On THE Road

WITH Ellen McCurtin

SEE JULIA RUN

Julia Kirtland won the women’s national marathon championship in February 1997 when she was 31 years old. It was a breakthrough performance and one of those days where everything fell into place. She felt good throughout and set a PR of 2:37:46. She also earned $12,500 for first place, her biggest racing payday, and the win earned her a spot on the World Championship team that would compete in Athens later that year.

Iremember seeing Julia before the race and knew that she was one of the favorites to win that day. I wanted to say “Hello,” and I think I did, but I was reluctant to really get into a conversation because I didn’t want to be adistraction to her as race time neared.

It inspired me to see how much Julia had accomplished with her running. To put this into context, Julia and I had attended the same boarding school in Massachusetts, Northfield Mt. Hermon School, back in the early 80s, and had met on the cross-country team during her senior and my sophomore year. Like other underclassmen on the team, I looked up to Julia. She was the bestrunner and also one of the nicest to be around. She was, and is, the type of runner whom you want to see do well and you don’t

begrudge her success. It is hard to explain why this is, but I’m sure you can think of at least one runner you know who falls into this category—and probably one who doesn’t.

She works hard—very hard. I would, as an outside observer, characterize her approach to the sport as quiet, methodical, and serious but by no means dour. She genuinely enjoys running, and, to be more specific, she truly enjoys the training as much as the racing. She is also a good sport and represents running well.

Going back to our days on the cross-country and track teams, Julia was unlike some of the better athletes I knew in that she never flaunted her successes or treated the slower runners any differently than the faster ones. It seemed to me that her attitude was that we were all on the team together and that was good enough for her. She placed more emphasis on the team’s performance than she did on her own individual race, and I remembered that, more than once, she and another Northfielder would end arace in a tie.

Andas the captain, she mercifully never led us on runs past the boys’

ON THE ROAD WITH ELLEN MCCURTIN @ 11

soccer practice and exhorted us to moon them, a shy person’s nightmare. It was another captain who led those forays…

NO MEMORY FOR STATS

Although no doubt there was some amount of expectation that she would always win or come close, she says she doesn’t recall feeling pressured, and, in fact, when I asked her about her PRs for cross-country and for her track events (which were mainly the 1,500 and 3,000 with an occasional 800), she could take only a ballpark guess. In fact, later on, some time after graduation, she was inducted into Northfield Mt. Hermon’s athletic hall of fame, where she was introduced to the girl who had broken her crosscountry course record. She laughed when she told me she had forgotten that she had the record at all.

Notthat she’s blasé about her time orher personal expectations. I’m sure she enjoyed the successes she earned in high school, but to talk to her about itnow, the analogy that comes to mind is blowing the dust off a trophy you stored in the attic and had forgotten was there but to look at it again brings you back, momentarily, to areally nice time in your life.

I asked whether she had been recruited by any schools for her running and she said no, which surprised me, especially since Northfield Mt. Hermon’s girls’ cross-country and track was, in the late ’70s and early

12 Mi MARATHON & BEYOND

’80s, notable for dominating its rivals at the New England competitions.

Her college choices came down to Carleton and Macalester. Having spent her high school years in a rural area, she wanted to go to college in a city and ended up choosing Macalester in St. Paul. She told me she loved it there and was very enthusiastic about it as a runner-friendly place, with lots of good places to run and proximity to trails as well.

Still, she didn’t center her life around running and did not envision making a career of it. “To be honest, I really didn’t think much about my future at Northfield. I think I knew that I would always run, but I don’t think I quite envisioned a competitive running career. Not even in college. But at that point I was thinking of trying to one day qualify for an Olympic trial, most likely in the 10,000 meters. But careerwise, I was more focused on a career in the field of plant ecology.”

Nevertheless, her career at Macalester was an excellent one.

The team was decent but still in its early stages, and Julia often trained by herself to get in the miles. This was the early ’80s and high mileage was given a lot of emphasis. Since she hadn’t been pushed to run that many miles in high school, double workouts and triple-digit weeks were new horizons for her, but the transition did not prove problematic.

She enjoyed rapport with her coaches, most of whom were women. In fact, she noted that she thought it