you could do that! I only measured distance, clearly. I wasn’t measuring time. So I wrote to her and asked, “Do you think I could run a marathon?” And she said yes, she thought I could, and sent me a Hal Higdon training program.

It’s only 16 more miles…
Yeah, exactly! So I followed his Intermediate Plan, which had a maximum of 45-50 miles per week, for my first one. I went into [that race] having three goals: the top goal was to finish; the second goal was to finish in under 4 hours; and my third goal, which I didn’t meet, was to make the Boston qualifying time.

People rarely get it on their first shot.
True.

But you seemed to do really well [racing] at the 10 mile distance. You’ve got some particularly good 10 mile races in there, and some good half marathon times in there too. Why the focus on the marathon?
It’s a variety of things. There was an amazing 10 miler, the Park Forest Scenic 10 Miler (which is now a 5 mile race due to street closure issues). Bud James, the race director, brought in great runners and made the whole experience really incredible. Some of my best times [58:14 in 2005] there were simply because the timing was good, the competition was phenomenal and I loved it.

My half PR [1:18:38 in 2004 at Grandma's [in the USA Marathon Championships] I kept thinking I would break someday. That came right on the heels of the Trials in 2004. I remember going there and thinking I’d probably run the first 10K faster than my 10K PR. And I didn’t. I was crawling. I don’t know what was going on in my head. I had gone out way in the back of the pack, and I was still there and I remember passing the 10K mark thinking, “This is ridiculous. You didn’t come all the way here for a Sunday jog. If you wanted that, you should have stayed home.” For whatever reason I set a 10K PR in the second half and a 5K PR in the last 5K of the race.

So I feel like some of my PRs are from “charmed race” scenarios as much as [being] better distances for me. But I love 10 miles and 13.1 miles. They’re great. They’re the right kind of intensity for me. I hate 5Ks — I don’t like that kind of physical discomfort. I’m probably motivated by the Trials as much as what might all go back to that original hangup: I’ve run 10K, so why would I train for that?

I also don’t like spending a lot of money on a shorter race. It’s ridiculous, right? For some reason, to get my money’s worth it has to be a major goal. I want to feel that accomplishment for awhile.

I’ve never heard anyone talk about their choice of a distance in economical terms!
It’s crazy! But there is something to that for me. And with the marathon, everything can go wrong. There’s something alluring about a race in which you control your training so much — you have to really put a ton of training in. And then you have one day and one shot — and a lot of the time the weather sucks, or you don’t feel good, or who knows what happens. But those are the cards; you’ve got to deal with them. There’s something very appealing to me about that.

Do you have a favorite course type? Do you race well on hills vs. flats?
I would say that I don’t love an extraordinarily hilly course. That’s changing right now. I used to like hills quite a bit, but that’s the one thing that my knee does not like right now. We’re still not friends on hills. I used to climb hills very well and now I get dropped on the hills all the time. So I’m guessing that my choice of races is in the process of changing. But I tend to like a little variety over the terrain. Running 26 miles flat gets pretty hard on the body. You’re using the exact same muscles the exact same way the whole time.

You’re currently up in the 85-100 miles per week range?
I am.

The knee’s not giving you a problem in terms of hitting that mileage. Are you feeling any twinges while you run?
Not usually, although yesterday in that 10K race I had a couple of really weird, obnoxious pains. This morning I did an 18 miler and the start was pretty rocky with my knee. But mostly it’s been okay.

See if you can spot which knee had a problem.

Injuries are a subject that’s very close to my heart right now. What was the longest that you were sidelined because of an injury?
It probably was the knee. Although I also did have a stress fracture [earlier]. So it was one or the other of those. But I was more or less completely off running for a couple of months, and then slowly building back up.

You did some pool running. What else did you do to try to keep in shape?
When I had the stress fracture I did a lot of pool running. Then as I transitioned back I did a lot of workouts where I would go hard on the elliptical and then get in the pool and run, that kind of thing. That was the reason I started working with the first coach: I knew I wanted to try and break 3 hours. And I had this weird goal — which most people laughed at — which was to qualify for the Trials, when I’d run a 3:13. [My coach] put me on an extremely conservative buildup, which was probably incredibly smart. Now I don’t think I would have needed that slow buildup. But then I’d only been running for three years, so I didn’t have a lot of miles in my legs. It was a lot of cross training and then slowly adding in a mile here and there of running.

This time, after the knee surgery, while I was doing physical therapy I was mostly doing elliptical and stationary biking. I didn’t ever pool run. If I was wealthy and had my own pool, I would do it all the time. I’d probably use it for supplemental training, because you can work your ass off and not get injured. But trying to fit around pool hours is a royal pain in the neck. It just made me so full of rage by the end of when I was doing it at Indiana University that, this time I was thinking, “I’m not even going to do it.”

I haven’t even started, and I’m already full of rage. So I can imagine what I’m going to be like in a couple of weeks.
Are you having a hard time with pool hours?

Aside from the fact that my local Y system’s pools are closed for cleaning until after Labor Day, it’s the concept of having to pool run that fills me with rage, which is something I have to get over. I’m still in denial about the fact that I have a problem. Which I’m reminded of every time I get up out of a chair and try to walk. So I experience rage about 20 times a day now.
The problem for me was that I used the University’s facilities because they were free to me as a grad student — but their normal swim hours were constantly being compromised and taken over by swim clubs. So I’d get all changed and ready to do a workout, and get maybe 30 minutes in, and then I’d get told that I had to get out of the pool.

Pool running can be fun, in its own mindless way. My sister and I had this idea that you should have swimming pools that can show movies while you’re in there.

That’s a great idea.
Yeah, then you could watch movies while you pool run. But, alas, I haven’t found one yet.

Maybe it’s a business idea. For a very small audience: people whose faces aren’t underwater when they’re swimming.
Exactly.

To totally switch topics, I wanted to get your thoughts on the actual qualifying time. The USATF has been slowly lowering it, taking a minute off in the last few Olympic cycles [from 2:48 in 2004 to 2:46 in 2012]. Do you have opinions about how that might affect the field?
At a selfish level, it would be great if it was still 2:48. On a non-selfish level, I was surprised this time. I thought it would be below 2:45 after the last Trials. American women are still looking for some major breakthroughs at the front of the field to match Deena Kastor. I think those are coming and are right around the corner, actually, with some of the newer talent that we have getting into the marathon.

When I look at the next tier of women, there are an awful lot who are running from 2:35-2:45. That’s really ballooned, which is exciting. So I thought they’d lower the standard further than they did, but I was more than happy when they did not. If they’d said it was 2:45, I probably would have said, “Eh, I’m probably not going to get it, so I’m going to quit thinking about trip number three.” I don’t think the field has to be tiny. But on the other hand, when you get so many people in that range, there’s something to be said for having the standard to be pushing for that helps bring out the best in runners.

I think it’s great that they’ve continued, unlike the men’s, to have the two standards [A = 2:39, in which all expenses are paid; and B = 2:46, in which a runner must pay her own way to the Trials]. In terms of development effects, I think that’s probably really smart. Women’s running [has lagged] simply because we haven’t been allowed to do it for very long. It is further back than men’s running in terms of development. So I think it’s important to continue to develop the talent before trying to just focus on the front of the field. I don’t know if that answers your question.

No, it does. I managed to get some age-related statistics on previous Trials race fields, and the average age of women qualifiers has gone down, not significantly, but noticeably. My theory is that, for one, a lot of women are pursuing the marathon at a younger age than they were 10 or 15 years ago. I also think the addition of the option of using a shorter qualifying distances [a half marathon or a track 10K] is pulling in some younger runners. Although the times for those distances are totally out of whack, relatively speaking, with the marathon times.
Absolutely. I would have no chance at qualifying on any standard other than the marathon.

Yeah, it’s ridiculous. The half marathon standard is 1:15, which is a lot “faster” than a 2:46 full.
Yes. I think it would be great if we had something that was between, say, qualifying for Boston and qualifying for the Trials, that could be a really big goal for people. Men and women. Because it is a shame that for most masters runners, as the standard gets tighter and tighter, that’s going to get harder and harder to make.

On the other hand, when I think about it, what’s the point of the Olympic Trials? The point is to determine the team that goes to the Olympics. I’ve never been in danger of running the standard to even go to the Olympics. Even if I’d won [the Trials] I wouldn’t have had the Olympic standard. I recognize that in the grand scheme of things, my being there is a little bit of stretch. That’s not true of everyone who qualified with a 2:45 — some of them could get the Olympic standard. I thought I would be, but I didn’t happen to be one of them. So I can recognize the need to tighten the field and focus on the point of that race. It’s frustrating sometimes that your options for goals are Boston or the Trials. For me, I don’t see the Boston standard as being challenging for many, many years.

And they’re making it looser [for masters] as time goes on.
Exactly. That’s a great goal, and I by no means mean to imply that it’s not a huge achievement. My qualification for my first Boston was one of the proudest moments of my life. But it would be great if there was something in-between.

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“My advice would be to enjoy the process and what you’re learning about yourself, and the challenges. Who knows if you’ll make it there or not. But at least if you’re enjoying the process, that’s pretty wonderful.”

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Unfortunately, I think there are a lot of women who are running right in the 2:50 range, who just can’t quite make it. But on the other end of the speed spectrum, I guess it’s good that [the standard] is where it is, meaning fairly liberal, because a race with 16 people wouldn’t be that exciting.
No, and I think that’s the tough balancing act that the USATF has to do. How do you get to a race size that’s manageable without it being a tiny, tiny little race? There’s a lot of evidence that some women make huge breakthroughs — men as well — from the time they qualify to the time they run the Trials.

Yes, I was going to mention that. I’ve seen some women get incredible PRs — 8 or 9 minutes — in their Trials race. I think it’s a real motivator.
I’d hate to lose that chance of [an outlier] making the team. But at the same time, I think it’s a pretty big stretch to guess that someone who qualifies with a 2:50 is going to make it. I think you have to run around a 2:38 to be able to run in the Olympics. I don’t know if it’s been determined yet [for 2012]. So I’m skeptical that that kind of leap [for someone running 2:50] is going to happen very often. But certainly, I’ve seen huge leaps from 2:42-2:45 on down.

Having qualified twice already, do you have advice for any women who are attempting this, especially for the first time?
My advice would be to enjoy the process and what you’re learning about yourself, and the challenges. And also that feeling of accomplishment [that comes from] making the huge gains that come from just doing training is likely to have. You don’t know how long that opportunity to do that training will last. I mentioned my sister earlier. She’s since been diagnosed with hypermobility syndrome and can’t run very much at all anymore. That was a huge part of her life for much of her life. She was a very good runner, having run a sub-3:10 marathon and I think absolutely could have gotten under 3 hours. Now she’s sidelined for life.

So you don’t know how long you have. I’m not just saying, “You need to try it now.” You need to enjoy it while you’re doing it. Who knows if you’ll make it there or not. But at least if you’re enjoying the process, that’s pretty wonderful.

The other thing I would say is to not pay too much attention to races as predictors. I do use those to help me assess where I am. But I think there’s a danger in putting too much value into one number or result. I had a lot of people tell me early on that if I couldn’t run a sub-17:00 5K (my PR is 17:40, which I haven’t hit in a long time)…maybe they even told me I had to be running around a 5:00 mile, which I doubt I ever ran…then there was no chance that I would ever make the Trials. So it’s important to remember that one person’s set of standards is not necessarily your own. I happen to have a much better ability to run well over long distance than I do over short.

But to me, the enjoyment is putting the time in — and learning about yourself. You learn a lot about yourself physically, mentally and emotionally. It’s about enjoying that learning.

