Becky Mackelprang, the U cross-country team’s freshman standout, started running the same way most of us do.
“I ran two miles every day, and I hated it,” said the Spokane, Wash. native. “Every step was torture.”
Sound familiar?
Well, Mackelprang stuck with it, and in four years, she transformed herself from a casual jogger into the fastest runner on the U cross-country team. She now runs 55 miles a week and loves it.
When she was a freshman in high school, Mackelprang became burned out from “playing soccer seven days a week” and wanted to try something new.
“I joined the track team because I had had the coach as a teacher and just really respected him a lot,” she said. “The rest is just kind of history. I fell in love with the sport.”
Her improvement was rapid. At first, she ran to stay in shape and be with her friends. However, it soon became apparent that Mackelprang wasn’t just another high-school athlete, and the dream of winning a scholarship to a major university was within reach.
“My junior year of track,” Mackelprang said, “I started to realize that I had something.”
Even though her father is an ultra-marathoner-he runs up to 55 miles at a time, as opposed to the standard 26.2-running didn’t catch on with the rest of the family.
“(My dad) never thought any of his children would run,” Mackelprang said. “We were really a soccer family.”
And she means that literally. Her parents weren’t just standing on the sideline handing out Capri-Suns and cutting up orange slices on Saturdays; they were playing in leagues of their own.
But soccer wasn’t in the cards for the youngest Mackelprang, who enjoys the individuality of distance running.
“It started out as a social thing for me. I had friends that I could talk to when I ran,” she said. “But what it grew into was a way for me to compete against myself.”
Each step in Mackelprang’s progression has been satisfying for the biology major who plans to earn a doctorate in neurosciences. She remembers the first time that she ran two miles in 13:10.
“That was a huge accomplishment for me,” she said. “That felt pretty much the same as running 10:57 this last spring. I’m just always trying to do better than I did last time.”
But Mackelprang’s road to success hasn’t always been smooth. In fact, there was a time last spring during her senior year of high school when her running career bordered on disaster.
“I just felt tired all the time, and I was running really slowly, and when the track season started, I ran so slow,” Mackelprang said. “I didn’t know what was wrong with me, and I was just so scared, like, what happened to my ability? It was just a really scary time.”
Blood tests revealed that Mackelprang was anemic.
She spent the remainder of her senior year rehabbing and working to get her iron level up. And just like in the final dramatic moments of a classic sports movie, the down-on-her-luck athlete overcame.
“It finally came together, like two weeks before the state meet,” she said. “Everything picked up and I ran 10:57 (in the two-mile race) at the state meet, and my whole goal for the season had been to break 11 minutes, and to be able to do that after all the trials that I went through was just amazing.”
Mackelprang took sixth in the state meet, noting with a smile that her time would’ve won her the race two years earlier.
It was a defining moment for Mackelprang, who hails from a long line of Utes. Her dad, a professor at Eastern Washington University, and her mom, a registered nurse, are “hardcore Utes,” according to Mackelprang, who has lived in Washington all her life. She also has two siblings and a grandfather who attended the university. Mackelprang’s family will be making the trek from Spokane to Utah this weekend to watch her compete in the first home meet of her career.
Cross-country coach Kyle Kepler describes Mackelprang as an intelligent runner who is in touch with her body.
Because of Mackelprang’s unique past, which includes getting involved in running later than the norm and her struggle with anemia, he believes that Mackelprang has the most “unknown potential” of any runner he’s coached in nine years.
By the time runners reach the college level, coaches are usually able to predict what their athletes are capable of, but Mackelprang is different, Kepler said.
Her potential may be a mystery, but one thing is clear: Mackelprang is getting faster all the time.
“I was thinking today about the workout I did today,” Mackelprang said, “and thinking how a year ago, that would have been unimaginable for me to do.”