I have race walked exactly once. The same number of times I have performed many another bizarre or chancy act.
Some things a person need not try but once.
Too many years ago to count, I was in college somewhere out west, at very high altitude, and it was the Campus Indoor Track & Field Championships. To score valuable points for my fraternity team, Greek Geeks, I entered the one-mile race walk. I am not too proud. Young, tremendously fit and not a little stupid, I figured, ‘How tough could it be, right?’
Thank God, this happened before video cameras. I looked like a giant heron in heat doing the funky chicken. Jurassic Stork. Kept wanting to break into a run. Take flight. Managed to gut my way around the many highly banked laps in less than ten minutes. Hips and knees completely fucked up. The mere memory of that race stiffens my still aching back.
Is race walking some weird looking shit or what?
Dateline. LaGrange, Georgia. October 1995.
Michelle Rohl rolls, just like her name is pronounced, over the women walkers in the United States. She rules. She holds the American record with a personal best of 44:17 for ten kilometers. Did that at the recent World Championships. She’s a leading candidate for next year’s Olympic team. Rohl is the reigning queen of her sport, you might say.
Queen mother. In her own home, the thirty-year-old needs all her stamina chasing after those two little tykes. Molly, an athletic four, and Sebastian, two. They’re allowed to run. Walkers must, of course, always maintain unbroken contact with the ground. Not much bigger than the kids herself. She’s small, tiny even at four feet and eleven inches. Ninety pounds on a humid day.
Michelle is, in fact, a brilliant runner. Fast. Fifteen times during her collegiate career, track and cross-country, Rohl was named to the All-American team. Twice indoor national champ. Very fast. Rohl didn’t take up race walking until after her graduation from the University of Wisconsin at Parkside in 1989.
“I switched from running to race walking for financial reasons mostly,” Rohl admits. “I was trying to run fifteen hundred meters and having a hard time getting to races where there was good competition. I was going broke. I didn’t have a sponsor. We ran our credit cards up to the limit. We just couldn’t afford to fly me to any more races.
“It came down to my last chance to qualify for the national championships. Mike DeWitt, my coach, suggested I try to qualify in the walk. I could get to walking races. Where I was living then, there are a lot of race walks, and a lot of race walkers who would be competitive with me at that time. So I didn’t have to travel.
“Also, I knew I had a better chance to make the National team. And if I did that, I would get more support. Not a lot more, but a bit. I had never even walked ten kilometers before. Never walked more than a mile.”
She hit the qualifying time with a minute or so to spare. Went and placed tenth in the nationals. Which meant she was the tenth best walker in the country. A month after she became a racewalker.
Mike DeWitt is one hell of a coach.
Progress was swift. Less than two years after giving birth to her first child, Rohl showed up at the starting line of the ’92 Olympic Trials.
“I wasn’t completely sure I’d make the team, but I thought I had a pretty good shot,” Michelle recalls. “It’s easier to come back to walking than running.”
Rohl brought the baby with her. “It was a big help bringing Molly,” Rohl says. “She helped keep my mind off the race. I went out controlled and waited for people to fall back. Even when I was in sixth place, I was confident I could finish third. At the end, my biggest worry was not to get disqualified. I was warned twice during the race, so I had to keep concentrating.”
Husband Mike attended the University of Wisconsin at Parkside on a racewalk scholarship. UW@P is the only college in the U.S.A. which offers an athletic scholarship for racewalking. You are not surprised. He is still walking. Still not surprised.
Today, Mike, a former cross-country coach at Wisconsin, is an assistant at West Georgia College, where he also pursues a master’s degree in English. He’s training, in his spare time, for a race walking berth on the U.S. Olympic team.
In August, 1993, the couple moved south to participate in the I Train In LaGrange Program. Which more towns should offer. The community is close to Atlanta, the venue of next year’s Olympics. There’s free housing in a little house on Fannin Court. And good coaching.
Southern hospitality seems intact. “We’ve had people show up at workouts with muffins for us,” Michelle smiles at the memory. There is such a thing as a free lunch.
