Janet Smith's 1983 Kinney Championship Built On Disappointment, Desire

By Doug Binder, DyeStat Editor

Thirty-five years ago, Janet Smith of Edison Township, N.J., took the downhills at Balboa Park so fast that her coach was convinced she was going to wipe out.

“I put my body on the angle of the hill and picked up my feet and I flew,” she said this week, recalling her championship win at what was then the Kinney Cross Country Championships. “I wouldn’t doubt that’s where I won the race. It’s what happens when you don’t leave a stone unturned.”

Janet Smith-Leet is in her early 50s now, a wife and mother living in in the suburbs west of Chicago.

But the story of what happened in her three races at Kinney (now Foot Locker) in the nascent days of girls high school running has resonance today. She has shared the stories, and her advice, for decades at the running camp she operated.

The 40th Foot Locker Cross Country Championships is Saturday at Balboa Park’s Morley Field in San Diego.

In some ways, Smith created the template that elite girls with national championship ambitions have followed ever since. She was one of the first to learn how to find balance between real life and national championship level running, how to cope with the burdensome weight of expectations, and how to set herself up to win.

Smith ran 16:43 at Balboa Park on a damp day in 1983 when spikes were not allowed. Over all the years since, only two runners (Melody Fairchild of Boulder CO and Julia Stamps of Santa Rosa CA) have run faster at the national meet in San Diego.

After her final harrowing descent of the hill along Upas Street, Smith cruised to the finish line and leaped with joy over the line, more than 30 seconds clear of second place.

“I did a little jump at the finish line and down the stretch I had my fist up in the air,” she said. “It had nothing to do with being disrespectful to my competitors. It was a year of committing to something, putting my whole self into something.”

In the 1970s, as girls were first gaining the right to compete in high school sports, Smith grew up playing sports with the neighborhood boys. Pick-up basketball games. Ice hockey. Tackle football.

She ran in the fall with the Hunterdon Harriers club and found that she had ability to run far and fast.

“The top seven got to wear the St. Francis sweat suit, and it was a race-by-race proposition,” Janet said. “If you didn’t make the top seven at the race, you had had clean the sweat suit and give it to the person who had earned it on Monday. In the seventh grade, I got the sweat suit a couple of times. In the eighth grade, I got it the whole time.”

She went with her team – all boys – to the New Jersey Catholic schools state championships.  

Her coach made her wear a knit stocking cap, concealing her gender because he wasn’t sure whether she was permitted to participate.

“I didn’t know any better,” she said. “I just ran.”

The coach entered the names of his team using first initials only.

The team won. In the back of a cafeteria, as the awards were announced, the coach made a dramatic reveal.

“They announced us to come up and he pulled my hat off and lit a cigar,” Janet said, laughing at the memory. “I could hear, ‘It’s a girl! It’s a girl!’”

She was the girl who ran like a boy.

In high school, Janet attended JP Stevens and won the New Jersey Meet of Champions title three times – 1980, 1981 and 1983.

After the 1981 state meet, her coach approached her at Holmdel Park.

“He comes over to me and says ‘There’s a gentleman from a corporation that is asking do I want to go to Disney World,’” Janet recalled. “Well what kid doesn’t want to go to Disney World?”

It was a representative from Kinney, sent to inform Smith that in order to win a trip the Disney World and the national championship cross country race that she first had to qualify at the regional meet at New York’s Van Cortlandt Park.

Smith qualified easily, flew to Orlando for the third Kinney Cross Country Championships and finished fifth.

In between her sophomore and junior years, she grew six inches.

“I remember waking up in pain from growing,” Janet said. “I ran pretty much the same. I didn’t increase or decrease.”

After she pulled a hamstring muscle, she started working with a local orthopaedic physician named Robert Narcessian, one of the nation’s leading experts in the science of running and athletic movement.

“We did these weird drills and they seemed to work, so I asked if I could work with him full-time,” Janet said. “That was my ‘off’ year. There was a lot of awkwardness. He re-coordinated me over the next two years.”

Smith took second place that fall at the New Jersey Meet of Champions.

In Orlando, she placed fifth again. Years later, she would learn that she had exercise-induced asthma caused by heat and humidity.

At the time, fifth place felt like failure.

“My junior year was complicated,” Janet said. “Expectations really wore on me. Everyone around me thought I was going to win nationals.

“It was the worst race I had in high school. Getting fifth, I felt like was last.”

Her coach cussed her out before she had cleared the finish chute. He said she’d embarrassed him.

“My coach came down hard on me, and my mom even came down on me a little bit hard,” Janet said. “It wasn’t fun. That was not a fun year for me.”

After the race, back in her hotel, Janet was especially hard on herself. It was her 17th birthday.

“I took a pen and wrote everything that was in my head on the cover of the Kinney (meet program), everything that was wrong about that year,” she said. “I felt it so much that I wanted to win that title.”

She was upset with how her coach had talked to her, but Janet strode down the hotel corridor and knocked on his door.  

“I told him ‘I’m going to do whatever it takes to win the title next year, and he can either come along or step aside,’” Janet said. “He apologized for what he had said to me.”

Then she walked to her mother’s room.

“I told my mom, ‘If you come to my race, you have to understand that I’m human and I’m beatable.’”

Over the next year, Janet set out to prove that she could do what it took to be a national champion.

She made plans to address every item that she had scrawled on the cover of the meet program.

Janet obtained a device to simulate high altitude. The apparatus had a mask and a tank that was strapped to your back. It limited the amount of oxygen available to breathe.

“I wore it for six miles every single day,” she said.

To acclimate to the heat of Orlando, she ran in the New Jersey summertime sun at 1 p.m. She went in to have her electrolytes checked every two weeks.

Janet devised a way to erase the pressure, to make the sport fun. She made the decision that every day she would have to make one of her teammates laugh out loud. Instead of sitting in last-period Chemistry dreading practice, she calculated ways to get her teammates to crack up.

Good news arrived early in the fall when Kinney meet officials announced that the national championships were moving back to San Diego.

Dr. Narcessian introduced the mechanics of running down a hill. They found a short, steep incline of less than 10 feet. Janet plunged down it. Over and over.

It was all part of a power training system devised to give Janet added strength and durability.

“All he said was pick my feet up,” she said. “I probably had a 10-foot stride (going downhill). I had the power in my legs to handle that impact.”

Janet ran 17:35 on the Holmdel Park course in New Jersey, a record that would last for 17 years.

She won the Northeast regional title.

Her parents, as a reward for her diligence and focus, paid to send Janet out to San Diego on Tuesday – two days before the rest of the athletes showed up.

For two days, Janet rehearsed the hill and the rest of the course. She visualized success. 

“I don’t remember it being hard,” she said. “The downhill was my recovery.”

The day of final, the girls race went out in 4:55 for the first mile. It was the fastest mile Janet had ever run, but there was still a pack of leaders.

“Kathy Smith surged on the uphill after the mile, and I thought ‘That’s a dumb place to do,’” Janet said. “I left Kathy on the top of the hill and never saw anyone else in the race again.”

A year after the most humbling and disappointing day of Janet’s running career, that leap of joy at the finish represented fulfillment.

“I didn’t feel the pressure,” she said. “The pressure the year before was my perception. Even though I had this feeling of tremendous pressure from newspapers to family to teachers … it’s just perception. How do you want to perceive it? I let my perception get out of control. I was in the mind of a 17-year old and had to get it in line.”

Thirty-five years later, Janet’s approach remains one of the blueprints to success at Foot Locker Nationals.