In the Long Run 

MT. CARROLL, Ill . — It’s doubtful that any of the teenage girls gathered under the stars here have heard of Jim Valvano. After all, they are almost 1,000 miles from NC State, and they were all born after the former Wolfpack basketball coach lost his battle with cancer in 1993. But Janet Leet ’89 thinks Valvano has a message these girls need to hear.

They are all runners, and they have come to a camp in the remote, northwest corner of Illinois for a week with Leet, a former All-American cross country runner for NC State (she was Janet Smith then) who now operates a runners’ training program outside of Chicago, Ill., as well as the weeklong summer camp. Many of the girls are high school state champions or promising runners for their junior high schools, and most of them have dreams of running for a college team. A few can even imagine competing in the Olympics someday. And who better to learn from than Leet, who was the national cross country champion as a high school senior in New Jersey before becoming a valuable member of the potent women’s running teams at NC State in the 1980s?

“I had a kid come to me, and she said, ‘All that’s important to me is running, nothing else.’ She’s 16 years old. That’s a problem. I want to change her thinking.”
— Janet Leet ’89

But Valvano’s message, contained in his speech at the ESPY Awards just two months before he died, has nothing to do with running. That’s okay with Leet, because it fits with what she tries to accomplish with her camp, which celebrated its 20th anniversary this summer. Yes, it’s a camp for runners. But it’s a camp that is about so much more than running. “I had a kid come to me, and she said, ‘All that’s important to me is running, nothing else,’” Leet says. “She’s 16 years old. That’s a problem. I want to change her thinking.”

And that’s where Valvano, who was NC State’s athletics director when Leet was in school, comes in. His ESPY speech is best remembered for his admonition to keep fighting in the battle against cancer (“Don’t give up … don’t ever give up.’’), but there is another part of the message that Leet wants the 100 or so campers to hear. It is about finding balance in their young lives. 

“If you laugh, you think and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day.”
— Jim Valvano

“To me, there are three things we all should do every day,” Valvano says in a grainy video projected onto a makeshift screen in the outdoor amphitheater amid tall pines at the YMCA camp that Leet has rented for the week for the Sub5 Girls Running Camp. “We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. Number three is you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day.”

What Girls Need

If only Valvano could see these girls this week. They will laugh, whether it’s when Leet shows up to scale the rock-climbing wall wearing an ocean blue shark suit (think of Katy Perry’s halftime performance at the 2015 Super Bowl), when Leet cackles while rolling through camp on a motorcycle, or when she hurls marshmallows at the girls as they go on their early morning runs along country roads that cut through endless cornfields. They will think, whether it is during late-night discussions in their cabins about the stress they feel to perform or during sessions about avoiding injuries and proper nutrition. And some of them will cry, often on Leet’s shoulder, as they open up about eating disorders or overbearing parents and coaches.

“She has such an eye for what girls need,” says Brooke Gordon, one of the camp’s counselors. “It’s totally crazy what she’s able to do. It’s incredible.”

Like most of the counselors, Gordon is a former camper at Sub5. She is now a junior and member of the cross country team at Lipscomb College in Nashville, Tenn. She says it is unlikely she would be running competitively — or even be in college — without Leet helping her deal with the pressure she felt as a young runner. “We lose that perspective, about what really is at stake,” Gordon says. “She forced me to look past one race or one injury.”

It helps that Leet, 51, understands what the girls at her camp face, whether they are a top runner or part of the pack. She knows the joy of victory and the satisfaction that comes from a good training run. But she’s also had her share of struggles — and is familiar with the difficult battles that other runners have faced — and it is her willingness to share those difficulties that helps her connect with campers younger than her own children. “She’s this great runner, this successful person, but she was still that kind of goofy, awkward kid,” says Meghan Laskai, a paralegal from Oak Park, Ill., and a former all-conference runner at the University of Maryland, who has worked as a counselor at all but two of Leet’s camps.

Learning to Laugh

Growing up in New Jersey, Leet tried several sports before settling on running. In middle school, she ran on the boy’s cross country team and was entered in meets as “J. Smith” so that she wouldn’t be disqualified for being a girl. She won the New Jersey state cross country championship as a high school freshman, and then again as a sophomore. “That was where I could get my mojo,” she says. “Running was my escape.”

