Becoming an elite athlete takes more than talent. Elizabeth Northern knows all about that. The Fort Worth runner danced and ran for fun as a child, and actually discovered her true talent level relatively late in life. “My dad ran cross country in high school,” she said of her roots in running. “And so I'd been running with my dad, and then my mom and I would do Race For The Cure each year. I've done (the) Cowtown (10-kilometer race) since I was in third grade. It's always been a part of my family, just something that we did together. And then in high school, when I did cross country, it was for fun. I had a bunch of friends that were doing it. And so it just kind of was more for social things. And I wasn't very good. Like I was decent, but I was not, like, recruitable. Elizabeth was a member of the cross country team at Fort Worth’s Nolan Catholic High School her junior and senior years. She then matriculated to Trinity University in San Antonio with no intention of pursuing further formal competition until a fortuitously-timed trot around the school’s grounds. “It was during freshman orientation. I was just kind of jogging around campus and ended up on the track and the cross country team was there. And they kind of hollered at me. And they're like, ‘Do you want to run cross country?’ And next thing I knew I was on the team,” she explained about how the day progressed. “I was in the gym and getting all my physical stuff checked out, and I got a uniform, and then I was racing, like, two weeks later.” She quickly found success at the non-scholarship Division III school under the Tigers’ then-head coach Jenny Breuer. “I walked onto the cross country and track teams at Trinity,” Elizabeth said. “Coach B noticed pretty early on that I was really good at long runs, like, that was where I excelled and so she knew, even from the first couple of months, she was like, ‘You're gonna do the 10K in track.’ (I was) like, ‘What? I don't know if I want to do that.’ But sure enough, my best event in college was the 10K. And since then I've just gone longer.” She ran in the 2006 and 2008 NCAA D-III national cross country meets and helped the Tigers’ squad to a best-ever sixth-place national finish in 2008. In 2009, she won the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference 10,000 meters and competed in the 2009 NCAA D-III 10 km national track and field championships. Shortly after graduation, after having moved back to Fort Worth, she returned to San Antonio to try running a marathon. “My best friend from college wanted to do one. So we did it together. That's literally the only reason why we did it, because the only reason why I did it was because she was doing it.” Elizabeth had not trained for run of that distance before. To complete a marathon, one must traverse 26.2 miles. “I did not do a long run longer than 16 miles (in training) and so that first marathon was a lot of crying. I mean, I still ran a fantastic time considering how bad it felt but I didn't do another marathon for two years. I was like ‘Never again, I'm never doing this again.’ And then I've done like 15 more.” She did some half marathons before trying another full one in 2012. It proved her breakthrough. “In 2012, I had signed up to do the New York City Marathon that year, and that was the year of Superstorm Sandy. And the race was canceled. We were in New York City when it got canceled.” She managed to get into a race scheduled for the follow weekend, ironically in the Alamo City. “I said I'd never do it again. Then two years later, I did the exact same race. And I cried, and by far my worst marathon ever was that one in 2012, because it was, like, 80 degrees.” She fought through oppressive humidity to finish the race and realized she could potentially have success at longer distances. “I decided to, like, really, really, really train for (the) Cowtown (Marathon the) next February,” she said. “That Cowtown has pretty much launched my whole next trajectory because I just ran my heart out and I ran a 2:46 there and shattered all their records.” …
Read More
