SPORTS Don’t Look Back

ON A MONDAY MORNING AT LE PEEP

Restaurant, near the White Rock Lake area of East Dallas where she trains, Francie Larrieu Smith slowly worked her way through a stack of granola pancakes without butter, sipping coffee without cream. Coffee is the sole departure from her otherwise high-carbohydrate, low-calorie, what’s-bad-for-the-body-doesn’t-belong-in-the-mouth diet.

Across town, fewer than forty-eight hours earlier, the thirty-seven-year-old four-time U.S. Olympian had smoked the field in the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure 5K. The outcome was no surprise, of course, Smith being a world-class athlete and many of the about 4,000 women assembled for the 8 a.m. start being first-time road racers who would soon wheeze and gasp their way along the 3.1-mile course.

Up Tront, moving out smartly with a take-that 4:54 first mile, soon to be a speck on the horizon for most of the field, was a running fool, a ground-pounding machine who has been leading the pack for a quarter century, practically since twelve-year-old Francie Larrieu of Sunnyvale, California, declared to her daddy. “Someday, I’m going to run in the Olympic games and win a gold medal!”

Track and field seemed tike a legitimate enough pursuit for any California girl who did n’t surf or swim or shop. Besides, Francie’s brother Kon, fifteen years her senior, had competed in the 10,000 meters at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo.

Like her older brother, Francie Larrieu began as a miler and gradually moved up to longer distances.

Smith qualified for U.S. Olympics teams in 1972,1976, 1980, and 1988, missing out in 1984 when at the Olympic trials she made the sort of impetuous tactical error you might expect from an anxious teenager, not a (then) thirty-one-year-old veteran who had set the first of her nine world records a dozen years before.

Francie went out too fast in the beginning of that 3,000-meter final, chasing an inexperienced runner who had no chance of making the Olympic team. Several nights before the race, Smith had had a vivid dream in which she lost the race to an apparition that pulled too far ahead for Smith to catch. In a grotesque parody of her dream, Francie forgot about the controlled race plan she’d crafted with her coach, Robert Vaughan, and gave chase to the front-runner, in the process running herself deep into oxygen debt and off the U.S. Olympic team. Late in the race, Smith faded to fifth. Only the first three finishers qualify for the Olympics,

Smith channeled her frustration into her running, posting a series of strong showings in Europe that same summer, then refocusing on the ’88 Olympic games. Between 1984 and 1988, Smith moved up to the 10,000 meters, became America’s top-ranked runner at the longer event, qualified for the U.S. Olympic team, and subsequently posted her best Olympic performance ever, a fifth-place finish, at Seoul. She’s making plans to compete in the 1992 Olympic games in Barcelona, even though she’ll be fast approaching forty. Smith hopes to qualify in the women’s marathon, though she’ll also train for the 10,000 meters, just in case.

In previous years, Smith had used the Kuilan race in Dallas as a training exercise, but this year, after an injury-induced layoff, she was eager to run. Plus, despite the casual runners, this year’s field was stronger, one of the top competitors being the protégé of a Larrieu roommate and training partner in the early Seventies. “I know I’m getting old when I find myself competing with girls coached by my contemporaries,” she shrugs.

Smith relished the Komen victory, and the two-carat diamond bracelet first-prize, a luxury item she said otherwise would not fit into the Smith household budget. Money is something most track-and-field athletes know only in passing-it tends to pass them by. Except for a handful of superstars like Carl Lewis or Flo-Jo or Mary Decker Slaney, the endorsement opportunities are few, the appearance fees negligible, the shoe contracts subject to sudden whims or post-Olympic-year implosion.

As a member of the New Balance team, for which she does promotional work, makes appearances, and conducts running clinics, Francie Larrieu Smith receives, as she puts it, “Enough money to pay the bills and put away a little bit for retirement-if you’re lucky and you manage it well.”

It’s all a matter of timing-and Smith was ahead of her time, “I got good in the sport before the sport started growing up,” she says without rancor. “If in the Eighties I had repeatedly broken world records, as I did in the Seventies, I’d be wealthy now.” Instead, little Mary Decker, who replaced little Francie Larrieu as America’s distance-running darling, cashed in on the big money that finally came into the sport after the fitness boom of the late Seventies.



WHAT SEEMS MOST REMARKABLE ABOUT FRAN-cie Larrieu Smith’s career is that, after all the training, all the races, all the years, she remains among the world’s elite runners. Keep in mind that, when she burst on the track scene, the USA/USSR dual meets were being broadcast in black and white.

Smith says she almost gave up her running twice, once during an anxious period back in the early Seventies and then in a serious period of self-evaluation in 1981.

By then, Smith had lost her coach, Preston Davis, the former University of Texas miler, whom Smith followed to Waco in 1979 but who subsequently left coaching for private business. She lost another chance to lu Ifill her lifelong dream of an Olympic medal after President Jimmy Carter’s decision to boycott the 1980 Games in Moscow. And she had finally lost the last of her world records, Mary Decker having wiped the name Larrieu out of the books.

By 1981, Smith was living in Denton and working out with the North Texas track team, but her running was listless, her times mediocre, her attitude worse. Direction and inspiration came from her husband, Jimmy Smith, whom she’d married the year before. “My husband finally sat me down and said, ’What are you going to do with your life, Francie, sit around and watch soap operas? Sort out your feelings and figure out what you want to do.’ “

Francie wanted to run. It’s what she does. So Smith changed channels, hooking up in 1982 with Vaughan, who coaches the Metroplex Striders and who, like Jimmy Smith, is an expert in exercise physiology. Francie credits Vaughan with helping her focus her mind, not on how fit Mary Decker and other runners might be, or what times they might run, but on her own performance. Through Vaughan’s counseling, Francie learned to look inward.

“I know I’m older chronologically,” says Smith. “I can look in the mirror and see the wrinkles. But in my mind it’s like I’m still a twenty-two-year-old. I still see myself as competitive. The other thing that helps me is my experience. I have so much knowledge of how to run on the track. And I understand race tactics. I’m very, very good at that, having a base built on experience.”

“It’s obvious she has good genes,” says Vaughan. “But mentally she’s different from most of the others. A lot of runners stop wanting to put in the effort.. .They get married, or they get jobs to make money. Francie enjoys doing the things she has to do. She’s goal-oriented, and she enjoys the simple act of running. She likes it.”

That’s the one thing to remember when you contemplate the career of an athlete who’s led the pack for two decades: Francie Larrieu Smith runs because she just wants to have fun.