“LaGrange has been really good to us,” offers Rohl. “It was lucky I was living here this year, because they provide physical therapy. These are things the top runners in the country have, but most racewalkers don’t have access to. That’s one of the reasons we have a harder time competing, because we don’t have access to a lot of help other athletes take for granted.
“Being able to get that therapy, I am sure made the biggest difference. If I hadn’t had the PT available, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to get through my race at World Championships. The town is supportive. If we ask for something, they’ll try to do it for us. They’ll help us with child care. Any little thing. If we’re trying to get to a race that’s nearby, they’ll provide a van for us.”
Michelle didn’t get into the event for the glamour, prestige, wealth and fame which inevitably avoids race walkers like they have some contagious disease. She works some twenty hours a week at the First Baptist Church nursery. Michelle needs the money.
“Actually, I’ve made more money from running than race walking.” She laughs. “Not very much.”
“Financially, it is very hard to train because you can’t work full time,” Michelle points out. “Living near Milwaukee was very expensive. When we decided to train for the Olympics, we made a conscious decision not to look for good paying jobs because a job like that would occupy all our time, and we would have to neglect training.”
Because Mike must use the family car to commute to work, forty-two miles each way, longer than a 50K and 10K combined, Michelle had to be resourceful to get the kids around town. The Rohls’ second vehicle is a Radio Flyer, a little red wagon she uses to pull the kids to the store for grocery shopping or to the library for children’s storyhour.
“About a mile and a half from our house is my limit pulling them in the wagon,” says Michelle. Of course, the littlest Rohls grow bigger and heavier every day.
Just another training advantage motherhood bestows.
Technique is critical.
“I am mostly working on my form to be fast and to be legal,” Michelle explains. “We have two rules. First, bent knee, which doesn’t apply much to me. Bent knee means your leg has to be straight when it passes under your body. Lifting: you always have to be in contact with the ground. That’s more of a problem, of course, when you’re going faster. When one foot is coming up, the other has to be on the ground.”
Most walkers get more lifting penalties than bent knee. If Rohl gets disqualified, and she has been, look for lifting calls.
“In a way, my size has hindered me here,” Michelle suggests. “I have shorter legs, so I have a faster turnover, and a lot of these judges don’t know what to do with that. They have a harder time seeing if I’m off the ground.
“When I was first starting, my coach said I was the only person he’d told to lengthen their stride. He’s always telling people to shorten their stride for walking. He told me to lengthen mine, because the judges just couldn’t handle it.
“I am a toe-runner, so it was really hard for me to convert to race walking which demands you move heel-toe,” Michelle explains. “I have very strong calf muscles, which makes it hard for me to land on my heel and get my toes up. I really had to work at that when I was starting out. I have to spend a lot of time stretching my calves, making sure I can get my toes UP.
“Usually, when people get called, it’s not because they are purposely trying to cheat. Their form is breaking down. They are trying to go faster than they’re ready to go. You get tired, mentally as well as physically. Mostly, lifting is physical. A lot of people get bent knees because they become injured and they start hurting in the later part of the race. Then they can’t straighten their leg.
“If you lose your technique in the middle of the race, it’s really hard to get back into it. It’s just easier keep walking, to do it right the whole way. If I don’t concentrate my entire race about keeping my arms down and my toes up, then I’ll start lifting. It’s probably more of a mental thing with me, I guess, now that I think about it. I have to really concentrate my whole race. Keeping my toes up. Keeping my arms down. You wouldn’t think the arms down would have much to do with lifting, but, for some reason, it does.”
Is she maybe a little paranoid about her form? “I worry about the judges more than a lot of athletes do, she admits. I think I am paranoid about the judges. Maybe not my technique. I’m paranoid about the judges in the U.S. I’m not paranoid about the international judges. It’s kind of a political thing. Like any sport. There are certain judges who are going to like you and others who aren’t. You just have to hope the ones who like you are going to be there. Most of them do like me these days.
“You have to pay your dues in this sport. In the U.S. I always like to clarify that, because in other countries the judging isn’t like it is here. I think we have a problem with judging in our country. When I first started race walking, I had a hard time getting past the judges, because they didn’t know who I was. I was up in the front and they’re asking themselves, ‘Who is she?’ Next thing you hear, ‘We don’t know what she’s doing wrong, but she couldn’t possibly be walking that fast.’ So, they give you a call.”
