Few Thought Eastern Star Would Go Far Former Prep Quarter-Miler Blossoms As Distance Standout

Forget loneliness. The book on Amber Johnson is all about the unlikelihood of the long distance runner.

Not that Spokane high schools haven’t produced an abundance of fine collegiate distance performers. But you don’t usually find them in the blocks for the 400 meters or trying to score points in the long jump, which is what Johnson used to do at North Central High School.

Then she walked on to the track team at Eastern Washington University, and now they simply won’t let her walk away.

This evening, Johnson will run the 3,000 meters at the 28th annual Arnie Pelluer Invitational at Woodward Stadium - the only distance event late enough on the program to accommodate her schedule.

“The last patient leaves at 5, and then I have to clean up - hopefully I’ll be out of there by 6,” she said. “If I don’t make it to the starting line on time, Ill just have to cheer my team on.”

Well, hello stranger.

Johnson is a senior majoring in dental hygiene, which means her days are incredibly full - class from 8-11 a.m., followed by clinic work from noon to 5. Her mileage gets done at dawn and over the lunch hour, but by the time she gets to the track at night - if she gets to it - her workout partners are long gone.

“This whole winter and spring, she’s been on her own,” said EWU distance coach Dan Hilton. “I haven’t seen her at a workout.”

And yet she’ll undoubtedly be among the favorites in the 10,000 meters at next month’s Big Sky Conference championships, having placed third in that race and sixth in the 3,000 a year ago.

That’s a mighty long way to run for a one-time sprinter.

“I’ve run cross country ever since the first grade,” Johnson said, “but I remember my elementary school coach telling me I’d be a good 400 runner, so that’s kind of what I always stuck with in track. Actually, I was terrible - I don’t think I ran faster than 60 seconds. I guess I kind of had to be pushed into being a distance runner.”

That push came at Eastern, where she turned out for cross country again and did well enough that she was offered a tuition scholarship to keep her running track.

“To be honest with you,” said Hilton, “I wasn’t sure she could ever run this fast, but she just keeps improving - every year, every race.

“My biggest battle has been convincing her should could keep doing it.”

Johnson is obviously serious about her studies. A 3.7 student, she will have made the Big Sky’s all-academic team 12 times by the time she leaves EWU - four times each in cross country, indoor track and outdoors. The demands of Eastern’s dental hygiene program are such that Johnson has intended to abandon track each of the last two years, only to return when the coaching staff said it would work around her schedule. She has missed meets like the Stanford and Mt. SAC Relays because she couldn’t leave with the team on Fridays.

Still, she managed to slice 14 seconds off her previous best for 5,000 meters last weekend at Washington, running 17:13.40 - third best on EWU’s all-time list. She’s also third at 3,000 (9:58.5) and second at 10,000 (35:44.38) - the school records in all three races held by Kari McKay, whose footsteps she followed again last fall by becoming the first Eastern woman since McKay in 1991 to qualify for the NCAA cross country championships.

The highlight wasn’t so much where she finished - she was 64th, which placed her ahead of every Oregon and Washington runner, including Huskies standout Anna Aoki - but the sheer experience.

“When you’re warming up,” Johnson recalled, “they’re introducing the runners and telling a little bit about them - `Here’s so-and-so, a three-time state champion from such-and-such.’ I started wondering what they were going to say about me. I never even went to the state meet. I was so nervous and at the same time I didn’t want it to end because it was so cool.”

The Pelluer begins with field events at 1 p.m. The first track race is at 4.

Mt. Sacked

Since he coached there long, long ago, Washington State’s Rick Sloan has always had a fondness for the Mt. San Antonio College Relays - but he might find somewhere else for his Cougars to compete next year.

And it’s not just because the Cougs had a thoroughly unimpressive weekend at the three-day track-fic jam in Walnut, Calif. - outside of Andrea Thornton’s school record hammer throw (192-9) and some quality sprinting and hurdling by Arend Watkins, Sharika Higgins and Attrina Higgins.

Sloan’s complaints range from late notification that some of his athletes had not been accepted to the meet to the uncertainty of what day their events were scheduled to bad presentation and non-existent results.

“To this day, I still don’t know how far Ian Waltz threw the shot,” said Sloan, who will take his team to Austin for the USA College Championships this weekend. “It’s not worth it. It’s a logistical nightmare, and I’m not sure it’s conducive to good performances. We need to find something more to our liking.”

Last laps

Casey Clark went off to Arizona State to study aeronautical engineering. After some low-level flying this spring, the two-time state champ from Mt. Spokane got up in the clouds last Saturday with a 7-1 high jump to win the Sun Angel Classic. It’s the No. 2 jump in the Pac-10 this year.

Central Valley and Community Colleges of Spokane grad Ryan Weidman is the NCAA Division II javelin leader with a best of 223-0.