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| Colorado state championships. Two first place finishes at the NXN Southwest Regional. Successive seventh place showings at NXN Finals. Division I recruits. For the past two years, the "Lambkins" of Fort Collins High School CO have embodied success at the highest level. Over the next nine weeks, assistant coach Phil Latter will be tracking the ups and downs, triumphs and challenges of the Fort Collins girls’ cross country team.
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the lambkin way | part 3
10.20.09
by Phil Latter, Special to DyeStat
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Tempo Time
Monday, October 12th – 3:30 P.M.
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| Marci Witczak shows her "serious" side for the Lambkins
Photo submitted by Phil Latter
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The snow is gone. In the span of less than an hour, three days and three inches of snow turned to air. The slushy State course trot is now nothing but a distant memory. In Colorado the sun always wins. Today is no exception.
Poor weather or not, today’s tempo run would have gone on without so much as a question. Along with Death Quest, near weekly tempo runs form the backbone of Coach Chris Suppes’s program. The course is always the same. Starting on a gravel path, the runners quickly funnel into a bushwhacked trail nestled amongst high grass stalks before hitting a sidewalk. There they follow a road for a quarter mile before the course dumps them down a grassy hill, through a Frisbee golf course, and onto another paved trail. An electric box and BMX park mark the turnaround for those going two and three miles, respectively.
Suppes and I see none of it. Mountain bikes are required to catch more than the first and last minute of each person’s tempo run, and ours are conspicuously absent. Instead, we are left to discuss Suppes’s near-death adventure in a Dodge Durango with a dying 4-Wheel drive system and the incredible volume of e-mail he receives on a daily basis. Such talk only tempers the curiosity of what’s happening out on the trails.
When the varsity girls finally come into view, neither one of us is surprised Erin Hooker is in the lead. The freshman has not rested on her laurels yet and continues to push the pace each workout. She crosses the line in 18:46, twenty seconds ahead of fellow freshmen Taleah McClintock and Maddie Staab. Marci Witczak, running only her second workout in the past three weeks, finishes comfortably in their midst. She tells us she barely felt the knee pain that has floored her for the past month and a half. It is the most positive sign Suppes has seen in awhile.
Turning back to the others who just crossed the line, I am suddenly ambushed.
“I have confidence, Latter!” Taleah tells me, jumping up and down and giving high-fives to anyone who’s not too tired to respond.
“I can see that,” I say.
“This is so awesome. I love having confidence.” I return the double high-five.
Not long after Maddie crosses the line, Aubree Dietrich finishes her three-miler in 19:33. A junior transfer, she would be the top runner for her old high school, but here she battles Allie Suppes, Coach Suppes’s daughter, for first spot off the bench. Her continual development, along with the graduation of three key seniors, lets her know that her time is coming ever sooner.
The rest of the girls walk around talking to the steadily accruing jumble of people who have completed their own two- or three-mile journey into the land of lactic thresholds. They wait here because their senior leader, Kirsten Follett, is out on the course completing a four-mile expedition of her own.
Come track time, few can match Kirsten’s blend of speed and endurance. She has run on nationally ranked 3200m relay teams, stood on the podium at the State Meet in the 1600m, and qualified by time to that same meet in the 3200m. Mastering tempo runs, however, has taken much longer. It is something Suppes is keenly aware of. Even though Kirsten’s classmates Rachel Viger and Denise Chilson were being permitted the rare treat of repeats on the track, Suppes elects to keep her out here on the course. It is a hard thing for a track star to swallow, but Kirsten does it admirably.
If the fifty mile weeks are catching up to her, no one can yet tell. Everybody cheers as Kirsten crosses the line in a very respectable 25:17.
Long Slow Distance
Tuesday, October 13th – 3:00 P.M.
There is nothing sexy about ten miles run slowly. Nothing. It is a run that neither inspires nor motivates. It is simply something that has to be done.