Not all judges. “We have some good judges,” says Michelle. “But it only takes three to DQ you. That used to be frustrating. But once I made the Olympic team, I had a lot less trouble.”
“My philosophy about judges,” offers DeWitt,”is that you got to learn how to walk to please them. Whatever that takes. It might slow you down sometimes, but in the long run you are only helping yourself.”
The Eastern Europeans are a couple of minutes faster.
“They used to be four minutes faster,” Michelle rushes to note. “I’ve improved by a couple of minutes since I had Sebastian, I can still cut at least another minute off them. They never walk that fast in big competitions. Usually they walk those fast times at home, where they have judges who like them. Unfortunately, I don’t have judges who like me at home.” She laughs. “So I can’t do those times.”
She walks seven minute miles. A good judge can tell if you are using good form. The best men in the world go six minute a mile. The judges can tell when the men are lifting.
“The rule is, what is perceivable to the human eye. So, if an athlete is lifting and you can’t see it, then it’s not illegal,” Michelle says. “Somebody did a study once at a major international race, and they discovered that everybody is actually lifting a little bit every step of the race, but you can’t tell. It’s just so minute, they’re only off the ground for such a tiny fraction of a second, there is no way anyone could ever see it.”
Sometimes the foot is quicker than the eye.
Michelle Rohl is a talent.
“Michelle is such a fiery competitor,” notes DeWitt. Glows. Burns.
“She’s exceptional,” a totally unbiased Mike Rohl exclaims. “As a coach, having coached my own teams, I’ve not worked with an athlete as exceptional. She is tough. She doesn’t think it, but she’s so mentally cued into what she’s doing. She may not be able to tell you how she trains well. ‘I just do what my coach says,’ she’ll say. That’s part of her mental toughness. She’s tough enough in her mind and has enough trust to not question what she is doing. Just that her coach has said she can do this, so she believes she can do it. I’ll look at the workouts and say, ‘I don’t even know if I could do this workout.’ She’ll say, ‘I can do it. If Coach thinks I can.’ Then she goes out and does it. And she does it by herself. That’s a key factor.”
The Rohls run cross-country in the fall. “When I’m in serious training, I can spend up to an hour and a half on technique,” Michelle relates,” and forty-five minutes of stretching. Every day. I don’t do it all together. I’ll do weights every day, alternating upper and lower body.”
She weighs ninety pounds. Boy, those weights must be working, huh.
“The meat of my workout will take a couple hours, so I can train as much as five hours daily when I’m doing my serious training. Although I’ve kinda decided it’s not worth training that many hours. A lot of it is technique work, where I’m going a hundred meters down, and a hundred meters back.
“On Mondays I do long intervals. Two miles, a mile and a half, one mile. All uphill. Tuesdays, I’ll do a threshold workout, which is a mile easy, then three to eight miles at threshold pace, then another mile easy. As the season progresses this workout gets longer. On Wednesday., I racewalk an hour easy. Thursday, I do short intervals. Fridays, an easy half hour or so, and Saturday, I race. Sunday, I go long, an hour and a half, or so. I don’t worry about the pace too much.
“I train a lot less miles than most racewalkers train. I maybe do fifty miles a week. I haven’t been keeping a log lately. I’m not doing morning workouts right now, just one workout a day. I’m going to start doing morning workouts next week.
“My strength? I am a good athlete,” Michelle responds after some thought. “The reason I’ve had success in walking in the U.S. is that most walkers are people who didn’t have any success at running, they’re kinda mediocre athletes who switched to racewalking hoping for some success because the competition isn’t as deep. My coach always says, people ask him how he made me an Olympian so fast. He replies, ‘give me any 4:20 fifteen hundred meter runner and I’ll give you a forty-five minute ten kilometer walker.’ That’s where my success lies, simply the fact that I’m a good athlete.”
She is coachable. “Michael says, mentally tough,” Michelle agrees. “I am mentally tough. My coach will give me my goals and race plan, and I don’t like to not achieve them. I’m driven to always have things exactly the way they’re supposed to end.
