Trials Don’T Have Her Cowed

Ever notice how the synonyms for two-legged long shots tend to drift toward four-legged beasts?

Lately, Kari McKay has heard them all: Sleeper, underdog, dark horse …

“Black sheep?” she offered with a laugh.

Hey, why not? The lady knows her livestock.

She also knows there is virtually no logical basis for predicting her chances in next weekend’s U.S. Olympic Women’s Marathon Trials, a race for which she qualified almost in spite of herself. To suggest she could finish anywhere from first to 50th would not be a bum steer.

Sorry.

“If I happen to make the top 10, I’d be ecstatic,” said the 30-year-old Eastern Washington University graduate and part-time cattle farmer. “If it’s the top 20, I’ll be happy and satisfied.

“But you never know - if I’m up with the big dogs most of the race, I might just wet my pants from panic.”

The top three finishers in Saturday’s race in Columbia, S.C., of course, earn spots on the U.S. team to the 2000 Games in Sydney - though, frankly, whether McKay gets one of those or gets her lunch almost seems beside the point.

What is the point is that the sport has a great chance here to get to know Kari McKay, and it had better not blow the opportunity.

This is not another running robot. Earthy, funny and blunt, she is the perfect lab rat to test the notion of whether someone disinclined to think of the finish line as The Only Thing That Matters can actually succeed at the highest levels.

“This is about fun, I think, more than about competition,” she said.

“It’s about doing our best at what we can do and making friends along the way.

“This is a lonely enough sport anyway.”

She understands her approach might not always play so well with the running elite - which, like any segment of society, has its share of chilly and self-absorbed characters.

By comparison, McKay seems like a perfect candidate for her own afternoon talk show.

“I’m so isolated up here that as soon as you get me around people, it’s, `My goodness, tell me about yourself,”’ she said. “I’m probably a little much for them, but I want to tell them, `You don’t understand - I’ve been on a farm all my life. The cows - they don’t talk.”’

The cows - 85-90 head - are pastured up on the Almira farm where McKay grew up. Her father, Gary, nudged her into the business after she got out of college, and now pays the price by having to look after the herd while his daughter pursues her running muse in Spokane. Depending on how she fares Saturday, that pursuit could turn more serious - and prolonged - than either of them expected.

“He said, `Go, get out of here, do what you have to do,”’ she recalled. “But this might be a little more than what he bargained for.”

The same might be said for McKay.

Three times a Big Sky champion at EWU, she was a road-race dabbler - albeit a pretty damned accomplished one - until she finally broke down and entered the Portland Marathon in October 1998.

“I told everybody for years that I wanted to qualify for the Olympic Trials in the marathon,” she said, “so I figured I’d better go run one.”

Her preparations were, admittedly, somewhat haphazard. Only once did she go out for a run as long as 20 miles. That one long run told her she could last for 26 - but not how long it might take her to finish.

And when the Portland race started, she conceded that she “had no idea what I was doing.

“I remember pulling up alongside a group of guys early in this race and having one of them glare at me,” she said. “Finally, he says, `Ma’am - we’re running a 2:40 pace. Are you going to run a 2:40 marathon?’ Hell, I didn’t know. I knew I didn’t want to run with a jerk.”

As it turned out, she didn’t run 2:40 - quite. She clocked in at 2 hours, 45 minutes, 55 seconds and won by nearly a minute and a half over Chris Clark of Anchorage.

“I wanted to raise my arms up at the finish line, except that I couldn’t lift them over my head,” McKay said. “I’m usually the one making fun of people coming across the finish line all emotional and bawling - `Oh, get over it’ - and now I could feel tears coming on.

“And then I couldn’t walk for four days.”

It’s still her only marathon - officially. Last fall, she and a friend decided to run the 13-mile section of the Spokane Marathon without paying the entry fee. When the friend dropped out, McKay - unfamiliar with the course - missed the half-marathon turn-around and resigned herself to running the full 26 miles.

“Then I see the time and it’s 2:36 and I’m getting all excited because that’s fast enough to get my way paid to South Carolina - except that I haven’t entered the race,” she said. “Then I got to talking with a couple of people and they asked me, `Kari, did you turn right at the community college?’ and I said, `No’ and told them my story. It turns out I missed about three miles of the marathon course.”

No matter. Her Portland time ranks her 76th among the Trials’ 209 qualifiers. Kim Jones, formerly of Spokane and now living in Boulder, Colo., has the sixth-best time of 2:35:44, run more than two years ago in Houston. Clark, as a comparison point, is 22nd on the list with 1999 times from the Twin Cities Marathon.

For a more current gauge, McKay finished fifth last month in the Millennathon half-marathon in Oakland - less than a minute behind America’s fastest marathoner, Libbie Hickman. Jones was 15th in the same race.

“I just have to figure out,” she said, “how to keep going that fast for another 13 miles.”

If she can, the cows will just have to wait until she comes home.