2005 USA INDOOR TRACK & FIELD CHAMPIONSHIPS
Interview with Shayne Culpepper
Reported by Parker Morse

Shayne Culpepper. (Photo by Alison Wade/New York Road Runners)

2004 U.S. Olympic Trials 5,000m winner Shayne Culpepper won the USA Indoor 3,000m Championship in Boston last month over Amy Rudolph and Lauren Fleshman, using a strong surge with 300m remaining to take a lead she would not relinquish. Staying close to the front of the race, Culpepper ran kilometers of 3:03, 2:59 and 2:53 on her way to an 8:55 finish. Two weeks earlier, Culpepper finished second in the 4K race at the USA Cross Country Championships, a race she had won in 2003.

On her overall feeling about the Boston race:
It felt really good. My training has been going better than ever. I ran the cross country championships two weeks ago, and felt really horrid there. So I felt a little nervous coming into this race, even though my training has been going so well. It's very reassuring for me to get out there and feel so well.

On the field of five, including herself:
It was a very good field. It was small, but that's how I like it. A strong but small field, so there's less room for elbows, tripping, and all that. It was a good field.

On how the race developed:
It started kind of slow, then there were some moves in there. Usually my race tactic is to wait until the last possible moment to kick. I decided to go a little bit sooner this time, just to test that out and see where I was. [It was] about 300 to go. For me, that's starting my kick really early.

On her next race, the World Cross Country Championships:
We've got a really strong 4K team, and I'm optimistic that we can make the podium this year.

On her husband, Olympic marathoner Alan, running the Boston Marathon in April:
He's in great shape. He's been out here training on the course, and having a really good time. John Hancock and the B.A.A. have been taking care of us, and we're really excited about the entire event. His fitness is excellent.

On Boston's snowy conditions:
It wasn't too bad. We're from Colorado, so we're used to working around it.

On her Athens experience:
As a team, we really did well. It was cool to be on such a young team, and see new faces. Everyone's very optimistic about the sport, as we keep going in a direction where you can see amazing performances which are also clean.

On what changed between the 'horrid' cross country race and the winning indoor track race:
I tapered. Going in to cross, I chose not to taper at all, because my training had been going so well. I was probably overconfident going in [thinking] that I didn't need to do my normal rest, that I normally do before an event. I did a session the Thursday before the race [which was on Sunday], that was definitely too hard. I just wasn't able to go to the well. So I definitely did my normal taper for this race, just to kind of check it and make sure my training was going in the right direction.

On the length of the taper:
Just about a week. I really struggled so much at cross that I couldn't walk down stairs for two days after that race. I didn't do a workout for over a week. It was my second cross country race in about two years, and I hadn't been doing a ton of training on that type of surface, and it really threw me for a loop. I'm not saying that if I'd tapered, that by any means the outcome would have been different, but I think maybe the recovery would have been different.

On training between Indoor Nationals and the World Cross meet:
I hope to get a quality workout about 10 days out. More than my aerobic system fitness, I hope to get some nervous system fitness in on surfaces that are more like cross country.

On the time [four weeks] between World Cross and the Boston Marathon:
Is that it? It will be good, because [Alan] will be tapering, and I'll have a good training block in there that will be pretty tough. It's good when we're racing at different times, because one of us is down and one of us is training hard.

(Interview conducted February 26, 2005, and posted March 10, 2005.)