Today I’m talking with Jill Howard, who’s in Highlands Ranch, CO. I wanted to start with what is the biggest distinction between you and the other runners I’m talking to, which is your unusual path to the marathon. You started out with an initial marathon in the mid-1990s. Then you did some shorter races over the next few years. Then it looks like you plunged headlong into doing triathlons after that. I’m interested to know what first compelled you to try a marathon when you were in your mid-twenties.
My dad had always told me what a natural athlete I was and how quickly I learned a new sport or took to outdoor ventures. He had me skiing and backpacking at five years old, and I learned things by watching my two older brothers (four and seven years older than me). As a kid, I was fearless to try new things, and I’ve always been very adventurous. I learned to take on pretty much any outdoor activity that we tried. I was very determined to do what they were doing, to be tough, to do things well, to not be “girly” about it, and to not be left behind.

But because of various circumstances in my life I don’t believe that part of me — the athletic part, which is a huge part of me — was nurtured. I spent too much energy chasing emotional wounds and the approval of others, instead of honoring the gifts within me. My parents were divorced and lived in two states so I wasn’t in any one place long enough to join a team, or hone a sport, other than the dabbling I did on swim team, drill team, gymnastics, etc. I did buffet style, but nothing specific. So it was an ability that was swept aside. And Olympic desires I had since the 6th grade were pushed deep inside to be ignored for a long time. I remember thinking, “I don’t care what sport it is, I just want to go to the Olympics.” I even drew myself a medal.

Ripping up the road during the bike portion.

So, in my mid-twenties, I moved back to Denver, which was a childhood prayer of mine to do. And got to spend regular time with my dad, who reminded me of my natural athletic ability. I had lost sight of that side of me; a side I yearned to express. I distinctly remember one day when I was 24, Dad and I were tossing a softball back and forth to each other in a park, practicing catching, and for some reason I had a thought pop in my mind about the Olympics. I had a moment of regret, thinking “Dang it, I wish I could have gone for it when I was younger,” but I quickly dismissed the thought and shoved it back inside thinking, “I’m too old now.”

What I’m starting to realize is that this dream has followed me throughout [my life]. It kept popping its head up, this Olympic desire. And I kept shoving it back down. For whatever reason: I didn’t think I was good enough; it wasn’t nurtured; I didn’t have the opportunity; I didn’t know how to pursue it.

It was that summer that I was introduced to triathlon by a guy named Ian Adamson, who is now considered to be the most successful adventure racer of all time. I was ecstatic to learn from an elite and to have opportunities opened for me that I yearned for.

He kind of taught me the ropes and then I was addicted. I also got a letter in the mail from the Leukemia Society to try a marathon. So I just thought I’d dive headlong into these awesome opportunities to try a marathon and try it all – this was a whole new world bringing alive a side of me I had dismissed, and that came so naturally. It seemed to express who I truly am. And, I loved it! It was redeeming me.

Did you have any running experience before this?
No, I hadn’t had much running experience. But I considered myself to be very athletic and I felt like it was just something in me. As I mentioned, I grew up with two older brothers and in the summertime we would do all kinds of outdoor things. I felt like I could take on pretty much any athletic challenge, or at least had the determination to try.

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“Once again, this dream was popping back up. 25. No, too old. Thirties. No, too old. This was the last time, this switch from triathlon to marathon, that it popped back up. It was like this dream won’t let me kill it.”

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You’re very accomplished in triathlon in the over-35 age group. [Jill  was the 2007 National Sprint Triathlon Champion in the F35-39 age group.] So obviously you got over that assumption [that you weren't "good enough"] at some point.
Well, it did help when I gained athletic sponsorship from various companies. This year I’m honored with serving on Team Aquaphor, which is an awesome brand that I already love.

It’s all relative though. I was above average, but not elite. That is my dream — to become an elite and world class athlete…to be honest with myself, it’s to be an Olympic athlete — that’s hard to say out loud — and the Olympic Trials will get me the closest to that dream!

Thinking I was too old became a thing for me, so I didn’t go for [the Olympics]. But I did jump into triathlon and marathon. I did that one marathon in December of ’96 in Honolulu. But I fell in love with triathlon and it pulled me away [from marathoning]. It fit me better, to have multiple sports rather than just one thing. Kind of fit my A.D.D. “want to try it all” personality…

That was 2005, when I dove headlong back into it. So I made this decision: I’m going to grab this by the horns, I’m not going to let bad relationships get in the way anymore, and I’m going to do this for me. I made this decision right before I met Susan Williams. It was very timely. Susan had just won the bronze medal for triathlon in Athens in August 2004. I met her in January, just as I was starting to get into triathlon.

Triathlon hasn’t been an Olympic event for that long, correct?
Yes. The first year was Sydney (2000). To date, Susan is the only US athlete, male or female, to have medalled. She is one heck of an athlete. She’s an animal. And yet she’s the most humble athlete I know. Over time, she became my role model for the kind of athlete I wanted to be. I saw her give a presentation and went up to her afterward and said I needed a coach and asked if she was available. She was. I did end up telling Susan, sheepishly, that I did want to make it to the Olympics, at that time thinking in triathlon. “I know I’m old, and this is silly, and it’s crazy of me to say, and don’t make fun of me. But you did it.” And her response was, “Who am I to say that you can’t go to the Olympics?” Yet I was not competitive in the swim at all.

It seems like swimming is often the weak point with triathletes I talk to, especially the strong runners. They just don’t like swimming or they can’t get better at it for some reason.
Uh, huh. Susan progressed me quite a bit, but there’s no way I would have been ready to race an ITU (International Triathlon Union) race as a pro in international championships where you build up your points for the Olympics. She did progress me quite a bit. But that’s where I realized, over time, that long course was my strength because of my run. I realized that I could make up a lot of difference in time [over competitors] with my run, what I lost in the swim. I was an average biker, maybe above average, but certainly not competitive.

In triathlon, it seems like there’s variation in distances and even what the events are called. What exactly is a long course? What are the three distances?
I can see why that would be confusing to someone outside the sport. Sprint distances vary a little bit. The Olympic distance is always the same. 70.3 is a half ironman — you race 70.3 miles of swimming, biking and running. Then there is long course, which has varied between different world championship races — anywhere from double Olympic to 3/4 of an Ironman. And then there’s ironman, and that’s always the same distance.

How does the 70.3 break down among the three events?
It’s exactly half of an ironman, so it’s a 1.2 mile swim, a 56 mile bike, and a half marathon run.

So what’s a long course breakdown?
Long course, as you pointed out, varies. When I was competing on Team USA, in France in 2007 it was a double Olympic distance. That ended up being around a 3000 meter swim, a 48 mile bike and around a 20K run [it was actually a 12.8 mile run]. But the next year that I did long course Worlds in Holland, it ended up being I believe a three quarter ironman distance. It changes a lot. I think the run ended up being 18 miles. The swim was hellacious. No kidding, I think it ended up being, who knows, around a 5K swim.

Wow. That’s grueling.
Oh, my gosh. It was in very heavy waves and lots of green seaweed. Apparently they had eel traps below us too. Any time I heard a squeaking noise underneath – it may have been a boat or something – I was convinced there were eels swimming underneath me. That was a two hour swim for me. It was crazy.

Then I qualified for the next year, although I didn’t end up going. That was in Australia and ended up being double the Olympic distance again. I have always wanted to go to Australia, and to compete there to boot — what a dream. So, it’s quite the testimony of how important this Olympic Trials dream is that I sacrificed competing in a world championship race in Australia to chase the Trials. Same thing went for giving up Ironman Canada, which I was registered to race last August…another day!

With that swim story, you’ve just convinced me never to do a triathlon. I didn’t really need convincing. But it sort of takes marathoning and makes it 10 times harder.
Long course, or 70.3, is actually my favorite distance. It’s my best distance. I feel it’s harder doing a 3:30 marathon than a 5:30 triathlon. I feel a lot more exhausted after doing a marathon than I do after a half ironman.

That’s surprising.
I think it’s because you change up the muscle groups [in triathlon], but you’re fatiguing that same set of muscle groups for the entire duration of a marathon.

Demonstrating proper carbo-loading technique.

What does it mean to compete for Team USA? Do you have to qualify, and what’s required when you’re racing for them?
Competing on Team USA is one of the biggest honors and achievements I’ve ever had — to represent the U.S. in a world championship triathlon against many other international teams. Team USA is comprised of the top triathletes in the nation in each age group, ranging from the teens up to the 70′s. And, there is a Team USA for each triathlon distance or discipline — Sprint, Olympic Long Course, and duathlon.

You have to qualify for Nationals first. It may have changed, but I believe qualifying in the top 10% of your age group in the same distance qualifies you for Nationals. At Nationals you have to place in the top 16 in your age group to make Team USA and compete in the world championship. When I qualified for Team USA for the Holland World Championship in 2008, I had to make the top five at Nationals. So competition was stiff.

The requirement is to wear a Team USA designated race uniform, which has your last name on it, like the pros. It’s fun! And participate in the “opening ceremonies” called the Parade of Nations with your team wearing our Team USA shirts, carrying our country’s flag. It’s quite an exciting honor, and we get to play Olympic-wannabes. It really was awe inspiring to see each country’s team in their team shirts and country’s national colors, carrying their flags, parading down the street one country after the other. And spectators cheered us on as if we were Olympic athletes. It was fun getting a feel for what it would be like in the opening ceremonies.
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“You cannot wing an ironman. You just can’t. At Ironman Arizona I was like Norm of “Cheers” at every med tent: “Hey, Jill! You’re back!” And I’d be laying on my back for 20 minutes, or on all fours trying to throw up. That race had the third highest dropout rate in Ironman history. It was 95 degrees and 25 mph winds.”

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How long did you compete for Team USA?
I competed on Team USA in three World Championships. One was Olympic distance. Two were long course. And I qualified for two others that I didn’t go to — Australia last fall, which killed me not to go to, and the newly popular Clearwater 70.3 Ironman series World Championship.

Did you get any sort of special support from being part of that? Stipends or anything?
No, not really. Not financially. Just the honor to compete for my country.

You wrote to me that you were “talked into” your second marathon in 2007. What happened there? It had been about 11 years between marathons.
Once again, this Olympic dream was popping back up. 25. No, too old. Thirties. No, too old. This was the last time, this switch from triathlon to marathon, that it popped back up. It was like this dream won’t let me kill it. [After the first marathon in 1996] I didn’t really feel the need to do a marathon ever again. At Worlds, in France [2007], that was the year, as my Mom says, “I found my feet.” For some reason, speeds were happening for me that year I don’t know how that happened. It just happened.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know why?
I know! We chopped 6 minutes off my 10K time in a triathlon in less than one year and I asked Susan, “What have we done to make that happen?” Her response was, “I just think you’re a natural athlete.” And, while I loved her response, I know it wasn’t a natural thing. It was something we were doing. Maybe the hill repeats? I don’t know. But I was flabbergasted.

Then Worlds happened and that was, at the time, the best race of my life. I ended up having a very strong run and ended up placing third in the run split in my age category…in the world! That kind of blew my mind. A guy I met at Worlds, who I ended up dating, was a marathoner turned triathlete. It was his goal to do the Boston Marathon every year. When he saw me at World’s he said, “With the way you run, why is it that you don’t do marathon?” And I said, “Because it hurts.”

He said I should try and that I should come qualify for Boston with him. I said, “Oh, that takes a lot of training. I remember how much training that took for that first marathon.” And he said, “No, it’s already in you.” So we trained for 5 weeks, did the California International Marathon [CIM] in December of 2007. That was my second one after 11 years.

And I did qualify for Boston with a 3:33 (which, ironically, is a very special number for me). I said I’d run it with him. But we’d also signed up for Ironman Arizona. Boston happened to fall one week after Ironman. And it was his tradition to do Boston ever year.

Did you do it anyway?
Yup. I did.

That’s insane.
You kind of have to be to be in this sport. At least triathletes are crazy. I was not coaching with Susan at the time. She will say to this day, “If I’d been coaching you at that time, I never would have let you do that.” That’s when I discovered injury. I’d never been injured until then.

I can’t say I’m surprised. Were you actually injured during the marathon, or did it happen afterwards?
Well, it was a domino effect. My training was very spotty for Ironman. The relationship was messy and the emotional drama distracted me from my training. Going into Ironman, we started training in January for an April Ironman. As has been my spirit before, my attitude was, “Well, I’ll try it. I’ll give it my best.”

