Wendi Robinson KWIK-E

December 12, 2008

Indiana Hoosier Wendi Robinson recently placed 28th at the NCAA Division I XC Championships in her home state. She's got 4:46 mile speed and looks to carry her Hoosier DMR team to the Indoor National Championships.

Can you give me a recap of your XC season? The high and low points?

To start it had been a while since I'd raced. I had redshirted outdoors. Mostly because we do peak training. We thought our team would be a better team in two years. Plus my fifth year we'll be hosting outdoor Big Tens. That, in itself, was a good reason to redshirt. That and I'd be in better shape. Basically I took the opportunity to run outdoor Big Tens on my home track as a fifth year senior. It had been a while since I raced, so I was excited to get back into that mode. All my meets went pretty consistently. If I had to pick one low point, it would be Pre Nats. I was 23^rd and that wasn't a low, low point. It just wasn't what I wanted to do there. I guess maybe Big Tens a little, because I guess I would have liked to be first team all-Big Ten. I missed that by one spot. The Big Ten is also an incredibly competitive conference. I can't be too disappointed with how I did. I ran better than I had at any other big meets in the past. After Big Tens, it was a good race although I was looking to improve on that more going into Regionals and Nationals. At Regionals I think that was a big race for me. It was kind of one of those races where things click. Being fourth there and running a lot of the race with Nicole Edwards and Gwen Jorgensen, from Michigan and Wisconsin, obviously they're very talented runners, so that was a confidence booster going into NCAAs. My coach and I talked a lot about building intensity through the race and through the season. That's just really what I tried to do. Here we say “run your best when it matters the most.” That's kind of how I sum up my XC season.

How happy were you with your finish?

I was very happy with it. We had a goal of All-American. That was the goal I set for myself before the XC season even started. We were looking for a top-40 finish, but it wasn't just top-40, it was also to finish as high as I can. I'm happy in that I achieved my goal and thought I ran the race pretty much as well as I could. Also not overjoyed because it was something I expected of myself.

Can you attribute your race to intensity or something like home court advantage, with the championships being held in Indiana?

I think it helped being familiar with the course, because I'm from there and ran there a lot. My senior year I ran the State Meet there. I've run there at Pre Nats and Nationals (this year). We have Indiana Inter Collegiates, so I ran there for that. I guess even running an invitational there in high school. I've run the course there a lot. I've had some meets go better than others. I knew I had a lot of experience on that course.

Was it a little bitter-sweet not having any other Indiana teammates joining you there?

Yeah. XC is usually something that when you line up you have your teammates around you. Whereas in track, if you qualify as an individual, we'll you're used to being on the line yourself. It definitely would have been amazing to have my teammates there with me. That's something that we're going to set to accomplish next year. I think all in all for our team, we had a great season, although it might not look like that. We were eighth in the Big Ten, but then you look it up and I think the Big Ten had seven teams ranked in the top 20 or 21 at some point. Most of our races all season long, at Pre Nats, I felt like we just kept improving all the way through. All of our runners were improving. It would have been great to have the team there and I know a lot of the girls are frustrated that if we maybe would have beat Notre Dame at Regionals, we might have made it in. All in all, our girls team ran to our full potential. And obviously the guys team was really frustrated not to be there. I guess it just gives us something to shoot for next year. That's where we all want to be and expect to be. You can already see it, how people are approaching track season. Everyone on the team is really prepared to take that next step and keep improving our training and keep improving and have next year go more of the way they want it to go. The entire team will get to go.

What was your break like? Did you take the standard full week off?

Not really. I had two days completely off. Then I had two days where I ran really easy for half and hour or so. Then I got Thursday and Saturday off. I did some decent length runs on Friday and Sunday though. Mostly just taking a week and not running as much. Mostly everything we ran was at whatever pace we wanted it to be at. A bunch of recovery runs. I think the way Coach (Ron) Helmer structures our training is that you're peaking, but you're not just peaking for that race. It's not your whole year. We have these two season to keep improving and have outdoor track be our best season. Obviously no XC coach wants you to be burnt out after XC season, but I think that's the way we tailored our workouts this fall. I finished the season and felt pretty good and felt like I didn't need a lot of time off. That's why I could jump back into training for indoor track.

