Way back in October, of 2013, I had the privilege of running with Olympian Carrie Tollefson. I had the idea of interviewing her while I ran, and I was hoping to get a version of the story I wrote published in a national running magazine. The Q and A format made it into "Run Minnesota" magazine, but the long form has sat idly on my hard drive.
Whether I took too long to submit and the story lost its timeliness, it was too long, or just not well-enough written, the long version of this article didn't make it to publication. So, I figured I'd share it here:
Interviewed on the Run: Carrie Tollefson
Looking
into the overcast fall morning in St. Paul, I wait in a Caribou Coffee to meet
Carrie Tollefson for a run. The smell of the coffee keeps me alert as I read
through my list of questions about Carrie's first marathon, the Twin Cities
Marathon. After I check my iPod to make sure it's ready to record our
conversation, I look out the wide-pane
windows, not wanting to make Carrie wait outside in the brisk fall weather.
An
Olympic Athlete and winner of the 2004 Olympic Trials 1500m, Carrie, a mother
of two, splits her time between Reebok Ambassadors, "C Tolle Run,"
training and racing, and caring for her family of four. Her newest, Everett,
was born sixteen weeks before her first marathon as a little brother to her daughter, Ruby,
age three.
“How far do you
have on your schedule today?” she asks after we shake hands and exchange
Minnesota pleasantries.
“I
can go as far or short as you want,” I say. I’m nervous about recording our
conversation on my iPod while asking questions from my laminated notecard, all
while trying to keep up with an Olympic athlete.
“Is
40 minutes OK?” she asks. “My glute’s been acting up a little bit.”
“That’s
OK with me. Since my knee started hurting, I’ve pretty much thrown my plan out
the window,” I say. I’ve been training for my next race, the St. Louis Marathon,
but a broken knee from the previous year has begun to flare up again.
We
run down Randolph Ave, and begin chatting about Carrie's first marathon. Carrie
is all smiles as she talks about her training for her first marathon. I hope I’m
not slowing her down at our seven minute-per-mile pace. “I ran consistently five days a
week, and my highest week was 63,” she says as we run from the Caribou toward
the Mississippi River.
Carrie’s
training consisted of about 45 miles a week, but she added in more quality
workouts than normal. “When I did 40 miles, it was a good 40 miles — not a lot of
junk,” she says. “Sometimes I only had time for five, so I’d make it a hard
five."
Her routine normally consists of more strength
training, but for her marathon training, she didn’t have time. “I didn’t do
much core work,” she says as we continue towards Minneapolis. She’s talking
easily, while my breathing is becoming a little more labored. “They recommend
you wait eight weeks after your pregnancy, and by that point I was halfway
through my marathon training.”
Carrie started the Twin Cities Marathon
with her friends, Angela Voight and Angela Williams. They soon met up with
Katie McGregor, a 2:31 marathoner, professional runner, and Carrie's best
friend. “I was feeling pretty good, and Angie Voight was saying, ‘I think
you’re going to surprise yourself,'" says Carrie. "At mile five I had
to stop and use the bathroom, which I never really have to do.”
At that point, McGregor waited for
Carrie while “the Angies” kept going. “I feel like I was overhydrated and I was
so uncomfortable,” says Carrie. Her bathroom break was unusual, because as a nursing
mother she’d been constantly dehydrated. Carrie had also been dealing with a
sore back after spending time driving to Grand Forks, North Dakota
and flying to New York City the week before the race.
“I started running 6:20 pace after I
went to the bathroom, and that felt better to me,” she says. I hadn't said much
as we crossed the Ford bridge from St. Paul to Minneapolis. Carrie's story
about her first marathon sounds like a lot of other first-timers' stories.
“Katie and I caught up to the Angies,”
Carrie says, “but got separated again at a water stop around mile seven.” She
then told Katie she was feeling better and ready to run a 6:30 pace.
Carrie had plenty of crowd support along
the way. Katie McGregor told me that people were cheering for Carrie all along
the race course.
As we ran toward Minnehaha Park, we
passed Cretin Ave, the first of a long section of uphill on the last six miles
of the Twin Cities Marathon course. “Want to run up Cretin?” I ask. She laughs.
