Fast Times Ahead

The best U.S. distance runner reveals the secrets to speedy 5Ks and marathons

By Gretchen Reynolds

For more from our Perfectly Fit section -- including the lowdown on how six top athletes built their most impressive parts -- check out Sports Illustrated Women's September issue, on newsstands now.

Deena Drossin   Andy Lyons/ALLSPORT

The past year has been phenomenal for women's distance running, with seemingly unassailable world records falling like so many pieces of ripe fruit. It has been an especially remarkable season for American runner Deena Drossin, 29. "She's the most successful long-distance presence we've had since Joan Benoit Samuelson," says Tom Surber, media relations manager for USA Track & Field.

Consider Drossin's recent run on the record books: Last November at the 2001 New York City Marathon, she set an American debut marathon record (2:26:58). She followed that up this spring with the fastest-ever American 15K road race (48:12). Weeks later she placed second at the 2002 World Cross-Country Championships, earning the first medal by a U.S. woman in more than a decade. She then lowered the American 10K track record to 30:50.32 (from 31:19.89), and most impressive of all, in April she set a new 5K road world record (14:54).

"It's been an incredible stretch of events, just glorious," Drossin says. "There's a momentum that has built from race to race and has given me so much emotional bounce." But her surge to the front of the pack is not a total surprise. "This is the culmination of years of hard work with many talented and dedicated people," she says, "especially my [running] coach, Joe Vigil, and my strength and conditioning coach, Zach Weatherford. My success is the result of a fitness formula that obviously works."

Drossin's passion to win developed over time. At age 11, growing up in middle-class Agoura Hills, Calif., she was a quiet, self-contained girl. "I was the anticompetitor," she says. "Content to play in my room or weed the garden." Her mother, worried that these weren't sufficiently social activities, enrolled Deena in a track club. "I'm not sure why," Drossin says. "My parents weren't runners. It could have been a swimming or tennis club and who knows what would have happened?"

Instead, Drossin discovered her passion. "I loved running," she says. "We would train in the Santa Monica hills. I loved the scenery." Drossin found that her most formidable opponent was her own ingrained insecurity. "One of my first races was against a girl who everyone thought would win," she says. "I hung with her until the final curve. And then I just let her go. I didn't feel, I guess, that I had the right to win."

By the time she had graduated from high school, she'd won five California state titles in cross-country and track (mile and two-mile events), but the self-doubt remained. "When I got to college [the University of Arkansas] I was supposed to do great things," she says -- and she did win seven Southeastern Conference titles. "But it wasn't a brilliant career." Unfortunately for her running, she'd discovered other interests. She toyed with the idea of abandoning the sport altogether and opening a bakery. Her college coach was aghast. "He told me that I could open a bakery anytime," Drossin recalls. "I could only race professionally now."

So in 1996 she agreed to call Vigil, a renowned track coach and physiologist in Alamosa, Colo. He agreed to add Drossin to his roster of elite athletes -- she was the only woman. This dynamic changed everything for the shy girl from Agoura Hills. "It wasn't until I started training with Coach Vigil that I discovered how competitive I could be," she says. Known for leading grueling, twice-a-day workouts (see sidebar), Vigil demanded that she hang in with the men, even during the infamous King of the Mountain run, a 12-mile hill grind, with the lead runner earning the eponymous crown. "I was never first," she says laughing. "But I'd gut it out the whole time. And I began to feel like I had the right to be up there, right at the front."

In one year with Vigil, Drossin had set personal bests in the 5K and 10K. In 2000 she won a spot on the U.S. Olympic team. An Achilles tendon injury hampered her there, and she didn't advance beyond the semifinals. But the groundwork for her breakthrough season was in place -- with one cornerstone still to come. "After the New York marathon," she says, "I took a month off to recuperate and decided that if I was going to be racing these longer distances, I was going to have to be stronger." The stringy Drossin (5'4" and 105 pounds) turned herself over to Weatherford, the strength and conditioning coordinator at the ARCO Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, Calif.

He developed a routine to increase the quickness and responsiveness of Drossin's muscles. She strength trains three times a week for up to two hours, alternating traditional weightlifting with supersets and plyometric drills. "It's one of the reasons I'm doing so well this year," she says.

"She is so dedicated," Weatherford says. "She deserves her success. And boy, is she strong now."

Today Drossin lives in Mammoth Lakes, Calif., with her fiancé, Andrew Kastor, 25, a personal trainer and massage therapist, and her chocolate Lab, Aspen, a frequent partner on her afternoon runs. Her next big race is the Chicago Marathon in October, where she confidently expects that the women's world record, already shattered twice in 2001, will be broken yet again. But not by her. "I want to set a personal best," she says. She's also aiming at the 17-year-old American record, set by Benoit Samuelson (2:21:21). And she is gracefully jettisoning any vestige of her old reticence. "I never go into races now feeling as if I don't belong in the lead," she says. "I do. And you know what? It's a really nice place to be."

For more from our Perfectly Fit section check out Sports Illustrated Women's September issue, on newsstands now.