I’ve been able to wing things in the past. And, like I said, I’m usually up for a good challenge — it’s that sense of determination that I have. I ended up getting patellar tendonitis, which interfered with my run training. So I didn’t get adequate run miles in. So I figured I could just walk the marathon if I had to.

So I went into Ironman with the patellar tendonitis. Ironman was miserable. You cannot wing an Ironman. You just can’t.

Well, you can’t really wing a marathon either, so I can’t even imagine trying to wing an ironman.
I had just 5 weeks of training for CIM and qualified for Boston, so I thought maybe I’d just go on my residual fitness from the last two years I had built in training. It’s not that I’m stupid. I’m just determined.

Was this the Ford Ironman Arizona race? You’ve got a 14+ hour finish time. That’s not a great finish time, I take it.
Let me preface by saying that finishing an Ironman is quite an accomplishment for anyone. That’s huge! But, for me, no, 14+ hours was not good. I was aiming for and believe I had the ability for an 11 hour Ironman. That was a bad race for me for all apparent reasons. Ironically, my swim was the best that day and I enjoyed that the best.

I remember swallowing hard at the pre-event dinner when watching a video and the voice-over said something to the effect of, “this is a race where the ill-prepared will pay.” I said, “uh-oh” and I did pay.

I was like Norm of “Cheers” at every med tent. “Hey, Jill! You’re back!” And I’d be laying on my back for 20 minutes, or on all fours trying to throw up. I visited every porta-potta with diarrhea. That race had the third highest dropout rate in Ironman history. It was 95 degrees (after training all winter indoors) and up to 25 mph winds. It was just messy all around that day. But I did finish, and that was a huge accomplishment for me, given the spotty training.

It was one of the worst and one of the best experiences I’ve ever had. And, I learned a lot about myself, my drive and what more we have within ourselves just when we think we don’t have any left. It truly is an amazing experience, even as miserable as I physically felt.

I didn’t even notice these dates. You ran Boston a week later and your time wasn’t really that bad, considering. A 3:38.
That’s part of what made me want to pursue this “marathon” thing. I wondered how far I could take this if I actually trained well and nurtured my run. We both knew it wasn’t the smartest thing, but it was a week apart and we wanted to go. We figured we didn’t have to race it and we could just walk it if we had to, or just run/walk. Just get through it and not worry about it.

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“The day before the Boston Marathon we watched the Olympic Marathon Trials in person…and I thought, “Well, maybe that’s the route — through marathon. Not triathlon.”

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But then I got there. And there’s something magical about Boston. And I was pretty snotty going into it. Ironman athletes are very, very different than runners. There’s a whole different atmosphere in that community. I was initially closed to the Boston experience because I was still on my Ironman high. I thought, “I’m an Ironman athlete, not a marathoner.” Until we got to the expo where excitement and energy just buzz! My attitude started shifting as I was in awe. I felt the challenge, was bit by the Boston bug and said, “Let’s try to race it tomorrow. I’m feeling pretty good.” My boyfriend said, “Really? You want to run the whole thing?” And I said, “Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s push it.”

We didn’t walk. But about halfway through I discovered what IT-band injury feels like, especially on Heartbreak Hill. “Whoa. IT is painful.”

You still did okay, though. You were running around an 8:20 pace. Did you start off fast and then drop off toward the end when you started having problems or were you running a fairly even pace?
There was a dropoff because I was in a lot of pain in that last 10K. And not because of the typical “wall.” It was really the last half, but mostly in the last 10K because of the IT band pain.

I forgot to mention that the day before, we watched the women’s Olympic Marathon Trials in person. My boyfriend had said. before we even went to Boston, “You should go for the Olympic Trials. You have it in you.” And my wheels started turning, thinking, “Where did he get that from? What the…?” And then I started thinking of this dream I kept dismissing, that kept popping up. And I thought, “Well, maybe that’s the route — through marathon. Not triathlon.” It took about 7 more months after that before I embraced going for it.

Boston Marathon, 2008.

It was so awe inspiring. We watched Deena Kastor come in first and get the American flag wrapped around her. She looked so fresh that she could run another marathon. We watched Joan Benoit-Samuelson come in, and that was so awesome. The crowd just roared. I didn’t know much about these figures at that time in the marathon world. I probably didn’t even know who Deena Kastor was at that time. But, wow, it was so inspiring. And then the wheels started turning.

I was thinking, “There’s no way I can to do that. What are you thinking? But, oh my gosh, why not try? 3:38 on no real training’s not bad at all.”

And a disastrous full Ironman a week before. I’d say it’s better than not bad.
It got me thinking: I wonder what it would be like if I actually trained. If I really focused on it and got some good, strong training. Not just 5 weeks, but really put my mind to it. Focused on and really nurtured the run. So I kind of kept it to myself and mulled on it from time to time. I did long course Worlds in Holland that fall. I was going through a breakup and depression that squelched my training. But it was soon after that, November 2008, that I went to Susan. I couldn’t let that idea go. Now the boy’s gone and what do I do next? Maybe I can and should actually go for the Trials. It would give me something to do. Something to focus on. And it would get “me” back.

So I went to Susan and said, very sheepishly, “What would you think if I went for the marathon trials?” I completely trust her, as she does not give a compliment unless she means it. But she said very enthusiastically, “You can so do that!” Shocked at her great confidence in me, I said, “Really? Well, let’s go for it.” And, that was my defining moment where my training, and my identity as a triathlete, started to shift. I just believe God put Susan in my path as she’s a huge reason for my inspiration and pursuit of my dream — she’s walked alongside me, encouraging and believing in me the whole way. And still encourages me as if I’m still her athlete. She’s such a gift!

That was about a year ago. So what’s happened in the last year in terms of progressing toward it?
I switched to Bob Seebohar, the 2008 Olympic Triathlon Team’s dietitian and elite triathlon coach, who’s also Susan’s business partner. I needed a lot of help with nutrition and trusted his expertise with the clout he has in the triathlon world. I didn’t know of any pure running coaches at the time. We switched to him and I told him my goal. But I wasn’t ready to let go of triathlon at that time. It was my passion. He said I could race [triathlon] in the 2009 season, but that we were going focus on my run, doing minimal biking and swimming. And just get through it in the racing, since I had enough background in [those two disciplines] to be fine. That’s what we did. I even placed 7th in my age group at a very tough triathlon course — Buffalo Springs Lake Triathlon 70.3 — with barely any swim or bike training. My run alone carried me on that challenging run course, making up what I lost in a very average swim and bike split.

I did three more 70.3 triathlons, another Boston marathon. Then Bob talked me out of doing Ironman Canada, which I had signed up for a year prior, and Worlds in Australia, because he said it would get in the way of my marathon goal. Although both those races were hard to let go of, I’m glad he did, as the Trials goal was more important to me. I needed to get away from triathlon. It took some weaning for me, because I really love the triathlon community, and I really love triathlon. But I’m glad I made the switch. The true focus on running started last August (2009). So, I’m pretty much a newbie. A crazy newbie with huge ambition and determination.

Let’s talk about your last couple of races. You ran around a 3:22 in New York last fall.
That was an issue day.

Was that something nutritional that happened?
For the most part. I was hoping to do a sub-3:10 in New York. I had gotten a terrible flu for the three weeks leading up to New York. Although never diagnosed, some of my friends believe it was Swine Flu. In my third week, race week, I was regaining health. But, I’m sure my body was still a bit weak going into the race. Just one week prior to the marathon, I had trouble getting through 5 miles. Prior to my getting sick, Bob had gotten me very strong, very fit, very quickly.

He also changed my nutrition plan to help me become more metabolically efficient,  which I really had a hard time adjusting to because of my prior eating habits. His plan completely changed the way I ate. So I not only was recovering from a flu, but was adjusting to a new nutrition plan going into New York. I wasn’t carbo-loading like I was accustomed to because with Bob’s nutrition plan you don’t have to if you’re metabolically efficient. Apparently, I wasn’t yet. My body just didn’t have enough fuel — no glycogen stored up. And I was still weakend from having been sick.

The first 14 miles were the fastest I had ever done in a long distance race. Because of Bob, I shaved off a full 6 minues at the halfway mark (1:33) from what I did in Boston just 6 months prior. I was consistently averaging a 7:00 mile through the first 14 miles and was on target for getting a 3:06-3:10. I felt fantastic. But then I bonked hard at the 14th mile and really struggled through the rest of the way. It was extremely painful. I just ran out of fuel.

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“I’m pretty much a newbie. A crazy newbie with huge ambition and determination.”

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You were on track to run Boston this year, right? But then you got injured. Yeah. The goal was to break 3:00 at Boston to set me up for the qualifying race for the Trials. My goal was actually 2:56 and it appeared that we were right on on target for that. But, then I strained my soleus partly because of my attempt to change my foot strike, since I’m a heel-striker. Never attempt to change your foot strike without the guidance of a very knowledgeable coach. And partly because of my intense training.

My PT, Mark Plaatjes, said the one leg was injured and the other was well on its way. My PT is amazing — he’s won 36 marathons in his life. and runs his own physical therapy practice in Boulder, InMotion Rehabilitation. I’ve shared my Trials dream with him, and it’s been wonderful having his support as well. He’s another one, along with Susan, who has fueld my motivation for the Trials. He, like Susan, tells it straight. And, when he said he thought my dream was feasible, I really took that to heart.

Yeah, I know his name.
Do you? He’s amazing.

He’s a former South Africaner, right?
Yeah. You’re really tuned into that world. I wasn’t. I didn’t know anything about the running world. He’s a sweet man. I really believe he has healing hands, a gift with that. He’s the one who recommended Bobby McGee.

Bobby McGee is a coaching legend, having coached Colleen De Reuck for 11 years, until 2000 [as well as the 1996 Olympic marathoner, Josia Thugwane, who won gold that year]. I think De Reuck just qualified for the Trials with a 2:32 or something.
Yeah. She is the only female in CO who’s qualified for the A standard so far and she’s still running 2:30′s in her mid-forties. From what I hear, she seems to be pretty amazing as well.

You haven’t been working with him that long, though.
About two months now. I switched to him at the end of April. Mark actually said, looking back that he should have had Bobby train him. He trained himself. In his opinion Bobby’s the best in the world. Bobby also has huge clout in the triathlon world, so that’s a nice transition for me to go to a pure running coach who is familiar with my world of triathlon and understands triathletes. He understands what hinders triathletes in the run in terms of running mechanics. It’s my impression that the pure running world and the triathlon world don’t usually commingle and have completely different mindsets. I really appreciate that I have found a world class Olympic running coach who also has trained elite and Olympic triathletes. He gets both worlds.

He speaks at seminars all the time to triathletes on sports psychology and running mechanics. I remembered his name from one of those appearances. And Bob’s friends with him too. So he has a foot in the triathlon world as well. And he coached Susan’s teammate, [triathlete] Barb Lindquist for the 2004 Athens Olympics. She was rated number one in the world. And Bobby is the one who trained her run. I was excited to learn this.

Do you live near him?
He’s in Boulder, so it’s about an hour drive to get up there. But, so worth it!

So he’s basically distance coaching you? You don’t go train with him (or have him come to you)?
The thing about Bobby is that he’s very invested. He jumps headlong into getting to know his athletes and likes to be hands on. He really prefers being in person. Bobby really has to see his athletes’ run mechanics. I have been so impressed that as his way to get to know me initially, he came with me to my first PT treatment to talk to my PT and came to my lactate threshold test. He took pictures of me running to thoroughly assess my mechanics.

I would not say that he’s distance coaching me since he makes tremendous efforts to either come see me here, or to have me there quite regularly. He’s a thorough communicator and is taking the time to get to know every aspect of me. He assesses from all angles. I’ve been so very pleased with how involved he is — even sends me articles and such in the mail when he thinks of something he wants to share with me. I’m really blown away with his coaching style and feel tremendously blessed to have found him.