Suppes is gambling and he knows it. This is Conference week, the chance to show who is for real amongst all the large schools from Fort Collins down to Boulder. It also when the cross country runners get their chance to have their pictures placed on the prominent All-Conference wall. One month ago he challenged the very young boys’ team by asking them to step up their levels and train like seniors. He has recently done something similar with the senior girls, pushing their mileage to its highest point yet. The payoff, he hopes, starts two weeks down the road at the Regional Meet. There the girls will try to retain their title and the boys will seek to prove they are for real. More importantly, it is the one and only chance to qualify for State.
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| Erin Hooker cranks out pushups during a post-practice core workout.
Photo submitted by Phil Latter |
Because of this, Conference is left to simmer on the backburner. It falls in a vital training week, the last one where any significant physiological advantages can be had before the State meet. All year Suppes has predicated the team’s success on getting continually stronger and smarter, using tempo runs, long runs, and hilly cross country workouts to stimulate their bodies into ever higher planes of fitness. He is committed to landing the runners at just the right time, bucking the traditional model of peaking by removing just enough tiredness from their legs to make them fresh and sharp.
The pictures on the school’s wall will just have to take care of themselves.
Even in his Absence…
Wednesday, October 14th – 3:30 P.M.
Recovery intervals. You could add them to the list of oxymorons along with jumbo shrimp and holy war. The name does, after all, connote two extremes of any runner’s training meshed together. Still, here are sixty kids doing drills under the shade of old oak trees, preparing their bodies for just such a task.
Suppes is gone today, sick as a dog, but his show marches on. Little is left to chance even in his absence, and sure enough when I check my inbox in the track office there is a list of all the runners I’m responsible for and their goal times. This is a product of design. Suppes meticulously catalogs each runner’s personal bests and potential bests, then uses a spreadsheet laden with formulas to accurately assess their fitness levels. The spreadsheet in turn is able to save Suppes the time of figuring out each runner’s workout paces on a daily basis. He similarly uses a levels system to determine the volume and type of work each athlete will perform based on their prior experience and interest in improving. When combined, these computer printouts allow Suppes to individualize training for over sixty athletes at a time.
All the varsity athletes do five repeats around the grass loop at Warren Park, the “recovery” in their recovery intervals a short jog back to the start. Rachel looks exceptionally strong. A different shoe-lacing technique has allowed her sore foot to feel light years better in the past week, and the previous weekend’s official visit to the University of Colorado has her looking as motivated as ever. After holding back on the first four intervals, Rachel is allowed to open up to full stride on the last one. She gives off the impression of a runner who knows her time is coming. Waiting, now, is the hard part.
Back at the school, a few of the freshmen come up and ask me to lead them through a couple circuits. Using only their bodyweight and whatever buildings or trees are around them, we go through twenty minutes of exercises, focusing mostly on their core. Abdominal crunches, Superman holds, lunges, pushups, wall sits, and a number of other exercises are all interchanged with little rest in an attempt to hit muscle groups that are often missed while running.
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| Coach Suppes cheers on Erin Hooker and Marci Witczak at a recent meet.
Photo submitted by Phil Latter |
Seriousness is not the forte of the younger athletes, and in between sets of crunches and lunges, I find myself being attacked by pine cones. I retaliate by making them laugh while doing elbow bridges, the struggle to hold one’s bodyweight up being much harder when the muscles are contracting from giggles.
All is fair in war and circuits.
Suppes Speaks
Thursday, October 15th – 3:15 P.M.
Suppes sounds horrible. As the runners file into one of the Physical Education classrooms, he tells them all to keep at least a four foot radius from him. This bug, he says, would be debilitating to any runner who came in contact with it. With less than a day before the Conference meet, all precautions are heeded with extra vigor.
In this classroom are the twenty-eight boys and girls who make up the varsity and junior varsity teams. They are spread out at desks and window ledges in the oddly shaped room. Despite his physical condition, Suppes is animated and bouncy as he talks to both teams.