“No,” she says, “I live on those hills; I run those dang hills every day. But during
the race I was thinking, when are these things going to end?” The last
few miles of the marathon were tough for Carrie. She slowed from a 6:35 pace
through 30k to a 6:52 pace through the next 5k.
Unfortunately,
Carrie didn’t quite hit her goal of a sub three hour marathon. “At mile 25,”
Carrie says, “Angie Williams went by me and ended up running a 2:59:28.”
Carrie’s other two friends also ran great times. Katie McGregor finished in
2:47 as a workout, while Angie Voight, a sports medicine doctor, ran a 3:08.
All four finished in the top 15 in their age groups.
“If I’d just tried to run the race I
meant to run, stayed with the Angies, then I would have maybe snuck under [three
hours],” she says. Carrie ended up running 3:02:47. “I just can’t complain about
this,” she says. “It was an amazing journey and a really good race, even though
I had to walk and wanted to go home rather than finish. I feel good that I can
go and speak about my marathon experience and relate to 99.9% of the people,
because how often does it go perfect?”
Carrie
knows how to keep up a good conversation while she runs. Normally when I run
with others, I talk their ears off, but now I’m able to ask questions, share a
little about my own running, but mainly listen.
For her part, Carrie acts just as interested in how my wife and I did at
our Twin Cities Marathon weekend races as I did about her race.
I’m
so engrossed with her story, I don’t even notice the beautiful fall colors
along the Mississippi. Normally I gape with awe at the views along Mississippi
River Blvd, but we’ve been running for almost twenty minutes when I finally notice
some of the scenery. “Last time I was
over here, there was almost no water in Minnehaha Falls,” I say, gesturing
toward the falls. After a couple days’ rain, water from the falls cascades into
the pool below.
“This is my favorite thing,” she says
while we run along the walkway overlooking the falls. “When I have the girls
come run with me, I make them stop and look.”
We wind our way back over the Ford Ave Bridge
into St. Paul. I finish off my questions by asking Carrie about the current
household record holder in the marathon, her husband Charlie. A former college
football wide receiver at the University of Hamline and three-time Iron Man, Charlie
has run a 3:01 marathon. At Twin Cities, in 2013 however, Carrie beat her husband
by almost an hour.
“Charlie’s a great dad and works really
hard. He doesn’t want to miss out on anything,” Carrie says. Charlie and Carrie
started their marathon training with Wednesday night date runs, and a long run
on the weekend. “Pretty soon date nights went away, and he was only doing the
Saturday long run,” she says. “He calls it the ‘lifetime taper plan.’”
As we come back toward Caribou
Coffee, Carrie tells me about her weekly web-show, “C Tolle Run.” Carrie’s
been doing the show since December of 2010. “I love sharing stories about
running and physical fitness, and just the joy that we can get out of life,”
she says. “There’s a lot of heartache and stress in life, but if you can’t
smile and try to enjoy 90% of it, it’s going to be a rough life to live.” Carrie also likes to get a little goofy on
camera. “I don’t care if people think I’m funny,” she says. “I’m a goofball in
real life and a goofball on camera.”
“C Tolle Run” enjoys a wide following,
and many runners recognize her from the show. She credits Julie Heaton, the
director, and Tim Bornholdt, the producer, for the show’s quality production.
“I’m trying to share with people that running is one of my favorite
extra-curricular activities, and I’m just lucky enough that I can do it at a
high level. Even if I didn’t, I could still get so many rewards from it. We’ve
enjoyed “C Tolle Run” and hope it continues.”
We finish our run, and after chatting a
little about some of my favorite runners, Geoffrey Mutai and Bernard Lagat,
Carrie heads back toward her home in St. Paul. She’s not sure when she’ll do
her next marathon — her work with “C Tolle Run” and Reebok Ambassadors keeps her
busy. She does pre-race coverage of many of the races she runs, and being on
her feet all day the day before a marathon makes racing a difficult
proposition.
I jog back to my car, blowing on my
hand, numb from the cool breeze and its locked position around my iPod. I stop
the recording, climb inside, and coax the engine of my old Honda to life in the
Minnesota morning. When I get home, I sit down to plan my next race, my next
marathon, and how to make my schedule work. If Carrie can get the training in,
maybe I have time too.