Totally changing the subject – two of the other women in this series, Tammy Lifka and Julie Wankowski, have a coach with an interesting approach to structuring training. He has them do 5K training as preparation to go into marathon training. He has certain goals that he wants them to hit for the 5K – 18 minutes – before considering a qualifying time to be a reasonable goal. So he’s focused on getting them to an 18 minute 5K and a 1:20 half as his litmus tests for readiness. Do you have incremental goals like these that you’re trying to hit along the way?
Since I was out of the game for three months in the spring because of my injury, Bobby started me back very slowly at base training to rebuild a solid foundation. So he reigned me back from any racing, speed or hill work for at least  6 weeks, which was smart. He was more focused on getting my strength and endurance back, and in this phase focused on increasing speed and distance at the same heart rate. This has been crucial before we could consider anything like you mention above. But Bobby’s approach is much different anyway, to answer your question. We are, however, building my 5K in training. For example, I did a 2x5K in today’s session in heart rate zone 2, and will build that to 5x5K as a good measure of predictability for my marathon pace. All the while watching my heart rate decrease as my speeds increase!

We’ve just started into the next phase and are starting to incorporate some speed work, which I’m very excited about. I’ve been eager since time is short and I feel very behind. I have to keep tucking that pride away when it wants to pop up every now and then…like at my first 5K last weekend since base training, and I lost my 2nd place overall lead in the last .2 miles. This isn’t typical. But I think getting our pride knocked around from time to time is very good training in itself! I’ll get there!

It sounds like he’s just trying to get you to a basic level of fitness first.
And he wants to be very careful to do it right since time is short now.

Are you running completely pain free now?
Absolutely! Very excited about that. Bobby’s getting me strong again! I’m happy to be building the volume again.

Can you give me an example of a typical workout?
I’m not sure Bobby has a typical one — he’s certainly not cookie-cutter or formulaic. It’s all dependent on where I am and how I’m improving. But, perhaps a good recovery example would be 6×10 minutes in Aerobic Threshold zone 1 with 1 minute walking inbetween each. Each session starts and ends with a 5 minute walk.

How many miles per week are you running now?
I will hit above 60 this week, and climbing weekly. He does this interesting run/walk thing, which also gets more volume in. It might be: run 9 minutes, power walk for 1, repeating this the whole way through the run. He counts those as miles. He’ll have you start off power walking for 5 minutes and end with 3-5 minutes of power walking, and he counts those miles too. That’s a way to get your legs ready for higher volume. But, it’s also a way to maintain your pace throughout a session. Some elites actually use this run/walk technique in a race to stay ahead. Apparently, highly-accomplished triathlete Gordo Byrn utilizes this technique in racing.

I imagine that also helps because you’re using different muscles. So it gives [your running muscles] some relief.
Right. And, keeps the cardio working.

Do you train alone?
Right now I’m training alone. Susan was my running partner last summer. That was really awesome. But everybody else is really fit and in racing condition. I’m in aerobic right now. I can’t get my heart rate up as much as I want to. I’m not supposed to. It’s like a horse wanting to get out of the gate.

New York Marathon, 2009.

You must be really frustrated. Had you wanted to do the Bolder Boulder race? It must be frustrating to have a big event like that happening.
That one, not so much. There are so many people there. But, yeah, like I mentioned, my pride has taken a bit of a beating lately, which again, can be a good thing. What was most frustrating was missing out on Boston this year, which I had trained the entire year for. And I had planned on breaking 3:00 to set me up for the qualifying race.

What’s frustrating, and that I’ve had to learn to graciously accept, is that my timeline has been skewed now. And it will have to happen a different way. So I’m learning to trust the process, and it will come. Just not how I had planned it. I also believe that if God is the one who put this dream in my heart, then He will make it happen. I can’t rush that. All in due time. So, I am trying to sit back and just enjoy the ride as it unfolds.

It sounds like there’s a lot of opportunity for racing where you are.
Yeah. 5Ks, 10Ks, half marathons are a dime a dozen here.

Do you think doing the shorter races will eventually become part of your overall training regimen?
I don’t think he’s too keen on the 5K. Whereas Tammy’s coach is focusing her on the 5K, I don’t think he wants me there. Bob focused me on the 5K and 10K last fall as well. But I think Bobby is happier with 10 milers, half marathons – those longer distances.

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“In the last two companies I worked for…my managers were threatened by my racing. The cool thing about Elements is that we’re very fitness oriented. I told them right up front about my dream for the Trials, in the job interview. They’re openly supportive of it…This is my last chance…That means not choosing a job that won’t support this.”

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You work for a massage company, Elements Therapeutic Massage. Do you take advantage of the massage services they offer, to help you recover?
I do. I get a massage once a month from the founder, Michele Merhib. I’m very picky about my massage therapists, and she’s great.

You obviously had to do a lot of traveling for races when you were doing triathlons. Were they generally supportive of that? Or did you just use all your vacation time to do that?
I actually started with Elements last fall, after I switched to running from triathlon. In the last two companies I worked for I found that both of my managers at those companies were threatened by my racing. I took all of my vacation time for racing. They didn’t understand that. Your vacation time is your vacation time – however you want to use it. Especially at my last employer, my manager wasn’t keen on that. He was worried and said, “What if you get sick? You’re not going to have any time left.” But, I didn’t usually get sick.

Yeah, don’t they know that athletes don’t get as sick as people who are not athletic?
I know! He really didn’t like it. He didn’t get it. In fact, I learned to just keep my mouth shut. The cool thing about Elements is that we’re very fitness oriented, very wellness oriented. I told them right up front about my dream for the trials, in the interview. Straight up front: “Is this going to be an issue, my training for it? Like if I want to go running during lunch, because there’s a trail head five minutes away, and it ends up being an hour and a half? Can I just make up the time on either end of the day? Do you have an issue with that?” I’ve never been up front about that before. And they’re fully supportive of it. That relieves me quite a bit.

That’s great. I guess it’s a real testament to how important this is to you that you were willing to go out on a limb in a job interview by making it a requirement.
Well, yeah. This is a dream. As much as I’ve been pushing it under the rug all these years and dismissing myself, I realized, “You know? I really am going to reach a point where I am too old. It will be true at one point.” This is my last chance. I’d better grab it by the horns and go for it as much as I’m able to and do the best I can. That means not choosing a job that won’t [support this]. It’s exactly half the salary of my last job, so it is incredibly tough. But they’re supportive and that means everything. It’s a mile from my house. It’s a mile from the trailhead. They’re openly supportive of it. It’s worth it to me to not have to focus on a stressful job, so I can really just go for it and give it everything I have.

I think you’re not alone in that regard. I haven’t spoken to that many people yet, but I have a feeling that this is going to emerge as a theme. People have decided that for the next couple of years, they’re just going to put everything else on hold and not worry about career and just go for this.
I think you have to at this level. Especially when I reach a point where I’m running 100+ miles a week. I need a job, like Elements, that is not stressful or requires additional hours outside the standard. I need to limit my stressors in every area as much as possible, and will need to increase my rest as well.

It is difficult. I was doing 100 mile weeks last summer. I telecommute, but I work a 40 hour per week job and also do a lot of freelance work. It’s really hard. You just feel like you’re running all the time. You’re running in the morning and then you’ve got to work for 7 or 8 hours and then go running again. It can be quite draining.
Well, and then you have to get your rest. It’s so crucial with all that running. If you’re not getting that between the time and stresses at work that add to the fatigue…yeah, that’s tough.

Do you know anyone else locally who’s also trying for a qualifier?
I don’t know anyone personally here. That’s why I really enjoy what you’re doing [with this series] because it is making me more aware of other people out there with similar stories. Here I thought some people might think, “You don’t have a run background and you’re 39. Who are you?” It’s really cool to see that there’s a lot of other people in the same shoes. But, no, the only other person I’m aware of is Tera Moody. And I’m not anywhere near her league. I know she’s not local either – she’s either living in Boulder or Colorado Springs, I’m not sure.

She’s probably around 30, right?
Early 30s, I think. And she has a sleep disorder.

Oh, yes, I’ve read about that. That’s really impressive, that she can train at that level and not sleep.
It really is. I’m the opposite. I need 9-10 hours when my volume is high.

I’m sure she does too, but she doesn’t get it.
No. She’s just amazing. I discovered her in January, right before my injury. It was the last race I was supposed to do, but I couldn’t do it because of my injury. I wanted to win that run. I remember looking up the results online to see who won it, and it was her. So I looked her up and discovered who she was – “Oh, that’s why she won it.” And then I was glad I didn’t show up. Ha!

Yes, she’s very fast.
I’ve been watching her in other races, kind of as a benchmark: “That’s what she’s doing, and that’s where I need to be…”

Any advice for others who are going after this?
I would hope that anyone going after this would not allow distractions to get in the way. That’s been the biggest thing with me. I keep kicking myself. Just to go after it with your everything and not let doubts, excuses, naysayers, tough circumstances or negative self-talk interfere. Focus on the goal, like in a race, and don’t get distracted by what’s on the sidelines. Just go for it with everything you have and see where you land. Take it as far as you possibly can go. And I hope you’ll find it will be a worthwhile journey no matter where you land, because I believe it really is more about the journey and who we become along the way than it is about the outcome.

I would like to encourage other people to go after their dreams, no matter how big, and to pursue their talents — they were given to each of us for a reason. When we use our talents, it just betters everyone.

I really do want to encourage others. And you – I want to encourage you!

Well, you already have.
That’s good. Because you’re not too old. I’ve used that one many times before.

Well, I’m a good 6 years older than you are, so I really am sort of hitting the upper limit of sanity with this idea. But maybe not.
You could show the world. It’s all in the head, right, with the thinking? It’s all what we put in our head.

I hope you’re right. Well, aside from the interview, I’ve really enjoyed talking to you and I hope I can follow up with you as you move along towards this goal.
Yeah, I’d love for you to.

I spoke with Tammy via phone for a little over an hour. It was a very fast hour. I’ve posted audio of our interview, which is also transcribed below. The transcription is edited in spots to cut down on my own rambling questions. You can hear them in their entirety in the audio.

I wanted to start by asking you about your athletic background and how you’ve developed as a runner. I know you’re sort of a latecomer to competitive running, having jumped into a 20 mile race on what seems like kind of a lark in 2006. it sounds like you were fit in terms of having done some running and gym work before. But you hadn’t run more than about 7 miles. So that was quite a jump. Can you talk a little bit about that?

I had three kids and I was going to the gym at the time and doing spin classes. The most I was running was getting on the treadmill for three miles. One of my best friends from college, Missy Pieper, lives in Madison, WI, and I like to go visit her. She called me up in the beginning of June and asked me if I wanted to to this 20 mile walk/run race. It’s called Syttende Mai, and starts at the capital and you run to Stoughton. I was told it was very hilly.

At first I was like, “No way. You’re crazy! How are we going to do a run?” And she said, “Oh, I know how you are. We can run/walk it. And if anything we can just walk the whole thing. But let’s sign up for the running part so we can run/walk it.”

Women's winner, 50 Hecto & American Slide-Chart 5K Run (May, 2010).

In my mind, I was thinking we could at least walk it. I signed up and did all the rookie things. We went out the night before and had fun, and had no idea what to expect. I didn’t even own a running watch. No idea or thoughts of pace. It was very on a whim.

I did have a PowerBar, which was good. The night before we had a plan, what we should do. And I said, “When I run on the treadmill, I can run a 9:00 pace. I’m pretty good at that. Why don’t we do that?” And Missy said, “Sure.” So for the first 4-5 miles, we were running between a 9:00 and 9:30 pace, right on track. Then right about mile 8, we started to run/walk. After doing that for a few miles, I either wanted to walk or run. It was driving me nuts, walking and running.

