I don't like to start off really fast," Rachel Johnson says, meaning the phrase as literally as possible. She's relaxing on a sofa at her home in Plano, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. It's one week after her second-place finish at the Foot Locker Cross Country Championships, and two weeks after her first-place finish at Nike Cross Nationals. No girl has pulled off an equal triumph in the seven-year dual history of the races, an achievement that places Johnson, a senior, among the top high school runners in the country.
"Not like really slow," she continues, "but a little slower and work my way up." Johnson is describing the way she attacks races, but the words, breezy and direct and enlivened by a face that's often smiling, also describe why her path to these achievements is so unusual.
It's funny with high school running: The majority of elite girls do start off really fast. They're packs of running Mozarts, as common as they are prodigious. They climb just below the summit of the mountain as freshmen or sophomores and then celebrate incremental gains the rest of the way up. Johnson wasn't like them. She ran a 23:31 5K as a freshman. At the Texas state meet as a sophomore, she finished 31st, running an 11:47 2-mile. Her time had improved by only 3 seconds in a year. The peak loomed too high. She wanted to quit.
Years earlier, at her elementary school, P.E. teacher Tim Eshleman hosted an activity called "Walk, Jog, Run" for his class, releasing his students on a 400m path that looped around soccer and baseball fields. Laps were counted with popsicle sticks. One afternoon, Johnson returned from school with 18 of them. Just over 4 miles. As a fifth grader.
Yet here, on a gloomy December day in 2008, running had become a chore. The school program lacked the discipline and organization necessary for a top runner, and Johnson didn't know how to improve on her own. "I don't know if I want to do track," she told her mother. "I don't know if I want to run for Plano or do it in college." Her parents were concerned. They didn't want to push her into doing something she no longer cared for, but they didn't want her to waste a gift.
By chance, they learned of a running team called the Metroplex Striders, and Johnson worked out with them for the first time the next month. She found herself running with some of the best runners in the state. The group's coach, Terry Jessup, told them to do a 4-mile tempo run that day. He would introduce a shocked Johnson to a previously foreign training plan involving hills, long runs and fartleks. Johnson didn't even own a watch. "I thought you would just go out and run like 5 or 6 miles and you're good," she says.
She craved the organization and thrived. Chart her times, and they look like fall 2008 real estate values: precipitous drops everywhere--a 5K of 19:58 as a sophomore to 17:10 as a junior, a 3200m of 11:50 as a freshman to 10:44 as a sophomore to 10:31 as a junior. She placed second at the state track meet for the 1600m in 2009, finished second at state for cross country in the fall of 2009, qualified for Nike and Foot Locker, won state track in the 3200 and 1600 as a junior in 2010 and captured first place by 13 seconds for state cross country last fall. It was a blur. But it wasn't over. The national meets awaited.
Gutting it out through thick mud, she won Nike. At Foot Locker, Johnson stayed in about 20th place for the first half of the race. By the time she trekked up and down Balboa Park's big hill a final time, she had moved up to second.
"I got to the lowest point when I didn't really want to do it anymore and was really tired of it," she says. "Now I can look back at that and say I was at a really low point and have just been able to do much more than I ever thought that I could."
Johnson has one track season left in her high school career before she graduates and runs at Baylor. She may run in a few national track meets this summer or she may just train before starting her college career. "I'll see how I feel," she says.
That's right. Johnson will take it slow, not like really slow, but with the calm and poise of someone who knows how to work to the front.
