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.