“Winning,” she adds.
Oh, Michelle Rohl has had her broken moments, too.
She doesn’t like getting disqualified. Not surprising. “This is a serious problem,” Mike Rohl rues. “When she gets disqualified, it’s very upsetting. She’s not happy for a week or two. Last year, at the nationals in Buffalo, where she got DQed, the only time in the last two years, she was going to quit racewalking.”
Michelle was in tears on the side of the track. “Her knee was hurting, her technique wasn’t right,” Mike Rohl remembers. “I had to tell her, ‘you have to quit fooling around. You have to get over this stuff, it’s part of the sport. Or you have to quit and go back to running. I don’t care what you do. But you’re not going to mope around, complaining about being a race walker, you’re going to get on with it.’ She decided to get back up and go train.”
And she came back at a higher level.
“I find that amazing,” Mike says. “I tell my athletes that Michelle is basically my hero, because she just does everything she’s supposed to do.”
Weird.
The Rohls do very little training together when they get serious, because she’s preparing for a six-mile race and he thirty-two miles. “Also, if we don’t train together, then we don’t have to pay for a baby sitter as long,” Michelle notes. “We really don’t like to train together too much anyway. We get on each other’s nerves.”
She laughs. Mike laughs.
Is racewalking weird looking or what? “I never thought it was weird looking,” Mike demurs. “Even when I was a freshman in high school and I saw it for the first time, I thought it was kinda cool. I always thought the racewalk was a graceful movement.”
Surprising.
“We don’t like to talk about weird looking,” Coach DeWitt says. “If people think walking is weird looking, how weird is a guy racing, carrying a long pole and jumping over a bar that’s twenty feet up in the air? Then dropping two stories, hoping the mat’s still there. How about somebody throwing a bowling ball sixty, seventy, feet. Same thing.”
Is racewalking beautiful then?
“I don’t know if beautiful is the right word,” says DeWitt, a great walker himself. “When an athlete is walking with excellent technique on an excellent day, cruising along real good, I’ll tell you what, it looks as good as anything else in track & field.
“As far as people giggling, this thought usually calms quite a few of the skeptical,” adds DeWitt, “when we’re doing a good long distance training walk, the top walkers will be covering a marathon in three and a half hours. Helps you appreciate it.”
In training. Do the math.
I have this image of Michelle, the Olympian. She finished twentieth at Barcelona in the ten kilometer walk, first American, telling herself, ‘slower, slower, don’t run, slower, you’re starting to run.’ Is race walking weird or what?
Michelle claims she never has a big desire to just start running. “I have a big desire to start running when I’m not walking. I would rather run. Race walking isn’t my favorite sport.”
That’s weird. “It’s no problem, except the first couple of weeks after a long layoff. Takes me a while to get back into my race walking technique, and it’s hard to stay on the ground. I am a good tactical racer, because Coach gives me a very detailed race plan, and it always works. I trust him. I know the plan he gives me is going to work.
“I think my race plan is the best; it works for me. People don’t think it’s going to work, people keep saying, you’re not going to win that way, you’re not going to get faster that way. But I keep beating them.”
Basically, the plan is nothing weird. “I walk an evenly paced race. I don’t go out above my head,” Michelle says. “Especially in walking that’s important, because if you go out too hard, your technique is going to break down in the end. So, even if you try to hang on, you may get DQed. I try to stay with the pack. It’s better if you’re in a pack, rather than walking alone, because the judges only have one person to focus on then.
“In walking, one thing that’s different than what I was doing when running, is my kick, the finishing sprint, has to be a lot longer. And less obvious. You can’t just wait until the last hundred meters and then sprint in, because there are going to be four judges on that last hundred meters for sure. You’ve got to start kicking with like eight hundred meters to go. Slowly picking up the pace. You don’t want anything to be noticeable when you’re walking. A lot more discrete than running.”
Did somebody say Olympics? “I really don’t want to think about the Olympics,” Michelle says. “I need to concentrate on getting to the Trials first. It’s never a sure thing. Especially in racewalking.” Take it just one step at a time.
