BOULDER - Of all the starting lines Jenny Barringer has toed during a magnificent running career at Colorado, what's one more?
In a word: everything.
When the graceful, gracious CU senior gathers herself Monday morning in Terre Haute, Ind., to begin her final collegiate cross country race in the NCAA Championships, she expects her mind to be clear, her gaze steely - exactly as they have been before other monster races.
This monster is different. If Barringer steps to the line expecting just as much of herself as she has in the past, in this race she wants - in her words - to complete a "storybook" finish.
More than in other races and the myriad NCAA and national titles she has won, she will be mindful of a conversation she had with Buffaloes coach Mark Wetmore as a freshman in 2005 and what Monday's race over the Indiana countryside means in that conversation's context.
"When I stand on the starting line, I want to think of this as another race," Barringer told me before leaving for Terre Haute. "This is another time when the gun goes off, I go out and do what I'm good at, do what I know how to do.
"But this is an opportunity, unlike some other races, that I've created for myself. I made a lot of decisions along the way with the intent purpose of being here on this day, at this starting line, a hundred percent.
"This race is an ending point for a journey that's probably been longer than any other one I've taken - four and a half years. When I came to CU, I didn't tell Mark, 'I want to be an Olympian, I want to break a 4-minute mile, I want to hold several collegiate records.'
"I told him, 'I want to win a cross-country national championship.' I think there's some irony, maybe some fate, in the fact that I'm going to achieve what I came to do on my last race at CU. That's what I'm going in trying to do."
Barringer has won big during her college career - three NCAA steeplechase championships, another pair of U.S. titles, and she is the American record-holder in the same event and American collegiate record-holder in the 1,500 meters.
She has been an Olympian (Beijing, 2008) and has competed for the U.S. in a pair of world championships. This fall, she has won four cross country races, most recently the NCAA Mountain Region championship.
She knows her way to the podium.
Her journey from Oviedo, Fla., to Boulder and what she has accomplished for CU and herself is almost as much a tribute to Wetmore and assistant coach Heather Burroughs as it is to Barringer.
She considers Wetmore a mentor, and Barringer says his insight and push-when-needed approach is discernible in each of his athletes.
After she settled on CU, choosing the Buffs over Duke and visiting Columbia, North Carolina and Notre Dame, Barringer remembers walking into Wetmore's office and seeing his "document of the day" - a detailed assignment sheet for all of his runners.
"It was everyone's assignment - not distance men, distance women - but every single person's name and assignment," Barringer said.
"I think that communicates a powerful message that he thinks of each of us as individuals . . . it opens up opportunity for a mentoring relationship if that's what you choose as an athlete. I like to think I seized that opportunity and it's grown over the last four years."
There hasn't been a particular Wetmore axiom that will stick with Barringer. Rather, from Day 1, there was bountiful reassurance that he would never set the bar so high for any of his athletes that failure could not be avoided.
Right away, recalled Barringer, she and her teammates were told, "We're never going to ask you to do something you can't do. You'll never be asked to compete beyond your capabilities.
"It sounds so simple, but it's so important for an athlete. When we go out on the cross country field, I don't have to make the impossible happen. I really know we've really worked hard and whatever he's asking me to do is truly attainable."
Of course, Wetmore's belief of what is attainable for Barringer is pretty much boundless. Part of that belief comes from the mindset Barringer exhibited from the beginning in Boulder.
"I can't remember in four-and-a-half years of Jenny ever saying to me, 'Why are we doing this? Should we be doing something else?'" Wetmore said. "This is pretty common with people in that age group.
"So that makes it easy to write a plan and to trust a plan, even one as complicated as going to the World Championships, Olympic Games, with three full collegiate seasons along the way.
"People have asked me, 'What's special about Jenny Barringer?' Well, other than coaching, her parents. Either by nature or nurture, she turned out to be a dream to coach."
The feeling is overwhelmingly mutual. Barringer laughed when asked about CU's selling points and what ultimately steered her here rather than to, say, Duke.
