John Blanchette: Shared passions

The race is one lap and 10 hurdles, and the first time Haley Heater tried it she was nervous and scared to the point of tears, finished dead last and was embarrassed about a hundred different ways.

And the first person to meet her beyond the finish line was Alex Moon, who faced a delicate choice.

Himself a hurdler, he could be the brutally frank critic of track’s most technically demanding race. Or he could shoot for the Boyfriend Hall of Fame.

“He was all enthusiastic and said, ‘Good race,’ and he was probably lying through his teeth,” Heater remembered. “But that’s OK. A good lie was just what I needed.”

Hey, what’s secret of a good relationship anyway if it’s not anticipating needs?

Oh, right. Sharing each other’s interests.

Well, Heater and Moon have that covered, too – possibly to the extreme. Seniors at Eastern Washington University, they’ve been track teammates for five years and together for three, and they now specialize in the same race, the 400-meter hurdles. In fact, each has the best time in the Big Sky Conference this spring

“It’s crazy,” Moon acknowledged. “Pretty much all we talk about is track. It’s amazing to me to find somebody that shares the passion as much as I do.”

In fact, each took a redshirt year in 2005 to postpone their senior seasons so as to be able to run at home when Eastern hosts the Big Sky championships this weekend at Woodward Field.

A number of their teammates did the same thing, the motivation mostly to put the Eagles in a position for their best-ever finishes in the meet – which to this point has been third for the men (three times) and sixth of women (six times). And the rare opportunity to solicit some local support doesn’t hurt.

“It sort of drives me nuts,” said Moon, a Shadle Park High School graduate. “In high school, you’re used to all this support – your friends can come after school and your parents can leave from work. Then you get to college and you’re gone every weekend. It stinks.”

Of course, there’s a flipside.

“Pressure to win,” he said.

Maybe it’ll help that they already have. Moon won the Big Sky 400 hurdles back in 2003, and Heater won the Big Sky indoor 400 meters the next year.

This spring, Moon has run the intermediates in 52.55 seconds – about a second off his lifetime best – despite trouble with both hamstrings, with his closest Big Sky pursuer being former Eastern teammate Jacob Foyston of Northern Arizona (52.67). Heater, meanwhile, has lowered her best to 1:00.69, a mark that’s qualified her for the NCAA West Regional.

Not that they got there the same way.

Moon has hurdled since the seventh grade – he was state runner-up in the 300 intermediates to Foyston in 2001. But Heater was strictly a sprinter at at Eisenhower High School in Yakima, and didn’t so much as look at a hurdle until EWU assistant Renee Scott casually asked her to jump over one sophomore year.

“Just before outdoor season, she pulled me into her office and said, ‘Haley, you start hurdles on Monday,’ ” Heater recalled. “My jaw dropped.”

So did her self-esteem. Heater was doing fine running the 200, 400 and both relays, and a cross country background had given her the endurance to tackle the long hurdles. But the 30-inch obstacles in her way may as well have been 30 stories high, and never mind this business of plotting the same number of strides between them.

After that terrifying first race, she told herself, “I’m never doing this again – this is humiliating.

“It’s hard on you mentally to be thrown in against people who have been doing this for years – girls with good form compared to me, who looked like a helicopter going over the hurdles.”

But the upside in taking up a new challenge is seeing quicker and more dramatic improvement than is possible in the events you’ve been running for years. Heater didn’t run the hurdles at the Big Sky meet that year, but she was the runner-up in 2004.

For Moon, the fitful progress can be frustrating. He’s been to regionals twice and in 2004 missed qualifying for the finals by two one-thousandths of a second. He’s rangy enough to take 13 strides between barriers, but hasn’t tackled it – unable to overcome the mental hurdle “of not knowing if I could hit a hurdle full speed and keep it together.

“If I had another six or seven years,” he joked, “I’d probably be pretty good.”

But now there’s no guarantee he’s the best hurdler in his relationship.

“He’s a competive guy – I can’t lie,” Heater teased. “He’s the best support I have, but once I started getting good at it, it was ‘Oh-oh.’ “

Really?

“Sometimes,” he smiled, “it’s nice when we aren’t doing the same event.”