So it was doubly shocking after our recent trip to the Grandma’s Marathon to receive news that Christine White of Metamora, Illinois, had died ina small plane crash in Santa Fe County, New Mexico.

No need to scratch your head trying to recall Christine’s feats as a marathoner— and she’d have found it ironic if you were to confuse her with Christine Clark, America’s only female Olympic marthoner in 2000.

Christine White was the mother of four. Her boys ran cross-country in high school. Her youngest son was a freshman in college. She’d spent much of her adult life raising her brood, and now that they were leaving the nest, she found, at the age of 51, the time to pursue her dream to write.

She went back to college and majored in creative nonfiction writing. She wrote about a variety of subjects, from skiing to her beloved Santa Fe. She also wrote a story about high school cross-country runners and what they say when they speak of their sport (see pages 99-112 in this issue). She was a friend of Lorraine Moller, a world-class marathoner from New Zealand, who has the distinction of being the only woman to have completed the first four Olympic marathons for women. Lorraine is a friend of M&B’s, and she turned us on to Christine’s story.

We admit to having a weakness forcrosscountry running and racing, just as Christine did. It’s pure, it’s simple, it’s elemental, it’s primordial—and it’s a breeding ground for world-class marathoners. In 1975, after taking third place at the World Cross-Country Championships, Bill Rodgers set an American marathon record of 2:09:55 at Boston. The various cross-country championship rosters read like a Who’s Who of marathoning: Grete Waitz, Steve Jones, Carlos Lopes, Craig Virgin, Ed Eyestone, and so on.

We held onto Christine’s story for months, slotting it into this issue because

the issue corresponds with the annual U.S. cross-country season.

We did what little editing was needed, dwelled on how best to handle a few exact quotes (and decided our readers are adults and have heard such words before), solicited a handful of Christine’s cross-country photographs (she was also good with acamera), and then went into the galley proof and page proof stages. The proofs were sent to Christine for her approval, but they didn’t come back.

When publisher Jan Seeley phoned after her return from Grandma’s to see how Christine was doing with the proofs, her sister-in-law, Diane Peterson, answered the phone. She related to Jan that Christine and her husband Mike had died in a small plane crash the week before on their approach to Santa Fe. Mike was an accomplished pilot, and everything seemed to be going smoothly—until the plane spiraled out of the sky, hit the ground, and burst into flames. The FAA reports it may take a year to determine the cause of the accident. In the meantime, Christine’s family has pulled together to survive the crash.

It’s not difficult to discern by reading between the lines of her story how proud Christine was of her children. And it’s not difficult to gauge her obvious talent in writing about the world around her.

On several occasions, as she and I exchanged e-mails, she was apologetic about not being a serious competitor herself. But in the end, she was wrong. She might not have been a serious athlete, but she was certainly a serious competitor, sweating and struggling for just the right word, much as her boys had struggled, during a wellfought race, to catch and pass that one runner in front of them in order to come home victorious, spent, and elated, another race well run. We hope you enjoy reading Christine’s story in this issue and lament that we can’t look forward to presenting any more of her beautiful writing —Rich Benyo

September/October 2001

On THE Road

WITH Joe LeMay

FAST WOMEN

Running, like any other sport, has its extremes. On one end, I think of what my mother told me when I was 14 and heading out the door for a three-mile run during one particularly hot summer: “Okay, but if you start to sweat, stop.” Mom was never particularly athletic and still does not know how she ended up with a kid like me.

On the other side of the spectrum, I think of Janice Anderson, who completed six 100-mile races in 2000 and will be doing “only” her second 100miler of the year on June 2 this year. (I’m writing this on June 1.) Ina sport where people consider running four 100-milers in a year to be extreme (they refer to it as a “grand slam”), Janice has not only gone two better but has run most of them pretty fast, winning and setting course records in four of them.

Janice lives in Kennesaw, Georgia, with her husband Craig, an architect who hopes to complete his first 10K this year, and her three dogs—all shelties. Janice is president of the Atlanta Track Club—the organization that oversees the running of The Peachtree road race, the largest 10K road race in the world, in addition to a dozen other races scheduled each year.

Iwas able to catch up with Janice, last year’s USATF female ultrarunner of the year, just before she headed to Wisconsin for the Kettle Moraine 100-miler, where she finished second woman, in 20:50. There’s little space in her life for distractions such as interviews. I got her just as she had to pack, go to bed early, and get up early so she could be at work before 7:00 A.. to get ina full day before her 3:45 flight to Milwaukee.

