By Sarah Barker
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Thirty years from now, Dakotah Lindwurm might not remember much about the Olympic Marathon she’s set to run on Sunday. That’s how it’s turned out for Janis Klecker, Minnesota’s previous women’s Olympic marathoner.
Klecker, a two-time Twin Cities Marathon champion, remembers the first 13 miles of the 1992 Olympic Marathon were along the Mediterranean, and the last 13, she remembers, wound through Barcelona to the stadium which was on top of a mountain. She was wearing Reeboks, her sponsor at the time. “There was nothing to them; I could just as well have been running barefoot.” Members of her church had signed a big banner and mailed it to Barcelona. “They delivered it to me on the bus! Of course, there was no email or texting.”
Mostly, she remembers the opening ceremony: She wore a Ralph Lauren skort and hot pink blazer; the athletes were given digital cameras (first generation Canons); she stood near the Olympic flame which was lit by a flaming arrow; they stood under a gigantic Olympic flag as it was unfurled, covering the entire infield.
While those memories are sparse, she thinks about words she heard from 1968 Olympian Ron Daws nearly every day. “He said, being an Olympian will change your life. There’s a big wow when you make the team, but you start to understand the ramifications and the way it shapes your life as time goes on.” Klecker shared these words at a send-off for Minnesota’s newest Olympic marathoner, Dakotah Lindwurm. “Immediately, being an Olympian means Dakotah will be on the start line in Paris, but 15 years from now, it will still be shaping her life.”
“You leave the U.S. thinking I'm the best in my sport, and when you get there, there are 10,000 people who are the best in their sport,” Klecker said. “It’s very humbling, and very easy to get overwhelmed. It’s also easy to magnify the importance of how well you do because you are the link to the Olympics for so many people. Dakotah is from a small town, so for all those people who know her, she’s their link to the Olympics. It makes it personal; you think, it matters how I do.”
After the Olympics, Klecker returned to practicing dentistry in Minnetonka, but did not have to wait long to see how that experience would change her life. “For one thing, being an Olympian adds credibility to your words. In reality, I didn't know any more than anyone else. I happened to run fast on the right day, but it gives you a platform to speak.”
Nearly a year to the day from the Barcelona opening ceremonies, she and her husband Barney became parents to twins John and Mary, and babies arrived less than two years apart after that until Janis and Barney were wrangling six children, aged seven and under. “I thought it was hard to run a marathon fast,” she laughed. “God has used running as a vehicle to teach me so many things. You don’t become an Olympian without tenacity, without overcoming adversity, without perseverance. I had to use those things to learn how to parent these children.”
Photo above: Klecker winning her second Twin Cities Marathon in 1992.
Klecker credits that Olympic mindset, and Olympic level support from Barney, for what she considers her most impressive marathon performance: “In 2000, with five kids under five years old, I qualified for the Olympic Trials. Just barely. I ran 2:49.49 and the cut off was 2:50. The time wasn’t anything, but I am super proud of the discipline it took to train for it.”
It was her mom, Mae Horns, a pioneer of women’s running in the Twin Cities and all-around active person, who motivated Klecker to start running. In high school, then-Janis Horns was on the ski team, and in her senior year, she started running around a lake near their Edina house, 1.3 miles, “for some semblance of health.” As a freshman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “my mom was training for Grandma’s Marathon and came to Madison to run the Diet Pepsi 10K.” Janis ran it too, winning her age group and qualifying for the regional race in Kansas City. She thought she’d better train.
In the fall of 1979, she transferred to the University of Minnesota and approached coach Mike Lawless to see if she could train with the women’s team. In the middle of the cross country season, Janis ran the City of Lakes Marathon with her mom, not really expecting to complete the whole thing. In fact, she finished third in 2:58. “I went to practice on Monday after the marathon as if nothing was wrong. It didn’t occur to me that running a marathon in the middle of cross country season was something you shouldn’t do.” She did compete for the University of Minnesota in cross country, but says she “wasn’t very good, the sixth or seventh runner.”
Competing in the 1980s while attending dental school, Klecker built off the pioneering efforts of women who came before—her mother, Patty Ratelle, Alex Boies, Jacqueline Hansen, Judy Lutter, Jan Arenz, Emily Lanin, Carol Klitzke, and others. “Women were on their own; there were no training groups.”
A word that comes up frequently when she’s talking about her competitive years is naivete. “Sometimes it’s easy to overthink things, to lose some of the simplicity. Not to take away from big goals and training groups and coaches, but there's some good to just going out for a run. When we moved here, I drove around and measured some routes, and made a pencil drawn map. That was my guide. For some of us, it worked. I trained hard and raced a lot, and it worked for me on the right day.” Klecker was coached by her husband, Barney.
Photo: The 1991 Twin Cities Marathon women's podium. Klecker flanked b runner-up Marcia Narloch (left) and third-place finisher Lutsia Belaeva (right).
She is quick to point out, making it to the Olympics is and was a team effort. “There may be more resources now for runners, and I know Dakotah has a great support system in Minnesota Distance Elite. I had Dorothy Spencer, a massage therapist, I had an orthopedist, my parents, Barney. A whole lot of people cared about what I was doing.”
With an Olympian for a mom, and a record setter for a dad (Barney is the former U.S. record holder for the 50 mile and the 50K), it would seem a foregone conclusion that the six Klecker children would be runners. In fact, all were collegiate athletes—five runners and a football player—and Joe Klecker represented the U.S. at the Tokyo Olympics in the 10,000 meters.
But Janis’s thoughts on running are tempered with a full life outside of running: “It’s easy for running to get too big in your life. Some people can make their living at it, like Joe. But he’s in grad school to get his Master’s in biotech. At some point, running will fail you. It won’t last forever. It’s important to be able to see yourself outside of being a runner. When I was in dental school, it was hard and all-consuming, and people asked, why do you keep running? I said, It keeps me in touch with reality. When I was out of dental school and running competitively, people asked why I practiced dentistry. I said, It keeps me in touch with reality. There was always way more going on in life than my next workout.”
Dakotah Lindwurm seems to be of the same mind about the fleeting nature of running as a career. She’s taken a break from her part-time jobs as a coach with Team Run Run and as a paralegal, but intends to take them up again post-Paris.
This article originally appeared in the TCM's weekly e-newsletter, The Connection. Subscribe to the Connection here.
Sarah Barker is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Deadspin, Outside, Runner's World, and elsewhere. She's enjoyed the vibrant Minnesota running community for a lot of decades, and hopes to continue in said pursuit. Recently, she wrote about Olympic gold medalist Million Wolde for the TCM Blog. Here's something she wrote about ultra running phenom and Hopkins product, Courtney Dauwalter.
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