Who: Shalane Flanagan
High School: Marblehead (Mass.) High School, Class of 2000
HS Personal Bests:
800m: 2:17
Mile: 4:46
2-Mile: 10:24
5K XC: 17:08
Current Personal Bests:
5,000m: 14:44.80
10,000m: 30:22.22 (American record)
Marathon: 2:25:38
Shalane Flanagan has been consistently atop American women’s distance running for most of the past decade. She has represented the U.S. on three Olympic teams, and she won a bronze medal in the 10,000m at the 2008 Games in Beijing, setting the current American record, 30:22.22, in the process.
A few years later, she shifted her attention to marathons. In April of this year, she made her Boston Marathon debut, a special moment for her because she grew up going to it. The Boston course finishes about 20 miles from Flanagan’s hometown, Marblehead, a small fishing community north of the city. Flanagan was fourth at Boston in 2:27:08, which became unimportant when bombs exploded at the finish line a few hours later.
In New York City in early November, Flanagan sat down with Running Times to talk about her start in running in Marblehead and her days at Marblehead High School.
Most Memorable Race:
Flanagan played soccer as a freshman and didn’t start running cross country until her sophomore year. She excelled immediately, winning the state championship that season. By junior year, she had aspirations of qualifying for the Foot Locker Cross Country championship. But she never made it. The two qualifying attempts, held the Saturday after Thanksgiving each year at Van Cortlandt Park in New York City, remain her most memorable high school races.
Junior year, her whole family had a vicious stomach flu at Thanksgiving. “Like food poisoning,” Flanagan says. She went to the race anyway. “I was making it to Foot Locker until the final straightaway, and I basically collapsed and crawled in. I was so depleted. I hadn’t eaten in two days. We had chicken pot pie the night before. Was it food poisoning or the flu? I don’t know. I still won’t eat chicken pot pie to this day.”
Senior year, Flanagan was one of the favorites to win Foot Locker nationals—not just the qualifying race. But she went out too hard on qualifying day. “I had this thing about me,” she says. “I thought I was like the next Prefontaine or something. I had this ability to really push myself, even though I wasn’t fit enough. I thought, ‘I want to win this and I want to set a record.’ Instead of just thinking about qualifying. I went out way too fast. I think Erin Donohue and I went through the mile in 5:10 and we blew ourselves up. I was literally winning and collapsed and didn’t finish. Once I got out of the woods, I just collapsed and was done. So I never made it.”
The Art Scene:
At Marblehead High back in the late ’90s, the student body was more artistic than athletic. “People were into theater and doing art portfolios,” Flanagan says. “Athletics was not the biggest thing. Soccer, if anything was predominant. All my friends did soccer. When I went to cross country the next year, we maybe had five girls, just enough to score. I had success my sophomore year, I won state, and the next year, the team was huge.”
Flanagan emphasizes that runners from different states didn’t know each other or what training was like elsewhere. Her parents, both world-class runners before Flanagan was born, were more knowledgeable about distance running than her coach, who was a hurdler. “At the time, Dyestat had just come out,” Flanagan says. “Running was totally different. You didn’t realize what was going on around the country.” Even without much official guidance, Flanagan ran between 40 and 50 miles per week.
Memorable Workout:
During the week she did whatever the team was doing. On weekends, he father would sometimes set up 1K grass repeats for her. “Sometimes I would do workouts on my own because I wanted to get better outside of the team atmosphere,” she says.
Other activities:
At Flanagan’s high school, you could be an art major. “You could build an art portfolio to go to college for art,” she says. “I built an art portfolio, but never actually had the intention of using it. I wanted to pursue my running. It was all types of media, clay, drawings and etchings and all that stuff.”
Was she any good? “My parents think so, it’s framed around the house,” she says. “I couldn’t imagine going to art school, to be honest. There were people in my class who were amazing. I was good, but a real artist would have looked at it and been like, ‘That’s OK.’”
Flanagan also was a swimmer during the winter, and her lessons from the pool stick with her to this day. “There’s some grit to it. Swimming? It’s probably some of the hardest training I’ve ever done,” she says. “Psychologically it makes you really tough. There’s obviously a toughness element to running as well, being uncomfortable. But swimmers put in way more hours than we do running. There's a lot of good life lessons: I was getting up in the middle of the winter to go swim at 5 a.m., and you don’t want to get out of bed, you’re cold, you can’t even really socialize, you’re looking at the bottom of the pool. It takes a lot of dedication to be a swimmer, and I think that transferred over to how I approached running.”
Sarah Lorge Butler is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World since 2005. She is the author of two popular fitness books, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!