Leet struggled in school, and learned in fourth grade that she had dyslexia. For the next four years, Leet would leave school twice each week to get special tutoring, a fact that she hid from classmates. She was an awkward high school student and had few friends outside the team. And then, in her junior year, even running turned sour for her when she failed to win the state cross country championship. “My coach just screamed at me at the finish line,” she says. “I felt like I was an embarrassment. I stopped having fun. I had expectations on me that were inhuman.”

But rather than retreat from the sport, Leet wrote down the things that needed to change. At the top of the list was that she was no longer having fun. On her 17th birthday, she summoned the courage to walk into her coach’s office with her list in hand. “I told him what he did was wrong, and that I was going to win a national championship,” she says. And then, in her senior year, she set the course record in reclaiming the state championship and went on to win the national high school championship in the 5,000-meter race. She was hailed by her coach as the greatest female distance runner in the history of New Jersey.

But that success only came after she made sure to have fun during her senior year. “I made somebody laugh on my team every day,” she says. “Instead of thinking about what awful workout the coach is going to give me today, I started thinking about what prank am I going to pull today to make my teammates laugh. I never felt pressure my senior year.”

Conquering College

Her success — and her struggles — didn’t end when she accepted a scholarship to run at NC State. She was joining a powerhouse cross country team, one that routinely won ACC championships and had finished third in the previous two NCAA championships. “Our team was a who’s who of distance runners,” says Leet. Yet she still managed to stand out, setting a course record as she won her first collegiate cross country race. She went on that year, as a freshman, to win the ACC championship and earn All-American honors. Before she was done at NC State, Leet would earn 10 All-American honors in cross country and track and field, win four ACC titles and be named to the all-conference team four times.

Leet did not enjoy the same success in the classroom, at least not initially. She had been warned by a school psychologist in New Jersey that she couldn’t handle the academic rigor of a school like NC State, and she ended up flunking all of her courses her first semester. “On the track, I had no problem knowing I belonged there,” she says. “In the classroom, I didn’t belong there.”

But, fortunately for Leet, she had a support system at NC State. Her coaches helped arrange tutors and for her to rely on audio books, a nod to the difficulty she had with reading. A teammate spent hours with her at D.H. Hill Library, helping her learn how to study, and routinely left encouraging notes in Leet’s locker. With their help, Leet turned things around in the classroom. She graduated — with honors — with a degree in recreation resources administration. That means more to her, Leet says, than all the medals and All-American honors. “I never made an honor roll in my life until I hit college,” she says.

Leet shares those stories with her campers. “I failed at a lot of things,” she tells them when they have gathered in the amphitheater one night after dinner. “I would not have looked you in the face when I was your age. I would not talk to you. I would have been the loner off to the side, because I did not have a whole lot of confidence in who I was.”

Figuring Out Failure

Leet recognizes that she can’t protect the girls at her camp from similar struggles. Failure, she notes, is a part of sports. But Leet hopes that by sharing her stories and offering up a week full of encouragement, challenges and goofiness, she can send them home better prepared to deal with the struggles when they come. And she wants them to know that they have someone, be it Leet, one of the counselors or a fellow camper, who they can turn to for help. “This camp is about giving these kids the tools to give them peak performance in whatever they want to do,” she says. “Whether it is break a five-minute mile or whether it is to be the seventh runner on their team or to make the varsity team.”

Other running camps, many of them run by college coaches looking for potential recruits, emphasize timed runs and competition among campers. The best runners are often given more attention by coaches and counselors. Meanwhile, at Sub5, the counselors are not told who the best runners are, and Leet has been known to take away the watches each runner wears if she feels they are being too competitive. And then there are the marshmallow tosses.

Leet is a one-woman force of nature, up at 5:30 every morning and running full tilt until she collapses in her bed late each night. Her counselors sometimes have to put a plate a food in front of her, worried that she won’t remember to eat otherwise. She bounces around the camp, always ready to hug a camper, share a good laugh or pull a runner aside for a bit of one-on-one instruction. Haley Renison, a counselor who’s a junior at Lewis University in Romeoville, Ill., remembers when she was a new camper and first encountered Leet. “Oh, my god, I thought she was insane,” she says. “I thought this lady was crazy. She has way too much energy, and I didn’t understand half the stuff she said.”