So I said I wanted to just walk or run. Missy said, “You don’t even seem tired. You seem fine.” She saw some friends walking on the side and said, “Go ahead. Go run. Go do this. See how far you can take it.” So I went ahead and kept running. And every mile I kept going I was very surprised. I had no idea what pace I was doing. I finished running the whole thing at what turned out to be a 10:00 pace, but we were walking inbetween.

I was amazed I did that. It seemed like it wasn’t real. I had no idea, no expectations and didn’t even think I could run 6 miles.

How did you feel at the end of the race? Did you feel completely exhausted or did you feel good throughout the whole thing?

I felt pretty good the entire race. I did take the water and Gatorade on the course. I felt like I ran the last 10 miles complete, without stopping. It was a lot of fun.

After that, after going back home, the questions started: “If you can run 20 miles, can you run 26?” So that’s how it started. I don’t think if she hadn’t called me up I would have even started. I didn’t even comprehend 20 miles in my mind.

You must have gotten some inkling that you had a capacity for doing endurance sports after that.

Everyone else around me motivated me. They were asking questions similar to what you’re asking: Did you train? I said those must have been some good spin classes for cross-training. But I really did surprise myself.

Did this experience immediately trigger a desire to start training for a marathon?

It did. After that race I signed up for a half marathon with my sister. That was the Chicago half in the fall [2006]. Again, I surprised myself. My sister wanted to do a half for her first time. We agreed we’d not try to run it together, but meet at the end. I lined up in the 9:00 pace area and ended up running a 7:50 pace for a half marathon. So that’s when I knew that I should start getting serious about this, meaning figuring out things like training.

Your debut marathon was 2007 in Chicago, which was brutal. It [the heat] sent hundreds of people to the hospital. Doing your first marathon is hard enough mentally and physically. What was it like to run your first marathon under those conditions?

I’d signed up for Chicago because I was very motivated to try 26. I really didn’t know what to expect. I still was running alone, 6-7 miles a day about 5 times a week. I was still doing spin classes and a lot of cross-training. I still didn’t sign up for a running group. I was just kind of winging it. I didn’t follow a plan or do 20 milers.

A lot of people gave me advice. About a month before I talked to friends who had done the marathon and they said, “It might be hot. It might be cold.” So I had three outfits planned. Still, I was training outside and doing my spin classes. So I bought a device that allows you to hold a water bottle when you run. I trained with that because I needed fueling when I ran on the Prairie Path.

So I got used to training with that. About two weeks before the race, they were talking about heat. It didn’t really stress me out because I didn’t know how heat can affect you for running. I hooked up with some of the Glen Ellyn runners in town and for $20 I would have a place to keep my stuff. I went down the day of and since it was going to be hot I thought I’d better use this water bottle. And that was the thing that saved me, that probably got me through the whole marathon. The other part that saved me was that, since I ran a half marathon in a certain time, I was in the B corral. I had water the whole time on the course.

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“I never did track except a little in high school. I wasn’t fast enough. I wasn’t a sprinter. I never made state. I was just a very average runner.”

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So I was figuring my pace was going to be around an 8:15 or 8:30. And someone said, “You might qualify for Boston.” And I didn’t know. I said, “What’s Boston?” I never followed running. And they told me about this race where you had to get a certain time, and the time I had to get was a 3:45. And I said, “Oh, well, that’s nice.” I didn’t know what it was about.

When I went to the expo I saw that they had pace teams, which I thought might be a good idea. But there wasn’t a 3:45 pace group there, so the guy told me to do a 3:40. I had a 3:40 pace band. I went out and started running and did the rookie move: “It’s going to be hot, so maybe I should bank some time.”

You kind of did everything wrong, but it worked out well anyway.

I know! I ran ahead and went in front of the pace group. I figured it was going to be cooler out [earlier], so why not run faster when it’s going to be cooler between the buildings rather than in the heat of the day. So I ran 8:00 pace, ahead of my pace. I was filling my bottle with Gatorade and sipping it the whole time.

Things went pretty well and at mile 20-22, there was no shade. People were dropping, by that I mean walking. I saw emergencies on the side of the road. And that’s when it really hit me: something’s going on here. It was kind of scary. I was trying to block it out.

I was still running my pace and saw the 3:40 pacer pass me at mile 23. And I knew I had to get a 3:45. I was so close. There was no way I was going to miss it by 30 seconds or a minute. So I knew if I could keep that pacer in my sight, I could do this. I could qualify for Boston. And I really didn’t know what it was about, but I do have a competitive personality with myself. So I was thinking, “I’m going to do this. I’m going to do this.” I didn’t finish with them but I kept them in my sight and finished with a 3:42.

Still, I didn’t know what was going on around me. All I knew was that after I finished I saw this stream of people in front of me, walking, like they’d gotten off the bus. I didn’t know what was going on. And people were saying, “The course is closed.” And I was worried. “Did I really finish? Did I get a time?” I finished in time and it all worked out. But I heard all those stories after that. But I had my thermos. It was really those two things: if I didn’t have water on the course, I wouldn’t have made it. Other people didn’t have water. I don’t think I would have finished.

I imagine a lot of marathons have felt easy after that.

Well, you know, I guess “easy” is compared to what your goal is. I don’t think any marathon’s easy. Even when I pace. There’s always a point when you’re running and you want to stop, for me. Whether it’s a 5K or a marathon. Even pacing — there’s some point in the race where I question if I’m going to be able to do this. I’ve gotten that question a lot when I was pacing: “Is this real easy for you?” Not really, because you’re still out there for a certain amount of time, and it’s still taxing on the body. There isn’t a time when it’s so easy; it’s a challenge.

Looking at your Athlinks racing history, not only are you prodigious racer but you’re also successful at racing. It looks like in just about every race you’ve gotten a PR, which is kind of amazing. You’ve had this very steady downward progress in your times in most distances. Looking at your major races, you went from a 3:16 in Boston last year to a 3:03 in the fall in Chicago. Do you think your progress has to do with having a predisposition to being a good distance runner, or does it reflect your more serious training for the marathon over that time?

What has helped me the most has been starting later [in life]. My PRs have jumped drastically. And I’m really competitive with myself. I also print my pace band out ahead of time and I race against that. That’s my competition. If I can beat that next time and get a PR, that to me is success. I really don’t race against other people, whether it’s a 5K or a marathon. That’s how I motivate myself.

In terms of how I’ve improved the most, I never did track except a little in high school. I wasn’t fast enough. I wasn’t a sprinter. They always put in the mile or 2 mile. I never made state. I was just a very average runner. That was the last time I did track. Then when I met Dan Marks and this group of Wheaton runners, that’s when I made the biggest jump. Track has been the most important part of my training.

Tammy (glasses/ponytail), Julie (#83) and Dan (orange shorts) at the Slide-Rule 5K start.

And by that do you mean speedwork? Or longer intervals?

Uh, huh. Speedwork and doing tempo runs. Before that I was really just running the same pace all the time. So by having that increase in mileage, and you’re doing a 15 mile run and you’re going to do a pickup for 20 minutes, it really helps you get faster. And also doing the different track workouts.

Yeah, you can see the difference in your top end speed when you look at your race times. Even just in the last year and a half you’ve gone from high 20:00s down to mid 18:00s in the 5K, which is really amazing progress. So you’re saying you attribute that to the track work.

That’s what we’re working on now. There are two different phases in training. Without getting into too many details, it’s trying to work on your 5K time first to get that faster before you go into marathon training.

You’re not the first person I’ve heard say this. I’ve known a couple people who have taken a break from marathoning and have concentrated on just 5Ks or 10Ks for a season. They’ve said it’s had a dramatic effect once they’ve gone back into marathon training.

Yes, they say to run fast. And to do it, you have to build your speed up. My strength is distance. I’ve never been a fast twitch runner. Since I’m more slow twitch, I need to work on my weakness, which is the 5K. If you looked at where my marathon is at 2:58 and then look at the calculators that say what I should run for the 5K, it was way off. My strength is in the endurance, but I don’t have that fast twitch. But I’m working on it. I have to work on my weaknesses.

Well, I guess everyone does. You mention that you have a competitive personality. And that you have a background in tennis in high school and college. That’s very different sport from running. Can you draw any parallels between how you competed as a tennis player vs. how you compete as a runner.

Tennis was a big part of my life. My whole family played. Tennis was my life, I would have to say. I taught tennis in summer. The dedication, the long hours, doing the same repetitive thing over and over again and not giving up — that, to me, has really transferred over to the running. Having determination in any sport — that’s what drives and motivates you. Why are we out there, in any sport, for so many hours doing the same thing over and over again? Even when you have failures, and successes — what makes you go out there? For me, even after losing a tennis match, it’s about trying to get better. That’s definitely carried over into running. I have seen the most success in running than in any sport I’ve played before.

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“Pacing helps me enjoy the sport more. I feel it’s given running another purpose. Instead of going out there and focusing on my goal all the time, pacing opens up your mind. I also feel like I’m giving back to the sport.”

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Well, you seem like a natural.

Well, I’m feeling very young right now. I tell my husband that this is a good midlife crisis. I’m going to be 40 in a month. I feel like I’m in the best shape of my life. I’m running faster than I was even in high school. I feel youth again, so that’s a good thing.

And you’ve only just started. They say that no matter what age you start running, you’ve got a good 10 year window in which to improve. So I’d say you’ve got at least another 6 or 7 years of improvement.

I hope that’s true.

I want to ask you about your pacing experiences. Can you talk about why you like pacing others and what you get out of it?

Pacing helps me enjoy the sport more. I used to be a teacher. I enjoy helping people and teaching. Now that I’m at home with my kids, pacing helps fill the void of not being able to teach in the classroom every day. I do enjoy it and it makes running even more fun. I feel it’s given running another purpose. Instead of going out there and focusing on my goal all the time, pacing opens up your mind.

I also feel like I’m giving back to the sport. I can really relate to people, as you can tell from by beginning stories. I’ve been there, and it wasn’t too long ago. So I can relate to the people who are trying to achieve their goals, or doing their first marathons. I can give them tips. I also help lead running groups and help other runners out. When they tell me they tried something I suggested that worked for them, that’s what keeps me going. If I was just out there every day, doing track workouts and just focusing on this one goal, I would get burned out. So this helps me move forward.

When I first started running in races, I would sometimes run with a pacing group. The pacing group leaders were always one part technician and one part cheerleader. The good ones were very good at motivating people along the course to help them keep up. Or in some cases encouraging them to drop back if they were running outside of their capabilities. It seems like it takes a special personality to do it.

It’s a long time to be out there. There’s a lot of conversation going on. I try to make it fun, like playing the game “You know you’re a runner when…” and they blurt out things along the course. We talk about our goals. You’re out there for quite a long time, so we have a long time to talk and get to know each other. It keeps their minds off of it. And I found out that I’m actually pretty good at pacing.

I’d say you’re very good at it. You just paced a half in Madison, WI this weekend and you were half a second underneath the goal time. How did you get that close?

I use my Garmin and then I always print my pacing band and see where we are on the course. I tried to keep an 8:00 pace and come in at 1:45. It was 1:44:59.4.

Talking about my personality — there’s even a little bit of competition amongst the pacers. We try to get closest to the “pin,” meaning closest to your goal time. So far, with everyone I’ve paced, I’ve come closest to the pin. It’s bragging rights. It makes it fun. It’s fun to meet all the different pacers and different people.

Like me, you probably live extremely close to sea level. But you’ve recently invested in some altitude simulation equipment. Can you describe what the equipment is and how you use it?

Right now I’m using a Hypoxico Simulated Altitude system. It’s a generator and there’s a tent that you put over your bed. It literally looks like a real tent [and allows you to sleep at altitude]. But it’s clear, so you don’t have to feel claustrophobic in there. Then there’s an exercise mask that you can run on a treadmill with. You adjust it so it’s like you’re breathing the air at 5,000 feet or 7,000 feet.

The generator and mask.

How long have you been using it?

About three months.

Your husband’s a triathlete, so he’s benefitting from it and is okay with sleeping in a tent. Have you both gained a noticeable benefit from it?

