Katie Burnett - USA Track and Field
In junior high school, I did track and field, and I loved it so much I decided to do club track in the summer, and a girl on my club track team happened to do the race walk. I was trying every event I could to see what I was good at. I raced in the Junior Olympics then made it to regionals and then to Nationals my first year, so I thought, “Maybe I'll do this again.”
While at William Penn University in Iowa, I went to a clinic with Tim Seaman, he's a two-time Olympian in the race walk. He asked, “Why aren't you winning NAIA nationals?” With my technique, my talent, my speed, he felt I should be doing a lot better. And so he helped guide me to doing some longer distance stuff and started talking to me about doing a 20K. He started coaching me, working with me, and he was the first person to say that maybe I could make it to the Olympic Trials. He believed in me, and that meant a lot to me.
I started out my career at the University of Arizona. It is a really big school, and my first semester there went really well. I started making some friends, but I didn't really fit in with the other athletes on the track team. I didn't like to party, and I was an engineering major so I was kind of a nerd. And they were just being normal athletes, making fun of each other, but I was still really immature, and I couldn't handle them very well. And I was just not having a good time. The group of friends I had outside of track was not a good influence group – they didn't understand that I had to go to practice and I had to keep up on my schoolwork and I had all these obligations and they just wanted to play video games and not do anything all day. One of my best friends from high school had gotten a soccer scholarship at William Penn, and she was having a great time. There were like 1,200 students; it was smaller than my high school. So I went out there, and I really liked it. The people there were really friendly, and the professors were really nice. So I transferred there for the spring semester in January – I went to Iowa from Arizona, which is quite a temperature shock. But I did really enjoy it out there, I loved the smaller school, smaller classes, it was a good decision for me.
My last year of college, I started thinking, “Okay, if I could do everything I could to be a better athlete, what would I do?” I wasn't always good about my core work or strength training, getting enough rest, or eating enough food. So I started to look at the different things I could do each day, and I started making myself accountable for each day. Am I doing the training my coach gave me and am I doing the other things that could make me a good athlete? I had this little placard I put on top of my training schedule, and it said, “Have you done everything you can today to prepare for London 2012?” Now at this point, making the Olympics in London was almost definitely not going to happen, but it was just that idea of if I were to try and make this big goal, what can I do to help myself get there? That year, in the UK, I got fifth at nationals and it was like a huge, huge thing for me. That was in 2011. So then the next year was a 2012 Olympics. The Olympic Trials there didn't go very well for me – I had a lot of a lot of setbacks that year. But then I got another improvement the next year and I’ve just been trying to build on that every year since.
I've always had a lot of anxiety, and racewalking gives me control over a lot because I can focus on my form and I can focus on my times. When I'm doing well, that helps me calm down a lot. It gives me something positive; I can reach for goals and achieve them. I have so many friends because of racewalking. And it's our own little special group, and it gives something to identify with. It's more than just the athletics, you know, it's my life.
I think part of why I had anxiety was because of the way that I grew up, my family wasn't always together; things weren't always very good. I went to 12 schools by the time I graduated high school. That community, as part of the race walking, feeling like they're kind of a second family to me helped me feel okay in going back to try and mend the relationships with my family. You can't change the past, but you can affect your future. And I didn't, you know, I don't want to lose people who I have kept in my life so far.
No U.S. woman has ever medaled in the race walk. When I made my dream goals with coach Tim Seaman back in 2009, that was one of the ones I put. I still don't know if it's possible but you know, if I'm gonna dream, I might as well dream big.
It's good to keep those far-off dreams but you need to have achievable goals. Don't expect that you’re going to win all these races or always get a personal best. Focus on the things you can affect right now. The dreams you have, you can get closer to them if you work on these small, short-term goals. I don't win every race, but I still need to feel like I'm successful because there's only one winner of every race, unless you look at these little things you can improve and you can find success in your own personal achievements.
