Today five athletes earned places on the US Olympic Marathon team. There were many great stories on race day, and I’d like to highlight one.
You might think I’m going to talk about the women’s race winner Fiona O’Keefe, who obliterated the Trials record, a local woman that we raced against when she was a superstar high school runner at Davis Senior High School (I have a clear memory of Sarah Feng turning to me and saying, “Did you see her hair??!?!?”). Your next guess might be Des Linden, who ran a trademark smart race; at one point, she was in 33rd place, but Des hung in there and moved up to a gritty 11th place finish.
Both are good stories. But what about the third-place woman, Dakotah Lindwurm? Do you know anything about her before today? I’ll admit, I had never heard of her.
While Fiona was winning California state meet championships and earning a scholarship to Stanford, Dakotah had an unremarkable high school running career. Dakotah’s high school track PRs were 2:44 for the 800m, 5:35 for the 16o0m, and 11:56 for the 3200m. These are nice times, but the 2019 Monta Vista track team boasted eight girls who had times that were under one or more of Dakotah’s marks. Dakotah’s 5km high school PR was 22:08; on Monta Vista’s 2018 cross-country team, that would have earned her a spot on our junior varsity team, as nine Matadors went under 21 and the 13th girl that year ran a 22:04. Dakotah was not a D-1 college runner; she walked on and earned her spot on a D-2 team. There are D-3 programs that would not have allowed her to join with her high school marks.
Yet Dakota Lindwurm is heading to Paris on the USA Olympic team.
I wonder how many athletes with more talent, but less grit, quit running along the way. How many athletes had as much or more talent than Dakotah, but did not have her passion and persistance.
I think, and I feel that Angela Duckworth would support me, that this story demonstrates grit and growth. Grit is passion and perseverance for long-term goals. What Angela has found is that grit is more important than talent in predicting long-term success. Talent can predict the rate of improvement, but grit is more predictive of the ultimate achievement. I don’t know all of Dakotah’s story, but my guess is that we would find that she outworked and outlasted many athletes who had more natural talent and measurables. I hope that all of you reading this blog post to heart and think, “If I am really passionate about something, and I hang in there and work hard, who knows what I might accomplish?” Don’t give up if you don’t have amazing running times in your freshman, sophomore, or junior year. Don’t give up if you struggle with math or Spanish, or your history essays. Don’t give up if you want to be an author and your first submissions are rejected. If you are passionate and work hard and hang in there, who knows what might happen? Dakotah ended up on the Olympic Team.
I watched her run with a smile on her face and watched her come back from 6th place at the 20-mile point to finish in third and take a spot on the team, and I wanted all of my kids to realize that this could be them. We all can be Dakotah if we don’t give up on our passions.
(Check out Dakotah’s TFRRS report. As a freshman in 2013, she ran a 26:42 on the 6km Roy Griak course. In 2017, she ran a 23:19 and finished a couple hundred spots further up. That’s four years of work, not luck!)
(One other thing I got a kick out of watching was seeing training partners Conner Mantz and Clayton Young take the two automatic qualifying spots; they ran together, encouraging each other the entire way. Having friends and training partners matters. Relationships matter. These two helped each other all the way. Imagine how many thousands of miles they ran together in the last year.)
Training partners running in synch!