“I’ve decided I am not going to change anything about my training in preparation for the ’96 Olympics. Because right now I’m on top,” Michelle affirms, “and it would be silly for me to switch things around, just because it’s the Olympic year. It’s been working for me so far. I’m going to run cross-country, because I always run cross-country. Then I’ll walk the indoor season. I may go to Europe for a couple of races in the spring, because they put on better racewalking races there. Aim then for the Olympic Trials.”
Step by step.
Is race walking weird looking or what?
“I guess you’d have to say it’s weird looking,” says Michelle. “In Europe, it’s different. There are so many more racewalkers. They love track & field over there and they accept racewalking as simple another event in a great sport.”
On a even par with, say, the sledgehammer throw.
Mike Rohl developed his love for racewalking while attending Averill Park High School in Chatham, New York back in the mid-Eighties. Back then, back there, race walking was actually a legitimate event in a prep track & field meet. Mike’s first place finish in the walk helped his team, the Warriors, capture a conference title. “One of my claims to fame,” he says.
A senior, undefeated that season, Mike beat his arch rival by a tenth of a second. “The race was, the two of us the whole way exchanging the lead. And if I won the race, we’d win the conference championship by two points.
“Looking back on all the things I’ve done, it wasn’t really a defining moment. What was more memorable to me, was not that I won, but what struck me, this was the last time my arch rival and I were going to race where it mattered to the team. At the end, after the fierce competition we’d waged, all we did was catch each other. All we could do was hold each other up, because we were both so exhausted.”
Know just what he means. A real competitor would do anything, even race walk, to help his team win. Her team.
Race walking is not weird. Just looks, umm, a little out of step. And nobody laughs at a winner. It’s a rule.
Michelle is motivated to be good at something in track and field. In ’88 she missed the Olympic Trials by about a second at 1500m.
She had a taste as a runner of what it was like to compete at the highest level and she kinda liked that.
Phone interview w/Michelle & Mike Rohl. October 11, 1995.
I’ve been taking it easy since the world champs. Nothing competitive.
I had a lot of fun at the WCs and I had a real good race. I was really happy with it. They put on a nice event there. Our race was fast. Flat, fast course, I was happy with it.
The eastern Europeans are a couple of minutes faster.
“They used to be four minutes faster. I’ve improved by a couple of minutes since I had Sebastian, I can still cut at least another minute off them. They never walk that fast in big competitions. Usually they walk those fast times at home, where they have judges who like them. Unfortunately, I don’t judges who like me at home. She laughs. So I can’t do those times.
We have two rules. First, bent knee, which doesn’t apply much to me. Bent knee means your leg has to be straight when it passes under your body.
Lifting is the other style rule: you always have to be in contact with the ground. That’s more of a problem, of course, when you’re going faster. When one foot is coming up, the other has to be on the ground.
Most walkers get more lifting penalties than bent knee. If I get disqualified, it’ll be lifting calls.
She used to be a fine runner.
“It’s no problem, except the first couple of weeks after a long layoff. Takes me a while to get back into my race walking technique, and it’s hard to stay on the ground.
Also, I am a toe-runner, so it was really hard for me to convert to race walking which demands you move heel-toe. I have very strong calf muscles, which makes it hard for me to land on my heel and get my toes up. I really had to work at that when I was starting out. I have to spend a lot of time stretching my calves, making sure I can get my toes UP.
She never has a big desire to just start running. “I have a big desire to start running when I’m not walking. I would rather run. Race walking isn’t my favorite sport.
If you lose your technique in the middle of the race, it’s really hard to get back into it. It’s just easier keep walking, to do it right the whole way.
Usually, when people get called, it’s not because they are purposely trying to cheat. Their form is breaking down. They are trying to go faster than they’re ready to go. You get tired, mentally as well as physically. Mostly, lifting is physical. A lot of people when they get bent knees, it’s because they get injuries and they start hurting in the later part of the race. Then they can’t straighten their leg.