“We trained a little bit tough this week,” he says, pacing the front of the room. “I got a strange feeling our legs are probably not one-hundred percent. We’re probably not firing on all cylinders. That’s one of the things that’s been rough about where the Conference meet lies. If we want to be ready for Regionals and the State Meet, then we need to continue to work hard this week. If we don’t, we’re risking going in the other direction.
“You have the regular season and the playoff season, just like football and all the other sports. Cross country doesn’t have playoffs, but [former coach John Martin] used to say that Conference is the first round of the championship series. Even though we get to go on no matter what, it’s our first chance to establish the intensity that you need to win Regionals and win State. What I’m trying to say is, we need to have more of a business-type attitude. It needs to be intense and excitement.”
“You have no nerves tomorrow. None. But sometimes nerves lead to having excitement. But sometimes that nervousness, that little bit of stress, causes adrenaline and you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m going to go get them.’ It creates that excitement that you need to make passion happen.”
Throughout the speech Suppes’s passion shines through. He draws a diagram on the classroom’s white board showing the girls how running as a pack could have given them a chance to beat Classical Academy two weeks ago. He discusses his fears that the girls think they are better than they are, that they can just assume they’ll throw down a good race when it counts. When this happens, he says, it leads to the disastrous showing they had at the John Martin Invitational earlier this year, a meet in which only one varsity athlete performed up to expectation.
In the end, though, it is focusing on the positives that unites the team. Suppes discusses their potential to do great things, lauds Denise for her performance two weeks ago in Colorado Springs, and discusses how each of them could have a race like that by finding “the sweet spot” in a race. “How do we know Denise didn’t find the sweet spot in the 5K?” Suppes asks the team. “How do we know that if Marci hadn’t been with her, and Maddie had been with her, you wouldn’t have just happened to fall into that sweet spot? Then instead of losing by one, we win by three. Then instead of losing by one, we win by four.”
Suppes ends his speech simply: “I think tomorrow we need to rise to the occasion and make things happen.”
The Final Follett
Thursday, October 15th – 5:00 p.m.
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| Kirsten Follett competes during in her senior season.
Photo submitted by Phil Latter |
Ice buckets are a standing tradition at Fort Collins High School. Many years ago, after realizing the training room ice bath always filled up too quickly with football players, Coach Craig Luckasen decided he could do just as well by filling fifty gallon plastic garbage cans with ice and cold water. Three to four kids can stand in each can comfortably, and by leaving them outside on sunny days the warm air helps everyone ignore the singeing cold that penetrates their legs and feet.
Today is cooler and overcast so the cans are indoors. Most of the athletes have long since left for home, but Kirsten and Denise are standing in frigid water. They may not want to stand in the waters right now, but less than twenty four hours from Conference is not the time to be changing habits, particularly with legs as tired as theirs.
Regardless of the upcoming meet, Kirsten’s legacy is complete. Had she been honored with any other last name, Coach Suppes and everyone else in the program still would have thought just as highly of her and her notable accomplishments: 2:19 in the 800m and 5:10 in the 1600m in track; 18:15 (5K), one State Title, and two 7th place finishes at Nike Team Nationals in cross country. Any coach would appreciate those by themselves, but there is one catch. Kirsten is a Follett.
Led by their father, Kevin, a long-time teacher at Fort Collins High School, the Folletts have created a unique, multigenerational legacy. His is a legacy of exacting precision – every mile he has run with a partner, every shoe he has laced up, and every unique sight he has seen while running is all recorded and available for viewing. Each runner has their chance for fame on the team’s website that he maintains. That is his legacy…oh, and helping start and foster the running careers of three of the Lambkin’s most successful female athletes.
“Whether we were at home or on a vacation in some new place, he would come home and tell us about all the interesting things that happened on his run,” Kevin’s oldest daughter Katie told me. “It always seemed like an adventurous and almost magical time to me. Starting when I was five, I would beg my dad to let me run the half mile loop around the park in front of our house, and I think I became addicted without realizing it.”
