FORT COLLINS, Colo.—For the past eight hours, Janay DeLoach has been on her feet, helping residents at the Northern Colorado Rehabilitation Hospital get out of bed, get dressed, eat and bathe, among other things.
All she wants to do when she gets home, DeLoach said, is eat a nice dinner and relax.
Instead, she has a quick snack, changes into her workout gear and heads out for one of her daily training sessions.
There’s no time to rest when you’re so close to reaching a lifelong dream of competing in the Olympics that you practically can feel the heat from the torch being lit at the opening ceremonies.
“It’s an amazing feeling, because you want it so bad it hurts,” DeLoach said after a recent workout at CSU, where she holds five school records. “Truly, I think about it every single day.”
DeLoach, 26, is the reigning U.S. indoor champion and the outdoor runner-up in the long jump, an event she hopes to represent the U.S. in at the 2012 Summer Olympics in London. Her winning jump of 22 feet, 11 1/4 inches at the USA Track and Field Indoor Championships last February in Albuquerque was the top indoor mark in the world for 2011, and her leap of 22-10 1/2 at the USA Outdoor Championships in June in Eugene, Ore., was the fourth-best outdoor mark in the world—trailing only the 23-7 mark of U.S. champion Brittany Reese and leaps of 23-1 1/2 and 23-0 by Russia’s Darya Klishina and Olga Zaytseva, respectively.
In the world rankings, which are based on an athlete’s five best marks in the previous year, DeLoach is No. 5. She finished sixth at last year’s world championships with a leap of 21-6 1/4.
It wasn’t easy, DeLoach said, to see herself as one of the top long jumpers in the world. Not at first, anyway. But with so many other people telling her last winter that she could win the U.S. Indoor title, her view changed.
“I went from ‘I think I can win,’ to ‘Why can’t I win,'” she said. “I think it was that change in thinking that made me realize I’m just as good as they are, so why not?
“Once I won it, I was like, ‘I’m in it. I’m not going anywhere. I’m here to stay.’ ”
It meant that the Olympic dream she first had as a young gymnast who idolized Dominique Dawes—a member of medal-winning U.S. Olympic teams in 1992, 1996 and 2000—was within her reach, albeit in a different sport.
“Our goal is to kind of get there and medal and hopefully win it,” said Tim Cawley, the Colorado State University assistant who has coached DeLoach for the past 8 1/2 years. “The hardest part in being a U.S. athlete is just getting there, because the U.S.
Trials are so hard. We’re not looking past that, but I think if you’re ranked as one of the top four in the world, you should be thinking about winning it.
“. I think Janay realizes on any given day, she can beat anyone in the world. She beat Brittany (Reese) a couple of times this year.”
First, though, DeLoach needs to make the U.S. team by finishing among the top three at the U.S. Olympic Trials June 22-July 1 in Eugene.
And to do that, she can’t afford to let her training lapse.
So, when she finishes up her eight-hour workdays at the rehabilitation hospital to complete the fieldwork requirement of the master’s degree she’s earning from CSU in occupational therapy, she’s got to drag herself to the weight room or track for daily workouts.
She wouldn’t make it, she said, if she didn’t have fiancé Patrick Soukup, a former CSU teammate who grew up in Fort Collins, and friend Colby Satterfield working out alongside her to keep her going. One of them, if not both, has been training with her nearly every day.
“To be honest, it’s probably the biggest struggle I have ever come across,” DeLoach said. “. Thank God for Colby and Patrick, because I honestly don’t know if I could do it without them.”
DeLoach said basketball was her first favorite sport in high school at Eilson Air Force Base just outside of Fairbanks, Alaska, where he father was stationed at the time. Track season in Alaska, she said, consisted of three meets a year, and running was for punishment, not pleasure. Except in competition.
That attitude changed, she said, after her first year at CSU, when she started to realize the kind of success she could have if she put a little effort into it. DeLoach set school records that still stand in 2005 in the indoor 55-meter dash (6.84 seconds), in 2006 in the indoor 60 (7.31), in 2007 in the indoor long jump in 2007 (21-0 3/4) and in 2008 in the outdoor 100 (11.45) and long jump (21-3 1/4).
She’s got the speed, strength and determination to be the best female long jumper in the world, Cawley said. Yet, the always-smiling DeLoach remains one of the easiest-going, low-maintenance athletes he’s ever coached.
“They don’t get any better,” Cawley said. “. She’s very calm and confident. It’s fun to watch her compete, because she’s a good competitor and she still has fun. It isn’t a job for her, it’s still just going out and doing what she loves.”
And there’s nothing DeLoach would love more than the opportunity to compete for an Olympic medal.
“It gives me, I guess, the ammo to really go,” DeLoach said. “It lights the coals for me—puts that fire under me, so I can get moving.”
