I was 19 years old and had just joined my university’s track/xc team the very first year that my university fielded such a team for women. I had never done competitive sports before but I’d been the star of my high school PE class in the 12-minute run and figured I’d give it a shot. I promptly established myself as the distance star of the ragtag team the coach was assembling.
I’d been training with the team for about six weeks when the coach told the distance girls we were going to run a local 10-mile road race. I had never run as far as ten miles but the coach told me he’d run with me to pace me. Of course I was excited and took off too fast, and coach let me do it. By about the 7-mile mark I was paying for it. Coach kept trying to encourage me but I was dying. And then:
“See that girl up ahead of you, with the long hair and the white T-shirt?”
“Uh, I guess.”
“She’s in your age group. She’s a good runner but she looks like she’s hurting. You can catch her.”
(Groan) “I don’t wanna catch her.”
“Sure you do. Come on!” Coach started to ramp the pace back up. I wanted to kill him but was too tired, so I had to follow.
Indeed, she was falling apart worse than I was and we reeled her in. The finish area was in sight as we pulled alongside her. She turned to look at us with that deer in the headlights look and we powered ahead to cross the finish line. I collapsed in happy exhaustion.
Immediately after the finish I saw white T-shirt girl crying and holding her knee. The age group was 13 to 19, and she had just turned 13 and looked about 10, while I was six months shy of 20. I felt like a grownup beating up on a little kid. I told coach I felt bad about beating an injured little kid for the age-group win. He told me “you know, if it had been the other way around, she would have done the same thing.” I reckoned he was right.
I have no idea what my time was. A couple weeks later I got injured doing a hard mountain training run and I never competed in a meet for my team. I quit running altogether for several years and picked it up again as a graduate student.