Patience Becomes a Record-Setting Virtue for Keller
Giving herself time to build up has allowed her to rise up nationally
Patience.
That’s what Lexie Keller would tell her younger self to really trust. It’s the advice she’d give to the younger multis on the Colorado State track and field roster. Believe in the work. Trust the coaches. Most of all, give it time.
Becoming good in the pentathlon or the heptathlon doesn’t happen overnight. There will be frustrating days of training, even competition. Expect them. Also take the time to celebrate even the most minor of achievements, be it a personal best or a school record or just an event feeling better.
The moments will come. But give it time. Feel the urgency, but don’t be in a rush.
“It’s very important. When you’re doing so many different events, you’re not going to see as much progress in each event,” Keller said as the Mountain West Indoor Track and Field Championships approach this weekend. “The progress is going to come and go. One week you might be doing well in one event, but the next, you might not be doing well. I think it’s important to be patient.
“Especially coming here, I didn’t know a lot of the events, I didn’t know how to do most of them. That took a lot of patience and trusting the process.”
One does not become a multi-event track star overnight. You don’t show up and break a pentathlon or heptathlon record out of the gates. It’s a slow build, especially for someone like Keller, who came out of high school in Albuquerque, N.M., having not trained or competed in it before. She was big into soccer growing up; track was fun for her. She just happened to be pretty good at it, and CSU assistant coach Ryan Baily was the first one to really believe in her potential.
Watching her compete in the high jump, he saw so much more in her than she did at the time.
“I really liked the fact she was tough. She could run a solid 400 – which is just an indication of toughness in general – and somewhat easy to convert to the 800 and 200, so that’s was nice to see,” Baily said. “And she could high jump, and she was flirting with long jump. More importantly, it’s more of an attitude and body type. Lexie is fortunate enough to be tall and she’s strong. When she came in, some of our struggles came from the confidence in general to be good.”
He talks to his athletes about the Catch-22, and for him, there are two routes. One, an athlete just believes they are good, and because of that, the marks follow. Or, they need to put in the work and see the marks before the belief comes. One or the other, and he had to be patient, too. Enough so to let Keller find her path.
Because before she could become somebody who could place in the top three in the Mountain West in the pentathlon or heptathlon – which she has – she actually had to learn what those things were and what they entailed.
Patience came natural to her. If the car in front of her in the turn lane doesn’t lurch forward at the first hint of green in the traffic signal, she’s not the type of person to lay on the horn or present a one-finger salute to their rear-view mirror. Still, learning to be really good in multiple events at the same time tests those limits, particularly at the start.
If I would have talked to freshman me and told myself I am where I am, I don’t think I would have believed it.Lexie Keller
“I would say my freshman year was a little bit frustrating, just learning everything. I knew I had to be patient, and I still celebrated the little wins,” she said. “I remember coming in, I didn’t know how to hurdle, so I had to learn, start from scratch. I was losing most of my races, but I knew and I was patient with myself because I was like, most of these girls have been hurdling through high school and throwing and I haven’t. I learned to become patient, but definitely more so within the past two years because of COVID, all the obstacles we’ve had to face.”
She learned to carry that over in other aspects of college. The academic toll was new to her, so patience helped. So did balancing the ledgers of athletics, school work and a social life. It carries over into every avenue she travels as a person, so breaking down five or eight events and becoming good in all of them seems a natural fit.
She has teammates who are sprinters who can focus in the area. Some friends can throw things, other jump over items and some can run really far. She has to learn to do all of that, do so with the same focus as they have, but compact it into a much shorter training time frame of 20-30 minutes per event.
Baily and Keller say there are times you can get lost in the shuffle if one allows. For the coach, he avoids the mistake of neglecting a strength. For Keller, she doesn’t allow her mind to wander away from what event she is working on in the present.
Part of the magic comes in the training, especially the skills which translate across the board. One in particular has helped Keller climb the latter to the goals she set at the beginning of the year. They targeted it on day one and never relented.
“Lexie’s biggest weakness was her foot contact. She’s a toesy runner,” Baily said. “We clean that up, now were faster, we put more force into the ground and we’re going to learn how to open that hip joint, because you can’t do it with your toes out here. It makes her better all around. We really focus on training the athlete as a whole.”
Clean that up, her approaches for both the high jump and long jump are better. She’s faster in the races she has to run, including the hurdles. Which – pun intended and in a literal sense – was a major hurdle for her to clear.
And she has. So much so to the point where she’s not only proficient at it as a multi, but in an open event. She will head to the championships ranked third in the 60-meter hurdles.
“Going into my first couple races in college, I was dead last,” she said. “I was training with my teammates, and I had good hurdling teammates, and they had been doing it so much longer, I don’t know how I’ll ever run that well. Just recently I hit a PR and ran an 8.5, and I kind of surprised myself there. I look back and I was running 10.5 my freshman year.”
