Features
Running in the Family
Medal-winning U of G athlete runs in her mother's footsteps
BY ANDREW VOWLES
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| Gryphon cross-country head coach Dave Scott-Thomas has coached both Lindsay Carson, centre, and her mother, Leslie, to national awards. Photo by Martin Schwalbe |
By now, many members of the U of G community know who Lindsay Carson is. She's the cross-country runner and first-year biological engineering student whose gold-medal win at the national championships this fall earned her female Athlete of the Year and Rookie of the Year awards, not to mention helping the women's team to its third straight victory in Canadian Interuniversity Sports (CIS) competition.
But here's what you might not know: she's not the first runner in her family to collect CIS awards for the Gryphons. That honour belongs to her mom, Leslie, who snared a bronze medal six years ago as a 38-year-old varsity athlete who regularly outran most of her teammates and competitors, half her age or not.
At the same time that Lindsay, then 12, was hanging up her speed skates in Cambridge and considering a switch to full-time running, Leslie was hitting her stride as a middle-distance runner with the Gryphons.
A longtime dietitian and sports nutritionist, she had returned to school in 2000 to pursue an executive MBA in hospitality and tourism management. Guelph had been an obvious choice, although not just academically. She could have applied to another university to do a master's degree, but she wanted to train with Gryphon cross-country head coach Dave Scott-Thomas.
“I specifically went to Guelph to run,” says Leslie, who now works at St. Joseph's Health Centre in Guelph and lives with her family in Cambridge.
That sentiment was echoed in her daughter's own move to Guelph this year.
“This is the best running program in Canada,” says Lindsay, 18, who plans to pursue medical studies after her engineering degree.
She points to last month's meet in Victoria, where U of G became the first school ever to win back-to-back team gold medals in both women's and men's cross-country CIS championships. Besides the women's hat-trick finish this year, the men's team led by second-year student Kyle Boorsma racked up its sixth win in the last nine years.
Lindsay missed the men's finish in Victoria because she was being drug-tested after her own event, but she was happy to learn that the men's team had also captured gold.
“The double-double shows we have the best,” she says.
Scott-Thomas was named both women's and men's Coach of the Year for the second straight season. Tell him that both Carsons cite him as their primary reason for choosing U of G, and the 43-year-old smiles and says: “I still feel awkward when I hear things like that. I'm really proud that people would come and think that, but it's just about sharing dreams.”
Dreams — and goals. He notes that his team risked becoming a victim of its own success this year. After that first CIS gold-medal sweep last year, he saw six of his All-Canadian athletes — three men and three women — graduate in the spring. Keen to avoid the euphemistic “rebuilding year” label, Scott-Thomas started this fall by saying: “Let's not rebuild, let's keep going with new people.”
One of this year's new recruits was hardly new to him at all. “I've known Lindsay since before she was in high school,” he says.
Lindsay was in primary school and a competitive speed skater when Scott-Thomas met her father, John, a triathlete and massage therapist. But it was Leslie whom he first encountered as a coach when she enrolled at Guelph in 2000 as a late-blooming athlete.
In the early 1980s, she had studied nutrition at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. Back then, she wasn't a varsity athlete but had begun running marathons on her own.
After the family moved to Ontario, she joined the Tri-City Track Club in Kitchener and continued to compete in marathons. She took nine years away from running when Lindsay and her two brothers were born.
Leslie returned to the racing circuit in 1994 at age 30, finishing third in a Detroit marathon with a time of 2:45. “A highlight for me was returning to marathons as a mother of three. That was a huge jump for me.”
She has completed 21 marathons and won seven of them. One of those wins came in Japan during her first year at U of G.
What was her secret? “It comes down to science,” she says. “Pretty much every runner has a good competitive 10 years in his or her legs.”
Having found her own legs relatively late, Leslie says she was peaking by the time she arrived at Guelph. That meant she was winning races against competitors as young as her 18-year-old daughter (although she hastens to add that Lindsay has already surpassed her mother's personal best times).
During her two-year MBA program, Leslie divided her training time between the Gryphons and her own marathon preparation.
“I had reached my potential in terms of speed, while those young people were just getting started.” Tongue-in-cheek, she adds: “This gives these young people hope.”
In 2001, she won a CIS bronze track-and-field medal in the 3,000 metres. That year she also won a bronze for Canada in the Francophone Games in Ottawa, completing the marathon in 32 C heat in two hours and 50 minutes. She also picked up cross-country medals in Ontario University Athletics competition.
Leslie ran — and won — her last marathon in Buffalo three years ago. “I came home $5,000 richer, but I definitely paid the price,” she says.
Before that race, she had begun feeling pain in her left hip. Suspecting a soft-tissue injury, she had continued training. It turned out that she'd suffered a stress fracture and had developed osteoarthritis.
Last fall, she underwent a hip replacement. Now 43, she swims and walks but does no more running.
After finishing that MBA here, Leslie worked at a sports medicine clinic as a nutritionist. She joined St. Joseph's as food and nutrition services manager 2½ years ago.
That means she's able to keep tabs on Lindsay's progress — and nutrition — regularly. Although Lindsay lives in residence, mother and daughter usually meet weekly to compare notes.
Leslie has seen her daughter race twice this year but didn't go to the CIS championships.
“I still get very nervous when I watch, although I never got nervous when I ran,” says Leslie, who once competed as a Gryphon on the same five-kilometre course in Victoria where Lindsay ran last month.
Lindsay entered that championship CIS race determined to grab and hold the lead over the hilly course.
“I knew I was one of the strongest in the field,” says the five-foot-one athlete. “If I led, I would dictate the race. You need to run your own race.”
She finished 20 seconds ahead of her closest competitor.
Lindsay began running seriously in Grade 9. As a skater, she had always run for cross-training. Now she was a high-schooler with a goal. She ran in world championships in Kenya last year and in Japan the year before.
Heat exhaustion in Kenya nearly beat her. “I fainted across the finish line,” she says. Last year's nationals in Vancouver were similarly less than memorable, although she finished eighth.
How does she feel about losing races? She shrugs. “You just learn from them. Bad race experiences are just as important as good race experiences. You learn way better from your mistakes.”
Scott-Thomas knew Lindsay had turned into a runner, but he hadn't known about her plans until last year. “She sat in her kitchen and said: ‘I'm going to Guelph.'”
She hadn't even applied anywhere else, including any American schools. Scott-Thomas recalls advising her to consider other options, but her mind was already made up.
He's expecting great things from his new recruit, whom he describes as a strong team player and a “fearless” runner who's willing to risk losing.
“Lindsay's an international-class talent,” he says, pegging her as a strong contender for the 2008 cross-country world championships in Scotland and for the 2012 Olympics.
Competing for Tri-City this past weekend, she finished second in the national cross-country championships here at Guelph. For that race, runners broke in a new course in the Arboretum. Scott-Thomas helped design and build the course as part of a team made up of representatives from the campus and the local running community.