Laura Thweatt’s Olympic dream hit a speed bump this week, not a dead end.
The 2007 Durango High School graduate finished fifth in the 10,000-meter run at the USA Track & Field Olympic Team Trials on July 2nd in Eugene, Oregon at the famed Hayward Field. Only the top-three advanced to the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. With nothing to lose, Thweatt decided to try her luck in the 5,000-meter run Thursday.
After leading her heat through 3,800 meters, Thweatt dropped to third with two laps to go. The rest of the field picked up the pace, but Thweatt had nothing left and fell to eighth in her heat and missed out on advancing to Sunday’s final by two positions.
“It definitely is disappointing for me to have things kind of fall as they did,” Thweatt said Friday in a phone interview with The Durango Herald. “When you’re working toward something for four years – especially the last seven months – and everything you do goes into it and then it doesn’t play out the way you think it should, it’s just hard.
“It’s time to get back to work and see how the next four years play out.”
It was the 27-year-old’s first trip to the Olympic trials. She competed at the University of Colorado after graduating from Durango High School and had a tough time in her previous trip to Hayward Field. Eugene is known as “TrackTown USA,” but it hasn’t been Thweatt’s town.
“It’s great to be here and be part of it and see what the next level is all about,” Thweatt said. “For whatever reason, Hayward is a tough place for me. It has so much history, and you feel the magnitude of what it’s like to be on that track in that stadium. No other place has the atmopshere Eugene has, but I let it get to me a little too much.”
Thweatt said it was an amazing week regardless of results, but she said she will be kicking herself for her performance. She didn’t execute her race plan in the 5K but was tired coming off the 10K. She got out front too early and then tried to push the pace to thin the field with five laps to go, and she had nothing left when the other runners made their move in the final three.
“It falls on me. I didn’t execute the right race,” she said. “I paid early, so when it was time to go I had already used what I had. It’s frustating looking back on how I ran it. ‘What were you doing out there? What was going through your head?’”
Thweatt had convinced herself she wouldn’t have to run the 5K and was solely focused on the 10K. That was the event she had poured everything into.
“I saw myself making that team, knew I could make the team,” she said, “but execution errors happened in that race, as well. I used everything emotionally and physically in the 10K, and that played into my execution errors in the 5K.”
At only 27, Thweatt knows her running career is only getting started. Distance runners don’t hit their peak until their 30s, and Thweatt knows she can push further.
She finished as the top-American woman at the New York City Marathon earlier this year and was seventh overall. The 26.2-mile distance very well could be Thweatt’s future.
“I think the marathon is going to be where I’m going to be my strongest as I continue to progress with my career,” she said. “I see myself as a marathoner moving forward. I’ve only done one, so I have a lot to learn. It’s a distance to be respected, but I think that will be it for me in four years. I’ll put everything into it.”
Thweatt is anxious to get back to her new hometown of Boulder and her community of supporters. She will take the lessons she had to learn in such a hard way and apply it to her coaching at Monarch High School and with her team at the Boulder Track Club. She won’t compete again this year but plans to stay in shape on the track and on trails.
“There are so many lessons I still have to learn myself,” she said. “I coach my kids a lot about execution and race strategies, and those are things I did wrong this week. I can use that experience for my own running and in my coaching to help hem through those things. I learned a lot of lessons.”
jlivingston@duranogherald.com