Lifting? If I don’t concentrate my entire race about keeping my arms down and my toes up, then I’ll start lifting. It’s probaly more of a mental thing with me, I guess, now that I think about it. I have to really concentrate my whole race. Keeping my toes up. Keeping my arms down. You wouldn’t think the arms down would have much to do with lifting, but, for some reason, it does.
Is she maybe a little paranoid about her form? “I worry about the judges more than a lot of athletes do, she admits. I think I am paranoid about the judges. Maybe not my technique. I’m paranoid about the judges in the U.S. I’m not paranoid about the international judges. It’s kind of a political thing. Like any sport. There are certain judges who are going to like you and others who aren’t. You just have to hope the ones who like you are going to be there.
Most of them do like me these days. You have to pay your dues in this sport. In the U.S. I always like to clarify that, because in other countries the judging isn’t like it is here. I think we have a problem with judging in our country.
When I first started race walking, I had a hard time getting past the judges, because they didn’t know who I was. I was up in the front and they’re asking themselves, ‘Who is she?’ Next thing you hear, ‘We don’t know what she’s doing wrong, but she couldn’t possibly be walking that fast.’ So, they give you a call.
Not all judges. We have some good judges. But it only takes three to DQ you. That used to be frustrating. But once I made the Olympic team, I had a lot less trouble.
She walks seven minute miles. A good judge can tell if you are using good form. The best men in the world go six minutes a mile. The judges can tell when the men are lifting.
The rule is, what is perceivable to the human eye. So, if an athlete is lifting and you can’t see it, then it’s not illegal.
Sometimes the foot is quicker than the eye.
Somebody did a study once at a major international race, and they discovered that everybody is actually lifting every step of the race a little bit, but you can’t tell. It’s just so minute, they’re only off the ground for such a tiny fraction of a second, there is no way anyone could ever see it.
I switched from running to race walking for financial reasons mostly. In ’89, which was my first year running after college, I was trying to run 1500m and having a hard time getting to races where there was good competition. I was going broke. I didn’t have a sponsor. We ran our credit cards up to the limit getting to races. We just couldn’t afford to fly me to any more races.
It came down to my last chance to qualify for the national championships. My coach said, well, you can try to qualify in this race but there is going to be nobody within thirty seconds of you. Or you can try to qualify in the walk. I could get to walking races. Where I was living there are many race walks, and a lot of race walkers who would be competitive with me at that time. So I didn’t have to travel.
Also, I knew I had a better chance to make the National team. And if I did that, I would get more support. Not a lot more, but a little bit.
I had never even walked a 10K before. Never walked more than a mile. But I qualified for nationals when I tried to do it.
Actually, I’ve made more money from running than race walking. Not very much.
5K PR is 16:38. Ran a 4:20 1500m. I ran everything in college from 400m to 10K. I remember my 8K PR is 27:17. My marathon PR is 2:48:55. My only marathon. At Columbus.
My size? “There are race walkers of all different sizes internationally. Seems like in the U.S., walkers tend to be tall and thin, but it doesn’t seem that way internationally. In a way, my size has hindered me here. I have shorter legs, so I have a lot faster turnover, and a lot of these judges don’t know what to do with that. They have a harder time seeing if I’m off the ground, I think.
When I was first starting, my coach said I was the only person he’d told to lengthen their stride. He’s always telling people to shorten their stride for walking. He told me to lengthen mine, because the judges just couldn’t handle it.
I just walked a 44:17 10K road AR at the WCs. I hold the track AR of 44:41 set last year at the ’94 Goodwill Games. My PR for 5K is 21:59. That’s kind of a weak PR for me actually. I walked almost that fast for the first 5K of my record 10K.
There are SO MANY WALKERS right now. It’s such a fast growing sport.
I am a good tactical racer, because my coach gives me a very detailed race plan, and it always works. I trust him. I know the plan he gives me is going to work. I would say, I’m a good strategist, but I’m very coachable. I think my race plan is the best, it works for me. People don’t think it’s going to work, people keep saying, you’re not going to win that way, you’re not going to get faster that way. But I keep beating them.
Basically, the plan is nothing strange really. I walk an evenly paced race. I don’t go out above my head. Especially in walking that’s important, because if you go out to hard, your technique is going to break down in the end. So, even if you try to hang on, you may get DQed. I try to stay with the pack. It’s better if you’re in a pack, rather than walking alone, because the judges only have one person to focus on then.
