Hailey Harren won the NCAA Division III cross-country championship in her first time at the national meet.
Michael Rand, Star Tribune
Hailey Harren wins because she doesn’t focus on winning. Wrap your head around that one for a minute, unless you’re one of those ultra-competitive types. She would probably drive the Vince Lombardis of the world crazy because winning isn’t everything or the only thing to her; it’s just one of many things she does.
The senior runner at Gustavus certainly can drive fellow runners a little mad. Last year, for instance, she won the <a href="http://gustavus.edu/athletics/news/1751"NCAA Division III cross-country championship in her first time at the national meet. All she hoped for going in was a top-35 finish.
“Right after the race was over, the second-place girl wanted to know if it was my goal to win,” Harren said. “She was like, ‘It was my goal to win. That’s all I wanted.’ It was one time when I realized how focused people are on that goal. And it had never crossed my mind.
“I felt bad for her because she felt she had failed even though she was second in the nation.”
That’s not how everyone thinks, but it sure works for Harren. Perhaps that sentiment can also explain how she could give up a season of track eligibility to study abroad; or how she knows how to balance school, cross-country and studying for the LSAT; or how when she trains in the summer, she doesn’t keep track of how many miles she runs.
She listens to herself.
The Harren way
Harren attended Rocori High School in Cold Spring. Like so many others — honestly, this is a recurring theme in sports — she only started running because a friend persuaded her to come out for cross-country in seventh grade.
“I knew I didn’t like volleyball,” she said, “so I decided to try it.”
She had successful freshman and sophomore seasons, but injuries slowed her during her final two years of high school. In retrospect, Harren said, it was a blessing in disguise. With little interest from Division I schools, choosing Division III Gustavus was much easier.
“I have a lot of friends who run in Division I, and a lot of times they refer to it as a job,” she said. “They’re focused on what they have to do, and running comes first. For me, it’s the exact opposite. It’s a stress-reliever.”
It’s stressless enough that she can walk away. After injury-plagued freshman and sophomore seasons in college, Harren emerged to win the D-III championship last year. But track season in the spring? She skipped it for a chance to study abroad in Germany. Her training goal while away was to go for a run in every country she visited.
“For anyone at the level where you’re contending for a national title, it is pretty unique,” said Gustavus cross-country coach Jed Friedrich. “Most of the time those athletes are savoring each competitive season they have.”
But as Friedrich and others know by now, Harren sees things differently.
“I had a lot of people say, ‘You’re taking the season off?’ ” Harren said. “But there’s no question the experience was worth more than another track season.”
And it doesn’t appear to have hurt her in cross-country this fall. Harren ran in the Division III Maroon Division of the Griak Invitational this past weekend. Her time of 22 minutes, 6 seconds over the 6K course was not only the winning time, it was better than any of the other 400-plus runners by more than a minute.
Balancing act
Saturday is a big day, which is saying something because for the past few weeks, Fridays and Saturdays have been not-so-exciting for Harren. She’s been holed up studying for the LSAT, and the test that will shape her law school fate will arrive in three days. Right after that, she has a banquet at Gustavus honoring her for being the school’s 2005-06 Female Athlete of the Year.
That’s on top of volunteer work. Last year, it was a reading program with kids; this year, it’s at a nursing home. And over the summer, she volunteered for a domestic abuse shelter in St. Cloud, where she monitored court proceedings.
Harren said her mom, Deb, sometimes worries that she has taken on too many things. But she’s also the one who shaped Harren’s perspective.
“She always reminds me that balance is needed in life,” Harren said. “I’ve always been instilled with the notion that everything is important, and if you focus too much on one thing, like running, it’s not going to be good for that thing or the other things you want to do.”
Sounds like a winning philosophy, even if that’s not Harren’s goal.