Going into indoor track, what are you setting your goals at?

That's kind of difficult to say because I'm not sure exactly what races I'll be running at this point. We should have a pretty good DMR. One of our goals is to try to qualify for the DMR at Nationals. I would probably run the mile on that. I made it last year in the 5,000 (meter). Obviously if I qualified for it in the DMR then I couldn't, or I wouldn't do the DRM and the 5k. Those are right next to each other. I think. Realistically I'd like to just hit the standards in as many events as I possibly could. If the DMR made it, I would like to run the DMR and 3k at Nationals. If the DMR didn't make it...then I'd probably want to run the 5k with the way XC and Nationals went. Basically to make it back to the National Meet and it would be great to be an All-American again. Also, at Big Tens, we're having them here at IU for indoors. So, I'd like to have our team do better at Big Tens as well. I'd like to be top-three in my race...or races.

Was there a push for you to be a basketball player with Indiana being a die hard basketball state?

I definitely played basketball. If you ask kids from Indiana, most played at least at some point. I played a couple years before middle school. I played in middle school. We have summer basketball camps. So, you come in three days a week. You learn the plays and go through the drills. I don't really remember, it was a long time ago. They talked me into running XC my freshman year. I never ran XC in middle school. Just track. I would come and do the summer running and I would also do basketball. I had a decent freshman XC season. The coaches, the ones who coached the older kids on the team, would meet during the winter and train for track, not training really, more like to keep everyone in shape. There was a small group of kids doing that. A bunch of them told me I should do that and it would help me during XC and track season. I was OK at basketball...but I wasn't very good. I certainly wasn't a standout. So, I kind of went back and forth and decided to do winter training for track instead of basketball. I'm really glad that I did because I probably didn't have much of a future in basketball.

Do you have a Larry Bird poster on your wall. Yes or no?

No. (laughs)

What's a typical day like for you?

I'll give you my day today. I got up and did my morning run, which was kind of unpleasant because it was raining. It pretty much rained all day here, so it was kind of gross. Went to class, which was nice because I only had one today. I came back to my apartment, made myself lunch and kind of hung out before our workout this afternoon. I studied a little for finals, although it probably wasn't for as long as I should have. I had practice this afternoon. We meet at 3 p.m. pretty much every afternoon. We did sort of a long fartlek today. I went home, had dinner and then went to class. That's a typical day: run twice, go to class, go to practice again.

Last question: can you give me a crazy running story?

I don't know if I'd call it crazy-crazy, but most of the weird things that tend to happen, happen when we get lost in the woods because Bloomington has a lot of trails around it. One run that was kind of cool was when I was running with a couple friends over the summer and we went to Morgan Monroe's State Course. That's just a little north of Bloomington. We're doing our long run and we're trying this new trail out and we kind of got lost. We ended up on these roads, outside of the park, so we weren't sure where we were at. This is probably 12 miles into the run, which was about what we were going to do anyway. We tried to pick the best house to stop and ask for directions at. We go up this one—it was this nice house with nice landscaping and a cute little country house—we walk up to it and knock on the door. Eventually this woman comes up and she looks like she's been swimming or something we tell her, "we're running and we're lost, can you point us back to the park?" There was a parking area where we had left our cars. She explained that we had to run a mile in this direction. Her and her son invited us back to this little pond back behind their house, this is in the summer, so I'm sure we looked hot. They invited us to jump in their pond for a while. It was random, but it was a cool little spot behind their house, surrounded by trees. We just jumped in and cooled off and ran back up the hill when we were wet. But that was a random story where we met these people and they asked us to jump in their pond.

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#2	Cara Hawkins December 12, 2008 at 9:22am I tend to always get lost on long runs.. reply
#1	Anonymous Coward December 12, 2008 at 5:59am Hey that's a lot better running story than some of them posted here. . . reply