There isn’t a definite measure. I’m also training harder and I’ve changed my diet — I’m doing all these different things in my training, so it’s hard to pinpoint one specific thing. But I will tell you that I’ve gone off of it for a week or two. They say after 4-5 days you can notice the difference. Just as if you were in Colorado and came to lower elevation. When I would start running I’d notice a difference in how I felt. But I can’t pinpoint my times and say I’ve improved by this much.

The altitude tent.

I do feel it helps and that’s why I bought it. My husband said, “I don’t want to hear it, that you could have used this one thing and maybe it would have made the difference of 30 seconds or a minute.” My philosophy, going forward toward this goal, is that I want to do everything I can — with diet, training, weight lifting, the whole package — and in the end I can say I gave 100%. If I did everything I could then I’ll be happy.

So I don’t have a certain measure. I sleep with it. I’ve done all my research and I know the elite athletes are using this type of simulated altitude training. I figure since they’re using it, it has to work or improve your times. All these coaches are also going out to Colorado and doing their training in altitude. There’ve been lots of studies and it’s not this new thing.

I guess it’s cheaper than going to Albuquerque or Mexico City every year.

Right. I have three kids. If I could move out to Colorado or whatever three months before my training I would do that.

Lake Geneva Winterfest 5K, Wisconsin (Feb 2009). Tammy and her kids: Nathan, 6; Tyler, 9; Lindsay, 11.

You’ve got three kids under the age of 11. With both you and your husband training, how do you balance parenting with your training demands?

What does help is that I’m not working full time. I’m at home with the kids, but I do tutor and do different things on the side. But I have a philosophy that says I can’t do everything, nothing’s going to be 100% with the general things that I normally do. The cleaning and going out, gardening — just the things that you have to do around the house. I would have to say that I’ve let some things go. I might not have everything spic and span, but I just feel that the one thing that’s most important to my husband and myself is spending time with the kids. So that’s what we’ve put as top priority. If there’s weeds in the garden, we let that go.

Also, I train early in the morning. Our group runs at 5:15 or 5:30. So when I come home from my training, my kids are just getting out of bed. Then I have the day to do my other things, whether it’s my weight training or different things throughout the day. My husband’s training for an ironman, so he trains in the morning and then at night. It’s kind of hectic, but our kids are proud and they are involved in sports. If anything, they’ll look back and we’re setting good examples for them.

Have they shown any interest in running themselves?

No, they haven’t. And that’s fine. Both my kids are on the swim team and they play baseball. So they’re active in other ways. But my daughter did say she wants to run the Freedom Four, which is a Fourth of July family race, which is four miles. We’re going to run/walk that, and she asked me, so that was good.

Where are you looking to run a qualifying time? Your race in Sacramento was kind of a preview of the California International Marathon [CIM] course. It looks like you want to do that again this year, along with Chicago again. And if you haven’t qualified at those, then try again at CIM in 2011 about a month before the trials. So that’s two or three chances. Marathons are so unforgiving. You can arrive at race day and the weather’s bad or you’re not feeling right. Do you have a backup plan in terms of other races planned in case everything doesn’t fall into place for these races?

I agree 100%. There’s a lot of things that can happen. Chicago ’07 is a perfect example. If I show up in California and the weather is not ideal, say, whipping rain — it’s not going to be the day to run — I won’t run that. I’ll just go home and look ahead to what marathon there might be in the next week or two. If I look too far ahead I’ll lose focus and be worried about the weather being right. I don’t want to jinx myself by looking at the next race. I know there’s other marathons out there you can do. If there’s another one out there I can always switch the date.

It seems like in the past your strength has been in not overthinking things. That seems to be working for you.

Yes, it’s kind of a side plan. Closer to it, I’ll look around to at least have an idea of what the other races are. I’m just going to focus on California. I’m not even focused on Chicago at this point. One race at a time, right?

How many miles are you running at this point?

It varies because I’ve been doing a lot of races. 5Ks, lately. It’s been between 70-80. We’re planning on increasing it to about 90-100. It’s going to be different for me vs. my training partner, Julie. 100 miles might be where she needs to be. For me, it might be 90. There isn’t a magic number. If I have 98 miles, I shouldn’t have to feel like I have to go out and run those extra 2 miles to get 100 in. My coach is stressing that what might be good for Julie might not be good for me. Or I might need more miles.

Are you going to be hitting those numbers in doubles or singles?

I’ll probably do doubles.

Have you done a lot of doubles work before?

I’ve done a few. With altitude training I’ve done a few where I’ve run [outside] and then gone on the treadmill for four miles [with the altitude equipment] and done that twice a week. I do doubles after track, and that helps my legs. In the evening I’ll go out and run real slow and do 3-4 miles. I was doing it not to get the miles in but because it helped me recover the next day. It’s going to be harder because we’re going to be putting a lot more miles in.

I’ve talked to other runners who are running 100 miles per week. They’ve said that taking one day off and doing more doubles is easier for them. They needed that mentally. I’m going to have to test it out because the most I’ve run was 80 miles so far, and that was just recently. All this is new to me. I’m not sure how this is going to feel or what’s going to work. But my coach understands that it’s not going to be the same and I have to figure out what works for me. Trial and error.

Speaking of volume, one of the other runners I’ve talked to, Jaymee Marty, feels that volume has been the one thing that’s probably contributed the most to her progress. Although you’ve mentioned speedwork. Are there aspects of your training over the last couple of years that have had the most effect on your improvement? Besides speedwork, I mean. For example, you mentioned weight training. Has that helped you?

Oh, yeah. I’m just like a lot of other runners. I’m always looking to see what the elites or other faster runners are doing. Not that there’s a magic workout. But what am I missing? Before this point I wouldn’t take multivitamins. Or I wasn’t watching what I was eating. I was eating healthy, but in terms of protein or different foods. And weight training is a real weakness of mine. I really don’t get motivated to do the weight training. So that’s what I need to work on, and work on the core by taking core classes.

I went to see a nutritionist (Monique Ryan), who’s been helping me with nutrition. I’ve been reading Matt Fitzgerald’s book “Racing Weight.” It’s only in the last 5-6 months that I’ve changed my diet. I’ve felt better. I’m now eating within 10-15 minutes after running any hard workout. It’s a of information and I didn’t know these things, like taking vitamins or glucosamine for my joints. So this has all really helped a lot.

I’ve always found it ironic that running seems like such a simple thing but the more serious you become about it, you realize how complicated it is. You have to do all of these other things to augment just going out and running. Paying attention to when you eat and what you eat, for example.

And I didn’t really have that in tennis. That’s a big difference between the two sports. I would say that eating has been the biggest change — so you do a track workout and two days later you’re doing a 15 mile run with pickups. You need your rest. For the first time ever, I have a book club in my neighborhood and I have to get up and say, “I’m sorry, but I have to go home.” It’s a huge commitment. This whole process has been a big life change for me. That’s what I feel it takes to do this. You have to be committed 100%.

Something that’s been impressive is that you’ve managed to avoid a lot of problems that plague people who jump into this fairly seriously. The big one being injury. But overtraining is often something that happens to people. I know a lot of masters runners also become iron defiicient if they suddenly up the mileage and training intensity. But you’ve managed to avoid all that. Do you know why?

If you define an injury as something that takes you out for a few weeks, I’ve had injuries. I had plantar fasciaitis. I ran through it, where I was limping home. But everything I’ve had, I’ve trained through. But there’s a fine line of knowing when to back off the mileage. I’ve had bursitis on my foot, where I’ve had to take off a week. Listening to your body, knowing when to take off, or knowing you didn’t recover long enough from a race — that’s important.

Out of all these things: nutrition. Nutrition has helped me recover. If your muscles are tired and not getting the proper nutrition, I think that causes a lot of injury. We see a lot of runners at different weights and with different eating patterns, and I’ve read a lot of articles [about nutrition], and that might have contributed to [injury]. I’m eating what I should be eating and that helps a lot.

To switch subjects, I’m going to go back to your racing history. You tend to race a lot, but on either extreme of the distance spectrum. You do a lot of 5K and 10K races, and the on the other end of the spectrum, you do half marathons and marathons. Are you using the shorter races as time trials, or ways to evaluate how your speedwork is going? Or are you racing them because you enjoy them? Or for all of those reasons?

I’m doing them for my training, not just to race them. My coach believes that there are certain checkpoints along the way, times that you should be able to run certain distances at. For the 5K, it would be running an 18:00 flat or under, as one of the stepping stones or guidelines. So I’m getting closer [Tammy's best time for the 5K is 18:22, run in early May]. For the half marathon it’s running a 1:20. So that would be my next goal, and then you do the marathon. There’s no science behind it, meaning you don’t have to run exactly that time. But you have to be within that range to consider the OTQ goal. There have been people who have run 18 flat and a 1:20 half and still haven’t been able to get that qualifying time. I want to be realistic, but they’re just benchmarks along the way.

So you’re about half a minute off an 18:00 5K. How close are you to a 1:20 half?

I just ran a 1:23 at Rockford. We’ve been training for the 5K. Without being in that kind of training phase [the half], I wanted to see where I was at. Before that time, last year, I ran a 1:29.

That’s a huge improvement.

From 1:29 to 1:23…

That’s got to give you some confidence.

Yeah, it has. I wasn’t going for the 1:20. I just wanted a guideline. It was hard to comprehend going to a 1:20 from a 1:29.

You’re closer to the lower end than the top end now.

You keep trying.

How do you deal with training in Chicago’s weather extremes? Do you just get used to it, or do you do any of your training inside?

We go to an indoor track one day a week. All the other days are outside. Unless it’s icy or there’s a lot of snow. Then we’ll go inside just to run. It’s very difficult running on a tiny track that’s 12 laps to a mile. Or even some of them are 8 laps to a mile. It’s taxing on your hips and you really feel the indoor track. It’s difficult [to run outside], but we’re out there if the roads are clear. In the wintertime when it’s 20 degrees out and I have all these layers on, it’s hard to go and run a 6:00 pace outside in the cold. It’s hard to train.

That’s another reason why none of my goal marathons are in the spring. I don’t want to train for a marathon during the winter. We’re running outside year round. But I actually fell last winter, I slipped on some ice and hurt my back. That kind of scared me. And it was just a casual run. I had to take a week off, so it was pretty scary.

I want to move on to your coaching experience and training with Julie. You’re both coached by Dan Marks. Most of the people I’m interviewing work with a coach and get different things out of that relationship. How do you feel he’s helped you, aside from the obvious things like putting together a training plan?

Training alone, I need someone to check in with. Even if I’m gone for the weekend, I send him my Garmin data. He keeps me accountable for my training. If it’s 80 degrees, or pouring rain, and I really don’t want to go out there and run, I know I have to because this is what’s on the schedule.

Tammy and Julie at the elite start of the Shamrock Shuffle 8K (Illinois, Mar 2010).

He also helps analyze where I’m at, what I’m doing. He helps me set goals, such as reaching an 18:00 5K, as incremental ones to reach along the way to this larger goal. And put things in perspective. You have to look at all the little things you have to do to lead up to the final goal, to kind of break it up.

What’s also nice is that we run as a group. He’s running races I’m doing and also running speedwork with us. When I’m waking up at 5:15 or 5:30, we have our whole group there and he’s running too. With him there, I can report on something that hurts or how I’m feeling. So when we go out to the track, he’s not the coach with the timer telling me my splits. It’s “Here’s the workout” and we all do the workout. Some of it might be more specific for certain runners, but he’s out there doing his workout too.

I don’t think I could have a “paper” coach, meaning he sends me my workouts and I go do them and they live out in California. I need to have someone I can talk to that’s there, that knows me as a person and a runner. That’s what’s helped the most.

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“I think there’s a lot of negativity about running over 40. There really isn’t a lot of encouragement for our age group. It’s like, “Okay, you’re done.”

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Are you all running as a club?