It wasn’t just patience, but persistence, which teammate Jordan Lanning has come to admire about Keller. Unlike her workout partner, Lanning came to Colorado State having already competed in multi events as a prep. Even still, she found there was so much more to learn about it at the college level.
She gleans a lot from Keller by watching her at practice, and much of that is physical. There is still the mental components, and the chats they have help enlighten her, as well.
“It’s very, very beneficial, because she leads by her actions in what she does and how determined she is,” said Lanning, who is the fourth seed for the pentathlon this week. “That’s something I’ve learned from her is if you put in the work, the results will come. That’s an important thing I’ve learned from her.
“It’s how determined she is and how confident she is. We’ll be on bus rides together and we’ll be explaining what scores we want to achieve during a meet. She won’t limit herself. She’ll set these goals, and she knows she can attain these goals. That’s one thing that’s great about her.”
Again, that took time, too.
At the beginning of the season, Baily hit her with a belief he carried. He felt there were not five or six athletes in the nation better than her in the pentathlon. Period.
“He said that at the beginning of the year and I definitely thought he was lying,” Keller said. “I said, ‘that’s not true.’ I think now I would put myself up there. I know what I’m capable of, and I’m getting better each week. I think I can compete if I get there.”
Despite what she believed about herself nationally, locally, she held herself in high regard. She targeted the school record in the pentathlon (held during the indoor season), and the first weekend of February she made it her own, scoring 4,105 points at the New Mexico College Classic, the same venue as the conference championships.
The top 16 make the NCAA National Indoor Championships, and her score currently ranks 11th on the list, and she’s not far from the top, either. She was thrilled with the school record, but like Baily, she believes there is a higher score out there for her to reach, and she will be targeting it this week.
She stayed true to herself, and she celebrated the mark. Still, she’s not fully thrilled with where she is, but she knows how to get there.
“I’m not fulfilled. Even after I got the school record I was happy, but I wasn’t at my happiest, because I know this mark I have right now may or may not get me to nationals,” she said. “As soon I as can secure a spot at nationals, hopefully this week, I’ll be excited about that. My goal is to make it there and to compete well there. I think if I can get to nationals and get through that, I’ll be happy.”
She’s not the only one, either. Baily is another, to be sure. So is Lanning.
She was recruited to push for the school record herself. The more Keller raises the bar, the greater the challenge, and as the sophomore put it, the expectation.
“That would probably be better for the both of us in the end,” Lanning said. “That just means I have to strive to be better, and she has to as well.
“It definitely motivates me, and since we are training partners, we kind of go through the same training process. I think some people are expecting things from me as well. Her confidence, she’s always telling me I can do it and we can do it. As well as being a great athlete, she’s very supportive.”
To all of her teammates. While she enters with the top score in the field, the pentathlon will be her only event on Thursday, but Friday will be filled to the brim. She will compete in the high jump, then an hour later move to the 60 hurdles qualifying, followed by the long jump.
She is seeded third in both the hurdles and long jump, eighth in the high jump.
All athletes are competitive, but Baily said multis have to carry a different mindset. They can’t look at the top five people in the country in an event and wonder why they’re not up there. They have to look at the entirety of the pentathlon and know being pretty good across the board carries them to an elite level.
In the pentathlon, it’s not just where you finish in each event, but the mark you hit, because they are weighted. The faster you run, the further you jump, the more points you earn. Her goal is to find herself among the top four in each event.
For Keller, the overall mental approach is still somewhat hard, especially with the value she carries for the Rams in individual events as they pursue the women’s team title at the Mountain West Championships.
“I think it is difficult, because I do expect a lot of myself in open events,” she said. “It’s exciting to see that across the board I’m doing decently well, but still at times, I compare myself to the elite hurdlers in our conference for elite long jumpers, and I still expect myself to be at the same level. You have to find a happy medium, but I know what I do is good for a multi, but I also want to be good in the individual events.”
To get to this point took time. She had the patience for it to all take hold, but sometimes along the way, those steps were a challenge. To learn an event. To understand the complexity of it all. To balance being as good as she could be in multiple events, and still pick a few out to be excellent at against a field of specialists.
To first believe she could do it, then believe she could become among the best.
“I don’t think I knew how much I actually would grow and build,” Keller said. “I knew it would be a slow process, because that’s kind of how track is. Most people don’t expect to get a PR each week or get better each week, so I knew it was going to be a slow process, but I do think I surprised myself with how much I actually did end up progressing. If I would have talked to freshman me and told myself I am where I am, I don’t think I would have believed it.”
Given some time, now she does. With her experience gained along the way, she believes she can be even better.