Nobody was more surprised than Pepperdine senior Kari Baerg when she broke the finish line tape at the 1988 West Coast Athletic Conference Cross Country Championships.

Running in just her second season of collegiate cross country, Baerg became the first Pepperdine women’s cross country champion on Oct. 28, 1988 in Belmont, Calif. Despite traversing the rolling hills and challenging switchbacks of the Crystal Springs Cross Country Course in 18 minutes and 31 seconds, Baerg didn’t feel fatigued. She felt a twinge of relief — especially when her gamble of running the first mile in 5:15 paid off — but she mostly felt shocked. 

“I had no idea I could go that fast,” Baerg told The Graphic, Pepperdine’s student newspaper, afterward. “I just wanted [to win].”

Nobody knew it then, but Baerg had accomplished one of the rarest feats in Pepperdine athletics history.

Pepperdine has sent a full women’s team to the conference championships since the West Coast Conference (formerly the WCAC) started sponsoring women’s cross country in 1985. Hundreds of runners have donned a Pepperdine singlet since Baerg’s title-winning run in 1988. Only three have won a conference title.

The year after Baerg’s shocking title-winning run, her teammate Kim McElhinney repeated that feat, making Pepperdine the first WCC program with back-to-back individual champions. Ten years later, Rebecca Freebury ran the fifth-fastest time in Crystal Springs history with her winning time of 18 minutes and 18 seconds. And although the Waves’ current 25-year drought since Freebury’s win seems staggering, the women’s squad has fared much better than the men. Pepperdine has never won a men’s cross country title. 

Chances are, the WCC will never see champions like Baerg, McElhinney and Freebury again. None of them were on scholarship. Barely recruited out of high school, all three runners showed up on the first day of fall tryouts until they earned roster spots. Their coaches, Kevin Steele and Dick Kampmann, worked as physical education teachers at Pepperdine. Receiving little-to-no team gear, Pepperdine cross country runners bought their own shoes, ran just once a day and trained on their own in the spring because Pepperdine didn’t reinstate its women’s track team until 2006. 

Although collegiate distance running has changed exponentially over the years, stakes at the WCC Championships remain high. This weekend, 10 Pepperdine women’s cross country team will toe the line at the Burke Golf Course in Lodi, Calif. for their chance at chasing Baerg, McElhinney and Freebury into the record books.

Unlike other WCC sports that crown a champion after months of competition or several days of tournament play, cross country athletes get just one shot each year at becoming a conference champion. Women’s cross country runners spend 365 days preparing for one, 20-minute window of mental and physical pain — all to claim a conference title.

There is virtually no room for error. An entire year of preparation can be squandered on a poor start. So can unfavorable weather conditions, difficult terrain, or even the smallest physical ailments or mental lapses. Runners can lead for the entirety of the 6-kilometer race, only to get outkicked in the home stretch. With so many confounding variables, no two conference title races are alike — even when using the same race strategies. Yet those who become cross-country champions will never forget those title-winning runs.

“Winning the conference championship was a big accomplishment for me, and I’m pretty proud of it,” Baerg, now Maenhout, recalls. “I recognized that it was kind of a surprise. I wasn't expecting it. But it's something that I’ll always have.”

(Baerg’s last name is now Maenhout, and Freebury’s last name is now Kieft. For simplicity throughout, they will be referred to as Baerg and Freebury, respectively, except for direct quotes.)

Kari Baerg’s college running career almost never happened.

Arriving at Pepperdine in the fall of 1985, Baerg knew something felt amiss in fall tryouts. Shin splints, a common adversary for distance runners, bothered her immediately. Feeling mentally and physically burned out from four years of high school cross country and track, Baerg decided not to join the team. She joined a sorority, applied for the London study abroad program and acclimated herself to college life.

But the urge to compete remained. Baerg considered joining Pepperdine’s swim team — she grew up in a family of swimmers — but fortunately for the cross country program, she never tried out. Baerg’s physical education instructor was Kevin Steele, a local marathon runner, entrepreneur and personal trainer who happened to be Pepperdine’s cross country coach. Steele made cross country running sound fun. The team atmosphere was laid-back, casual and close-knit. Baerg mulled it over.

Like most Pepperdine students, Baerg studied abroad for her entire sophomore year. After returning from London in 1987, Baerg spent her summer at home in Gig Harbor, Wash., where she focused on two things: her full-time internship at Russell Investments and running every day to get back into shape.

