A The author, Doctor P-D, at the finish line.

The Honolulu Marathon, whose support I cannot overstate, went above and beyond by listing all of us deployed finishers on its official marathon Web site and also mailed us finisher certificates from race headquarters in Oahu. In a small token of our appreciation, we mailed back to them a huge thank-you banner signed by participants at the awards banquet. We are thrilled to report that the banner still hangs in Honolulu Marathon race headquarters.

This deployed marathon brought many new marathoners into the fold of the running community and gave us an incredible opportunity to honor the sacrifices of our country’s greatest heroes. In Hawaii, there is a special word for family: ohana. Ohana is the most important, sacred, and powerful bond imaginable—eternal and indestructible. On December 12, 2006, the Honolulu Marathon and the Hawaii-based 25th Infantry Division formed an ohana of runners, volunteers, and surviving family members—one that I will always be proud to be a part of.

‘See Marathon & Beyond, May/June 2005 or visit www.marathonandbeyond.com and click on “Other Editor’s Choices” and scroll to the bottom to read “You Want to Put on a Marathon—Where?” by Ivan Hurlburt. i

First Lieutenant Sara Day Wants to Run the Olympic Trials for the Marathon, but First She Has to Finish Her Baghdad Deployment in One Piece.

AMP LIBERTY, BAGHDAD, IRAQ—First Lieutenant Sara Day had just

hopped on the back of a bus near the massive concrete barriers that protect her sleeping trailer from incoming rocket and mortar attacks here at a barren military base just west of Baghdad’s International Airport. The 28-year-old soldier was taking part of her platoon over to the fitness center—actually an enormous air-conditioned canvas tent—for a group workout. But Lieutenant Day was slightly annoyed. Her close friend in the platoon, Staff Sergeant Christine Cooper, was a minute or two late, holding up everybody on the bus.

Lieutenant Day could see the usually punctual Staff Sergeant Cooper scurrying toward the bus. Suddenly, a big boom rocked the air; that awful noise means incoming indirect fire—in this case, a rocket had hit the U.S. Army base. Out the grimy window of the dilapidated bus, Lieutenant Day could see Staff Sergeant Cooper dive down headfirst, landing spread-eagled with her nose buried in the hot sand. Soldiers are taught to get as flat as possible when rockets or mortars are

Staff Sergeant Cooper was uninjured. Lieutenant Day and her soldiers proceeded about a half mile to start their daily session of physical training. But there was a commotion at the fitness center. It turned out that the rocket had landed about 30 meters in front of the entrance to the PT tent. A young female soldier, the military policeman assigned to guard the entrance to the tent, had been hit by shrapnel and killed. Lieutenant Day couldn’t help but choke back the morbid thought that if Staff Sergeant Cooper had been on time, she and her soldiers would have been walking into the entrance of the tent when the shrapnel was flying.

For Lieutenant Day, a shy and unassuming woman who spent her early years on a North Carolina dairy farm, this was just another day at work, albeit at work in a war zone. It is here, at dreary Camp Liberty, where Lieutenant Day and the 19 soldiers she is responsible for in her platoon grind through 80-hour weeks. They go months at a time with nary a day off. Like the 168,000 other American soldiers here, Lieutenant Day is doing her bit for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

ASSIGNED TO BE ON THE MOVE

Lieutenant Day’s platoon is part of a headquarters and services company in a special-troops battalion in the Army’s First Cavalry Division. In civilian terms, that means she and her troops maintain a fleet of vehicles; they take soldiers and equipment where they need to be. Sometimes that means cruising 20 miles through the desert to drop off a generator at an outlying Army post. Other times this means driving in heavily armored convoys into dangerous parts of Iraq where they are fired at or run the risk of getting blown up by an improvised explosive device, an IED as they are known here.

This is also where Lieutenant Day—a talented scholarship track athlete at Wake Forest—is training to try to qualify for the Olympic Marathon Trials. She is on target to do so, despite incredibly harsh training conditions. Her extremely long hours are the least of her problems. Daily summer temperatures here hover between 110 and 120, often even higher. Running outside is virtually impossible except in the wee hours of the morning, a tough task before starting a 15-hour workday. Forget about massages or coaches. To the degree that Lieutenant Day even has acoach, it’s the resourceful—if self-taught—Staff Sergeant Cooper, who spends a lot of time online looking at training programs and diet regimens.

Medical facilities at the Army base are first-rate for soldiers who have been shot up but aren’t much when it comes to athletic injuries. When Lieutenant Day had terrible shin problems during her training, she was unable to get a simple X-ray to indicate whether the pain was triggered by a stress fracture. “They put a tuning fork on it and gave me two cortisone shots,” she explains. “I’ve never been much for doctors.” She is better now, but she never got a diagnosis.

It gets worse. There is no track here. The food in the dining facility is institutional and heavy on fried foods. Lieutenant Day has no access to PowerBars, her energy bar of choice. The fitness center has only five treadmills, all of which are often in use. It can take weeks to get proper running shoes shipped over. The Army post exchange doesn’t carry the adidas Supernovas that Lieutenant Day prefers. The only outdoor running surfaces are concrete roads, left over from Saddam Hussein’s days. Lieutenant Day shares a tiny trailerp—smaller than a standard walk-in closet—with another female officer. She must go outside to locate a latrine or shower.

