NEW PALESTINE — She finished each lap sweating, out of air, pushed to her limit. But no matter how hard her feet pounded the pavement, her race times just weren’t improving.
New Palestine’s Brenna Shaw couldn’t figure out why her numbers in track weren’t what they used to be.
That was before she found out she was suffering from anemia.
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But the Dragons track and cross-country state contender wasn’t exiting her sophomore year without putting up a fight. After a personally disappointing track and field season, Shaw ended up nabbing first place at her team’s victory at their cross-country regional this year — the first regional title in program history — and placing individually at semistate.
Shaw went on as the sole cross-country runner from Hancock County to advance to the state finals this year, earning her the Daily Reporter’s Cross-Country Athlete of the Year award.
Shortly after being aware of her anemia, Shaw was ready to continue the battle around the track, she said. She continued coming back to track practice every day, but her track and cross-country coach Chuck Myers eventually told her to ease off to focus on regaining her health.
Running wasn’t worth killing yourself over, he’d said.
“She was not the same runner she was in the fall,” Myers said. “Once she was tested, it explained a lot. It wasn’t as if she wasn’t putting in the work.”
“The hardest part I would say is that I didn’t know what was wrong with me,” Shaw said. “I came to the track day after day, and I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I’d get frustrated.”
But Shaw took her coach’s advice. She took a few weeks allow the iron supplements and rest days to rebuild her body. Come cross-country season, it was time for redemption, she said.
She got that redemption. She was the individual county, Hoosier Heritage Conference and regional champion and finished 15th at the semistate. She helped lead the Dragons to county, HHC and regional titles.
“The great fall season she just had is a huge testament to her work ethic,” Myers said.
“My whole track season was kind of wasted,” Shaw said. “I did so much training over the winter for the track season, and then to find out I had anemia, it was really hard. This cross-country season was really me trying to make up for those missed opportunities.”
Shaw regularly performed high above expectations throughout the season, Myers said. Shaw is soft spoken and mild-mannered, but she has a fire and strength within her that her teammates unilaterally respect.
It’s no question that she is the embodiment of a “lead by example” athlete, Myers said.
Running is mostly a mind game, Shaw said. In each race, she finds her rhythm and doesn’t lose sight of it.
“During a race, I usually go into this weird zone,” she said. “I guess I’m just so in the zone, reflecting back on races, I sometimes can’t even remember physically running them. I don’t really remember what I was thinking about.”
Occasionally on a long race or training day, Shaw’s teammates kept their minds off the daily grind by playing memory games with each other on the trail, she said. They’d often play the alphabet game, where the team would pick a topic, and one player would start with a word on beginning with the letter A.
The next on the team would follow up with a word of their own in the same category starting with B, and so on. It might have been a silly mechanism to cope with the fatigue of long distance running, but it was something that the team was able to bond over, Shaw said.
And bonding with her team is what got her through the toughest moments.
“I wanted to thank my team for continuing to practice with me even though their season was over,” Shaw said of the week between semistate and state. “I know they all probably wanted a break, but they stayed in it for me and I’m really grateful for them.”
“Next year I’ll be a junior, and the plan is just to keep running,” she said.
