Enthusiastic competitor

Lisa Haley talks the way she runs: fast and with an unmistakable sense of passion.

The Central Valley senior is a hurdler, an event that stirs her passion and fuels her competitive fire.

“Oh, man, I love to race,” she said, blasting out of a verbal starting block. “There is no feeling in the world, nothing at all, like running someone down in the last 50 meters of a race. It’s an incredible feeling. Of course, you have to go over and be nice about it and say ‘good race’ and everything. But inside you’re thinking ‘I just kicked your butt.’

“My favorite thing is to come off the turn (in the 300 hurdles) with two girls in front of me and just knowing, ‘Nope. Not gonna happen.’ And then just running by them to the finish. It’s an incredible feeling.”

Haley is an integral part of the Bears’ 400-relay team, but her passion is focused on running the 100-meter high and 300-meter low hurdles.

“It’s one thing to just go out and run around a track,” she said. “But there’s an art to running the hurdles. It’s all about technique. You have to be relaxed and still run over the hurdles. If you start hopping over the hurdles, you lose all your momentum and all of your speed.”

Talk to her for a few minutes about the two favorite events and watch her inner fire burst into flame.

“I love them,” she said. “I want to go to college so badly with them. Just talking to you about them makes me want to go out and run them.”

Haley first ran the events in middle school and loved it, but the passion for the events did not reignite until her sophomore year at Central Valley. In fact, her passion for competition was fueled before her passion for hurdles.

“I qualified for state in the 1,600 relay as a freshman,” she said. “That’s where I first felt that thrill of competition. I was on the track for the state meet and it just hit me that I was running with the best in the state.”

The following spring, head girls coach Dennis McGuire took Haley aside, told her she had the perfect body to be a hurdler and turned her loose on the Greater Spokane League.

As a sophomore, Haley ran a 16.38 in the 100 hurdles and a 49.56 in the 300 at the Class 4A regional meet, just missing the finals in each event.

As a junior, nagging injuries haunted her season.

“My biggest problem was the muscle behind my knee in my lead leg,” she said. “The thing I did wrong was not saying anything about it when I first got hurt. I just tried to tough it out, and that’s not the smart thing to do. When you get hurt, get help.”

Haley has put in a lot of work preparing for her senior season.

“This semester I took a few more active classes – I can because this is my senior year,” she said. “I am taking a cardio-fitness class where we do step boxing and go on long runs. That’s helped me get my endurance up. After that, I have a weight class where we do bench presses and squats to help strengthen my hamstrings and my quads. That will help me get over those hurdles. And we’ve been training hard in practice.”

The hard work has put her ahead of schedule already this season.

“I will run better,” she said. “But things are going awesome so far. I’m really excited. The competition level in the league is incredible already, and we’ve only had one meet.”

At the moment, Haley’s main competition in the 300 hurdles is junior teammate Christi Schofield.

“She’s just rocking it in the 300 hurdles,” Haley said. “She’s working hard and doing very well – I am so proud of her. She’s almost getting me and it’s making me nervous. But so long as we’re on the same team, it’s all good.”

In fact, Eastern Washington already has seen some blistering times in both hurdles events. Already this season four GSL runners have turned in sub-50-second times in the 300 hurdles and Brynn DeLong of Shadle Park owns the state’s fastest time in the 100 hurdles at 15.55.

“I get so excited when I see other girls run like that,” Haley said. “I love it. It makes me want to get out there and compete just that much harder and work that much harder.

“I love that feeling before a meet. You’re thinking ‘Is she going to beat me? Is she going to beat me?’ And then you think ‘No way, I’m not going to let that happen.’ And then you get a tingle feeling all over just before the start of the race. There’s nothing like that in the entire world. That’s what I love about this sport.”