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Long distance runner and Indiana road-race icon Lucie Mays is a small-town girl with Olympic-size dreams. Born and raised in Mount Vernon, a small dot on the map in Illinois, she's hoping to run the biggest race of her life in front of a home crowd on streets she knows well when, on Feb. 24, 2004, the Olympic Trials for the 26.2-mile marathon will be in St. Louis, about an hour's drive southeast of Mount Vernon.

Mays, 31, has won plenty of big races, the most significant to her being the three national championships she captured in college. But the value of family, hard work and a great coach that have defined her have not been lost despite her success. A battle with anorexia tested her strength, and again Mays succeeded.

The youngest of four children, including two brothers and a sister, she is part of a tight-knit family. She recently moved about a mile from her sister.

She calls her nieces – a toddler and an infant – her buddies and "often the sunshine of my day. Both my sister and my mother are my best friends."

Her family was part of her running early in life and has been at every race of significance since. "Mom and Dad would do the local road races and I would go along and run the events they had for kids and the shorter races," she says, recalling her beginnings as a runner in the fifth grade.

Mays no longer is tagging along. She is setting the pace. She's been competing and training in Indianapolis since she moved here in 1994 after her graduation from the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. She has competed all around the country and still loves the small/big-city charm of the Indianapolis Life "500" Festival Mini-Marathon. This past spring, she finished the 13.1-mile course in her fastest time ever – 1 hour, 19 minutes, 10 seconds – third only behind a woman from Kenya and a woman from Russia.

"I love the Mini. I'm so grateful to the city for hosting the race each year. It's a great opportunity to compete against other women at a high level, particularly women from around Indiana. We have great respect for each other, knowing how hard the others have trained. It's really a tribute to all the hard work that goes on all year."

When Mays takes off her running shoes, she is a registered dietitian. She moved to Indianapolis for a dietetic internship at IUPUI. She now works for Clarian Health-Methodist Hospital where she advises inpatients on their nutritional needs. She loves her job and wants to help other athletes benefit from her knowledge.

"I love being able to help people all day every day. I was initially interested in sports nutrition but those jobs are few and far between. I really enjoy that every day is a different day and always a learning experience."

Her own personal experience would indicate that there is a need for more education and interest in the area of sports nutrition. Despite pursuing a degree in nutrition, Mays spent her college years struggling with anorexia. She insists that very difficult battle does not define who she is, but absolutely played a critical role as part of the overall journey of her life.

"You wouldn't think that someone who has a degree in nutrition would have an eating disorder. It's hard to explain, but you become so obsessed that it takes over what you know to be logical. It's like there is this person inside you that you battle with – that more consumes you than even wanting to be good. You run, but it's not the same. I think it did help, though, studying nutrition and it helps me keep from heading back down that road because I now understand the horrible things it does to your body."

Mays experienced all those things over the four years she was held captive by that obsession. At 5 feet 7 inches, her frame was reduced to a mere 92 pounds. But she did not realize until years later how gaunt and unhealthy she looked. She experienced five stress fractures related to the loss of calcium in her body. She developed amenorrhea that lasted for years. She also put strain on the relationships she had with her family and friends.

"There are parts of my life then that I don't even remember very well. You almost live in this altered state of mind. You get kind of mean. It's really very selfish when you get that far gone. I'm sure I didn't treat my family very well. I did a lot of damage to my body that was pointless.

"It pretty much destroyed the rest of my career as far as what I could have attained had I not gone that direction. It was probably the biggest obstacle I faced in my running career. It is the one thing I really regret in my life."

She attributes her sickness to the pressure on young women and particularly athletes that says ‘thinner is better.'

"It wasn't my family. I had a great family. And my mother was appalled at what I did to myself. I think it started with the thought that being a little thinner would make me run faster. That is so far from true. It seems to work at first, but then it has diminishing effects as you become weaker and eventually really sick."

She became sick to the point of being unable to run at all. The beginning of her recovery was a scary moment in her life.

"I was at home and still trying to run twice a day. I went for a run in the evening. I got about two miles from home when I started to feel really weird. My heart started beating really, really fast. I lay down on the side of the road. I didn't think I was going to make it home. I thought I was going to die.

"I crawled home all the way up our long driveway and I beat on the door until my mom came. Then I crawled into the house. My whole body was spotted red. My mom was really scared. It was that episode – when I got that scared – that made me realize I was very sick. From that day on I slowly got better."

Mays says that though there is more information available to athletes about nutrition, eating disorders are still a major problem in competitive athletics.

"As long as there is the focus on weight and what women look like there will be a problem. If you spend any time with very competitive teams as young as high school-aged you can see that it is still an issue. Women come in all different sizes and shapes and it really should be what you feel comfortable and strongest with. Coaches and role models really need to make sure that young athletes understand that, not only by telling them that, but by supporting it by their coaching practices. Weigh-ins are still too prominent in programs."

Mays now is comfortable with her body, her running, and her goals. She lives quite a simple life, apropos to one who excels at running, the most "pure sport."

Mays' life in Mount Vernon until she was 18 years old truly was simple. Her father Don, an Illinois State Police officer and U.S. Marine, and mother Sally, a cook at her school, taught Mays to work hard and appreciate the simple things in life on the family's 10-acre farm. She credits her modest rural upbringing for her interest in an active lifestyle.

