MOST OF US have done the mundane routine of running the mile in middle-school gym class.
It was the introduction to distance running (for 12-year-olds, 1 mile is distance running) for Massachusetts native Sean Quigley. After the run, he quickly looked up the world record for that distance.
"When I saw it, it boggled my mind," he said.
Now in his senior season of track and field at La Salle, it's Quigley who has been boggling other people's minds with his success in the sport.
Beginning on June 27 in Eugene, Ore., Quigley will compete in both the 10,000- and 5,000-meter races at the Olympic Track and Field Trials for a chance to run at this summer's Olympics in Beijing.
Before then, Quigley will run the 5K race in the NCAA East Regional Meet on Friday at Florida State to qualify for the NCAA Championships, June 11-14 at Drake in Des Moines, Iowa. Quigley already has qualified for the 10K, in which he placed fourth last season.
For Quigley, who grew up in Braintree, Mass., this whole running thing didn't become an obsession until a few years after that first mile run.
"My freshman year in high school is when I started running on the cross country team [at Archbishop Williams]," he said. "I wasn't super into it at that time. But I knew I had an ability for distance running. I thought I could be really good at it. At that time I was playing other sports. I felt like I was pretty good at those sports. But running, I knew, was going to be my best sport."
It didn't take long for him to start dominating.
"The first cross country meet I had as a freshman, I came in like fifth or something," he said. "It was early in the fall, so it was pretty hot and I felt like crap. Then my next race I won. It wasn't saying much, because our league was pretty crappy back then. My time was probably like 19 [minutes]-something. But I improved as the year went on.
"I also played hockey my freshman year, but I quit that the fall of sophomore year and just focused on running. Sophomore year I became real serious about it. I mean, I was serious during races all along, but I didn't really know how to train at that point. I didn't know what you had to put into it to be really great. I started to realize it's a lot of hard work."
As Quigley's wins piled up and his times spiraled down, colleges took notice. La Salle coach Charles Torpey liked what he saw when he recruited Quigley.
