By Joe Vanden Acker
Lawrence Today magazine, Spring 2003
The word average and Valerie Curtis have never become acquainted. Nothing about Curtis, '03, is ordinary or typical. Her achievements in the classroom, on the cross country course, and on the running track have been exceptional and, given her athletic background, somewhat amazing.
Curtis is a Midwest Conference (MWC) champion in track and has earned all-conference honors three times in cross country. A physics major and biology minor, she has a sparkling 3.8 grade-point average and has earned a spot on the academic all-conference team nine times, the maximum a Midwest Conference athlete can achieve.
Her success is rooted in a drive to be the best and a work ethic that complements that motive. The overriding factor is that Curtis hates to lose about as much as a six-year-old hates Brussels sprouts and liver put together.
"When she loses, I don't think she wants to lose again" says head track and field coach Matt Kehrein, and that attitude extends to every day in practice.
"I take every workout pretty seriously," Curtis says. "I don't want anyone ahead of me. I don't want to lose. My whole family is like that. I have two older sisters, and we've always competed a lot."
Her older sisters, Janelle and Vanessa, '00, were both collegiate athletes. Janelle wrestled at Knox College, and Vanessa ran cross country and track at Lawrence. Vanessa is now in medical school at the University of Wisconsin, and Janelle is in dental school at the University of Iowa.
Valerie Curtis didn't appear destined to be a top collegiate runner; she came from Shullsburg, a city of 1,250 located in the southwest corner of Wisconsin, that had little to offer a distance runner. Shullsburg High School doesn't have a cross country team, and the track program was cut the year after Curtis graduated.
With her sister already at Lawrence, Curtis was recruited by LU head cross country coach Mike Fox and prodded by both her sister and Fox to run for the Vikings, despite a lack of high school experience.
"I liked running, but it wasn't real important at that point," she says.
After putting together a solid freshman year that included helping the Lawrence women win the 1999 Midwest Conference cross country championship, Curtis increased her focus on running. She and Vanessa began training harder and ran the Green Bay Marathon during the summer of 2000.
"After that, I was focused on my sophomore year of cross country. I wanted to get in the top 15 and be all-conference," Curtis says. "That was my goal for that year. I reached it — and that was just amazing."
From then on, she was, pardon the pun, off and running.
She grabbed 13th place at the 2000 MWC cross country championships to receive all-conference honors for the first time. After placing second in the 3,000 meters and fourth in the 5,000 at the conference indoor track championships, she capped her sophomore year by winning the 5,000 at the conference's outdoor meet. She also took second in the 10,000 and fifth in the 3,000.
"Her concentration is strictly on the goals she sets for running, and she makes it a year-round thing," Fox says. "I don't know that she's a natural talent. I've had runners with more talent, but no one I have ever coached has had more drive or a better work ethic.:
The training consists of time measured in miles on the road or track, and Curtis admits she revels in being pushed hard by Fox, a coach for whom she professes great respect and someone who has helped her achieve things she didn't know were possible. Curtis also spends countless hours in the weight room, where she has no peer, male or female, when it comes to pounding out pull-ups, push-ups, and sit-ups.
"If I can just keep working harder, I can keep getting better," says Curtis of her training philosophy. "I saw so many improvements from the hard work, and that was such a positive reinforcement that I kept working harder. It was really surprising. I don't think of myself as being very fast. It seems kind of surreal."
Fox says the strength training has helped Curtis improve her running, but she admits there might be another motive.
"I want to be strong and really tough, able to kind of scare my opponents," she says with a small, but slightly devious, laugh.
The rest of the conference wasn't laughing during the 2001-02 school year, when Curtis improved again on the gains made during her sophomore year. She ran to third place at the conference cross country meet and helped the Vikings to the team championship for the second time in three years. She then placed third in the 5,000 and fourth in the 3,000 at the conference indoor meet.
During the outdoor season, she qualified provisionally for the NCAA Division III Championships in the 3,000 steeplechase and had three second-place finishes, in the steeplechase, 5,000, and 10,000, at the conference meet.
She followed up by again placing third at the 2002 MWC cross country championships. At the NCAA Midwest Regional Championships, Curtis ran to an eighth-place finish, completing the 6,000-meter course in 22 minutes, 1.33 seconds, to claim a spot in the NCAA Championships.
Fox says Curtis' achievement of reaching the NCAA Championships needs to be put in perspective. In that competition, only the top three teams and the top six other runners not competing for one of the top three teams qualify for nationals.
"That was an incredible feat, when you consider that, when Courtney Miller, '03, was a freshman, she finished in 26th place (at the 1999 regional meet) and qualified for nationals," he says. "That shows you how tough individually the regional is now, compared to what it has been in the past."
Curtis ran to a 73rd-place finish at the NCAA Championships, held at St. Olaf College.
She has fought some injuries since cross country season but is prepared to do whatever work is necessary to get herself back in top form. That approach summarizes her career, says Kehrein.
"Valerie is the type of person who wasn't that successful in high school but has become a lot more successful in college because she was willing to work hard," says Kehrein, adding he remains a bit stunned at where she has taken herself.
"We knew from our experiences with her sister that she was going to have a good work ethic, but it was surprising how much she improved."
Curtis has her sights set on winning at least one more conference championship during track season, and then it is graduation and graduate school. She has applied to several schools and plans to pursue either biophysics, biomechanics, or biomedical engineering. She admits that those areas of study are large, so she isn't sure what her eventual research specialty will be.
Which will mark the first time in a long time that Valerie Curtis didn't know exactly where she was going.