Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge

I enjoyed the chance to train with a couple of national class middle-distance runners recently in the Sarasota, Florida area recently. 23-year-old Duke grad Shannon Rowbury, the NCAA indoor mile champion in 2007, and 24-year-old UNC grad Erin Donohue, who ran the fastest mile (4:27) and 1500 meters (4:05.55) by any American woman last year, are both Nike athletes coached by former George Mason University Sarasota resident John Cook.
Shannon and Erin will both compete in the 3,000 meters this weekend at the USA Indoor Track & Field Championships at Boston’s Reggie Lewis Center. They arrived in Sarasota about eleven days ago after a two-week stint at altitude in La Loma, Mexico, and depart today.
While they were here, I and some friends who live in the area (accomplished masters runners and physicians who double as the women’s de facto medical providers when they’re in town) did a number of workouts with them, some of them quite fast — for Shannon and Erin, anyway. I took the opportunity to interview both Erin and Shannon for the New York Road Runners’ Professional Racing Page, and will have a feature article in the June issue of Running Times about what it’s like to be a young, full-time runner in an Olympic year. Both women are extremely sharp and have plenty of opportunities outside of competitive athletics waiting for them someday — Shannon, in fact, is enrolled in a masters degree program at Duke even as she devotes her time to training and racing and its attendant travels demands — so talking about how they view being paid comparatively modest sums to take a crack at reaching the Olympics made for some interesting conversation.
Photos below.

Drills and general strength exercises are an essential element of a complete middle-distance runner’s program, and Coach Cook prescribes a formidable array of them. This is why I stick mainly to road races lasting over an hour.

That’s Coach Cook up there on the left with my friends Mike — one of the best 40-and-over marathoners in the state– and Alan.

Erin’s unusual for a miler in that she was also a conference champion javelin thrower in college. She’s lost ten pounds of muscle in the past year as her focus has switches to running and could still snap a ScienceBlogger between her thumbs, which offered a good excuse for dropping behind a little during a 33-minute “tempo run” in the rain on a six-mile stretch of Longboat Key.
The women’s 3,000 starts at 5:25 p.m. on Saturday, and if you tune in to ESPN2 on Sunday at 5 p.m., you can probably watch at least part of their race (in the tradition of track and field coverage in the U.S., this is a highlights-only show). Even if you don’t follow running, you at least now have a nominal reason to pick two favorites.