It’s a group. We’re called the Buffaloes. Some people are there just to run. Some of us like to do more racing. But we run seven days a week and we have certain routes that we meet at. That really helps me. If I showed up at 5:15 and it’s 30 degrees and there was no one [else], I’m already thinking of driving back home. I am not motivated to run by myself when the weather is not ideal.

You and Julie are both going for a qualifier. Is this an idea that came to you both at the same time, or did you start thinking about this independently and then talk to each other?

It was independently. It came up in conversation, but at the time my PR was 3:16 and I didn’t think I was even in the ballpark. So I didn’t think about it too much. But I thought I’d see how I’d do in Chicago (2009). I’d only been doing training, doing speedwork, for a year. So I ran Chicago (in 3:03). It was a good race, but I didn’t go all out. My coach didn’t want me to go for a huge PR — from 3:16 to sub-3:00 — and be disappointed.

So I ran what I could do. I’m not a runner who can start off slow and then increase later in the second half. I like to do a steady pace. After Chicago, I thought that if I was going to do this course [CIM] in California, I wanted to see what it was like. So I signed up for that race to just see the course. I was told that I might not run as well, I’d have tired legs. But I knew I had more in me.

It [a push for a qualifier] mostly started after California [in December]. All these women were saying I could have run faster if there hadn’t been that wind and I was like, “Really?” So, after California I was motivated to really put my goal out there and tell people about it and talk to my coach about it.

Fourteen women over the age of 40 qualified in 2008. Something I often think about is why so few women over 40 qualify when I think that there are probably more than that who are capable of doing it. I question whether it’s sociological — meaning for a lot of women, it just doesn’t occur to them to go after his. Or if it’s that there are so few people who are physiologically able to do it. But then I talk to people like you who took up racing competitively fairly late in life, without a lot of background it in, and yet have excelled very quickly. Do you think there are more people who are like you out there, who may be nascent very good marathoners, but just don’t ever discover it and so never go after something like this?

Women in our society today are having children later in life. I think having their families later, getting married later, has a big role in women achieving that goal or even knowing that they can be at that level. For me, I would have never started this if it wasn’t something like my friend Missy [suggesting we do a 20 mile race]. I was done having children and I didn’t have any idea.

If you have kids and you’re working in a very demanding job, it’s very hard to balance. For me, I’m lucky because my husband’s understanding. Having him be in the traithlon world, he’s a little bit more understanding than some other people might be because he understands what the training involves.

I also think there’s a lot of negativity about running over 40. There’s not a lot of motivation to do that when you’re older. In many sports, there really isn’t a lot of encouragement for our age group. It’s like, “Okay, you’re done.”

I don’t know what the racing scene is like where you are, but here in New York the most competitive age group is women’s 40-44. I have a theory that a lot of women wake up in their late 30s and realize that this is something that’s important to them and they really start applying themselves. I was so happy to finally move out of that age group because it’s so much easier now, now that I’m 45.

What I say to a lot of women out there [in their 30s and 40s] is that it’s really a lot of fun going out there and finishing with all these young girls. At the starting line, I get the look. In even the 5Ks. They look at me like, “What are you doing on the front line?” I can tell what they’re thinking, when I’m doing my strides; “Who is this woman out here?” And then to win the race…I had a girl come up to me after a 5K and say, “That was a great race. How old are you?” And when I told her I’m almost 40, it’s like, “Oh…wow…” It’s a compliment. But people need to realize that you can do things later on in life. It’s not like you can’t start a new dream or a new goal. That makes my day.

I want to finish up by asking you for some more details about your race at Sacramento this December because I think it was an important race for a lot of other reasons besides your finishing time. Can you talk a little bit about it?

Yes, so I signed up to go to California. I went with my friend, Kurt Fiene. He’s a visually impaired runner and he was in Runner’s World and runs over in Elmhurst. So we went out there together and he was running with the visually impaired group. We went out there and I told him I wanted to see the course and see what’s happening. But then I hinted to him, “It would be so great to get under three hours. But I just don’t know…”

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“We’re driving the course and going up and down these hills. And I was nervous. This course was terrible. The car was having trouble going up. I was like, “Are you sure this is the right course?’”

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After Chicago I really didn’t do any speedwork and my coach is like, “I don’t want to put too much pressure on you.” I think he was worried about me going out and running a slower time and having me be depressed about it, or not motivated. So he said to take it easy and was playing it on the safe side.

But Kurt helps me mentally, with my mental game, in running. He’s the guy that I go to. If I have a question, I’ll go to Kurt. I can call him any time. So he was, like, “Well, I think you can do it. Let’s just see. ” I thought he was going to run his own race.

It was funny — I was told this course was very, very fast. We were staying in Folsom, where the race starts, and we went to the home where the other visually impaired runners were meeting up. I was told I was going to be the driver, because I was driving six other visually impaired runners. And I said, “Well, I don’t know where I’m going!” So we’re going to drive the course. We start at the start and they’re telling me where to go. And I’m thinking, “This is great — visually impaired runners telling me where to go.” But the one man, Rich, was from the area.

So we drove it, and we’re driving this course and going up and down these hills. And I was nervous. This course was terrible. The car was having trouble going up. I was like, “Are you sure this is the right course?” At one point, I think it was [mile] 23, there’s a bridge and Kurt goes, “If you can get past this point, you’re home free.” And I said, “Okay, this is not a goal race. Whatever. I’m just going to run as best I can. I don’t know what you guys are talking about, this being a fast course.”

The next morning we went to Folsom and I had an elite start. It was very nice, just like Chicago. I had my three hour pace band on and thought, “What’s it going to hurt? If I try it and I don’t think it’s going to happen, I can just slow up and pass on.” So I started with the three hour pace group … which had 150 runners. So Kurt, being visually impaired — he doesn’t need a guide — found it easier to run on the outside. He told me stay with the group.

So I’m thinking, “What’s going on here? It’s mile six and he’s still running with me.” He was coaching me: “Lean in a little, drop your arms, pull the rope like you’re running uphill…” Coaching me with all these tips. So then at the halfway point, the pacer was fast, like five seconds [per mile] fast. I came through the halfway mark and ran my half marathon PR. It was like 1:28 something, and my PR was 1:29. And Kurt’s like, “Okay, you just PR’ed! Great!” And then when you turn at the halfway point, the hills are not as bad. We had the headwind, but I stayed in the [pacing group] pack and I think that really saved me.

Kurt’s not leaving. I ask him why he’s still here. He ran a 2:42 at Boston [Fiene ran 2:43:44, a new American visually impaired record for the event]. I thought he was going to run faster. I’m not going to say anything, because then he’s going to feel obligated to stay with me. We kept going and at mile 18 the pacer is starting to slow down and says, “I was sick last week and I’m not going to make it. So if you want to go under three hours, go ahead.” I saw a Starbucks up ahead and said, “Okay, Kurt, get me a Starbucks. I’m coming up front. We’re going to do this thing.”

So I followed him and he still was coaching me, “You’re going to do it.” And I’m like, “Really? How do you know?” And he said he was listening to me breathe and talk. He’s very in tune with his body and the others around him. Even when I just run with him, he can tell when I’m working hard. So we kept running and went past a mile mark where the woman was calling out the time. I said, “Kurt, are we going to be under three hours?” And he says, “Oh, I think we’ll just make it. We’d better pick up the pace.”

Okay, so now we’re running 6:40s. I look at my watch all the time. At one point I say, “Kurt, we’re running a 6:20!” He’s like, “Stop looking at your watch and just go with the feel.” We’re passing all these people, it was the best feeling. We did get back down to 6:30 or something, but we were just zooming, passing all these people.

We finished [in 2:58:37] and it was the best feeling ever. I was in tears. And I asked why he did that for me and he said, “Because I knew you could do it. I knew that if you did this…you could go forward with your goal. If I felt you couldn’t do it then I was going go ahead. But I could tell with your breathing.”

For someone to give up his marathon — I mean, we flew out there — for me. It was the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me. And he said that he knew if he’d told me his plans I wouldn’t have let him do that. He’s always been there for me and is a really good friend. It means to much so give back to other people and help others in the sport. I highly encourage anyone to do that…because that’s what really makes it worth doing what we’re doing. That race was better than any race I’ve ever run, because he did that for me.

I just love the part about how he’s telling you to stop looking at your watch and run by how you feel. You can often be your own worst enemy at the end of a marathon because you can convince yourself that you’re going to fall apart when, really, everything’s okay.

Yeah, and I asked him why he told me to start [running faster] and he said, “You yelled at me, saying we were doing a 6:20. If you could yell at me, I knew you were fine. You wouldn’t be able to yell that to me if we were going too fast.” So he’s a great runner and person. That was my highlight and I told him we’ll look into next year and maybe he can pace me. We’ll see. I like to take it a day at a time and see where I’m at.

I have my coach, Dan. But Kurt is my coach mentally, which is just as important. If I’m questioning what I should do, I’ll talk to him about it.

We’ve talked about so much in terms of having the right people around you, eating correctly, sleeping and having everything else in place. Is there anything else that you can think of that other women who are pursuing this might be able to benefit from knowing?

I think when you’re trying to have a goal, whether it be the trials or [something else] — before I was searching for the magic workout or the training plan or the diets. The most important thing is getting to know yourself, your body and what works for you. Because what works for someone else might not be what you should do. You should read and try things out, but make sure to listen to to your body and know what works for you. And know that every runner’s different and unique. That’s really, I feel, the key to success.

Being determined and setting your goal: For me it really became a reality when I started putting it out there. I started coming up with the plan: “Now, what can I do in my life to help make this become possible?” Then you have to find what drives you. For me, it’s time. For some people, it might be something else inside of them. But you need to stay focused along the way and stay motivated. I’ve gone through that already with staying motivated by doing other things. For me, it’s pacing and helping other runners. If you just do the training you can get burned out pretty quickly.

Yeah, it gets old.

It does. It really does.

Well, I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you and hearing about what you’re putting into this. And I’m looking forward to following your progress over the next year and half or so.

Hopefully sooner! I’m just going to keep working at it and, like I said, in the end, I will give 100% and see where that takes me.

We’ve not yet met, but Jaymee was the first person I thought of when the idea for Houston Hopefuls came to me on a run. And so I decided she should also be my first interview.

Unlike a lot of people who pursue an Olympic marathon trials qualifier, you haven’t been running all your life. When did you start running and why?

I started running in the summer of 2004 mostly to see Devo in concert. Nike sponsored a series of 5K races called the Run Hit Wonder 5K where they featured 80s one-hit-wonder bands throughout the course. It just so happened that the race was going on in Portland the weekend before I was going to be in the area for work. My brother lives in Portland and told me about the race. The experience was fantastic:  I saw A Flock of Seagulls at mile 2 and Devo performed after the race.

The experience was a life changer for me. I was super impressed with myself for placing 18th in my age group with a time of 25:54 for the 5K. My brother later that day revealed his ambition to run a half marathon in the fall. I was intrigued by this goal and dared myself to try to do the same. Up until that point in my life, I really hated running. Having a goal as lofty as running 13 miles in a row without stopping seemed like a serious challenge.

I picked a local half marathon that October and used a Hal Higdon training program that I downloaded from the web to slowly build up to a long run of 10 miles the weekend before the race. I ran the half marathon at a faster pace than my 5K of two months before, finishing in 1:44. I realized during that training cycle that the reason I had hated running was because I had never run long enough. I now loved running long (>6 miles) though I still found the feeling I had for the first few miles of running to be excruciating. I decided to just continue on with my training program and to tackle a full marathon that December. I averaged 19 miles of running per week with a peak volume of 26 miles and no other supplemental training for the two months leading up to the California International Marathon (CIM) in Sacramento. I finished in 3:41 and qualified for Boston.

En route to the finish, CIM 2004.

Then how long was it before you started training and racing seriously?

After CIM 2004, I told some people about my accomplishment, and they seemed surprised at what I had done. This made me wonder whether this was a fluke or if I could get even faster at the marathon distance. While I was training for the 2005 Boston Marathon, I ran across some information about a racing team sponsored by a local Fleet Feet running store. I stopped in at the store and joined up. I would say that joining that team marked the beginning of my serious training and racing.