Janice works full-time for Home Depot, with the job title of Chief Engineer in the information systems department, which works on warehouse systems for Home Depot’s distribution center. She seems to have a lot of responsibilities, with six people reporting to her. In short, she’s got a “real” job. With only two weeks vacation per year (what’s wrong with American companies, anyway?), it’s difficult to schedule her weekend races. They almost always require a quick dart to the airport (fortunately, Atlanta has flights to everywhere) on a Friday afternoon, followed by a Monday-morning return to work, no matter how tired she is. Her five-year anniversary with the company this

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September/October 2001

year will provide an extra week of vacation and some welcome relief from that schedule.

IN THE BEGINNING

Janice Anderson, 35, was born Janice DeHaye and grew up in Huntsville, Alabama. Other than an occasional “y’all,” neither she nor two of her three brothers have any trace of a Southern accent. She doesn’t know how this happened, as both her parents have thick drawls.

A fast high school runner with a 5:02 for 1,600 meters, she attended Troy State University, partly because she wanted to be coached by Ed Sheehan, who was there at the time. Before she even arrived, he left for a coaching job at Harvard, and she never really flourished in college in the way she had hoped. “I ran in the 4:30s for the 1,500,” she said. “That was all I did on the track. I made it to Division II nationals in cross-country but missed being All-American by a half second. It was so close.” To be fair, her college career was cut short by graduation. I didn’t ask how she managed to get a computer science degree in three years, but ’’m guessing she’s one of those people who could have been anything she wanted.

When she was 24, Janice was one of the youngest ever to be named to the U.S. 100K team. Her fastest conventional 26-mile marathon is 2:54, which happened in 1987 at the Rocket City Marathon in Huntsville. In 1989,

September/October 2001

she ran in the World 100K Challenge but not as part of the U.S. team. It was the first time she had ever run over 40 miles in her life, and she’s been doing ultras ever since.

Last year’s six 100-milers were an experiment of sorts. “I wanted to see how my body would react to that kind of quantity,” she said, sounding as if she didn’t know better.

Last year’s 100-mile races were, in this order: Rocky Raccoon, Umstead, Massanutten, Mohican, Vermont, and Arkansas. She broke 19 hours in five of them, the one exception being Massanutten, which was the leastrunnable of the bunch. Janice says she does better when the races don’t have such difficult terrain— which may sound obvious, but some athletes are known to thrive on tough ground. Sue Johnson is one such runner and handed Janice a rare defeat at Massanutten. But Sue was the least of Janice’s problems for this particular 100-miler. For starters, the weather was awful. Two thunderstorms complete with hail unfolded during the race, which led to a lot of “blowdowns”—trees that have fallen on the course. Then, just before 75 miles, she fell and broke her arm near the wrist. “It was obvious it was either broken or seriously damaged in some other way,” Janice said. “It was so swollen it looked like Ihadalemon in my arm.”

For those last 25 miles, every time she encountered a “blowdown” she had to stop, put down the flashlight she was carrying, maneuver over the

tree, and then pick everything up before continuing. Just for an extra kick in the teeth, neither the weather nor the arm was the worst aspect of this particular event. “I had smashed my knee into something at about the same time, and it really hurt to run. It was worse than the arm.”

Fortunately, this was one of the few times she elected to have a pacer for the journey. She usually prefers to go it alone the entire distance (“It allows me to zone out better”), but this time a fellow everyone called “Muffy” (actual name: Reed Lanaham) was with her for the last 25 miles. Her time was 28 hours and 40 minutes.

This year’s Massanutten was a much less painful experience. Janice ran about 26 hours in nice weather and won. As an indication of how difficult the course is, Courtney Campbell, often under 15 hours for 100-milers, finished first for the men in just under 20 hours.

ROCKY THE FAST RACCOON

If Massanutten was her record for most time “on your feet,” then Rocky Raccoon was the quickest and easiest of the six races. Nothing seemed to be going right except that she was hitting her splits faster than ever. As usual, she had flown in just the night before.

Starting the race, it was cold, and she was unaware that she had a nosebleed. She kept wiping something from her nose, but the dark gloves she

was wearing kept her from seeing it was blood. “At the first aid station a volunteer let me in on the secret,” she recalled. She got some tissues, and the problem eventually went away.

Later on in the race, her small flashlight went dead. Fortunately, she waited a little while for someone to catch up to her, and he lent her his spare. I wonder what would have happened without the flashlight delay, as her finishing time of 16:03:30 is the fastest 100 miles ever run on a trail by a woman. The flashlightlender, a Mr. David Jones, ended up five minutes behind. The legendary Ann Trason, who handed Janice her only other 100-mile defeat in 2000, went after that time and came up 46 seconds short in the Vermont 100 Miler.

Training for these events consists of an endless cycle of a four-week recovery, followed by ashort buildup, followed by a race, followed by another recovery. The most difficult training cycle started with the Arkansas 100, followed by a 50-miler two weeks later. Usually, Janice gets up to around 80 to 100 miles per week during her buildup, which includes threehour training runs when she feels up

September/October 2001