When junior Emily Eynon learned her freshman year that her twin sister Chrissy walked onto the Penn's cross country team, she had only one thought: "If she can do it, I can do it."
But it almost didn't come to be. After playing for the squash team as a freshman, Eynon joined the cross country team in her second year, but racing was a different story.
"I remember standing on the line and wondering what [the coach] would do if I just didn't go when the gun went off," Eynon says.
But the competitive spirit that drove her to join the team prevailed and Eynon ran the race. During the next year, she distinguished herself as the No. 2 runner on the team.
"I shocked myself," Eynon says. "Somehow I just kept up. I don't know how."
But she shouldn't have been shocked. Eynon has a long history of competing and succeeding. The junior was recruited to play squash, which she still does in addition to running cross country and track.
The Cincinnati native, who was ranked in the top 10 nationally in squash before college, played in the No. 5 position on the squash team last year. The team came up just short of its bid for the national title, falling, ironically, to the Penn team for which her sister plays.
Growing up, Eynon always had a builtin partner in her twin. Their dad taught their older sister Libby to play, and she went on to become the national champion. So he later decided he ought to teach them too.
"In practice, we'd never keep score," Eynon says. "We would get in battles and just play and play."
Family ties
Her parents took the twins and their older brother Barrett to squash tournaments on the weekends in the winter. It was Eynon's first athletic priority, but it certainly wasn't her only one. She played soccer for her high school team in the fall and spring, did gymnastics in the winter and ran track in the spring. Eynon sometimes had to skip gymnastics meets for squash tournaments. And since soccer overlapped with track, she didn't have to practice with the track team — she just ran in the meets.
The juggling of athletics is obviously nothing new to her. The hardest part, she says, is getting her body in the right condition for the different needs of each sport.
"I love having so many things to do," Eynon says. "I always have to be doing three things at once."
Cross country coach Peter Farrell cites Eynon's ability to pace herself as the key to her success.
"She has a great sense of pace and a very strong drive to finish," Farrell says. "It's odd to see a runner catch on so quickly and set herself up at the optimum pace."
Eynon notes that in practice, the team is given a target time to run a specified distance on the track. Despite having no idea what it should feel like, the Tiger says that she is intuitively able to do it.
"Maybe it's something you're just born with," Eynon says.
Slow and steady
Eynon's strategy for races is to run the first mile slowly, work to pass people in the second and let the third mile take care of itself.
So far it's working. Eynon placed third overall in the double dual meet at the Princeton Battlefield Sept. 16 and fourth among the 15-team field at the Fordham Invitational earlier in the season. Eynon was second for the Tigers in both meets.
She has big goals for the team this year. She wants the team to go to Nationals and she wants to win the Harvard-Yale-Princeton meet.
Her favorite moment as a runner so far was competing at Heps last year. There, Eynon recorded her fastest time on the hilly Van Cortlandt course, again finishing second for Princeton.
She says that something that helps her through each race is a friend who e-mails her inspirational messages:
"Just remember, you won't get last."
With the athletic talent that serves her in three distinct sports, there doesn't seem to be much threat of that.
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