This time, Baerg made the team.

“It took a while to get back into shape,” Baerg recalls. “If you lose [endurance], it takes a long time to get back to being in top form. In my junior year, I was just trying to get back into racing form. And then by the senior year, I was there.”

In Baerg’s first cross country season in three years, she was consistently a top-three runner for the Waves, peaking with an 11th-place finish at the 1987 West Coast Athletic Conference Championships. On an overcast morning in Belmont, Calif., Baerg navigated the 5-kilometer course at Crystal Springs in 19 minutes and 55 seconds — just 12 seconds shy of earning a spot on the all-conference team. Baerg was instrumental in the Waves’ third-place finish, which was a then-program best.

With higher expectations, Baerg entered her senior year as the Waves’ second-fastest runner behind Kim Hughes, Pepperdine’s first-ever all-conference runner. But in the first race of her senior season, Baerg led the Waves with a fifth-place finish at the Chapman Invitational — her first of five top-10 finishes that year.

Baerg returned to Crystal Springs for the final time on Oct. 29, 1988. Under overcast skies and with her mother watching in the crowd, Baerg took the lead early and didn’t let up. Racing in front of her mother, who flew down from Washington to watch Baerg race for the first time in college, Baerg bolted towards the front early, ran a 5:15 opening mile and hung on for dear life to win the race in 18 minutes and 31 seconds  — a comfortable 21-second cushion ahead of the chase pack.

The run was surreal to Baerg, who was in a state of disbelief throughout the entire race. For starters, her 5:15 mile was way too fast, and the course seemed shorter. Also, nobody wanted to challenge her. To top it all off, she didn’t feel like she was running that fast.

“I remember being in the front and it didn't feel that hard,” Baerg remembers. “I thought the course might have been measured wrong because the mile splits didn't seem right. The crowd was yelling out splits at the first mile and I thought, ‘Okay, this is really fast.’” 

Although Baerg’s hunch was correct — for unknown reasons, the course was 2.98 miles long instead of the usual 3.1 miles — a win was a win. Baerg became the first Wave in program history to win a WCAC trophy and the Waves took second behind the Portland Pilots, a burgeoning distance running powerhouse.

Baerg graduated from Pepperdine just in time to avoid a tumultuous year for the cross country program. Steele stopped attending practices during the week due to work obligations, leaving the runners to fend for themselves. With only partial funding and no full-time coach, the Waves regressed in 1989 before Kim McElhinney salvaged the season at Crystal Springs.

Improving on her eighth-place finish as a freshman, McElhinney helped Pepperdine win back-to-back individual titles at Crystal Springs. The sophomore fended off San Diego’s Sue Chen —  a diminutive, 37-year-old former lieutenant commander who was granted athletic eligibility after leaving the Navy — down the homestretch, winning the title in 18:49. Chen crossed the line three seconds later for her second-straight runner-up finish.

At the end of the season, Steele officially resigned after four years to pursue private business ventures. Thankfully for Pepperdine Director of Athletics Wayne Wright, he didn’t need to look far to find a replacement. On Nov. 13, 1989, Wright named Pepperdine physical education professor Dick Kampmann as the next full-time head coach. Although Kampmann volunteered as a part-time coach late in the 1989 season, his hiring officially kickstarted the program’s most successful seasons of the modern era.

If anyone could turn Pepperdine cross country into a contender, it was Kampmann. A Southern California running legend who led Santa Monica’s University High School to unparalleled success in his 26-year tenure, Kampmann had a knack for developing inexperienced high school runners into all-conference stars. As a coach, he inspired hundreds of athletes, seldom showed favoritism, was unwaveringly optimistic and brought the best out of his athletes without grueling, high-mileage workout plans.  

Kampmann did it all. The prep football and track star served in the Navy after graduating high school, competed for UC Santa Barbara after leaving the service in 1946, and was immediately successful in his first coaching job at Dorsey High School in Los Angeles. Most of his athletes were successful after running — chief among them being Mike Love, the lead singer of The Beach Boys who says Kampmann inspired the song, “Be True to Your School.”

The road ahead wasn’t easy. Over the next six years, Kampmann’s cross country teams toiled in the WCC’s middle class, searching for a breakthrough. Although the women’s team had at least one top-15 finisher in six consecutive years, no individual placed better than seventh at the conference race. Shannon Rogers placed eighth and led the Waves to a runner-up finish in 1993, yet that accomplishment was overshadowed by Portland, which was in year three of a dominant decade that included nine WCC team championships and six individual titles. 

