Kat Taylor: Injured Captain Gains Through Pains

Senior year should be the pinnacle for a college athlete, but for fleet-footed Kat Taylor, the final leg of her track career has been a frustrating series of injuries.

A talented two-miler and the co-captain of this year's women's team, Taylor joined the Harvard program as a freshman; and 1976 was a rookie year both for her and the current women's track coach, Pappy Hunt.

Since then, though, Taylor has become someone who Hunt calls instrumental in helping to build a solid women's running program here. "Kat's been one of the biggest boosters of our program since she was a freshman, talking to people and hosting recruits," Hunt said this week.

But the San Mako, Calif., native, who has earned three varsity letters in both track and cross country, has had to do most of her boosting from the sidelines this year. She's had a game leg since last summer, when she pulled a hamstring while training with Frank Horwill and his British Milers Club in England, where Taylor spent the summer.

That injury kept her off the cross country courses most of last fall. Then, thinking she finally had been cured of her injury, Taylor began the indoor season last December and clocked an 11:24 in the two-mile, renewing hope that she finally might reach her goal of breaking 11 minutes.

The December race would turn out to be the last she'd run in more than four months. Returning to practice after winter break, she frayed her Achilles tendon while running along the Charles. "I'm injury-prone to a ridiculous degree," Taylor said this week while sipping coffee in the Eliot House dining hall. And though Taylor is now running again, preparing for next week's Ivy Championships at Princeton, the trek back to the track has not been an easy one.

Trying to mend her wounds and to stay in shape for the spring outdoor season, Taylor took up swimming and bicycling this past winter. But, though this Kat can swim, she doesn't enjoy it much.

"It's tremendously frustrating for a distance runner not to be able to spend a lot of time running," John Babington, assistant women's track coach, said Wednesday.

Yet Taylor insists that her injury has not left her disappointed, but rather it has given her a different perspective on her sport and has made her a more effective captain.

"In one way this injury has been a blessing in disguise," the American History major said. "One thing I've learned is patience; and now I get more excited about other people's performances, because I'm not so worried about my own."

Having grown up on the West Coast, Kat never had run track before coming to Harvard. She recalls that she had intended to take up crew as a freshman, calling it "such an East Coast thing to do." But, she remembers, "I went to the athletic meeting, and there were about five girls standing around this old guy telling jokes." It turned out to be Pappy.

"Pappy's had more influence on me than just about anyone else at Harvard," Taylor explains. "He's the type of coach that will take you out to Charlie's because he knows it will boost your morale. He keeps it all in perspective and understands how Harvard students are always being pulled in about 16 directions."

As Taylor enters the final weeks of her collegiate track career, she's not certain about future athletic plans. She says she hopes to keep running "as long as I physically can," but adds, "I've learned that if running isn't a positive experience, it shouldn't be anything at all."

Taylor thinks she'll probably give up organized running and spend more time with other sports, including her first love, horse-back riding. She also plans to spend next year working on a farm in Australia, before returning to apply either for a Rhodes Scholarship or for law school admission.

Regardless of what she decides to do, she says her experience in the women's track program will remain her most significant memory of Harvard.

"I think I'll probably remember that more than anything else here," she says. "I came here for the education, and that's what I'll leave with. But running has been a kind of barometer for my education."

Running, and not-running, that is.