Courtney Andre hurdles adversity

It was a warm day – the kind of day all hurdlers pray for before a track meet.

It was a home meet and the conditions were perfect. The pre-race rituals though, were not. Courtney Andre, a star hurdler and multi-event athlete here at Mt. Hood, hadn’t gotten her pre-race hit from her inhaler 30 minutes before running. Instead, it was handed to her by a family member just minutes before the starting gun.

“I took it right before my event, like two minutes before I was lining up in the blocks,” she said. “When you do that, your body is not adjusted and your body feels faint.”

The start was clean though, and the first few hurdles were very promising. A quick lead on the backstretch had her friends cheering enthusiastically. Coming off the last corner, though, things started to change for her.

“Coming onto the last straight, my eyes started to get blurry and then it started to get all white,” Andre recalled. She blacked out and fell, on the second-to-last hurdle.

Rewind to sixth grade: “I started running cross country because my best friend Sami asked me to join. I don’t remember exactly why I started running track, probably the same reason,” Andre recalled.

Regardless of the reason, she fit in with the sport perfectly. “I loved being with people that also loved to do it, and had fun winning and trying to get better. I guess the challenge was the greatest part of it. That kept me wanting to get faster and faster,” she said.

After Andre had success at Reynolds High School, the next question was where to go next.

“I wasn’t really talking to any other schools (colleges) because I was waiting for them to talk to me. Then I heard my friends from high school, Brandon Raleigh and Emily Trosino, went to talk to (Mt. Hood) and got scholarships,” Andre said. “I decided to talk to the coaches, and I got offered to be on the team.”

A year later, training was going very well, and the racing followed suit. Andre was in the best shape of her life, until life decided to knock her down.

“I guess I blacked out right as I was going over the second-to-last hurdle and I just fell onto the hurdle, then onto the ground,” she said about the surprise collapse. “I was just lying there, and then I got up. I finished the race!” she said, not without pride.

For a veteran hurdler, the worst part was the fact that it actually happened.

“You hit a hurdle and you trip up a couple of times but you should know by now how to balance your body when you hit a hurdle to not go down. So to actually fall on my face was really embarrassing.”

Despite the fall, the 400-meter hurdles remain as Andre’s favorite event. Her lifetime goal in track is to one day make it to the Olympics. “The 400 hurdles are what I would really want to improve in and make it to the Olympics in,” she said. “I don’t get as stressed by the 100 hurdles; I couldn’t care (less) if I win or lose. It is exciting that I have improved so much in them recently, though.

“That’s the biggest goal, and of course you have to make smaller goals to get to your bigger goal,” Andre added. For her, that is winning all her events at the NWAC Championships. And the training so far has led this to being a realistic goal. The focus has been getting over the hurdles faster.

“A lot of people make the mistake that hurdling is jumping, when actually it’s running. You shouldn’t feel like you are jumping at all,” she said. “Every second you spend in the air is a second added to your time. That is what we have been working on. Jumping over and then getting back down and off the hurdle faster. That has improved my time in the hurdles.”

Andre won the 400 hurdles at the South Region championships this last Saturday at Mt. Hood in a season-best time, and took second in the 100 hurdles with a personal best. In the whole NWAC conference, she is seeded second in the 100 hurdles, just eight-hundredths of a second behind first, and is seeded fourth in the 400 hurdles.

In April, Andre committed to run track and field at the University of Hawaii on a full-ride scholarship. She will be pursuing a degree in kinesiology. “I’m wanting to be a physical therapist, so in order to do that you have to have your master’s or doctorate. Nowadays people only hire people with their doctorate, so I still have, after the two years I’ve been at Mt Hood, I still have five or six more years of school left,” she said.

In such a technical event, a hurdler has to put together a perfect race to win. Clipping a hurdle, even a lot lighter contact than Andre made a year ago, can decide who wins the race.

Her sprint toward athletic and academic success looks to be on a near-perfect track, so far.