“In high school, we didn’t have a cross-country team, but I really wanted to run cross-country because I loved it in middle school. So my mom wanted to fight for me and give me that chance, so she would take me to meets, and we’d just follow Jordan Dekker’s team around because we knew they’d be there. [My mom] would just be like, ‘My daughter really loves cross-country. Can she run in your race today?’ And they’d let me in, and I’d get to run, and I had so many more opportunities. I got to race at state that year, even though I just randomly entered cross races when my mom found them. She’s not a runner at all—I don’t know if she’s run a day in her life—but she was like, ‘You can do it; we’re going to do this.’ She was like my coach. It was really cool, because she believed in me and fought for me when that could’ve been it.”
“I had plantar fasciitis for a year-and-a-half, and it’s still not quite gone. But I raced through all last track season and just sucked it up, so then I could go compete at nationals. It worked out really well because we did well and it was worth it. But then I had to take my entire summer off, which I wasn’t expecting to do because I thought I could just heal up in a couple of weeks. So I didn’t do any of my summer training, and it was kind of scary because by the end of the summer, in a weird way, I started enjoying not running. It scared me because I wasn’t training and I was enjoying the lazy life. That’s really scary because I love running, and then to think that I would actually enjoy not doing it was really scary for me. But when I started running again after a month of torture—I was trying to jump back in after no summer training—I loved running more than I had before I was injured. I loved not running, but I loved running more than I loved not running.”
“Be patient. Everybody that is thinking about running in college probably is pretty successful in high school. No matter who you are, if you’re going somewhere to run in college, you’re probably not going to be the top dog your first year, or even the second year—maybe not even the third year if you have a really good program. You also might come into a situation where the expectation is beyond what you thought you could do. You almost have to turn that off and not worry about it. I’m running things now that I wouldn’t have thought about when I was 18 years old. You have to realize that you’re going to go through the grinder before you get there. But you can still get there, as long as you do those little things.”
“My high school coach, we call him Coach Pi. I remember going to Illiana Christian, my high school, and [my sister] played volleyball and basketball, and they had cross-country practice around that time. I’d walk in, and I knew [Coach Pi] was the cross-country coach. He’s not a weird-looking guy, but he just kind of stands out just the way he is. He’s like 55 and wears running shorts, and he’s muscular and stuff—he just stands out. I wasn’t even going to do cross-country, and my mom just told me during the summer while they were at cross-country camp, ‘You should go [to the practice for non-camp runners].’ My mom told me to go, and I just ended up doing it. Even now, and during my whole high school career, [Coach Pi] was always doing things to make it fun. We’d play Ultimate Frisbee sometimes when heck, we could’ve been getting injured. We did football tosses and made running fun. He just did the silliest things, and at the time it was like, What are we doing now that’s stupid? It was so different in college—I like college—but it’s just different. I remember asking Coach [John] Foss when I came [to IWU], ‘So do you guys like, play a lot of Ultimate Frisbee and stuff?’ I could tell he was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ … My whole high school career, [Coach Pi] made it fun for me, and I try to make things fun, and I like when other people try to do that. He loves running, and we took it seriously, but he was never—I mean, we had a lot of interesting personalities on the team, so the fact that he balanced all that is incredible. If you knew all of us, you’d just be like, ‘How did he deal with you guys and make you guys pretty good runners?’ He knows his stuff, and he just keeps it fun.”
“I trained all through the spring to get ready for cross-country for my junior year [at IWU]. In high school, I was the top guy on our team, so confidence in high school was huge for me. It propelled me to being the No. 1, and then I came here junior year, and I was all the way in the back. So that whole flip was huge for me and completely diminished any confidence I had, and I definitely struggled through that. But then I learned that [running] is more than just an individual sport, and you can be excited for other people on your team.”
Hooray Run 