Two years later, Pepperdine fell back to earth with its second-straight sixth-place finish in 1995. The Pilots won their sixth WCC title, and programs like Gonzaga and Saint Mary’s took Pepperdine’s place as the league’s new, upstart programs. Needing to replace nine graduating seniors, 1996 looked like another rebuilding year.

Then Kampmann picked up the phone.

Over the next few minutes, Kampmann listened as an incoming freshman named Rebecca Freebury introduced herself, rattled off her high school times and asked about upcoming tryouts in one breakneck burst. Even he couldn't catch up with her in conversation.

“Coach Kampmann said I was a whirlwind,” Freebury recalls. “I was like, ‘Hey coach, I ran cross country in high school. Here are my times. I would love to run with you, but I'm going to Europe for the summer, so I'll see you in August. Okay?’”

Freebury ran only one season of high school cross country, but that didn’t deter her from asking Kampmann if she could join the Pepperdine cross country team. Few things in life deterred her.

A standout sprinter at Peninsula High School in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, Freebury never ran track events longer than 400 meters during her first three years of high school. But every offseason, Freebury’s distance-running friends from the track team tried convincing her to try out for the cross country team. Each time, Freebury turned down their offers. She didn’t think she could run that far.

Finally, Freebury caved. Although a hip injury hampered her senior cross country season, she immediately fell in love with the sport. Once track season arrived in the spring, Freebury’s sprinting events lost their luster. She wanted to keep running cross country in college — all she needed was a chance.

“I tell my kids and my students all the time that you just never know how the choices you make impact the direction of your life,” Freebury said. “I'd only been a distance runner for a year, and I just showed up on day one of practice.”

Arriving at her first collegiate cross country practice, Freebury wasn’t the bubbly, energetic leader she was in high school. She was unnaturally quiet, shy and uncertain of herself. When some of her teammates called her Becky — one of her pet peeves — she was too afraid to correct them. For the first time in her athletic life, she wasn’t sure she belonged. The night before her first practice, Freebury agonized over choosing the right outfit to wear because she didn’t want to stand out. To her embarrassment, an older runner on the men’s team asked Becky if she got a new racing uniform before the rest of the team.

Eventually, Freebury came out of her shell thanks to Kelly Taylor, a senior who took the younger runners under her wing and encouraged them often in her warm, Carolina drawl. By the time her sophomore year rolled around, Freebury fell in love with the collegiate cross country experience. 

It didn’t take long for Freebury to become Pepperdine’s leader. In the 1997 season-opener, she led the Waves in San Diego, kicking off a streak of 24 consecutive races as Pepperdine’s top finisher — an unprecedented feat. Two weeks later at a dual meet against LMU, Freebury won her first-ever collegiate cross country race, finishing nearly a minute ahead of her teammates in 19 minutes and 26 seconds.

Throughout her ascent, Freebury never questioned why Pepperdine cross country offered zero scholarships, didn’t have a women’s track team, or that she and her teammates had to buy running shoes with their own money every year. The opportunity to run was good enough.

“I was so thankful that I got to do this,” Freebury said. “I would stand on Pepperdine's track and look at the view and be like, ‘Man, I'm so lucky. I feel so, so blessed.’ It was an honor.”

Despite Freebury’s resurgence, the Waves struggled in 1997 and placed dead last at WCCs. Although Freebury improved significantly by placing 25th, the Waves faced the tall task of replacing four graduating seniors in 1998. Meanwhile, the rest of the conference was going through a youth movement: Seven of the top 10 runners at WCCs were underclassmen, and teams like Portland and San Diego looked poised to continue their reign atop the WCC.

In 1997, Freebury and the Waves started noticing differences between them and the rest of the WCC. For starters, teams that wore buns intimidated them. Unlike the Waves, who showed up to races in loose, free-flowing blue shorts and oversized singlets, women’s teams like Portland wore tight, spandex buns. All the fast teams wore buns.

A year later at the 1998 WCC Championships, Freebury took out the first mile with the buns. As the runners reached the bottom of Crystal Springs’ opening descent, Freebury knew she was running faster than usual, but she ignored early signs of fatigue and stuck with the Portland pack. When Freebury and the buns passed the 1-mile marker, a voice cut through the sound of her heavy breathing and steady, pounding footsteps.

