An Interview with Veena Reddy

Veena Reddy, now a Philadelphia-based architect, began training seriously while at Wesleyan University. She quickly found success in the marathon, and has been a steady sub-3:00 performer. Her qualifying time of 2:41:30 was nearly an eight-minute PR.

V.R.: I was a tennis player and my first season in high school; I wasn’t so light on my feet. I was probably about 20 to 25 pounds heavier than I am now. I couldn’t even run a mile.

At Moses Brown, where I went to school, it is a requirement to participate in sports. For the winter season, I couldn’t really swim, couldn’t play basketball, and couldn’t run indoor track. Still, I had to choose one of them and decided to run indoor track, as did the majority of my friends. I was so slow and out of shape that I was benched for every meet initially. One day, I found my window in the two mile – a race nobody wanted to run. I learned to love that race. I learned to run on my own. Living remotely from my school out in Somerset, Mass, and with my best friend at the time living on a farm in Dighton-Rehoboth, we would run and walk to meet one another. I got into the habit of running two miles a day in the summer. And I still remember the sound of the ice cream truck.

V.R.: Unfortunately I have nothing first hand because I never ran cross country. I can only attest that the man is an icon and I’ll never forget those thick black rimmed glasses, his London Fog trench grown and that growl of a voice. My coach at Moses Brown was Ken Castro, a happy-go-lucky guy from New Bedford, Mass., who had me running everything in every meet – 4x400, the two mile, and he’d put me on the shotput.

V.R.: Tennis was my sport. I was very competitive, playing number one singles for MB. I would train at the Nick Bollettieri Academy in Florida, and in their outpost in Amherst. To this day I love tennis. I fell out of it, really, because I was disenfranchised by the Wesleyan tennis program and once I didn’t have the team, I couldn’t organize playing.

B.A.A.: Talk a little bit about your collegiate career at Wesleyan - you took some time off didn’t you?

V.R.: I showed up to run at Wesleyan as a freshman and was completely ignored. The focus was on the short and middle distance runners, so nobody knew that a pretty good distance runner was there. I ran on my own and I didn’t joint he team until my senior year.

I became interested in the marathon after spending a semester in Italy. Three of my peers were going to hop over to Greece to run the marathon there and I thought it was such a cool idea. I was still working out and running to keep in shape and asked my boyfriend at the time to run the Ocean State Marathon with me to celebrate my 21st birthday. He accepted. We went on a 20 mile run which left him with such low blood pressure – he senselessly scoffed down five Dunkin Donuts trying to resuscitate himself.

That summer I did an internship in Washington, D.C. and met a crazy runner on the Capital crescent trail. He was one of those know-it-all runner types and he told me I should join the cross country team. When I got back to school, I showed up with the intention to use the team as a way to train for the marathon. It ended up that I ran pretty well, at least better than a lot of my teammates. I developed terrible IT-band syndrome as I increased my mileage and spent a lot of time with the trainers getting stimulation and icing every day. I was so hell-bent on running that marathon and I did, in all of its painful glory. I then continued to run indoor and outdoor at Wesleyan. It was like going to a whole new University, I had forgotten how much it means to be part of a team and to compete.

V.R.: It’s less about convincing. I just let them think it’s a phase that I am going through. I have been able to stay on my professional trajectory. I never decided to give up architecture to train full time, so it remains a side interest. Ultimately they like it when I am happy and healthy. They don’t like it when I am moody and injured. Otherwise they could take or leave my running life.

B.A.A.: You ran a personal best 2:41:30 at the Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth in 2006 – take us through that race and comment on what it meant to run that time and qualify for the Olympic Trials?

V.R.: This is a way too long answer but its fun to remember it all.

Going into that race I was so emotionally charged to run the marathon distance. It had been a pretty tough year for me. After a race in May, I was injured when a car and I ran into one another. Then shortly after that I was laid off from work. (Architecture is a fickle business.) The next month I developed two stress fractures in my sacrum. I didn’t run until November despite being scheduled to run the Twin Cities Marathon in October. I had registered for the Houston Marathon [and was] just eager to compete as it had been over a year since my last race.

In December, on a morning run, I felt that particular stress fracture again and started crying right then and there. It felt terrible to know my bones weren’t sustaining my passion. By the end of January I was running again and feeling a whole lot better. I was determined to do whatever I could to strengthen my bones, getting into a little bit of physical therapy.

I had registered for Grandma’s, only telling two people of my intentions to run the race. I just wanted to see if I could run 2:47 because my personal record to that point had been 2:49. A week before the race I bought my ticket to Minnesota and arranged to stay with a host. She was a lovely woman and since I had no one there with me, she took it upon herself to be my family and support. We talked all night, made dinner together and I let it slip that if I ran well, I would treat myself to a cold beer and a big slice of carrot cake.

The weather was hazy but it wasn’t raining. I had grown my hair long and had one hair elastic with me. I somehow lost it in between the shower and racing to get on the shuttle to the start. The host I was staying with knew of my hair dilemma, found the hair band, and raced to the start to give it to me.

So the race began and I went out trying to stick at a 6:25 pace, but I just couldn’t stick to it. I had so much energy and was so excited that I started ignoring my splits. At around mile 20 I got a sense of where I was and it looked good, but I needed to take a pit stop terribly. I had no choice and thank goodness it wasn’t a city marathon.