The Army’s “morale, welfare, and recreation” program occasionally puts on races but they are informal affairs where Lieutenant Day rarely has serious competition. Even in the ultra-fit Army world, she typically whips all the men. In May, she easily coasted to victory in the Baghdad half-marathon—staged amidst several of Saddam’s former palaces—in a time of 1:23. Then, of course, don’t forget the factors that make training for a marathon here most difficult: the daily stresses and meager living conditions associated with living in a war zone. In short, people—soldiers and civilians alike—are getting killed here.

» First Lieutenant Sara Day easily outpaced all challengers—including the men—in winning the 2007 Baghdad Half-Marathon last May.

THE BIG OPPORTUNITY COMES IN HOUSTON

“I just figure that training here in Iraq will make me harder and stronger,” says the unflappable Lieutenant Day. “I know it’s going to give me an edge when I get home.” Lieutenant Day, who wears a 9-millimeter Beretta pistol strapped in a shoulder harness under her arm, hopes her unit will be shipped back home, to Fort Hood in Killeen, Texas, by the end of December. She is only too aware of a marathon nearby soon afterward. In fact, r Lieutenant Day’s only real chance to run a a

her qualifying time is at the Chevron Houston Marathon on January 13, 2008. Of course, that assumes the U.S. Army will end her deployment in time for her to compete in the race, hardly a foregone conclusion. Assuming she can run the 2:47 needed to qualify for the Olympic Trials, that will give her just about three months to recover before the trials are held April 20, 2008, in Boston.

I spent three days trailing Lieutenant Day around Baghdad. She showed me three of her six tattoos; my favorite is etched into her right forearm in thick black script: “Without evil there can be no good.” Through all the hours I spent at her side, not once did I hear her complain. Never did I hear a drop of self-pity. “We all know that she doesn’t have the right assets here to train properly,” reports Staff Sergeant Raymond Martinez, 33, from Montrose, Colorado, one of the soldiers in her platoon. “But she makes do with what she has. She does it freehand. She’s no complainer. She’s always encouraging us. That’s just who she is.”

Yes, that is who she is. Here is her background: Lieutenant Day was born into a decidedly middle-class home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. None of her family had even been to college. Her father was a dairy farmer; her parents split when she was 11. Lieutenant Day’s mother was left to raise two kids on a bank teller’s salary. Her mother eventually remarried but has divorced again. “My mom always insisted that we focus on schoolwork and sports so we could get ahead,” Day explains.

The young Sara Day worked at Mr. Gatti’s, the fast-food Italian chain, to help make ends meet. She was an athlete, playing softball and basketball mostly. Day

eventually discovered running at tiny Ledford Senior High School. By sophomore year, she was the North Carolina state champion at both 800 meters and the mile. Day’s track coach, the local algebra teacher, didn’t know diddly squat about running; lack of good coaching would be a familiar pattern throughout her running career.

No matter. With her track times and 3.9 grade-point average, athletic scholarships began pouring in from around the country. Day eventually settled for nearby High Point University, a tiny liberal arts school in High Point, North Carolina. A smalltown girl, she wanted to be close to home. But Day quickly grew frustrated at High Point. Once again, she had a coach who knew little about distance running. Her coach simply saw that he had a fast girl and had her randomly competing in the 1,500, 5,000, 10,000, and 4x 400.

She soon transferred to Wake Forest, where she was a three-time All-American. Senior year, at the indoor NCAA championships in 2001, she posted a 9:23 in the 3,000 meters. At the same meet, Day ran the mile leg of the distance medley relay in 4:44. Later that year, she clocked a 33:25 in the 10,000, which qualified her for the NCAA championships. Despite the fast times, Day says, she struggled with her self-image at Wake and waged a constant battle with eating disorders, both anorexia and bulimia. She ran at 120 pounds, which she now says, was “way too thin.”

Sara Day was a three-time All-American athlete at Wake Forest University.

Wake Forest Athletic Media Relations

32 | | JAN/FEB 2008

It was at Wake that she began running under the tutelage of coach Annie Schweitzer Bennett. The two quickly bonded. Even today, Day is in e-mail contact from Baghdad with her former coach. “Sara was not the most talented runner I’ve coached,” Bennett recently recalled from her Winston-Salem office. “But she was determined to be a nationally ranked runner. And she was willing to make the hard sacrifices to make that happen.” (After graduating, in 2001, Day ran a 33:25 in the 10,000 meters at the USATF championships at the University of Oregon, where she placed 10th in a field of professionals.)

Day had graduated from Wake with a degree in sociology, with an eye toward maybe joining the FBI one day. Instead, she drifted back to High Point, took a meaningless job, and started writing letters to adidas and Nike looking for someone to sponsor her running.

“Then 9/11 hit, and I figured I ought to be doing something more meaningful,” recalls Day. “So I walked into an Army recruiting office. I had no idea what I was doing.” The Army recruiters, however, knew exactly what they were doing. In short order, Day was placed in the World Class Athlete Program, where top Army athletes—those who have a shot at the Olympics—train full-time on the Army’s dime. The goal was the 10K. To qualify for the Olympic Trials, a 33:20 is needed. Day peaked at 33:22.