What Alexandra Krieg ’09 talks about when she talks about running.
By Sarah Tuff ’95
The football field gets her first. On a Sunday afternoon in September, Youngman Field shimmers with freshly painted goal lines and bright blue end zones.
“Ooh, want to run across here, a new field?” asks Alexandra Lanners Krieg ’09. Without waiting for an answer, she effortlessly lopes across, her aqua Saucony running shoes tamping down the turf as she makes a shortcut toward the 16-mile Trail Around Middlebury.
Then she revels in the appeal of pavement. “South Street is just gorgeous. Today, with the sun and the light and the fields and the mountains, it just glowed,” says Krieg, recalling a separate, 14-mile run she completed this morning. “I couldn’t think of a lovelier place to run.”
Ah, but what about trails? Krieg calls them “magical” and “spiritual,” waxing rhapsodic about roots, turns, and muddy banks. She also loves the precision of a track. Only one running surface leaves her flat. “There’s no joy in a treadmill,” she says.
After some 170 races in her lifetime, Krieg has managed to master whatever happens to be underfoot—and whatever the meters or miles happen to measure. Last fall, she placed third at the NCAA cross-country championships, and then earned All-American honors in the 5,000- and 10,000-meter races at the NCAA track and field championships in the spring. While most college students are still sleeping on Sunday mornings, Krieg is running. “I can’t imagine what I would have done,” she says, “if running hadn’t become such a big part of my identity.”
* * * * *
Alexandra Krieg was not born to run. Well, not really. Her mom exercises on a NordicTrak, she says; and her dad has run a few marathons, but there are no Prefontaine genes in the Krieg family, which also includes a younger sister and a younger brother. Krieg recalls a “nine-minute-run” from her elementary school in Iowa, during which she and her classmates received a Popsicle stick for each completed lap. Thirteen Popsicle sticks equaled a mile. “I think I always made a mile,” she says, “but maybe that’s just memory reconstruction.”
Krieg signed up for track her freshman year at Wellesley High School in Massachusetts (her parents moved east from Iowa when she was in eighth grade) because she thought it would make her look “more well rounded” on her college applications. “I don’t like other sports,” she says. “Anything where you’re kicking balls or catching things, or there are balls flying toward your head or that requires coordination—that’s intimidating.”
Running was painful at first, but then Krieg became addicted to the endorphins and the team camaraderie. By her senior year in high school, Krieg could run the mile in 5:12 and the two-mile in 10:53. The Boston Globe called her “the state’s top cross-country runner” for a finish 23 seconds ahead of her closest competitor in the high school championships. By then, Krieg had thought about running in college. But not in Vermont.
“I didn’t want to go to Middlebury,” she says. “I thought it was a language school and a skiing school.” Cross-country head coach Terry Aldrich, and a visit when the mountains were exhibiting fall colors, convinced her otherwise. Krieg began her freshman year at Middlebury averaging 40 to 45 miles a week and rising to third place on the team. Now, she’s up to 65 miles a week and poised for even greater things this year.
“It’s exciting to see what she’s doing now and how much more there is available in her reserves,” says assistant coach Nicole Wilkerson, who also speaks of Krieg’s fierce competitiveness during races.
But when Krieg talks about her running, she does not talk about winning. She says she “did fine” at a meet, when, in actuality, she came in first. Most of her winnings—medals, ribbons, certificates, and a gaudy trophy topped with a golden turkey she earned at a Thanksgiving Turkey Trot last year—are in a cardboard box in her parents’ attic. (One exception: a fleece “participation” blanket from cross-country nationals, “so dorky,” she says, now warms her dorm bed in Forest Hall.)
Instead, Krieg likes to talk about the zone, the perfect rhythm of notching 26 laps around a track, or the runner’s high of “extreme joy” she gets toward the middle of a run. Her infectious enthusiasm about running, and life in general, could make even the most devout of couch potatoes lace up a pair of Nikes. “When you’re running through the woods by yourself, and there are no people sounds, but there’s the wind rustling the trees and the birds and squirrels,” she says. “It just doesn’t get better than that.”
* * * * *
“It gets lonely,” Krieg says of running by herself all the time, which she did last summer while working in Burlington at a health-care products distributor. A molecular biology and biochemistry major with a 3.79 GPA, Krieg may follow in her father’s footsteps and attend medical school—or maybe podiatry school. “Feet are really interesting!” she says.
Then again, she’d also like to run some more, and to travel. Maybe a marathon (her hometown is the halfway point of Boston’s fabled marathon), but not before she’s 100 percent ready. She talks about options and opportunities and the balance required to manage them all. Her role models are not necessarily the top runners in the world. Krieg says she has mixed feelings about Olympic marathon bronze medalist Deena Kastor. “She’s a professional runner; that’s all she does,” says Krieg. “That’s not a balanced lifestyle.” A more apt role model is her own coach, Wilkerson, who, says Krieg, balances a job, a family, and a competitive lifestyle as a triathlete.
Wilkerson, in turn, praises Krieg’s own methodical approach to the stresses of a tough academic and athletic schedule. “She’s extremely efficient and balanced on a quiet natural, spiritual level as well,” says Wilkerson.
Some things have to go. Like a social life: Krieg’s in bed by 10 P.M. on Friday nights. She’s sad to miss an upcoming lecture by author Eric Schlosser because of practice. But most everything else, Krieg crams in. “I envision the day as an orange with different wedges,” she says, “and you just have to squeeze every drop of juice out.”
Krieg’s multitasking includes reading books as she walks across campus and thinking about such concepts as evolutionary psychology as she runs. But she also lets her thoughts wander: to the oatmeal and coffee she’s had for breakfast or to the soft-serve vanilla ice cream with peanut butter, chocolate chips, and granola she’ll treat herself to after the run. Only very rarely does she listen to music while running.
Instead, Krieg likes to keep her senses open to the run. She’s seen curious things, like a snake trying to eat a toad, and wonderful things, like $75 in cash on the side of the road.
In the middle of the Sunday-afternoon run on the Trail Around Middlebury, Krieg confesses to another aspect of running that lacks joy: workouts on Chipman Hill. She used to get so nervous before the straight-up sprints that she’d almost feel a panic attack. But then they are over, and Krieg gets to do her favorite tempo runs, which she performs just slower than race pace. “You’re just directing all your energy forward,” she says. “There is no wasted motion.”