In walking, one thing that’s different than what I was doing when I running, is your kick has to be a lot longer. And less obvious. You can’t just wait until the last 100m and then sprint in, because there are going to be four judges on that last 100m for sure. You’ve got to start kicking with like 800m to go. Slowly picking up the pace.
You don’t want anything to be noticeable when you’re walking. A lot more discrete than running.
Is race walking weird looking or what?
I guess you’d have to say it’s weird looking. In Europe, there are so many more racewalkers. They love track & field over there and they accept racewalking as simple another event in a great sport.
On a par with, say, the hammer throw even.
I’m running cross-country now. When I’m in serious training, I can spend up to an hour and a half on technique, 45 mins. stretching. I don’t do it all together. I’ll do weights every day, alternating upper and lower body.
She weighs 90 pounds. Boy, those weights are working, huh.
The meat of my workout will take a couple hours, so I can train as much as 5 hours daily when I’m doing my serious training. Altho I’ve kinda decided it’s not worth training that many hours. A lot of it is technique work, where I’m going 100m down, and 100m back.
I train a lot less miles than most racewalkers train. I maybe do 50 miles a week. I haven’t been keeping a log lately. I’m not doing morning workouts right now, just one workout a day. I’m going to start doing morning workouts next week.
On Mondays I do long intervals. 2M, 1 1/2, 1m, all uphill. Tuesdays, I’ll do a threshold workout, which is 1M easy, then 3-8 miles at threshold pace, then another mile easy. As the season progresses this workout gets longer. On weds., I racewalk an hour easy. Thursday, I do short intervals. Fridays, an easy halfhour or so, and Sat. I race. Sunday, I go long, an hour and a half, or so. I don’t worry about the pace too much.
My strength? I am a good athlete. The reason I’ve had success in walking in the U.S. is that most walkers are people who didn’t have any success at running, they’re kinda mediocre athletes who switched to racewalking hoping for some success because the competition isn’t as deep. My coach always say, people ask him how he made me an Olympian so fast. He replies, give me any 4:20 1500m runner and I’ll give you a 45 min. 10K walker. That’s where my success lies, simply the fact that I’m a good athlete.
I am coachable. Michael says, mentally tough. I am mentally tough. My coach will give me my goals and race plan, and I don’t like to not achieve them. I’m driven to always have things exactly the way they’re supposed to end. Winning.
I’ve decided I am not going to change anything about my training in preparation for the ’96 Olympics. Because right now I’m on top, and it would be silly for me to switch things around, just because it’s the Olympic year. It’s been working for me so far. I’m going to run cross-country, because I always run cross-country. Then I’ll walk the indoor season. I may go to Europe for a couple of races in the spring, because they put on better racewalking races there. Aim then for the Olympic Trials. I really don’t want to think about the Olympics, I need to concentrate on getting to the Trials first, because it’s never a sure thing. Especially in racewalking.
This year was very hard. I had IT ban tendinitis, it was very painful, and it was starting to get to where I was having problems locking my knee, so I was getting a little worried. But by the time I got to the World Championships, it was gone, because after Nationals, I spent a lot of time in physical therapy and I haven’t noticed it since. That is a problem I can have, so I have to be sure I stretch my IT bans real well. Ilio-tibial ban goes from my hip to the knee, on the outside of the leg.
This year, I was very badly dehydrated at the Pan-Am games, then again at World Cup. So now I have to be careful I’m drinking enough, because I’ve been told it’s a lot easier for me to get dehydrated, since I’ve already been severely dehydrated. If I don’t drink enough, I really notice it now.
I’m getting old, I going to be 30 next month, 11/12/65. I need to spend a lot more time taking care of myself, stretching, getting in the whirlpool, allowing myself more recovery than I used to have to have. Right now, I am hoping I don’t get achilles tendinitis, because usually by the end of cross country season, I get that.
LaGrange has been really good to us. We have a nice little house here that we live in that they’ve provided for us. It was lucky I was living here this year, because they provide physical therapy for us. These are things most of the top runners in the country have, but most racewalkers don’t have access to.