When I bolted back into the race I somehow thought I was really behind, I surged some, thinking I needed to in order to make my time. I remember coming into the finish in shock, seeing the clock at 2:41:30. I raised my arms in the air and smiled. Nobody was there to greet me, but I didn’t mind. I was so proud of myself and ran in to find my cell phone so I could call my boyfriend.

My host had found me. She wanted to go get her car which was parked pretty far away. I watched the race from a curb in a patch of sun and cheered. My flight wouldn’t enable me to go to the awards ceremony in the late afternoon. I was just going to go back to the house, relax for a bit and head off to the airport. When I got back to the house, my host presented me with an entire homemade carrot cake. She had made it from scratch when I had left that morning. There were cold beers in the freezer. She had packed a picnic basket and we drove over to the lake, drank beers and ate fruit and cake.

B.A.A.: Can you describe your feelings and emotions that come with competing in an Olympic Trials? What does the accomplishment mean to you?

V.R.: Anything associated with the Olympics means high caliber. I am so proud to be associated with those athletes that will go to the Olympic Games. Emotions right now are few. All I feel is "I gotta get ready!" I am so excited that I am able to train at my peak now with the race right around the corner.

B.A.A.: Talk a little bit about your previous Boston Marathon experiences - and what it means to have the Olympic Trials so close to home.

V.R.: I've run Boston three times and each experience has been totally different. The first would be the best, my running partner Elizabeth and I hopped on a train to Boston, slept on some friend’s floor and got on the yellow school buses to Hopkinton. I hadn’t told anyone local that I was running and I was in the corrals with everyone. It was my first big marathon and I was blown away by the crowds. 

The second was the first time I’ve ever hit the wall and had to walk. My family and friends were there and I felt that I let them down. My running and sleep patterns were even worse than they had been with the increased pressures of my final year in my Masters program and I didn’t take that into account when I set a pace goal for myself.

The last was the monsoon [in 2007] and it was an honor to be at the front of one of the oldest and greatest marathons in the world. Sure, I didn’t stay there, but I had a good run considering the conditions, and I learned what it felt like to race a marathon trying to stay with the chase pack – then having to fall off at mile 13 and find my own motivation.

I know Boston’s energy and the Trials will be thrilling. I know those crowds, my family and friends, won’t let me give up.

B.A.A.: How has your training evolved over the years, since you first took up the sport?

V.R.: In my early days I averaged about three hours of sleep a night drinking a lot of Mountain Dew and sustaining myself on York’s Peppermint Patties and other forms of refined sugar. On weekends, the focus was not running. Very little racing or long runs, it was mostly studio work and going out quite a bit.

I’d on occasion try and do something on the track but most of the time it was just running as hard as I could for as long as I could on days my running partner Elizabeth or my friend Ian and I felt like pushing. In 2005, after running the New York City Marathon, I got more structured and began working a lot harder. I began racing more distances in order to get workouts for the marathon. I began doing many more long-long runs, with tempo portions, and I started hanging out a lot more with my running enthusiast friend, now husband Bart.

I have been high mileage for a long time and I have learned to cut back on mileage certain weeks to do harder workouts, or to heaven forbid…rest. I tend to do some of the extra things more – stretching, core exercises, watching what I eat and sleeping.

B.A.A.: Do you have any goals or expectations for the Olympic Trials that you're willing to share?

V.R.: My goal is to run a personal best and place in the top 25. I am working really hard to make this happen, but I don’t feel pressure. I just want to run with guts.

B.A.A.: What are your goals for the 2008 season, beyond the Olympic Trials?

V.R.: I’d like to do some ultra distances with my husband Bart. We’d like to run across Rhode Island, where I’m from, and Holland, where he’s from.

V.R.: Running is the perfect compliment to my career. I began running a lot again after my first semester in grad school, when I hardly made any time to do anything good for me. My work was everything to me and I would hardly venture out of the studio.

When I began to cry whenever my work was criticized and I felt out of control with my sleeping and eating patterns, I decided I needed to get back out there. I began to run again and through running, I met my best friend Elizabeth. We explored the entire city together while getting fit and confident. We would meet twice a day to run early in the morning then again when she got out of her classes, which served as a studio break for me. I would not have been the runner, or the person I am without her. Her field is psychology/social work and during the course of our runs, we would work out so many difficult issues and vent. Since then, in order to be effective and successful, I must run, sometimes more competitively than others. Having immediate running goals along with long term career goals keeps me fulfilled.

B.A.A.: Tell us a bit more about your work - so far as we can tell, you're the only architect in the Olympic Trials field.

V.R.: I have been involved and interested in architecture since high school. I love the field and I am lucky to have found a career that keeps me stimulated. I never have a day at work that is identical to another. Projects are so multifaceted, so complex, and good design cannot happen unless you are consistently gathering knowledge and solving problems.

B.A.A.: What is something interesting that the running community may not know about you?

V.R.: My mother has never run a mile, let alone half a mile, in her life. I think that is amazing considering I have probably run 50,000. My dad has probably run a total of 50. Running does not run in the family.

V.R.: Simple things. I ride my bike to meet friends in good weather. I go bowling, play Scrabble, make fancy meals for friends, and go out dancing. I love pubs, a nice cold draft in a lively atmosphere with a friend or two is the best.