FEATURE: CNU Junior Sarah Dake Sets Sights on Distance History for Women's Cross Country / Track & Field

(From CNUSports.com)

Many athletes find their sport naturally, some by sheer happenstance. For Sarah Dake, a junior distance runner at CNU, it was almost by accident.

Through her junior year of high school, her chosen sport was basketball and playing collegiately her goal. During the offseason, as a way of conditioning, she ran on the cross country and track teams.

Then came the unexpected.

"I don't know, I fell in love more with running than I did with basketball," Dake said. "So in my senior year, I finally started running full time. I got kind of burned out with the sports I had been playing all my life. This is a different kind of sport, I guess."

Different for sure, but Dake is figuring it out.

Heading into the Coast-To-Coast Outdoor Championships Friday and Saturday in Fredericksburg, Dake's times are ninth or better in seven events on the program's all-time list — two in cross country, five in track. She holds the school record in the 4K at 14:35, set Aug. 30 at Pole Green Park near Richmond.

Dake has shown rapid improvement in each season. Consider the 5,000 meters, in which she finished her sophomore season with a PR of 18:36.28. Last month in Lynchburg, she clocked 17:49.71, fourth all-time.

Unlike most of her teammates, Dake hadn't run year-round until her senior year of high school. Then, as a freshman at CNU, she lost most of her outdoor season due to stress fractures.

"Late bloomer isn't quite the right description for her," said Tyler Wingard, director of track and field/cross country. "Her sophomore spring was the first time she had been healthy and pushing her limits for the whole summer, fall and winter. She hadn't been able to do that before.

"Now, we're continuing that through the spring. She's very humble in her expectations of what she can do for herself. But she's also willing to do the work and takes some risks, especially in competition."

Like any competitor, Dake isn't content. As she sees it, there are several PRs waiting to be broken.

"The 5K school record is 17:33," she said. "I've only run sub-18 once, that was a couple of weeks ago. I don't know if it'll be this season, but hopefully next year I'll be able to set the record and go sub-17:30."

Then there's the 10K. She's third on CNU's all-time list at 38:02.67, which she ran earlier this month at the Colonial Relays in Williamsburg. It was only the third time she had competed in the event, and her time is within striking distance of record holder Kaitlyn Ardrey's 36:40.52.

"Her faster 10Ks are ahead of us," Wingard said, "and they're probably significantly faster."

Dake grew up a military kid and lived in seven different states before middle school. She was born in Watertown, N.Y. From there, the family moved to Georgia, Maryland, West Virginia, Kentucky, Virginia, back to Maryland, Alabama and back to Virginia.

Dumfries, 30 miles south of D.C., is home now.

"Here to stay," Dake said. "Hopefully."

When she was in the second grade, Dake did a poster board project on her life. It was titled "The Seven States of Sarah Dake at Seven Years Old." Her parents, Michael and Megan, still love to tell the story.

"I hope we still have it," she said. "I don't know, it might have been lost in one of the moves."

At Saint John Paul The Great Catholic in Dumfries, Dake became friends with a teammate who was two classes ahead. Her name was Erin Elliott, a distance runner who Dake looked up to like a big sister.

In August of 2021, Elliott came to CNU as a kinesiology major and distance runner. Before she arrived, she put in a plug for her school.

"She was like, 'I'm going to CNU, you should check it out,'" Dake said. "I always looked up to her, and I grew to like CNU because she liked CNU.

"I visited her a couple of times before I was even looking at the school. I guess it felt very familiar and like home."

Dake also majored in kinesiology before switching to cellular, molecular and physiological biology. Her plan after graduation next spring is to attend physical therapy school.

"I love learning how the human body works, and I've learned to appreciate it more this year," she said. "It makes me very grateful for my Catholic faith and God. That's something I probably don't talk about enough."

Looking back, Dake has no regrets with her decision to make track/cross country her chosen sport.

"It's very much a team sport, but I like that the pressure is only on me in the moment," she said. "That was something I think I struggled with a lot in basketball and soccer. The anxiety of your teammates being hyper dependent on you in the game.

"I just grew to like racing. It's a different type of competition. I'm a very competitive person, and I think that racing competitiveness is more my style than game competitiveness."