That’s one of the reasons we have a harder time competing, because we don’t have access to a lot of help other athletes take for granted. Being able to just get that therapy, I am sure made the biggest difference. If I hadn’t had the PT available, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to get through my race at World Championships.
The town is supportive. If we ask for something, they’ll try to do it for us. They’ll help us with child care. Any little thing. If we’re trying to get to a race that’s nearby, they’ll provide a van for us. We have a course around a lake that’s about 20 miles away, if people don’t have a car, they’ll give us a rental car.
I have a problem with my wagon right now. One of the wheels is broken. We still only have one car. Mike is done w/school except for his thesis. That was a 42-mile commute each way.
The importance of Mike.
He’s training for the Olympic Trials himself. The 50K walk will be held in LaGrange in April. He’s had a really good year this year, a lot of PRs, got back on the national team. He’s been off the National team for several years due to injuries. He’s finally healthy and back in the sport, and better than he’s ever been. He’s really hoping that next year will be a good year for him.
The 50K is a race where the best racers tend to be older. So, even though he’s 30 now, he’s very young for a 50K walker.
They trained together today. Don’t usually do much together in their serious training, because she’s training for a 10K and he’s training for a 50K.
Our training is a lot different. Also, if we don’t train together, then we don’t have to pay for a baby sitter as long.
We really don’t like to train together too much anyway. We get on each other’s nerves.
She laughs. A deeper laugh rumbles in the background.
Is Mike available?
He’s right here.
I thought he might be.
A senior in high school, undefeated that season, beat his arch rival by a tenth of a second. The race was, the two of us the whole way exchanging the lead. And if I won the race, we’d win the conference championship by two points.
Looking back on all the things I’ve done, it wasn’t really a defining moment. What was more memorable to me, was not that I won, but what struck me, this was the last time my arch rival and I were going to race where it mattered to the team. At the end, after the fierce competition we’d waged, all we did was catch each other. All we could do was hold each other up, because we were both so exhausted.
Is racewalking weird looking or what?
I never thought it was weird looking. Even when I was a freshman in high school and I saw it for the first time, I thought it was kinda cool. I always thought the racewalk was a graceful movement.
I am a walker because I’m built to do it. My chances are better than fifty-fifty of making the Olympic team. I give myself sixty-forty. I need to train hard in the next months and not get hurt, and I’ll have a crack at it.
Is there Allan James and then everybody else?
Well, Allan sure thinks that. I have shown moments where I’ve been able to stay with some of the top people. I love those moments.
Hold those memories.
“I hope so. When I’m racing I remember many of the things I do in training. I’ll recall being tough in a workout, that’s the reason I know I’ll be able to get through the next part of a race.
Michelle? She’s exceptional. As a coach, having coached my own teams, I’ve not worked with an athlete that exceptional. She is very tough. She doesn’t think it, but she’s so mentally cued into what she’s doing. She may not be able to tell you how she trains well. ‘I just do what my coach says,’ she’ll say. That’s part of her mental toughness. She’s tough enough in her mind and has enough trust to not question what she is doing. Just that her coach has said that she can do this, so she believes she can do it. I’ll look at the workouts and say, I don’t even know if I could do this workout. She’ll say, I can do it. If coach thinks I can. Then she goes out and does it. And she does it by herself. That’s a key factor.
Oh, she’s had her broken down moments, too. She doesn’t like getting disqualified. This is a serious problem. When she does go away and gets disqualified, it’s very upsetting. She’s not very happy for a week or two at a time. Last year, at the nationals in Buffalo, where she got DQed, the only time in the last two years, she was going to quit racewalking.”
Michelle was in tears on the side of the track.
“Her knee was hurting, her technique wasn’t right,” Mike Rohl remembers. “I had to tell her, ‘you have to quit fooling around. You have to get over this stuff, it’s part of the sport. Or you have to quit and go back to running. I don’t care what you do. But you’re not going to mope around, complaining about being a race walker, you’re going to get on with it.’ She decided to get back up and go train.”
And she came back at a higher level.
