If you had asked Sarah Toland '00 what her favorite activity was when she transferred to Colby, she might have answered swimming or dancing. "I was always trying things out, but I can't say they meant a lot to me," she said. Today she is a professional runner, competing at the world-class level, has a contract with Nike and might win thousands of dollars in a single race when she runs well.

When she spent her first undergraduate year at the University of Colorado at Boulder, an Olympic training center, she gave competitive sports hardly a thought. "I'd run on and off in high school. But I was smoking cigarettes and being unathletic," she said. All that changed late in her sophomore year at Colby. She tried out for outdoor track, picked up cross-country as a junior and indoor track as a senior. Specializing in the 3K and 5K distances, Toland found her passion.

Today she tends to minimize her running achievements (All America, third in the nationals) and now says the Division III races weren't as challenging as she thought. "I thought I was good and I wasn't good. I wasn't where I thought I was," she said.

Following a move to Boulder after graduation, she spent a season of more intense training with a top-flight coach, a former Olympian. Her first professional event was the national cross-country trials in Vancouver. The top six finishers go to the World Championships; Toland finished seventh in the 8K race, but the strength of her showing landed her a Nike contract.

By Memorial Day 2001, she was ready for the famed Boulder race that attracts runners from all over the world--three per country. When a qualifier dropped out, Toland got a chance to compete at the 10K distance with the U.S. team, and she finished third overall. She earned $7,000 that day, "a pretty good payday" for the women's track circuit; $800-$1,000 is more typical for a middling finish.

In February 2002 she finished seventh in the 8K national cross-country trials, a race in which five of the top six finishers were former Olympians. She ended up running in a world event in Ireland in March, finishing third for the U.S. and 32nd overall, a showing she calls her "breakthrough."

Since then, Toland has competed in China, Japan, Houston and other venues, moving up in the rankings. This February she finished fifth in the 4K national cross-country trials, earning a berth in the World Championship scheduled for late March in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Despite what most would consider dazzling success, Toland remains practical about her prospects: "I'll run as long as I can move up and compete on the highest level. I'm not satisfied yet."

Women long-distance runners rarely peak in their 20s and some top runners are nearly 40, so Toland, while a late starter, cannot be considered a late bloomer. And she wants to have options when her professional running career ends. She recalls that her English literature studies at Colby were "everything I could have wanted in education," and she is mulling going to graduate school. Meanwhile she works part time at the Boulder Running Co., an athletic center run by two former marathoners, which allows employees, many of them runners, highly flexible hours.

Why run? "This is my passion," Toland said. "There's a wonderful purity about it. It doesn't matter about your equipment, about where you train or what your income is. That's why the best runners come from all over the world, from Africa, from Asia, from the U.S. In the end, it's just you, your body and the race."

--Doug Rooks '76