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Don't Bet Against National Champion Susan Taylor By Doug Robinson, Deseret News
June 19, 2000
No sooner had Susan Taylor dashed across the finish line to claim her first national championship than the national press had one small question for her: Who are you? Good question. Taylor had just won the 1,500-meter run at the NCAA championships in Durham, N.C., and hardly anyone had even made her acquaintance. Introductions were definitely in order, so here goes. Who is she? A homegrown Utah girl who began her running career on a bet, won a couple of state titles, then suffered the world's quickest case of burnout (two years?!) and quit, only to sign on for a second tour of duty a year later. And here she is, two schools and five years later, a national champion who has qualified for next month's U.S. Olympic trials in Sacramento, Calif. "This running thing now has put a new twist on things for me," says Taylor. "I was planning on being done with running and moving on to a new phase in life because I'm done with college. But my coaches think I can take this thing further." Having finished her senior year at BYU, Taylor is eager to begin graduate studies in English, but there is this one nagging question: How good can she be at this running thing? "She is just starting to bloom," says BYU head coach Craig Poole. "She has a lot left. It wouldn't surprise me if she contends at the Olympic trials." If so, he'll be the only one. Other than her coaches, nobody saw Taylor coming at the NCAA meet. She hadn't won a single race during the outdoor track season until the conference championships. Whether she was running relays or individual events, she had this strange habit of finishing second. Somehow, Patrick Shane, who coaches BYU's middle-distance runners, wasn't fooled. After the race, teammates told Taylor that Shane, who likes to predict the team scores by scoring each event, had penciled her in for first place before the race even began. He just hadn't told Taylor. For much of the race, Taylor lagged behind, running near the back of the pack somewhere between seventh and ninth place. With 500 meters to go, she moved to the front and with 200 meters to go she took the lead. She was still pulling away at the finish, beating her nearest competition by a whopping three seconds. "It was weird running down the homestretch thinking, I'm winning this race," she says. "After I won, I was shocked. It was a neat feeling. It was like, wow, I finally did it. After all these years and the long road it's been." The long road began one day when Taylor was a sophomore in high school and her brother David, for reasons no one seems to remember, told her that a girl couldn't run under five minutes in the mile. Taylor, a regular jogger at the time, thought otherwise, and a bet was made: $100 if she could break five minutes. Taylor began training on her own. She went to the Skyline High track every day and ran a mile. A high school coach saw her and invited her to run cross country and track for the school. That spring she finished second in the mile at the state track and field championships. A year later she won state championships in the 800- and 1,600-meter runs and set a state record in the former. At the Great Southwest Classic, a multi-state all-star track meet in Phoenix, she was second in the 1,500-meter run with a time of 4:34.41 -- the equivalent of about a 4:52 mile (her brother never made good on the bet anyway, claiming he had given her only one year to break five minutes). Her potential seemed unlimited. She was only a junior with just two years of running behind her. She hadn't even participated in organized sports before taking up running, preferring instead to dance and play piano. "It didn't ever occur to me that I could do sports," she says. She was a natural. So what does she do after her junior year? She quits the team. The self-imposed pressure she placed on herself, the battle with pre-race nerves, wore her down, and running was dominating her life. "I wanted to do something else," she says. "That's all anyone would talk to me about. I had done pretty well. I thought where else could I go, even though of course I could have improved. I was tired of it." She spent her senior year on the sideline, but eventually she missed the sport. She began running on her own, then decided to return to competition. She enrolled at the University of Utah and joined the Utes' track team. "I loved to race, and I missed that kind of excitement," she explains. "Also, I thought if I'm going to run for fun -- and I don't like to run for fun -- I'd like to train for something. I thought, I want to go all the way with this. I haven't been burned out since then." After three years of so-so performances and little improvement at Utah, she transferred to BYU to train with Shane and his stable of national-class runners. Running the 1,500-meter anchor leg on BYU's distance medley relay team at last winter's NCAA indoor meet, she rallied the Cougars from ninth to second and ran a time that was two seconds faster than the winning time in the open 1,500. But no one outside of BYU was prepared for a national title run in which she covered the distance in 4:13.03, breaking a 13-year-old school record set by Olympian Julie Jenkins. "I guess I did appear out of nowhere," says Taylor, who will compete in next weekend's Pre Classic in Eugene, Ore., to tune up for the Olympic Trials. Along the way, Taylor has learned to control the nerves and pressure that once drove her from the sport. "I'm a lot different now," she says. "I still want to win, but it's more about seeing how good I can be. I still get nervous, but it's more of an excitement because I keep surprising myself."
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