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For Robert Ashby, Life Is A Marathon He Plans to Win
Running a 3,200-meter race in 10 minutes seems a trivial goal compared to Robert Ashby’s other aspirations.
The junior wants to maintain his 4.0 grade point average at Liberty High School. Then he wants to attend the United States Air Force Academy. Then he wants to design planes and jet engines as an aerospace engineer, or perhaps become a chemical engineer, instead. He wants to provide for his family, give his children a life even better than his own.
In short, Ashby has unusual vision for someone 16 years old – a rare long-term perspective. Perhaps that’s also a reason he was drawn to long distance running.
Ashby joined the Liberty track team as a freshman, envisioning himself as a sprinter, a 400-meter runner. So he became a sprinter.
That dream lasted a few days.
“When we were doing our workouts and stuff the other sprinters were way ahead of me. I was pretty much left behind. I knew if I was going to be competitive, this wasn’t for me,” said Ashby, whose brother Evan IV was a distance runner at Liberty before graduating in 2006. “My coaches [said], ‘If you don’t have a lot of speed, you have to take the speed you have and spread it over a greater distance.”
So the 3,200 became Ashby’s bread and butter race, and he’s since turned into one of the better runners at that distance in the Group AAA Northwest Region. He placed 19th at last season’s outdoor region meet with a 3,200 time of 10:24.32 and then he placed 11th during this past indoor season, finishing in 10:27.79. But neither performance propelled Ashby to state because the Northwest Region houses some of the state’s top distance runners.
“He could have run in any other region and he probably would have made state,” Liberty track co-coach Dee Thompson said.
Regardless, Ashby’s goal is to qualify for outdoor state this season. He said it will likely take a sub-10-minute time in the 3,200 because the qualifying mark in the Northwest Region is 9:59, based on an average of times logged by the top-six finishers over the last couple seasons.
“The distance runners in our region are pretty much national-caliber athletes,” Ashby said. “It’s almost like the state meet, but with a little less depth.
“There’s Thomas Porter in the two-mile, who just annihilates the field routinely,” Ashby said. “It’s really impressive.”
Porter, of Mountain View High, deserves such admiration after running the 3,200 in 9:15.24 last outdoor season.
Another source of inspiration for Ashby is former Fauquier High distance runner Sarah Bowman. A 2005 FHS graduate, Bowman is now a six-time All-American at the University of Tennessee who still holds Virginia Group AA state records in the outdoor 800, 1,600 and 3,200 and indoor 1,000.
Her success helped coax Ashby out of sprinter’s shoes when he was a freshman...See the Wednesday print edition of the Fauquier Times-Democrat for the complete story.
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