Wednesday, May 13, 2009 11:22 PM CDT
Grant makes most of injury-plagued career
By RICK DAWSON, Staff Writer
rdawson@jg-tc.com
CHARLESTON -- What happened during Tarra Grant’s freshman season may have been prophetic. When she got to Eastern Illinois she knew she wanted to become a personal trainer. She couldn’t have known that she would eventually have personal reasons to consider it a good career choice.
Before her college track and field career ever got off the ground, Grant suffered a stress fracture of the tibial tuberosity, a slow-healing injury whose repercussions are still felt four years later.
“It’s been progressively trying to get better, but it’s just been real slow,” she said. “It was severe enough where I considered getting surgery, but we looked into it, and the procedures sound legit, but I just didn’t want to take all the time off that was going to be required. So I’m like, I’m just going to tough it out and keep going.”
It wasn’t a choice taken lightly. Now with her undergraduate degree in hand, Grant felt that this would likely be the end of the road as far as track is concerned (although in the future, coaching is still a possibility, she says). She moves on to graduate school in Kinesiology and Sports Studies at EIU this fall, determined to put to use some of the techniques she’s had to apply during her own college career.
“Personal training has always been something that I wanted to do,” Grant said. “I think it’s because I want to help people. The majority of people I work with, I assume they’ll be overweight. If I can help them achieve their goal that would be good.”
Her injury hasn’t prevented her from keeping up. At Indiana last weekend, she ran one leg of a 4x100-meter relay that shattered a school record with a time of 45.55, meeting the NCAA Regional standard as a bonus. That regional at Louisville, Ky., is still two weeks away and the hope is to make it to the finals.
“I think that seeds us top half in the region,” she said. “We have a good chance of making it to finals, but again it’s going to depend on what we do that day.”
Not that Grant hasn’t performed well in pressure situations. At Beardstown High School, she won the 200- and 400-meter dash at the 2005 IHSA Class A state tournament on the same outdoor track she runs on now – one she adored because of its sky blue color. It was a wonder, then, that she didn’t visit EIU until July, when she snatched one of the last available scholarships.
The primary obstacle: she had already committed to Monmouth College and wasn’t aware that the Panthers had an opening on their track roster.
“I was definitely interested in coming here before they contacted me,” Grant said. “But in high school, in my mind we really didn’t know how to talk to schools. We waited to get letters and stuff, and then responded that way. I never really got any information from Eastern that I knew of, but they said that they e-mailed my high school coach. He said he got the e-mails, but he didn’t want to give them to me because he thought I was going somewhere else. I was like, ‘You should have told me.’”
Once the outdoor season is over, she’ll stay in Charleston and train until the fall. The past two summers she served as a counselor in a journalism camp at the prompting of Ken Baker, her supervisor at the EIU Student Recreation Center, watching students produce a pair of news sections over the course of a two-week period.
Journalism may not be a potential career move down the road, but she’s finding that good experience can come from many directions.
“I don’t know anything about journalism but I really enjoyed working with the kids,” she said.
“They also taught me. I didn’t get to write anything but they knew their stuff. They opened my eyes to what journalism is all about.”
Contact Rick Dawson at rdawson@jg-tc.com or 238-6855.
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