Imagine being a four-time All-American. Imagine running 100 miles a week in the fall, and 70 miles each week since. Imagine that you ran 18 miles on Monday, the last 16 of them on 5:45 pace. Imagine owning the school record in the mile, only a couple of heartbeats over the legendary four minute barrier, but you still have to run faster and train harder. Imagine that the past counts for nothing and your future is now, and should the race go well, the future is the next week and so on.
Sam Wilbur's senior track season has been one personal best after another, two All-American designations, a school record and a period on the top of American track rankings in the indoor 3,000. Yet this counts for nothing at the NCAA Track and Field Championships next week in Knoxville, Tenn., where he will compete in the 3,000-meter steeplechase.
The race is the end of Wilbur's collegiate career and a race he has been focusing on all season because, as Wilbur said, "My performance [at the NCAA's] determines what happens," in the future after he graduates. The faster he runs at the NCAA meet the better the options he has for the rest of the year, the better the club teams Wilbur would be invited to train with and the greater the chance he would be able to compete in Europe, said track and field Coach Barry Harwick. Wilbur is one of a number of Dartmouth seniors who plan to continue racing next year.
"Next year is going to be about running," Wilbur said. "Not a career. Not grad school. Just how fast I can run. Then I will reevaluate."
A great performance at the NCAA's, would put Wilbur in a good position to compete at the US Track and Field Championships in mid-June and a good effort there opens up the possibility to go to Scandinavia to train with the US Track Federation's Emerging Elite program. Each step is an increasingly hard jump up the Track and Field ladder to Wilbur's ultimate goal, the Olympics.
The immediate future, however, is the steeplechase at the NCAA Championships.
The trials are next Wednesday, with the finals two days later. Wilbur, accomplished in all the distance events, chose to compete in the steeplechase because he feels it is the best event for him at the NCAA championships.
"I qualified for the 5,000, 10,000 and the steeplechase," he said. "I would have loved to run [more events] but the schedule doesn't allow it ... [the steeplechase] is where my chances are the best."
The steeplechase is a dangerous event; a little less than two miles with 27 three-foot high jumps, and seven more water jumps, but the 3,000-meter distance is Wilbur's best track distance. It is over this distance he topped the charts indoors during the winter, and earned his moniker of "fastest man in America".
The solid wood hurdles present more of a problem. Wilbur broke his arm training for the race last year, slipping on the water jump. He has tried to improve his hurdling technique this year. The danger, he said "weeds out some of the competition. A lot of guys don't like to do it."
Last year Wilbur ran well at the NCAA championships, finishing in fifth place in his first season as a steeplechaser.
Wilbur said his only disappointment was that he was so close to second place. "I could reach out and touch them [second through fourth] with 100 meters to go."
Wilbur is guardedly optimistic about his chances at the championships this year. His personal best is 8:45, but Wilbur and Harwick both feel he can run faster. "I know I can run 8:35, maybe 8:30," Wilbur said.
Throughout the season he has purposely not run a fast steeplechase, instead he has posted blazing times in the flat races. "I don't want to be a favorite," he said.
Wilbur is gunning for top place in what promises to be tough race. All the athletes who finished ahead of him last year will compete in the year's competition.
Wilbur came to track by chance. "I wrestled freshman year [in high school] and in the spring a friend of mine joined the track team," he said.
In a high school of 400 in Maine, Wilbur said that a hundred students ran track. There were only two spring sports, and the baseball team had cuts, he said. Track was, "something to do."
When he came to Dartmouth, Wilbur was not a nationally ranked high school performer. "I was good in Maine," he said, where he "won state meets a bunch of times".
Wilbur's first two years at Dartmouth did not produce the stellar performances of the last two, but did provide the emotional highlight of his career, which was anchoring the distance medley relay team at the Heptagonal Championships held in Leverone Field House in front of 2,000 people. Wilbur received the baton in fifth place and picked off athletes bringing the relay team to victory in front of a "major home town crowd." For Wilbur it was a reminder of what was possible. "I'd finally done something," he said.
The All-American designations, the blazing personal bests and the school records have all come in the last two years, after Wilbur, a '94, took a year off. The Dartmouth track and field team was in the middle of a coaching change, and Wilbur said he simply "wanted to get away."
Training in Colorado, Wilbur had an opportunity to run with Mexican Olympian Roberto Barrios, and American Mark Plaatjes.
There, Wilbur said, he realized, "how good I could be. I learned to believe in myself ... These guys were ordinary people, not genetic anomalies, who just trained very hard."
Harwick said Wilbur, "became very focused on what he wanted to accomplish."
Since returning Wilbur has reached most of the goals he had for his career at Dartmouth, many of them coming in the last three weeks. He wanted to break 14 minutes in the 5,000, which he did last weekend, to close in on four minutes in the mile, and to run a fast 10,000 meters, as he did earlier this season.
The achievement of those goals has come from tough training with his fellow Dartmouth distance runners. Wilbur said he "enjoys coming to practice."
Part of the importance of doing well at the NCAA's is to be invited to train with a top club team. Wilbur said, "I don't think I would want to continue [running] without," the camaraderie of the team. They"help me so much during workouts ... I don't want to live in a cabin and train" by myself, he said.