Was there a particular event that got the wheels turning in terms of thinking you could qualify for 2012?

I actually decided I was going to shoot for an Olympic Trials Qualifier (OTQ) soon after my first marathon. In Dec 2005, I ran CIM again and got my time down to 3:20. I did the math and decided that all I needed to do was knock another 33 minutes off of my time, and I was in there like swim wear. I had chopped 20 minutes off in one year, so this seemed like a reasonable prospect to me. For a number of reasons, I did not get my marathon time down enough to qualify for the 2008 Trials (I ran 2:55 in April 2008), but I did try and I never stopped believing.

You’ve made huge leaps in your racing times relative to your experience and age. Do you attribute any of this to having an innate gift or predisposition to being a good distance runner, or is it all due to hard work?

It’s definitely a combination of good genes and hard work. I don’t think I work much harder than many of the other fast runners I know, but I have poured a lot of energy into this pursuit. I have dedicated a big chunk of my life these last 5 years to training and doing the maintenance work necessary to be able to continue to train and race hard. But hard work only goes so far. Going from couch potato with zero running experience to a 2:46 marathon in 5 years is unusual progress that indicates some small amount of added talent.

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“To remain successful over the long term in any sport I think you first have to have a love for the sport itself.”

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Have you progressed at the rate you’d hoped to?

As I mentioned above, I was shooting for an OTQ for 2008, so I guess I’d have to say that I didn’t progress as fast as I had calculated initially. However, I’d like to think that was just an arithmetic error. I always believed I could run under the standard of 2:47 and had many people telling me the same. When I finally ran a 2:46 marathon at the Twin Cities Marathon, I felt like I had reached a major milestone even though I didn’t quite qualify for the trials under the new standard. That 6:22 pace had been locked into my psyche for so many years that it was a huge accomplishment for me to finally run a marathon at that pace.

What kinds of setbacks have you experienced and how have you dealt with them?

In April 2007, I ran my first sub-3 hour marathon working with my first on-line coach. Soon thereafter, I stopped working with him and was pretty lost without a direction for my training. I ran myself into the ground in short order trying to self coach, but was lucky to find my current coach before I hit rock bottom. She had me get my iron stores checked and my ferritin levels were at 12 ng/ml, which is super low. It took me 6-12 months before I got my iron stores up to a level where I felt peppy again in my running. I continue to take iron supplements daily and get my levels checked every 6 months, but my levels remain dangerously low.

I had my first real injury, achilles pain (still undiagnosed), back in February of this year. I was planning to run the Eugene Marathon in April and was in the thick of my training program. It was a very interesting experience for me, learning to differentiate good pain from bad pain. When you’re training hard, you get used to pain, and you work through it. I had experienced pain before, but I always joked that I had ‘under-use’ injuries because the remedy seemed to be to run harder to make them go away.

This time, I felt a bad kind of pain that got worse the more I ran. I knew I was in foreign territory but was lucky to have a coach that had been through a similar injury. In the end, I took 6 weeks off from hard running, but proved to myself that I could cross train through an injury. That was something I wasn’t sure I could do, mentally.

I’m now back to hard training and ramping up my mileage with a new appreciation for the importance of stretching, massage and the basic maintenance needs of my body.

As you mentioned earlier, you managed a 2:46:26 at Twin Cities last fall, just 26 seconds shy of making the B Standard. What do you think needs to happen to comfortably widen that narrow margin?

I just need a relatively fast course with good weather and a good group of folks to run with. Is that too much to ask?  I feel like my level of fitness was there for Twin Cities, but I just wasn’t able to deliver that day. If I can get back to that level of fitness or better this summer, I think I will run a 2:45 marathon or faster in Chicago 2010.

What time do you think you could eventually run the marathon in, under ideal conditions?

Wow. I have no idea. I have read that you continue to improve in fitness for 8-10 years after you start training seriously, so, given that, I’m about half way there. Of course, age will counteract that somewhat, but I do know Masters runners who have run for a lot more than 8-10 years that are still setting PRs. I’ve joked about going for a sub-2:40 before, but why limit myself?:)

Without going into detail about your training, is there any particular aspect of it that you feel has contributed to your progress as a marathoner?

Volume. Increasing my training volume while remaining injury free has no doubt been one of the keys to my success. I have been training for marathons (averaging 3 per year) since I started running 5 years ago, so I have been in a perpetual state of marathon training with little to no focus on speed training. I do want to see what the addition of speed work can do for me, but I still think my bread and butter is in high-volume training including long runs with fast finishes.

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“Training is just one big life lesson.”

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How are you going about planning for your qualifying attempts? Meaning how many marathons will you plan to race? If race day arrives and circumstances (bad weather, bomb scares, etc.) make running a good race impossible, do you have a backup plan?

My first attempt was at the Twin Cities Marathon in 2009. My next attempt will be at the Chicago Marathon in October 2010. If weather conditions look gloomy or a bomb threat pops up, I may attempt another marathon close to that date to take advantage right away of my fitness level. There’s always the local fast favorite, CIM, if I am left without a back up race to run close to Chicago. The only problem with this plan is that I’m running the 2500th Anniversary of the Athens Marathon for the US Military Marathon Team on Halloween 2010. I’ve thought about using that hilly beast of a course as my final long training run if I end up needing to use CIM as a qualifier. I always plan for contingencies.

Belgrade Marathon, 2009; 4th female overall, 1st masters female.

Which courses have you chosen for your qualifying attempts? What were some of the factors for choosing them?

Twin Cities was certainly not the fastest course, but it was the only chance in 2009 to qualify for the 2012 Olympic Trials. It was also the [USA] Masters National Championship marathon race so it was guaranteed to have fast women shooting for the same goal as I was. This was definitely the case. I had a pack of fast women, many of them masters, to run with for the first 20 miles. It was amazing. The last 10k of the course had some fun uphill grades that I knew were going to slow me down, and they did.

I chose Chicago because I’ve run it before, it is flat and fast and there will be a lot of women there trying to qualify. I also love the energy of that city.

Do you have incremental racing goals that you’re trying to reach on the way to a qualifier, sort of as checkpoints or milestones? Or any other running goals that are completely apart from that one?

Not really. I will be racing some shorter distances this spring and summer, but I really don’t think of those as checkpoints. As a matter of fact, I think I will actually use my marathon PR as a predictor of my shorter race distances and see if I can get those times down.

As far as other running goals, I would like to keep pushing up my total training volume. My coach, Nicole, gives me just a little more volume every training cycle and that makes me happy. I never seem to exceed 100 miles per week by much, but I get up there multiple times during a cycle. One goal I have set recently is to try to run all of my quality training runs without stopping to take “water breaks” during the quality portion of the workout. That seems silly, but I tend to push my paces a little hard in my workouts which makes me feel like I need to stop and catch my breath, if only for a few seconds.  I have gotten used to letting myself do this and want to change my ways. I don’t think I will gain much physiologically from this change, but mentally it will make me a lot tougher.

Your coach is Nicole Hunt, herself a former marathon trials qualifier, among other distinctions. Besides the obvious reasons, such as getting a customized training plan and ongoing guidance, how else has working with a coach been helpful to you?

I realized the value of having a coach very soon after I started running. I am a very self-motivated person which is great for getting me out the door every day to train. The problem is that my drive causes me to push myself a little harder than I should, so I can’t be trusted to make the best decisions for my training. Nicole, like any good coach, is my training conscience and helps me keep everything in perspective.

She says that she is very much like me in many ways, so I know that she understands what drives me. We have a very good working relationship. While I totally respect her experience and advice, sometimes I respectfully decline to go with it in an effort to push myself and learn whatever lesson can be learned on my own. I’m always up front about this with her.

These lessons can be painful, but they add to the whole experience of running. I know that it must be hard for a coach to watch an athlete learn the same painful lessons that they learned many years before, but there’s really no way to transfer the experience and essence of those lessons to another person simply by telling them the story or directing them to do something a certain way. Training is just one big life lesson.

Do you believe there is a specific kind of running “talent” as relates to longevity as a competitive runner? Something that could explain the competitive staying power of lifetime athletes like Colleen De Reuck or Linda Somers-Smith, not to mention successful late bloomers like yourself?

To remain successful over the long term in any sport I think you first have to have a love for the sport itself. For me, it’s a blast right now because I’m continuing to improve and have no reason to suspect that I won’t continue on this trajectory for a bit longer. For athletes who’ve been at the sport a lot longer and have peaked in terms of performance, there has to be something else that motivates them.

That’s another great thing about running, you can figure out so many different ways to challenge yourself even after you’ve peaked in one area. You can train for different distances, you can do ultras, track meets, mountain running. You can strive for age group records or age group awards. Turning 45 is something I look forward to because I’ll be in a new age group and won’t have to compete with all those young upstart masters runners any longer.

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“I think you’ll see a spike in qualifiers over 40 this time around.”

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What do you think of the women’s B standard qualifying time of 2:46? Too hard? Too easy? Just right?

I think men (major generalization there) have always complained that the women’s qualifying standard is relatively easy. I think it is what it is. Women who barely qualified when the standard was 2:47 are now setting PRs and qualifying at 2:46. I don’t see any problem with changing the standard. I am glad that they kept two standards rather than going to a single standard like they did for the men. It gives people like me an achievable goal to work toward.

In 2008 just a handful of masters runners qualified, including a few former Olympians. Why do you think so few 40+ runners manage to qualify every year? Does it reflect physiology, sociology or something else entirely?

I think you’ll see a spike in qualifiers over 40 this time around. It wasn’t so long ago that Kathrine Switzer jumped in the Boston Marathon and was the first woman to complete a marathon in the US. I don’t know the statistics, but it seems like the marathon didn’t really catch on for female athletes for many years after. I think a lot of those women who were inspired by runners like Joan Benoit in the 1980s are hitting their 40s and are looking to get their racing legs back in shape.

This is a huge undertaking, requiring a commitment of many hours per week over a period of years. How has having a social support system – things like a supportive spouse or partner, employer and colleagues who can be flexible – enabled you to go after a qualifying time? Have people around you needed to make adjustments in order to help you go after this?

Yes, this undertaking is pretty monumental. The thing I’ve had a hard time with is juggling all the stuff in my life. I don’t like to let things go, so I just try to do everything (work long hours including travel for two jobs, running and strength training, musical hijinx, blogging, socializing). My solution for a while was to just cut back on sleep. It seemed so simple. That caught up with me in a major way and, I think, was one of the major factors leading to my injury a couple of months ago.

It really does help to have a spouse/partner that ‘gets’ your running. My boyfriend is also a runner and understands my desire to achieve this goal. That’s really important. The number of hours I spend working my main job can be pretty high, but I do get flexibility in my work hours. I rarely run during work hours, but I do sometimes come in later in the morning after a long workout. Part of my ‘job’ in the military Reserves is to run for the Air Force Marathon Team, so there’s a perfect fit there.

What was your most memorable racing experience and why?

That is a really tough question for me for some reason. I’ve had so many memorable marathon races for both positive and negative reasons. I’m going to say that my first marathon, CIM 2004, was my most memorable. I had so much fun doing that race and felt great throughout. To date, I have never felt better in a marathon race than I did in that first one. I stopped and walked at every water station. I talked with other runners along the way. I distinctly remember running past the 20 mile marker and being so thrilled that I was going into uncharted territory because I had never run longer than 20 miles in my life. At the end of that race, I crossed the finish line and told my friend, “that wasn’t that hard.”  I guess that was the day I became a marathoner.

Besides what we’ve talked about here, do you have any advice for other masters women who are interested in qualifying for 2012?

I would tell them to believe. What we’re trying to achieve is big, and it takes a big commitment. If you don’t picture yourself crossing the finish line with 2:45 on the clock, you won’t get there. That’s the bottom line. You have to believe that you can achieve it and then work your ass off to get there.