Following her final workout at the University of Cincinnati before she embarked on her trip to Europe and, eventually, the Olympics in Beijing, Mary Wineberg sat in an ice bath and talked about her career-defining journey.
As she discussed what had to be one of her best moments in track and field, she clenched and unclenched her fists. She appeared to be in pain – or, at the very least, uncomfortable from the chilled water that cooled her body.
Better this discomfort, though, then the flip side. If, for example, she hadn’t held off two competitors late in the 400 meters to grab second place at the Olympic Trials earlier last month and instead had finished fourth, she probably wouldn’t be in the ice bath today preparing for an athlete’s biggest dream.
She wouldn’t be going to the Olympics, and that wouldn’t be painful. That would be soul-breaking.
Allow Wineberg’s husband and training partner, Chris Wineberg, to walk you through his emotions that night in Eugene, Ore., as his wife’s form went to hell in the final eighth of the race and she struggled to keep her place on the U.S. team.
“Complete horror,” said Chris Wineberg, who’s also an assistant for the University of Cincinnati track team. “I can’t even describe the nervousness and the fear of that last 50 meters. My best analogy was if you’re walking down the street and you turn down a dark alley, and all of a sudden, someone steps out of the shadows and pulls a knife or a gun. You’re in complete fear of your life. Then, all of a sudden, they rip their mask off and it’s your long-lost buddy, and he’s like, ‘Psyche.’ That’s what I went through.”
Mary Wineberg, in the meantime, was giving herself the most important pep talk of her life. Get to the finish line, Mary, she told herself. Get to the line. You’re going to make this team. Get to the damn line.
For Wineberg to find herself in this position – we’re talking about making her first Olympic team at the not-so-youthful age of 28 – it’s almost hard to fathom. Especially for the Winebergs themselves.
“I don’t think we ever expected her to reach this level,” Chris Wineberg said. “We knew she could be doing better than what she was doing, but I don’t think we saw her running as a true way to make a living and being big-time and running in all of these European meets and going to the Olympics. We’re as surprised as anybody else to hear that someone who wasn’t that good in high school and wasn’t a star in college is now at the world-class level.”
Mary Wineberg has had to learn how to be a world-class athlete. Before her 2007 breakout season, she didn’t know how, because before 2007, she wasn’t running in European meets. She wasn’t running world-class times. She was teaching special needs children full-time at St. Joseph’s Orphanage and then training during her spare moments.
This is not how an elite runner acts.
But how would she know? At Walnut Hills High School, she had an unremarkable track career. At UC, she was better, but she never won a conference title, never made the NCAA championships, never took a trip to the junior nationals meet.
If you don’t experience that level of competition, you don’t know how to act once you finally reach it.
“For some people, it comes naturally,” Mary Wineberg said. “A lot of the competitors I race against, they were really good high school and college-caliber athletes. Some of them went pro right out of high school. For me, I had the opposite. I had to learn how to be a better athlete and work harder and figure out my race strategy so I could hang with my competitors. I learned how to do that.”
She ran in the 2004 Olympic Trials but didn’t make the finals – she seriously thought about washing her hands of track and field for good after she returned to Cincinnati – and in 2005 she was running in the 53-second range (consider that she turned in a personal-best time of 50.24 in last year’s national meet).
But her career changed last season.
At the U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis, facing a star-studded lineup that included Sanya Richards, Natasha Hastings and Dee Dee Trotter, Wineberg ran the race of her life and beat Richards to make the U.S. World team.
“Mary has come a long way,” Trotter said after the race. “She’s a very good competitor.”
She proved it at the worlds in Osaka, Japan, winning a gold medal with her 4-by-400 meter relay team and finished eighth in the open 400. Life was not the same after that meet.
“It was different,” Wineberg said. “People actually knew who Mary Wineberg is. I think people realized I’m not the same runner as I was three or four years ago when I was average. Mentally and physically, I was stronger. I was not afraid to be running against my competitors. I saw myself as one of the best runners in the world. It was really an interesting year. It opened my eyes to so many different things.”
Her eyes likely will grow even wider in August when she competes at the Olympics. As Chris Wineberg will attest, it almost didn’t happen. Though her usual race strategy is to start quickly, maintain her speed for the second 200 meters, and as she rounds the final curve, begin her finishing kick and sprint the last 100 as she passes her competitors.
But in this case, she sped up too soon, and by the time she made the last turn, she and Sanya Richards were even. That’s why Wineberg struggled to keep pace in the last 50 meters.
“When I crossed the line on that night, it was kind of unbelievable and I was in shock,” Wineberg said. “But I’ve trained for four long years. I’ve had some ups and some downs. I knew going into this year that my times proved I could do it. I just had to believe in myself. Even though I ran the wrong race, I was still able to make the team.”
And as painful as her journey has been to this point – or how many times she’s had those fist-clenching moments – that’s the only thing that matters to Cincinnati’s newest, and perhaps unlikeliest, Olympian.
Josh Katzowitz is a freelance writer living in Cincinnati. He previously worked at the Cincinnati Post and is writing a book on University of Cincinnati football.
Photography provided by Chris and Mary Wineberg