He and his wife, Karen, have encouraged the girls since their interest in the sport first took. This year they’ll make all but one of Kirsten’s meets and will travel to Indiana on multiple occasions to watch Katie and Kelsey, the middle daughter, compete at the big meets, including Nationals (held in Terre Haute for Division I and Evansville for Division II).
“I would have quit early on if it hadn’t been for the support of my dad,” Kelsey says.
Katie is the one with the most accolades. She was All-State 11 times in high school, broke 5 minutes for the 1600 at altitude, and since moving on to college has won two PAC-10 titles in the 1500m, run in the Olympic Trials and won a team NCAA Championship. This Saturday she placed 4th at the NCAA Pre-Nationals meet, helping lead the University of Washington to the team title even without one of their top runners. She aspires to run post-collegiately and has a legitimate chance to do so.
Kelsey is the bridge, having run in high school her first two years with Katie and her last two with Kirsten. After being a key member of the Fort Collins girls’ team that finished second at state in 2007, she continued the family tradition of college runners by heading west to Mesa State, a top ten Division II school.
Standing in the ice tube, Kirsten is a captive audience. Senior year is a year of lasts – last meets, last dances, last times through the fields and track. It’s as good a time as any for moments of introspection. I ask her about getting into “the family hobby” as Kelsey calls it. She tells me it took awhile for running to feel like her own sport, how she just assumed Katie would win every meet she entered, and how running with Kelsey was both a great sister moment and also stoked her competitive fire.
Denise asks if she can say something. I’m in no position to deny her.
“I just remember our sophomore year when Katie got her first All-American honor [for Washington], everyone was so pumped that day. We were all talking about it and were like, ‘We’re doing the same workouts she did.’ She did [these workouts], so it’s cool just coming up through the program.”
“Suppes will point out if we have a really good workout,” Kirsten adds. “He’ll point it out and say, ‘Hey, that’s what Katie did when she was doing this workout.’ So that’s very exciting.” I ask if Kirsten ever feels pressure from Suppes, intentional or otherwise, to perform up to the level of his sister.
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| Kelsey, Kevin and Kirsten Follett - Photo submitted by Follett family
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Both Denise and Kirsten say there is no pressure, that the stories Suppes brings up are the humorous ones.
“It’s how ditzy she could be,” Kirsten says. “Katie put paperclips on her shorts to keep track of the laps. But she’d forget to take them off. When she raced she’d put all her splits on her arm. She was very methodical that way.”
That methodical attitude has also led to numerous awards, interviews, and the closest thing to fame a college runner can achieve. Kirsten is sure to pick her sister’s brain whenever she’s home about the different types of training they do on a national champion cross country team. Yet in talking with all four Folletts, not once do I get any sense of envy or jealousy.
“I had a lot of fun running with Katie for two years,” Kelsey says. “I never really felt like I was running in her shadow. She has always been an inspiration to me, and I love how much passion and dedication she has for running - that’s more what I have been trying to follow, in terms of her footsteps.”
“One thing we have sought to do as parents is never compare the girl's athletic abilities to one another,” Kevin says. “They are each unique individuals with different running styles and goals. I know Kelsey and Kirsten are proud of their older sister's accomplishments, and this shows them that through their own hard work they can go far in the sport as well.”
“My parents have always been supportive on and off the course,” says Katie. “They came and watched me at not only my races, but also other things I enjoyed doing like orchestra concerts. Have you ever been to a junior high orchestra concert? It's definitely not the Philharmonic! Because they've always been so involved in all the other areas of my life, I don't have to feel pressure that they aren't going to be there for me when I bomb and have a terrible race.”
Kirsten and Denise’s ten minutes in the ice bucket are almost up. I wonder as they count down the last sixty seconds if Kirsten knows how much her family thinks of her.
