I am a 21 year old college student living in Newark, Delaware. In high school I focused on the 3200m and my eventual PR was 9:19, with a 1600 PR from junior year of 4:26. I grew up in Delaware and liked the school and the coach so it was natural for me to attend the University.
Freshman year I made the varsity XC squad and ran a 15:03 5000m, but hurt my hip three days before the conference meet and had to call it a season then. In hindsight that probably was for the best, since I was due to run my first 10000m and I was absolutely not prepared for that at all!
Sophomore year I was on varsity in XC and track and got down to 4:01 in the 1500, 14:46 in the 5000 and a 31:25 10000. That 10k was a big eye-opener for me; I just didn't think I would be tired for a week after a track race! I ran another 10k at our conference meet but it was at George Mason in May, so of course the weather was unfavorable and the race was rough. Those races convinced me that I needed more strength and basework.
Junior year I started training much more seriously than I had been before. In the summer I upped my running to twice a day, every day and was consistently over 110 miles per week, even with the terrible heat and humidity from June through August. I ran well when it counted that fall and scored an All-Region spot in the Mid-Atlantic region as well as an All-East spot at Van Cortlandt. In the winter I set my goal as running well outdoors, but when our team got cut in January I made the difficult decision to try and run well indoors in a Delaware uniform, even if it meant compromising my outdoor season. I made IC4A's indoors and ran a school record at that meet, as well as qualifying for the outdoor IC4A meet. That was great, since getting it out of the way so early took some pressure off! Outdoors I ran 3:57 in the 1500m, helped our 4 x 1500m relay run a school record at Raleigh Relays and then in April and May had a string of some good 5k races with a relatively poor 10k thrown in at Penn Relays. That was quite the experience, since the gun went off at almost 1 am! I ended the season with an 14:22 5000m PR and a 2nd place medal from the conference meet.
During the summer I resumed running over 100 mpw but once I registered for the Philadelphia Rock N' Roll Half Marathon I tried to focus on quality strength workouts in preparation for that race. I ran even better than I thought I could and finished in 1:07:32 and 46th place overall. Only two women beat me!
That's a pretty concise summary of my running career up to this point. I hope I can continue to improve and get on the radar of any potential sponsors out there looking for someone to advertise their products at the front of the field. Look for more updates as the season and training continue!
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