“5:07! 5:08! 5:09!"

Freebury’s aggressive start did not pay off. 

Thirteen minutes later, an exhausted Freebury crested the final hill and mustered every ounce of energy she could into the final 400 meters. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Saint Mary’s senior Molly Lawrence fly out of nowhere and surge ahead. Freebury had nothing left in the tank. The two runners finished one second apart.

The team struggled too. Despite favorable weather conditions on an unseasonably warm day, Pepperdine’s overall time was three minutes slower than the 1997 squad, and only two Waves runners placed in the top 35 to give the team a seventh-place finish. Portland won its fourth consecutive title with an astonishingly low team score of 20 points — a far cry from Pepperdine’s 180-point total. Ever the optimist, even Kampmann was uncharacteristically blunt in post-race notes.

“We can run better/faster than this,” He wrote in blocky print. “AND WE WILL.”

Later, Freebury and the Waves sulked around a table at the Crystal Springs Golf Course clubhouse for the award ceremony as they watched Lawrence and the rest of the top-10 finishers accept all-conference plaques. One by one, the buns joined her onstage. By the time LMU junior Malinalli Martinez — Freebury’s biggest rival — took the stage, the Waves couldn’t hide their disappointment.

Stewing in silence, Freebury replayed the final 400 meters over and over in her mind, trying to figure out what went wrong. Why did she let the buns trick her into starting so quickly? Would she have enough energy to outkick Lawrence if she had a more conservative start? Why did the competition seem so difficult even though she improved so much?

“‘Okay, that's it,’” Freebury remembers saying to herself. “‘A year from now, I'm not just going to get a plaque. I'm going to win the West Coast Conference Championships.’”

Winning a cross country title doesn’t happen overnight.

For the next 364 days, Freebury did everything she could to keep that promise to herself. While other WCC teams trained for track, Freebury spent her spring semester trying to get her teammates to run with her during the offseason, whether it was running before class in the mornings or signing up for local road races. 

When she returned to campus in August 1999, she skipped social events because she didn’t want to stay up too late. She monitored her diet and made an effort to sleep more — even if she felt well-rested. Finally, in an uncommon move at the time, Freebury ran twice a day during her senior year.

Yet she didn’t leave her teammates behind to chase her goals. Remembering her freshman year as a self-conscious, shy newcomer, Freebury started a secret gift exchange at the beginning of the season to boost team morale. Every week, Freebury and her teammates would write anonymous letters of encouragement and buy inexpensive gifts for each other before the runners revealed themselves at the end of the season. When Pepperdine toed the line on race days, Freebury wanted the Waves to be more relaxed, more joyful, and have more fun than anyone else.

“Rebecca makes everything a lot more fun,” Teammate Joanie Baca told The Graphic in September. “She has a ton of energy. She’s literally bouncing off people. She’s definitely a motivator, and she shows that by how hard she works and by how she keeps this team together. I’ve never met anyone like her.”

Freebury’s infectious joy and magnetic personality made her the team’s best recruiter. When she heard that junior cheerleader Laura Crow missed working out and being on a close-knit team, Freebury suggested showing up to practice and giving cross country a shot. Despite her inexperience, Crow became a top-seven runner for Pepperdine in 1998 and 1999. Heading into the 1999 season, Freebury also convinced freshman Michelle Basanda to join the team, who was Pepperdine’s fourth-place finisher at WCCs that year.

“When I saw Michelle a couple of years ago, the first thing she said to me was ‘You changed my life. You convinced me to run cross country and it was the best decision I've made,’” Freebury said. “Sometimes it doesn’t occur to you at the time that things you say to people can change the trajectory of their lives.”

Donning their free-flowing blue shorts, loose white singlets, and new running shoes purchased by the athletic department, Freebury and the Waves kicked off the 1999 season with little fanfare at the Cal State Fullerton Invitational. Even though Freebury picked up right where she left off in 1998, the rest of the team spent September trying to find its footing.

Once the calendar flipped to October, Freebury found another gear.

A win at the Biola Invitational on Oct. 2 was the first of three consecutive victories. She led the team in a dual race against in-conference rival San Diego, and then against some of the toughest competition the team had seen that season, Freebury won the Cal Poly Invitational with a new personal-best time of 18:17. And although Freebury’s win streak came to an end at the Titan Invitational, her runner-up time of 17:59.3 is the fifth-fastest 5K in Pepperdine history.

