Jody Carlsen opens a new chapter

For Jody Carlsen, who grew up in Carson City and later ran for the University of Nevada, this was an exceptional day.

"You can always tell when Jody's running well, just by looking at the body language," he said after watching Jody run the San Diego Marathon. "At 10 miles, she was running along and smiling. At 16, you could see she was a little more tired, but she still looked good. At 21 she was hanging in there. And she was still able to pick it up a little at the end."

When she reached the finish line at Plaza Camino Real in Carlsbad, Calif., Jody was the fourth woman in a time of 3 hours, 13 minutes and 26 seconds. Her fourth-place finish (she was less than a minute out of third) is impressive considering 839 women finished the race, led by Alena Vinitskaya of Belarus, who ran 2:46:25 to win her third San Diego Marathon women's title in the last four years. Jenko Bensa of Yugoslavia was the overall winner in a time of 2:19:27.

For Carlsen, the performance was all the more impressive considering this was her first attempt at the 26.2-mile marathon distance. In fact, she started out with some rather modest expectations in a race that followed the coastline through North San Diego County.

"The bottom line goal was to run eight-minute miles, which would have brought her in at about 3:28," Dave Carlsen said. "Then, once she got out there, she said she felt good so she decided to go with how she felt. The conditions were perfect for running a marathon and the course is good, so it worked out well for her."

None of this will surprise anyone in the Carson City running community acquainted with Jody Carlsen. Or her father, for that matter.

Dave, a standout running back and baseball player at Carson High in the early 1970s, evolved into one of the area's better marathon runners in the early '80s. He twice turned times of 2:30 marathon clockings -- once at San Francisco, the other at Avenue of the Giants.

Jody was also a two-sport athlete at Carson High who won a state championship for 3,200 meters on the track as a senior in 1997. She went on to run four cross country and track seasons at Nevada, highlighted by her second-place finish for 10,000 meters at the 2000 Big West Track and Field Championships. where she ran 37:41.79 (her best of 36:12 came at the Mt. SAC Invitational that same season). She was also the Wolf Pack's cross country team MVP as a freshman in 1997 and again in 1999.

After graduating from Nevada with a degree in economics last spring, Jody moved to Southern California, where she now lives and works for an accounting firm in Newport Beach, Calif. Still a month shy of her 23rd birthday, she appears to have opened up a new chapter in her distance running career.

"My first marathon was Silver State and I ran something like 3:17, 3:18, so when I saw her finish in 3:13, I was totally blown away," Dave Carlsen said. "I think she's going to be a good marathon runner. She's more of a longer distance runner just because she's just so tough mentally.

"This was the perfect race for her. She's got that first one under her belt and I really think she's going to keep getting better."

Dave Price is a sports writer for the Nevada Appeal