But it didn’t take long for Renison to see how much Leet cared about the girls: “She completely abandons all of her needs this week and just puts everything she has into this camp.”

Proper Mechanics

It can take time, though, for the lessons to take hold. During a session in the camp dining hall on proper running mechanics, girls share puzzled looks as Leet offers up a rapid-fire series of directions. But Leet persists, in part because she believes that better form will help prevent injuries to knees, ankles and shins. “The injuries that I’m seeing are horrendous,” she says. So she keeps encouraging the girls, in this instance, to repeatedly lift a foot onto a bench while keeping the back of their legs against the dining table. At a different point, Leet has the girls sit across from a partner on the floor for exercises with the soles of their feet pressed against each other. They are all in socks, their expensive running shoes tossed aside. “Look at that,” she screams to no one in particular. “They’re actually getting this one.” She touches one of the girls on the shoulder. “Oh, Delaney, that was nice,” she says. “Do you feel that?” Delaney nods. “Oh, Delaney, you learned a little bit. Do you feel how powerful that is? That’s awesome!”

Earlier, speaking to a larger group in an open-air pavilion, Leet is like a preacher at a tent revival, calling on her campers to feel the power of her message. She is wearing a microphone as she leads the group through squats and other aerobic exercises. She shouts at one of her counselors to crank up the volume on the music. “Feel the rhythm,” she yells. “Don’t worry about hitting your neighbor. Have fun! Say, ‘Baby, I’m worth it.’”

“When you empower a young girl about fueling their body better, you prevent eating disorders.”
—Amy Baltes

A similar attitude spills over to the kitchen, where Amy Baltes makes sure the girls eat healthy while they are at camp. Baltes, a registered dietitian, works with Leet to replace chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese with fruits, vegetables and lean proteins. “Everybody is iron deficient,” Baltes says. “There’s just a whole host of injuries and things we never saw before. And a lot of it has to do with what these kids are eating.” Baltes teaches a session on proper knife skills — the better to cut up carrots and other vegetables — that gives her an opportunity to talk more about nutrition while also enlisting the campers’ help in preparing dinner. “When you empower a young girl about fueling their body better,” Baltes says, “you prevent eating disorders.”

Eating disorders — and an obsession with weight and body image — are one of the toughest challenges Leet deals with. She has seen plenty of runners struggle with their diet, as well as the notion that they will run faster if they drop a few more pounds. Such concerns can be crippling, both physically and emotionally, and in the most extreme cases can lead to depression and even thoughts of suicide.

Leet is careful about talking with campers about eating disorders — she doesn’t want to plant unhealthy ideas in their minds. But she says the emphasis the camp puts on proper nutrition and healthy eating opens the door for any camper who wants to talk. “I can’t help them unless they want help,” Leet says. “So that kid who came up to me, the first big step she took was asking for help.”

A Full Day

One of the camp’s hallmarks is a goal-setting session that Leet leads. The campers are asked to list three goals, and only one can be related to running. One must deal with academics and another must deal with the social aspects of life. The girls decorate tiles to illustrate each goal, be it reaching a specific time or something broader such as “Find the Love,” and then take them home with them when they leave. When they reach one of the goals, they smash the corresponding tile. 

It is all part of the balance that Leet is trying to help these girls find. During a brief break, Leet looks out over her camp and is amazed by the spirit of the campers, the dedication of her counselors and the empowering network that they have built over 20 years. Most of the campers are from Illinois or surrounding states, so they talk about seeing other Sub5 girls at cross country meets and talk with their coaches about what they learned at camp. “It’s like there’s a magic that happens here,” Leet says. “I can’t explain it.”

But she tries, late one night, as she talks to the girls yet again. She asks them if they laughed that day. “I laughed so hard my stomach actually hurt,” she tells them. She asks if they thought about something that day, and tells them that one of the campers cried with her that day.

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” she says. “It’s okay. It actually makes us human. It’s been a heck of a day.”

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