Regular-season success wasn’t enough for the Pepperdine women’s cross country team. One final trip to Crystal Springs for the WCC Championships loomed for Freebury and her fellow seniors as they tried to avenge the disappointment of 1998. Picked seventh out of eight teams in the preseason WCC poll, Pepperdine was not expected to turn many heads at the WCC Championships. That didn’t faze them.

“We were such a close group, and I think we knew we were all in this together,” Freebury said. “We were running for each other. And we had that knowledge of the huge leaps and bounds we made. For seniors like me, Laura Crow and Jessica Foley, we felt that this was the end of the time when people watch you do your sport.”

Situated on a hill overlooking the Upper Crystal Springs Reservoir, the cross country course at Crystal Springs is as spectator-friendly as they come. To runners, the Crystal Springs course is anything but friendly.

The course starts with a half-mile descent. Runners funnel quickly along the wide starting line down a narrow dirt path for the opening quarter mile before reaching a hairpin turn at the westernmost end of the park. From there, the trail continues descending into a deep decline until runners reach the low point of the course.

However, the downhill first mile belies how challenging the course actually is. About half a mile into the course, runners double back up the opening descent and run up the largest, longest hill in the park. Despite losing almost 150 feet in elevation in the first 0.68 miles, runners make up that elevation gain in just a quarter-mile stretch before reaching the 1-mile mark. By that point, the adrenalin from the start has worn off. The downhill start coaxes novice runners into pushing the pace too early, only to burn out in the hilly second mile.

Freebury was not a novice runner in 1999. Unlike the aggressive start she took as a junior, Freebury showed some restraint in the opening downhill. She positioned herself behind Portland’s front pack, maintained a steady pace and watched as Malinalli Martinez and other top runners tried staying with the Pilots.

“When I saw her run up with the Portland girls that first mile, part of me laughed,” Freebury said. But the other part of me was like, ‘Come back. You don't want to do it. I made that mistake last year.’”

Keeping the front pack in sight, Freebury began the gradual uphill climb. She was exactly where she wanted to be. Trying to stay mentally engaged throughout the race, Freebury counted each runner she passed, only to find she was safely in the hunt for an all-conference plaque. But she wanted more.

Once Freebury and the runners crested the hill, a half-mile back stretch of rolling hills awaited as the trail narrowed. One by one, Freebury gradually picked off runners as she moved her way towards the front. At the easternmost point of the course, Freebury rounded a sharp right turn and entered a series of switchbacks as the trail twisted back into the valley.

But what comes down must go up. Just before the 2-mile mark, Freebury and the pack reached Cardiac Hill — a second steep incline with narrow turns that block spectators from watching runners grimace and wince their way uphill. It’s the only hidden part of the course.

By this point in the race, Freebury caught up with Martinez.

“Come on, let’s go,” Freebury said in between breaths. The two rivals ran stride-for-stride up Cardiac Hill, but once Freebury crested the hill she noticed Martinez lag. Starting with the buns wound up becoming a costly mistake for Martinez. Freebury kept counting.

Shortly after the 2-mile mark, Freebury passed one final Portland runner. An empty trail was the only thing ahead of her.

To this day, Freebury considers the 1999 WCC Championship as her final college race.

When she reflects on the lasting memory of her cross country career, she remembers sitting with her teammates during the post-race banquet, hearing the emcee announce the team scores one by one and erupting with elation when they heard Pepperdine placed second. Further celebration ensued at the Waves’ table when Kampmann became Pepperdine’s first — and currently only — WCC Cross Country Coach of the Year. Dressed in their Sunday bests, Freebury and her teammates spent the rest of the afternoon celebrating together on the clubhouse patio, taking group photos holding yellow roses that the men’s team gave them, riding out the last moments of post-race euphoria before they packed up the bus and drove home to Malibu. It would have been a storybook ending.

However, the women’s team was rewarded with a trip to Portland, Oregon for the NCAA Region 8 Championships two weeks later. This was fairly uncharted territory for Pepperdine, which sent a women’s team to regionals only twice before. On a rare sunny day in Portland, an ailing, exhausted Pepperdine squad mustered what little energy it had left to place 22nd out of 28 teams.

