An exhausted Sandy Blakeslee after running in the 1985 Southwest Conference Championships.
One Sunday this past December, Texas women’s cross country assistant coach PattiSue Plumer settled in at her dining room table in downtown Austin to Zoom with her athletes. The table was new, purchased precisely for this purpose virtual coaching and so was the apartment. She had recently moved to one of the freshly vacated, more spacious lower-level units within her complex to avoid catching COVID-19 on her daily elevator ride down from the 26th floor.
Plumer always arrived early
to these weekly meetings with her team, so she was momentarily staring back at her own reflection as she sipped from a can of Berry La Croix. These careful adjustments to everyday routines defined her year, and as the squares appeared with her runners Maddie Vondra, with a giant Longhorn emblem painted on the wall behind her, Beth Ramos with a cat meowing faintly offscreen, and Kathryn Gillespie, who occasionally