"It was definitely the coaching, but the Flatirons helped," she said. "That was very helpful and important. But the training here is unrivaled by any other location in the U.S. And Mark and Heather's coaching philosophy was an important selling point for me.
"I felt when I came here, if there's any two coaches in the country who can make something special out of me, it's these two people."
Have they performed as advertised?
"Absolutely," Barringer said. "Mark says all the time that he thinks I would have been successful wherever I went. That's flattering, because he thinks I would work this hard and be this dedicated anywhere. But I don't think I would have been as good anywhere else."
It's hypothetical, but I asked her if she really thought any other coach could have gotten as much out of her as Wetmore.
"I don't think so," she said. "I really think I have a special relationship with Mark and Heather - especially Mark with his combination of experience and his simple way of life.
"He invests a disproportionate and maybe, at times, a too abundant amount of his time and mental energy into what I do and what this team does. And while that doesn't lend itself to a very well-rounded life for him, it's been really good for me."
Over the past nine months, Wetmore has seen Barringer show stunning versatility. "She is national class at 800 meters and world class from 1,500 to 5,000," he said, adding he is "totally confident she even run 10,000 at a world class time.
"I guess that's the fantasy - that we can do things well enough together that she can be world class at lots of different events and have fun racing at a variety of distances."
If pressed, though, to pick one event for Barringer to concentrate on as a professional, Wetmore would choose the steeplechase as her premier event: "If I was asked what world record she could threaten the soonest, I would say steeplechase."
But first comes the NCAA cross country championship, which Wetmore most eloquently defends as "the most prestigious title in all of NCAA sport."
His reasoning: "Everybody, tens of thousands of women, get invited to the first round of the NCAAs. Then 280 advance to what's coming on Monday.
"It isn't a poll, it isn't a ranking, there's no BCS. They all stand on the starting line in very little clothing in the howling wind in Terre Haute, Ind., in the winter time and they shoot a gun and run 3.75 miles.
"This is what I'm leading up to, the Heisman (Trophy) is a vote of people who think is maybe the best football player, but you know no offensive tackle has ever been considered.
"This is a race that determines the very best runner in the whole NCAA."
And Barringer appears ready - physically, mentally, emotionally - to run it.
"I think I'm in just as good a shape or better shape than I've ever been," she said. "Physically, I feel great; I haven't been sick, which is a blessing, because that's often far out of our control. I've been injury free the whole last year, which has been amazing.
"That's not commonplace in women's distance running in general, and it's not commonplace for any runner. Fortunately I've gone 41/2 years with very few interruptions. So I wouldn't say it's really uncommon for me; I haven't suffered a lot of injuries.
"But I'm training more miles than I ever have in my career here. You push the envelope, you run on the edge - and you take that gamble. Fortunately, it's paid off and I've avoided injury.
"But this is a very emotionally loaded ending to my career. So I think being physically prepared, at this point, is the least of my concerns."
Watching Barringer on Monday in Terre Haute will be a group she calls her "common cast, the common crew." It is composed of her parents (Bruce, Janet), other relatives who live in Muncie, Ind., and her fiancé, Jason Simpson.
"He's young and starting a promising career of his own, so he doesn't get to go to a whole lot of my races," she said. "So it's going to be exciting to have him there."
But missing her final collegiate race will be her brother (John), her sister (Emily) and her high school coach (Jay Getty). If she "could have one or two special people there, it probably would be my brother and sister," Barringer said.
She knows both siblings will be watching on television, as will a multitude of runners in the Boulder community and her legion of followers at CU.
Wetmore was asked last week about Barringer's CU legacy, which obviously will be significant. He said while his protégé could be pondering that, as well as the considerable cash or cars - "Ferrari 599 GTBs or Teslas" - that might figure into her future, this is the advice coming from him, her teammates, even herself:
"Stay on task. Stay on this thing that's going on Monday. This is a really cool thing if we can do it. Let's focus on that . . . legacies and Teslas are for Tuesday."
Monday is for finishing the story, an epilogue worthy of capping Jenny Barringer's CU career.
Contact: BG.Brooks@Colorado.EDU