“Everything hinged on [WCCs],” Freebury said. “I remember not being happy with regionals. I was sick, and a lot of us weren't really expecting to go. The regional race was never even on my radar. I think it wasn’t as easy of a race because our tapering was different.”

Without track season to train for, Freebury finished her degree and earned her teaching credential. Had Freebury enrolled at Pepperdine four years later, she would have gotten at least one chance to don the white singlet, step onto the oval on a warm spring afternoon and race with the smell of fresh spring grass and rubberized track surface lingering in the air. Anyone who follows distance running knows cross country and track have a symbiotic relationship. Distance runners need to balance cross country’s steady, base mileage with the high-intensity speedwork of track. Freebury could’ve been much faster if she had done both. Instead, she was ahead of her time.

Nevertheless, Freebury graduated as the first cross country runner to earn Pepperdine’s Scholar-Athlete of the Year award — one final accomplishment in the most successful career the women’s cross country program has ever seen. Now, Freebury remains grateful for Pepperdine and her experience, just like she was 25 years ago.

“We were grateful for what we had,” Freebury recalls. “I felt very lucky to be a part of the team and to be able to take my sport to the collegiate level. But it's very different now. If you think about it, women's running was only about 20 years old when I started. We've come a long way.”

“I have a daughter now who runs cross country, and I feel like I was at the tail end of the pioneering era that made distance running a women’s sport,” Freebury added. “And I'm so proud that my daughter can run.”

She didn’t know it at the time, but attending Pepperdine and running cross country became the springboard for the rest of her life. Because of Pepperdine, Freebury got her teaching credential, found a job immediately after graduation and continues to teach in her hometown of Ranco Palos Verdes, Calif. Her serendipitous decision to run cross country was a bonus, yet her four years on the team sparked an infectious enthusiasm for distance running that she still shares with her family, her coworkers and her neighbors.

Distance running eventually prepared her for life’s toughest challenges.

Nearly six years ago, Freebury was diagnosed with breast cancer. Chemotherapy took away her dirty blonde hair, but she didn’t want to give up running. Fatigue from the treatments couldn’t deter her. Quizzical looks from her neighbors on her morning runs didn’t bother her. Using the mental and physical strength she developed from cross country, Freebury ran regularly throughout her cancer treatment. Her path to remission was marked by morning runs and counting down chemo treatments — just like she used to count runners she passed and minutes remaining in difficult workouts.

“If you run, you know what it's like to have that mental and physical strength,” Freebury said. “When I was running, I’d tell myself, ‘I've only got two minutes left, I can do anything for two minutes.’ And I would use that same philosophy. If I only have three chemos left, that's nothing. I can do three. A lot of the same tricks you would play to push you through and give you that strength can be used in other areas of life.”

After successful rounds of chemotherapy, Freebury is in remission. She still runs regularly and her eldest daughter, Charlotte, is in her junior season of high school cross country.

”I tell my daughter to just love [running],” Freebury said. “Have fun. Smile when I cheer for you. Smile because you get to do this, and you get to have people cheering for you and supporting you. You're so lucky to get that experience and still be on a team.”

Freebury only had two minutes left on the Crystal Springs course.

Rounding the turn on the course’s last ascent, the trail gradually widened, welcoming Freebury to the final stage of the race. As she powered closer to the finish line, spectators clumped together behind a string of plastic flags as they watched the race unfold.

She always had a devastating finishing kick. No matter how the race went, she knew she could dig deeper within herself and make up a lot of ground with her footspeed in the last half mile. The culmination of Peninsula High School track practices, Coach Kampmann’s structured, challenging workout plans and Freebury’s morning runs in solitude throughout Malibu’s winding canyons prepared her for this final push. 

Recognizing a small hill that signaled the final 400 meters, Freebury drove uphill with a few short strides and saw the finish line underneath the wooden sign at the park’s entrance. She drove her arms and focused on staying upright on her toes, relying on her sprinting background to find another gear as the crowd beckoned her onward.

The finish line bobbed up and down with each step. Her vision blurred. Wind rushed past her ears as she accelerated and drowned out the cheers as she popped her arms back, drove her toes into the dirt and hurtled towards the finish line with each powerful stride. Even though she knew she was all alone for the last mile of the race, Freebury didn’t leave anything to chance because she was unwilling to let anything come between her and the WCC title she had been chasing for years.

She didn’t coast and she didn’t relent. Instead, her toes hit the dirt one final time and she flew across the finish line. Her heels never touched the ground.