MORGANTOWN — The sky was painted battleship gray, a reminder that the day’s rain was simply off on recess but would surely return.
The facing blue surface of the West Virginia University track was still wet from the morning downpour as the old coach and the young runner were going through their paces. The NCAA outdoor championships were less than a week away, and Chelsea Carrier was trying to get herself ready.
The weather wasn’t cooperating, and neither was her body. Her right thigh was still bright red from the heat she had applied to the quadriceps strain that had cut into her training routine and there was, of course, the bone problem in her left foot that kept her out of the heptathlon and limited her strictly to the 100-meter hurdles.
She got into the starting blocks, four hurdles standing in front of her, and the old coach backed away, the digital stopwatch settling so naturally into his hand.
“Can you grit your teeth?” Martin Pushkin, the retired WVU track coach who has returned this year to voluntarily work with the sprinters and hurdlers, asks.
“My family, we bit our lower lip,” Chelsea Carrier, the sophomore from Buckhannon, answers.
“Well, this is an event where you can get mad,” Pushkin continues. “Those hurdles are barriers. They are not your friend.”
Carrier sets herself. The starter’s gun breaks through the morning silence, and she is off and running.
“Dig into the track,” shouts Pushkin. “Dig! Dig!”
Her spikes grab hold. She reaches the first hurdle in 2.4 seconds and effortlessly takes it. She goes over the second and the third and the fourth.
“Good, good,” says Pushkin. “Dig. ... I think that’s a good word for you.”
You can tell Carrier “digs” it. She grins.
Pushkin smiles.
Pushkin retired as West Virginia’s track coach seven years ago. His men’s team had been abolished and, after 40 or so years of coaching, it was time.
But recently he realized you can only garden so much and that raising flowers and vegetables isn’t quite as satisfying as watching athletes bloom. He offered to help head coach Sean Cleary with the hurdlers and sprinters.
“I don’t have to travel, and I work in the afternoons,” Pushkin said.
As a coach of hurdlers and sprinters there are few better and when he and Carrier crossed paths it was a perfect fit.
Chelsea Carrier had been born in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and lived in Boca Raton, Fla., until she was …
“It was two days before my eighth birthday,” she said.
That’s when her father and mother, both of whom had gone to West Virginian Wesleyan, decided to return to West Virginia.
Most people go from West Virginia to Florida, not the other way around.
Carrier comes by her speed naturally. Her father, Rick, was a football player at Wesleyan and just recently saw his school 200 record broken. She recalls as a kid how she and her brother, who is a year and a half her senior, would race at school.
“He was the fastest boy in the school, and I’d beat him sometimes,” she said.
She parlayed that natural speed into 11 state championships, the kind of thing that can bend your mind, but it just came naturally to her, and she didn’t think that much of it.
Before she took up track she was a gymnast … and a good one.
“Mary Lou Retton was my idol,” she said. “We had the same coach, and at Level 7 I beat her all-around score,” Carrier said.
But track beckoned and she came to West Virginia to run, raw talent that needed to be molded.
“I did it with speed before, but now it’s all technique,” she said.
Enter Pushkin.
“I’m so grateful to him,” she said. “He comes out here when he doesn’t have to, like today, and he works one on one with you.”
Her time has tumbled dramatically in the last year, enough so that she is now running about 13.3 and is hoping at the Nationals to get down to 13.2, which could get her into the semifinals of the NCAAs.
“I have a lot of goals,” Carrier admitted.
One would be to get to the Olympic trials.
“My dad looked it up. Last year they took 27 to the trials, and my time would have been 15th,” she said.
In other words, she could one day wind up in the Olympics like her idol, Mary Lou Retton.
Can you dig it?
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
Bob Herzel
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