4/11/2023 0 Comments She a runner she a track star![]() This week, she can add to her state track resume. During her junior season, she tallied 19 goals for Carlisle, and through the team's first 11 games this season, she has 22. Erzen has also twice finished third in the state cross country meet. She's won four Drake Relays titles and two state titles in track. In the spring, she'd play high school soccer and run track.Īnd she's found success in all the sports. In the fall, she'd compete in cross country and on her club soccer team. But what made Erzen's story intriguing was that she was doing it at the same time. Having success in multiple sports isn't unheard of in high school. That's what Stone explained to the soccer coaches across the country who were recruiting Erzen. "I don't know a lot of athletes that could do that in one sport, let alone two," said Stone, who has worked with Erzen as the founder of Next Level Soccer, a training, educational and development program. Against the nation's best high school runners, Erzen won the 800 meters with a time of 2:06.52, the top time ever run by an Iowa high school girl. She had been playing since she was 5 and was in love with the sport. Tilus agreed and quickly got her involved with any big meet he could throughout the nation.Įrzen's career was about to progress just as Tilus envisioned.Ī week later, Erzen competed at the Outdoor Nationals at Haywood Field in Eugene, Oregon. She had one request, though: She wanted to keep playing soccer. "It definitely kind of showed me early on the potential that I had and the potential that he saw in me even though I couldn't really see it in myself," Erzen said. Tilus thought it was all possible for Erzen, who had never run competitively before. He laid out a list of things he thought she could eventually accomplish. A day or so later, he showed up at their house to convince Erzen to start competing in running. Tilus ran over to Erzen's parents, who were celebrating the win, and introduced himself. "I'm like, 'There is something ferocious and tenacious about this kid if she's willing to make a move at the point where everyone's normally (running) their slowest lap,'" Tilus recalled thinking. The only person to beat her was a boy a year older than her. Erzen beat every girl and finished second overall. Impressed, Tilus still remembers her scorching time: 5 minutes and 20 seconds. During the third lap of the four-lap race, she distanced herself from the competition like a veteran. But Tilus convinced her to come out for the mile-long race, which included boys and girls in seventh and eighth grade.Įrzen stole the show. She didn't have much interest in running. I tried to convince myself: ‘This is not my life.Erzen was a middle school soccer star then. “I kept trying to push it out of my mind. “I knew it was there during all those years,” she told me. She had entered what became the final battle. In 2016, after she fell short in the Olympic trials, Justin gave her a morning hug. In 2011, doctors found cancer again, and there were more treatments. “It’s like I lost all excuses for not pushing myself to reach my fullest potential,” Grunewald told me. It was as though the reality of cancer had stripped away an enamel of fear of failure. She returned to running three months later, and again her times got better. Strands of her sandy-brown hair fell out and her skin burned. The next day she ran a personal best of 4 minutes 22 seconds in the 1,500, known as the metric mile. She got the news while in Arizona for a race. She discovered the cancer for the first time while a fifth-year senior in 2009. It was, and in time he became her husband. She knew what she was up against, and she knew the horsemen that accompanied her now: vigilance and denial and the creep of fear. She spoke of cancer eloquently, no pretense here, words tumbling out. She dreamed of making the 2020 Olympic team. It was Grunewald’s fourth bout with cancer, and she was determined to turn running into an agent of her salvation. Less than two weeks after that race she began daily chemotherapy sessions. ![]() ![]() Just before that race doctors had found two new lesions in her liver. Nine months before that race surgeons had cut a large tumor out of her liver. I would have had difficulty picking Grunewald out from a fine pack of runners in 2017 save for the purple half-moon scar that stretched across her abdomen. She died on Tuesday at 32 and left a husband, Justin Grunewald, for whom she was everything. This week it caught Grunewald on a final lap. “That shadow keeps sneaking in.”īy that she meant her rare and incurable metastatic cancer known as adenoid cystic carcinoma. “It’s just kind of rough,” she told me later that evening.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |