Paces & Places: A Hall of Famer in our midst

That is so a hill!

I didn’t say that. It was Jennifer Ford, with whom I shared a five-mile training run on June 6 around Island Lake in Shelton.

It’s been 14 years and several thousand miles since I last saw Ford.

In 1998, she was wrapping up a phenomenal prep cross country and track career for Gov. Thomas Johnson High School in Frederick, Md. At 19, I was barely three years into my career as a journalist.

So, as it happened, we bumped into each other through a mutual acquaintance in Shelton and decided to go for a run.

My first thought: How on earth would I keep up with her?

After high school, Ford had accepted a full athletic scholarship to the University of North Florida, an NCAA Division II institution in Jacksonville.

Her running career there went quite well. Ford earned All-America status five times and won three national championships at 5,000 meters.

Ford, 32, still holds the university’s school records in the indoor and outdoor 3K and 5K, the latter in a time of 16 minutes and 37.15 seconds.

Ford was inducted into the University of North Florida Hall of Fame on Oct. 23, 2010.

She was slim — I’d bet she weighed less than 110 pounds — strong and fast.

So why, I wondered, was she worried about a hill?

The Jennifer Ford I met on June 6 is a very different person than who I knew in 1998.

She’s now a Navy veteran who is close to finishing her second master’s degree. A year from now, she expects to be a middle school science teacher.

She’s also in training for the Ragnar Relay Northwest Passage. In July, Ford will be one of more than 1,000 runners to join relay teams and run from Blaine, near the Canadian border, to Whidbey Island.

Ford is on a team comprised of runners largely from the Port Orchard area. She and each of her 11 team members will run three times beginning at 10 a.m. on July 20 until the team reaches the finish line around 11 a.m. on July 21.

Ford’s three sections total 18 miles. Her goal is not to run each mile at a sub-six-minute pace.

It is, as she said, “to finish without walking.”

This is how Ford, who has allowed her athletic talent take her to prestigious competitions across the country, connects to the common man, woman or child lacing up their running shoes for the first time.

Ford is nervous. She is not the odds-on favorite to win. In fact, the Ragnar Relay is not a competition so much as it is an event of camaraderie.

Ford is trying out new shoes to fit her new body, which has gained about 30 pounds — enough, says the common runner, to make her look like the rest of us. Enough for her to worry about things like chafing and other things often on the mind of midpack runners.

Her goal for our run on June 6, which was slightly less than five miles, was to average nine minutes per mile.

As we headed towards the end of our run, I asked if she wanted to go to 5.0 instead if finishing slightly short of a round number.

Ford didn’t hesitate.

“I’m headed to the car,” she said.

Over the last half-mile, though, Ford must have started to feel pretty good. She picked up the pace and, according to my Garmin GPS watch, hit a pace as fast as 7:15 over the last half-mile stretch.

Ford won’t win another national title anytime soon. After her last national title in 2002, she continued to run and made her marathon debut in 2003.

For the next eight years, Ford didn’t run at all.

Her goal, after Ragnar, is to be able to complete a 10-mile run at a quite ordinary pace of eight minutes per mile. Sometime in the next 12 months, she said she wants to run a marathon.

Those seem like pretty good goals. Maybe those goals are similar to yours. And that’s pretty neat. How often do you have something in common with a Hall of Famer?

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Join the conversation on all things related to running and walking in Mason County on a new Facebook page. Simply search for “Mason County Running” and ask to join the public discussion.

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Upcoming events

* All Comers track meet tonight at 6 p.m. at Tumwater High School. $5 for up to four events ($10 max per family). See www.runoly.com for details.

* Beast of Big Creek trail races in Hoodsport, Aug. 4. Two-mile, 10K and 12.5-mile distances.

Limited entries. Visit www.sheltonharriers.com for details.

Kevin Spradlin paces the Potomac Highlands Distance Club, an affiliate of the Road Runners Club of America, from the middle of the pack. He recently moved to Shelton from Maryland and now lives a few miles outside of town. He prefers running on trails and roads more so than the oval of a track. Write him at
[email protected].