Lights, Camera, Back In Action

Shannon Rowbury Returns To The Track, With Eyes On Championships And Movies

DURHAM, N.C. - Shannon Rowbury hasn't filled out her January calendar yet, but she knows where she will be on the second weekend of the new year. Duke's indoor track season opens Jan. 12-13 at Virginia Tech and Rowbury plans to be on the starting line for her first appearance in a Duke uniform in over a year.

Rowbury ranks as one of the top middle distance runners in school history, with four All-America citations and a handful of ACC championships and school records to her credit. Her last race for Duke came in the fall of 2005 at the NCAA cross country championship, where the Blue Devils placed third after spending the entire season ranked No. 1 in the country.

Rowbury then missed the 2006 track season, indoor and outdoor, where she almost certainly would have added to her collection of titles and honors as one of the top track performers in the country. She wasn't injured or suffering from any personal tragedy; the absence was entirely self-imposed, a calculated move to redshirt and return for a fifth track season this spring. With the 2008 Olympics a year away, Rowbury and Duke coach Kevin Jermyn perceived a competitive advantage for the Blue Devil star in using the upcoming 2007 campaign as a springboard toward the U.S. Trials.

Rowbury remained in school and still trained and competed last spring, just not for Duke. She entered meets all across the country as an unattached participant, along with a couple of teammates who also were redshirting. By all accounts she was in peak form. At the annual USA Track & Field national championships in Indianapolis last summer, the unattached Blue Devil turned in a time of 4:12 in the 1,500 meters to place sixth, just two seconds behind the national champion. Had she been wearing her Duke uniform, that time would have broken her school record of 4:14.81 set the previous year.

Now it is time to get back on the track for Duke, and Rowbury can't wait. Talking about the months ahead, her eyes and smile widened in anticipation. She very clearly is one of those athletes who loves her university and cherishes the opportunity to represent it in competition. Winning a national title at the NCAA indoor or outdoor meet would be the perfect capper to her five years in Durham, and that is a distinct possibility. During her junior year she finished as the runnerup in the mile at the NCAA indoor meet, and she is a much better competitor now.

"Last spring and summer I got to race in a bunch of professional meets, which was neat," Rowbury said. "I enjoyed the experience of getting my butt kicked, getting pushed, and trying to rise to the next level. There are a lot of great athletes in college, but when you get outside of college there are even more at the next level. It was good to be exposed to that. I think it made me that much tougher. I did lots of races against really good people and did well.

"In training for the Olympic Trials, having this fifth year is a nice way to transition from collegiate running to professional running without having to fund myself. I used last year outdoors to start to get a feel for what it's like to run in the professional world, to see if it's even something I liked, and I loved it, so I'm very excited about that. Now having an idea of what I'll be getting myself into afterward just helps me going into this last semester with a lot more confidence. I'm not scared of what's going to come afterward, I'm excited for it."

A former ACC champion in cross country, Rowbury's range on the track extends from the mile or 1,500 meters up to at least the 3,000 meters, and she also learned the steeplechase last spring. Once she gets back into racing after a fall of building base mileage, she and her coaches will begin to determine what she should specialize in this season.

Performing arts

As dedicated as Rowbury is to her athletic endeavors, there is another side to this 22-year-old San Francisco native that is equally as significant. The performing arts have long been a passion as well, and over the past couple of years they have shaped much of her life away from the track and trails.

Academically she majored in English and Theater Studies, with a Film and Video Certificate, so her course work has run the gamut from storytelling and screen writing to editing and production. During the summer of 2005 she studied abroad in London in a theater program, and during the following fall she began work on a documentary on the Blue Devils' cross country season as part of an independent study.

Rowbury finished her undergraduate degree requirements last spring and graduated in May. This year she is pursuing a master's in humanities degree. But much of her time this fall was spent on a project not completely connected to her academic curriculum. She and another student, Annie Fleishman, organized and launched Duke's first Movie Making Marathon (MMM), a campus wide initiative to engage the talents of any students interested in film making.

The culmination of MMM will be the weekend of March 24-25 - two weeks after the NCAA indoor track championship - when 10 teams of student actors, directors and production managers will take original screenplays written by their classmates and turn them into short films within a 24-hour period. The films will then be screened on campus in an American Idol-like setting, with panelists to evaluate them and a student audience to vote for their favorites.

The MMM process has been well underway for co-producers Rowbury and Fleishman for several weeks as they have been developing all the fine details, setting up screenwriting workshops and promoting the event on campus, with the assistance and guidance of Elisabeth Benfey, a lecturing fellow in the Theater Studies department who taught one of Rowbury's screenwriting courses.

Fleishman, a junior, conceived the idea of MMM while working out on the elliptical and reading a magazine article about playwrights and actors in New York producing a series of plays in 24 hours for charity. Benfey helped get the idea in front of provost Peter Lange, who embraced the concept and authorized some funding.

Now it's up to Rowbury and Fleishman to make it work. The deadline for students to submit eight-page screenplays is Dec. 15. Three to five will be selected over the holiday break, and in February an MMM Crew Call will be held to assemble the film making teams. Scripts will be randomly assigned to the crews, and each will have 24 hours to shoot and edit a 5-7 minute film during the climax weekend in March.

"My entire life I've been interested in the performing arts," Rowbury said. "I started Irish dancing at the age of six and just loved that. It was always something I found exciting and interesting. When I got to college I started studying English, but I missed some of the creative aspect that I had lost when I stopped dancing, so I started studying theater.

"I found myself frustrated a little by some of the confines of theater. You can do a lot, but there are also a lot of limitations. So then I moved into film, did the Film and Video Certificate and loved all the possibilities it presented, and that solidified my desire to get involved with film.

"My ultimate dream is to get involved in film production or be a film producer or something similar to that, so this seemed like the perfect experience."

High standards

During the spring semester, Rowbury will turn some of her MMM experience into an independent study report, and she will work on expanding her "Blue Soles" cross country documentary from its original nine-minute length to a 45-minute feature.

And all the while she will also be taking aim at high-level athletic performances, based on the bar she set for herself as a junior in 2005-06 when she: (1) won the ACC indoor mile and 3,000 meters to earn conference MVP honors; (2) placed second in the NCAA indoor mile; (3) won the ACC outdoor mile in school record time; (4) anchored Duke's distance medley relay team to the national championship at the Penn Relays; and (5) picked up her fourth career All-America award with an eighth place showing at the NCAA outdoor 1,500 meters. High standards indeed.

Rowbury takes no credit for incorporating a running term into the name of her extracurricular activities with the Movie Making Marathon. That was Fleishman's idea, but it's fitting. "I guess everything is a marathon if you think of it in the long term," Rowbury noted.

In her case, the home stretch of an incredible Duke marathon is about to begin.