A Visit From Vicky Huber Rudawsky

ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS ABOUT WORKING at Runner's World is that you often get visits from old friends. Vicki Huber Rudawsky dropped by a couple of weeks ago. In case you've forgotten, the former Villanova runner made two USA Olympic teams (1988 and 1996), with best times of 4:07.40 and 8:37.25. She also was twice featured on the cover of RW. And when I welcomed her into the building where I work, my first thought was that she looks almost exactly the same as when I last saw her more than a decade ago--as youthful as ever, with a lean, muscular body, big eyes and a ready smile. She said she still runs 30 miles a week, still loves to kick up the pace on a track once a week, and has been under 17:00 for 5K a couple of times in recent years.

Vicki was visiting to tell me and several other staffers about a stability shoe named the Massage Barefoot Technology, MBT. It's not a running shoe, though some people apparently do run in it. It's more of an orthopedic and balancing/strengthening shoe. It seems to gently nudge you onto your forefeet rather than allowing you to slouch back on your heels. I've been wearing a pair every other day or so, getting used to the feel, trying to fight my natural, bad-posture inclinations.

But we talked about lots more than shoes and posture, something that's important around the household, given that Vicki's husband Rudy is a PT who has worked with the USA national soccer team, and she has become a massage therapist who enjoys treating runners and triathletes. "People want to go to someone who understands the pain they're feeling," she notes. Vicki and Rudy have two children, Alyssa, 12, and Christian, 7, and live near Wilmington, DE, where she grew up.

I asked Vicki about her first Olympic Trials in 1988, when, just turned 21, she finished second to Mary Slaney. "You have to have work hard to make it to the Olympics," she said, "but you also need a fair amount of luck. That year everything just seemed to go right for me. I was racing and setting PRs almost every week. I was so relaxed at the Trials. I just tried to treat it like any other meet. It just seemed like the next logical step in my running that I would go to the Olympics."

The Olympics competition in Seoul, for some reason, was the exact opposite. Vicki just about panicked on the starting line, felt like she wanted to sprint outside the stadium. "Luckily the gun started the race, and I had no choice but to begin running," she says. After five slowish laps, she found herself taking the lead with 800 meters to go. "I remember thinking, 'What are you doing up here?'," she recalls. "But I was a rhythm runner, and my rhythm took me to the front. A lap later, five other women sprinted around me. That last lap was a huge struggle. I was just exhausted." She held on for sixth.

"The experience in Seoul was just fantastic, almost surreal," she says. "It's hard to describe to someone who wasn't there. But what I took away, what I tell people all the time, is that the Olympic creed states that the important thing is to take part, and I found that to be really, really true.

Vicki turns 40 on May 29. She's taken a look at the masters running records, and found them "very lofty." She'd like to find a fast 5K sometime shortly after her 40th birthday. If she does, she'll probably aim for a 16:30. But she won't go any further with it. "I love running so much, I'm afraid that if I got competitive again, I'd lose some of the enjoyment," she says. "Besides, I don't want to take the time away from my family. They're the most important thing now."


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