"We didn't have a whole lot of money so my parents would take us camping for two weeks in the summer. We did the whole tent thing. Mom would do all the cooking. We would have to ride our bikes two miles at a time to take a shower. We used to have a basketball hoop that we always played on and got pretty good. Basketball was my first love. My mother and father both worked very hard at everything they did and really instilled in me not to give up on anything I decided to do. I still enjoy staying busy"

Staying busy these days includes tough training for qualifications. Mays typically puts in seven to 10 miles per day, with one day of speed work a week, a race or tempo run, and a long run of 15-22 miles per week. The discipline necessary to manage her hours of training and 65-70 miles weekly was learned early, through her participation in sports as a young girl.

As a student, she was involved in every sport possible in her early years, including basketball, cheerleading and track. There were only 18 people in her grade school until eighth grade. She then moved on to high school where there were still only 286 in her graduating class. She began running track when she had personality issues with her middle school basketball coach.

"I loved basketball but my coach suggested that I run track. So I did. I've often wanted to thank her for that advice. She had no idea that our personality differences would change my life and neither did I. I ended up being the first girl from my school to qualify for the Illinois State Cross Country meet."

Running is a priority in her life as it was through college, but she knows there will be a time in the not-too-far future when her priorities will shift and she is prepared for that.

"I would love to have a family some day. That's part of why this qualifying attempt is so important to me. My time is now and I want to enjoy it and make the most of it. … Growing up with a family like I had made me appreciate the need to focus on family. … I look forward to establishing my own family when I meet the right person."

Mays attributes her relaxed approach to running to her formative years growing up and training in the country. Her attitude and her training are a breath of fresh air in the midst of all the high-tech training methods available to runners.

"I don't spend time staring at my watch and calculating splits. I train according to how I feel. … When I began running, the way I estimated how far my workouts were was by running from telephone pole to telephone pole out on the country roads. I would just run, no pressure, no watch. If the competition was gone today I would still run like that. I run because I can. It's a great stress-reliever, especially when I can run like that – no place to go, no time to beat."

Mays always has enjoyed the role of the "unknown." After graduating from high school in 1988, she escaped the pressure of expectations enrolling at Rend Lake Junior College while living at home and training for road races. She was a wildcard when she was discovered at a road race at the University of Southern Indiana by Bill Gautier, distance coach at Southeast Missouri State University.

"Nobody knew who I was. … Every success I had was a pleasant surprise. I didn't know what I was capable of and nobody else did either. It was kind of like high school before I won the state championship. There was no pressure. Pressure is the thing I least enjoy about competition. Once I won the national championships in college, the pressure was back. I was happy to move on to the road race scene where I was a relative unknown again."

She attended Southeast Missouri from 1989 to 1991, where she developed a life-changing athlete-coach relationship with her coach. He directed her to great success early when she won the NCAA National Championship at the Division II level in the 1500-meter indoor, the 5,000-meter outdoor, and the 3,000-meter outdoor. Through her successes and failures she has learned how essential it is to have a coach whom she respects and who believes in her.

"Excelling not only comes from within yourself but also from a great coach. I credit a large part of my accomplishments in college to the direction of my coach. He never ran a race for me, but he developed the plan and believed in me. He showed me I could do things I never imagined. I had no idea how good I could be. That plan and belief instilled in me took me to the next level."

She so believed in the chemistry she had with Gautier that she transferred to University of Tennessee-Chattanooga when he took the head coaching position there in 1991.

After graduating she began to run the road-race scene again, finishing her first 26.2-mile marathon in 1993 at the Music City Marathon in Nashville, Tenn., – only 10 minutes off the 2:48 it will take to qualify for the Olympic Trials.

"I learned a lot about the marathon that day. … You soon realize that 26 miles is a long way to run." She won, but says "I was very happy just to finish and then to break three hours. I've run quite a few (marathons) since then, but that one was special."

She has been searching for a substitute for Gautier for the years since college. "He was irreplaceable. He will always be the standard by which I judge all other coaches. There's just something special about the coach who introduces you to success."

She is now working happily for the first time since those days with coach Bud James, whom she met at a race last year and who has been advising her for the past nine months. They communicate through e-mail since he lives near Chicago. James sends a workout to Mays, she does the workout, sends feedback, and James adjusts the next workout accordingly. Mays attributes the personal best time she ran at the Mini-Marathon this year to working with him.

One of the hardest lessons for Mays to learn has been that if she is running a marathon and it's not going well, she should drop out instead of struggling through to finish.

"I finished the San Diego marathon in 1998 when I shouldn't have just because I wasn't a quitter. I still am not a quitter but I have learned that with the kind of damage a marathon can do to your body, if you push through it you can really hurt yourself and prolong your recovery which can take you out of training for the rest of your season."

Mays had to apply that strategy at her first qualifying attempt in Duluth, Minn., at Grandma's Marathon on June 22. After difficulties on her trip to Duluth, she arrived at the race stressed, having not eaten correctly, and basically unprepared.

"I should have known early in the day the day before the race and headed back home, but I wanted to give it a shot. My calves cramped up early. I was about two minutes behind where I wanted to be at the half. I was proud of myself for the discipline it took to drop out and save myself for my next attempt."

Mays has plenty of time to make more attempts. She may try at the Chicago Marathon in October. If all goes well she will make that trip home to St. Louis in February 2004. She's a long shot to make it through the qualifying. But don't be hasty to bet against her. She'll be an unknown on home turf with her family beside her – just the way she loves it.