Saunders returns to Hill City

LYNCHBURG — Since graduating from Jefferson Forest High School in 2002 and James Madison University in 2006, where she starred in cross country and indoor and outdoor track and field, Shannon Saunders has continued to make strides in the sport.

On Saturday, she will return to her old stomping grounds when she enters the 36th annual Virginia Ten Miler, starting at 8 a.m. outside E.C. Glass High School.

“I used to run in that area when I was training in high school,” Saunders said. “It is coming home for me because all my family lives in Lynchburg — my parents and my grandparents.”

Lately, she’s been leaving her tracks in Charlottesville, where she has lived for the past year after earning her master’s degree in counseling at JMU.

“I’m part of a team called Ragged Mountain Racing, a post-collegiate racing team made up of people like me who were pretty successful in college and didn’t want to stop running,” said Saunders, 25, now a counselor for kids at Charlottesville’s Children, Youth and Family Services.

She trains under Ragged Mountain Racing coach Dana Coons Thiele, a two-time U.S. Olympic Trials qualifier in the marathon, and has tentatively targeted a 2012 Olympic bid in that event.

Saunders ran her first marathon, the Shamrock in Virginia Beach, in March of 2008 and is training for her second, the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C., in October.

It will be Saunders’ third time running in the Virginia Ten Miler. Last fall, she was the first woman to reach the five-mile turnaround in Riverside Park before eventually finishing runner-up to Joan Benoit Samuelson, the event’s guest of honor, with an impressive time of 1 hour, 3 minutes, 1 second.

“I tried,” Saunders said of holding off the former Olympic gold medal marathoner. “We were pretty much right together going into the park.”

She was a precocious 14-year-old freshman at Jefferson Forest when she ran her first Ten Miler in 1998, in the midst of her first cross country season with the Cavaliers. She went on to lead JF to back-to-back Group AA state championships, while winning consecutive individual crowns, in 2000 and 2001. For her high school career, she captured a total of seven state titles in cross country and indoor and outdoor track.

At JMU, she qualified for the NCAA cross country championships twice and set the school record in the outdoor 10,000-meter run at 33:54.

And though she wants to be an Olympic marathoner, she likes the length of the Ten Miler.

“I enjoy the 10-mile distance,” Saunders said. “It’s not super short where I have to run really fast, and not so long that I’m going to be torn apart when it’s over.”

Saunders won the Charlottesville Ten Miler in early April in 1:01:29 and finished first in three of this summer’s Lynchburg Road Runners’ race series events — the Presbyterian Homes 5K in June, the Percival’s Island 5 Miler in July and the Lynchburg Half-Marathon in August — to rank her in the top three in points.

She may not be in peak form for Saturday’s final event, which counts double in points toward the series’ total, as her body is broken down after running 100 miles last week and between 80 and 90 more this week.

“I’m not totally rested up for this race because I’ve been training for the marathon so my mileage is really high,” Saunders said. “It’s harder training, a lot more tiring. That’s part of what marathon training is. A marathon’s a long way.”

Still, she’s hoping to do well, especially in front of her hometown fans.

She will have a sort of home-course advantage.

“My whole career, I’ve been telling people I’m from the Hill City,” Saunders said. “The hills are never a problem for me (because) I always had to deal with them in racing and training. I do feel comfortable racing on hills in Lynchburg, and comfortable running on that course.”