“Each of the girls [is] unique,” Kevin says of his three daughters, “and Kirsten is very different from her sisters. She is not as high-energy as Katie, and [is] more analytical than Kelsey. My wife and I joke that if she had been our first child, we would have had ten more kids because she's been such an easier child to raise.”
“I love watching Kirsten develop as a runner,” Kelsey adds. “Each year she’s becoming stronger, and I’m really excited to continue watching her succeed into college. Being together on some All-Conference teams and going to nationals together was such a more memorable experience because I got to do all that with Kirsten.”
“Kirsten is the sweetie of the family,” says Katie. “She is always thinking of ways to make someone's day better and I always try to be more like her!”
From listening to all the Folletts, it seems the backbone of the team is in good shape.
Six for the Wall - Front Range Conference Championships
Friday, October 16th – 4:00 p.m.
Game time. The girls look to be taking this race as seriously as Suppes asked. Kirsten and Denise, in particular, looked a little rough after their warm-up jog. Denise has felt dead-legged all week, and disappointing workouts on both Monday and Wednesday have done nothing to ease her fears of trying to compete today. Kirsten’s pre-race attitude has an aura of apprehension around it. It is something I’m not used to seeing.
At the gun the Boulder girls get out hard. It is clear they have no intentions of getting boxed around at the start. The course here at Loveland High School is exceptionally twisty and turny, featuring everything from steep hills to sand traps. Trying to find a quiet place where cheering is most needed, I stake out where the course runs adjacent to Lake Loveland. Boulder’s Kelsey Lakowske is by me first. And then there is silence. Absolute, dead, nothingness. It takes nearly thirty seconds for Boulder’s Sam Lewis and the Lambkin’s Rachel Viger to come by running astride of each other. Rachel’s pre-race goal was to stick with Lewis and play it from there; it’s clear she’s intent on following her own advice. Not far behind her, Erin and Marci are leading the chase pack with Kirsten just behind them. Maddie and Taleah are just behind those two and look as strong as they have at any point this season. I run to the next spot.
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| Awards ceremony for the Front Range Conference Championship - Photo submitted by Phil Latter
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To a cross country spectator there are many dark rooms and alleys. After all, one minute you see Rachel running with company, the next she is clear in second place and putting daylight on those behind her. Though she will gain no ground on Lakowske (who was on her way to an absurd 61 second victory in 18:03 on a fairly slow course), Rachel looks smooth to the finish and hears her due applause. Erin is the next Lambkin in sixth, with the pack of Marci, Kirsten, and Maddie right behind her. Running with her newly found confidence, Taleah finishes in 16th, her best placing in a race of this magnitude.
Although five of the girls had outstanding races, Kirsten and Denise having off days means waiting for the team score is a contentious time. When the rumors start spilling through the various coaches running around watching the boys’ race, the news is in Fort Collins' favor. The Lambkins end up winning by seven points.
Afterwards, most of the girls are ecstatic. Rachel, Erin, Kirsten, and perhaps most surprisingly, Marci have all made the All-Conference wall, and freshmen Maddie and Taleah earn certificates for their second-team placing. Adding to the day’s joy, the boys unexpectedly win the team title and add two more to the All-Conference wall as well. This despite having lost to five Conference teams earlier in the year and having one of their top runners plagued by a bad plantar fasciitis flare-up. Still sick and wanting only to lie in bed, Suppes ends up running around the course in ecstasy congratulating all the Lambkins he sees.
The awards ceremony dies down as the sun starts to set behind the foothills to the west. It has been a day of many victories, but also a few concerning defeats. While the team enjoys the momentary thrill of victory, they are well aware of the challenges that loom ahead. One week to qualify at Regionals. Two to State. Five to the Nike Cross Nationals Southwest Regional in Tempe, Arizona.
A Conference Championship is nice, but bigger tasks loom ahead.
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