CORBIN OVERCOMES OBSTACLES TO SCORE IN GRAND PRIX

Placing second in the New Balance Grand Prix after turning forty was the last thing on Julie Corbin’s mind at the start of the 2005 season. Corbin, who lives in Mendham, was more concerned with her battle with Lyme disease than with any contest involving running.

Oral antibiotics had not stopped the disease and in fact were only adding to her woes, causing neurological problems. For a time she was on continuous intravenous medication. With the advent of spring, however, things were looking up. Corbin was back in training, and even able to race. She won the inaugural Exercise 5K, and ran in the Our House five-mile race in Summit. Then the other shoe dropped.

“The beginning of my season it was pretty rough because I was trying to recover from Lyme disease and all the antibiotics that I was on,” she said. “When I started running again, I had another kind of setback.”

“My running partner, my golden retriever Cecilia, my best friend—got sick,” said Corbin. “As soon as I got better, she was diagnosed with cancer and died real quick. A lot of people don’t understand - that was my girl, she was my kid. She would go out and run me every day - for twelve years. One morning we are out on the trail hiking and the next day she is dying in my arms.”

Corbin was devastated by the loss of her pet. As she returned to running, she vowed to dedicate every race to Cecilia. She devoted her energies to running and racing.

“From the time I started racing again, at the end of season,” said Corbin, “I had a lifetime pr for everything from a 5K to 15K. Every race I ran was a pr.”

Coming off the Lyme disease in April Corbin finished the Cherry Blossom 10K in 41:48. In November at Giralda Farms 10K she ran her personal record 39:49, just nine seconds off her best 10K, set when she was in her late twenties.

At the Great Swamp Devil 15K she crossed the finish line in 1:01:38, two minutes faster than her best Midland Run. At the Westfield Turkey Trot five-mile in November, she finished in 31:25, almost a minute and a half faster than her previous best. She broke nineteen minutes for 5K at a race in Pennsylvania and is credited with 19:17 in a New Jersey race.

Corbin, who grew up in the Doylestown area of Pennsylvania, began to run in her mid twenties to take off some weight and soon was racing.

“They don’t have the same sort of running community out there,” said Corbin. "They don’t have a lot of clubs or a grand prix series – not that I knew of anyway. When I moved to New Jersey it was surprising to me that there was such a tight knit community of runners and of running clubs and races and so forth. I think I got into running more because of that.”

As Corbin got in more and more races, her husband Erik, also a competitive runner, suggested that she take a look at what she needed to complete the grand prix.

“I wasn’t even thinking of the grand prix until late in the season, until Erik brought it to my attention,” said Corbin. “He said ‘you are racing really good. If you do these races, you’ll do really well.’”

At first she dismissed the idea, but he insisted and told her what races she had to do to maximize her points. Not only did she place second overall in the New Balance Grand Prix but she took third overall in the Mini One as well.

The Corbins are able to train together much of the time, running on the trails in the Schiff Reservation and on Patriots Path, both readily accessible from their Mendham home.

“Last fall when I was running my best time I wasn’t doing any track work,” said Corbin. “I was just going out there and running with Erik. We would do a lot of hills and just trying to keep up with him – because he is quite a bit faster than me - that would help me a lot.”

Corbin tries to get in forty to fifty miles per week and has no plans for a marathon; she says the long ones take too much out of her. She will stick with the shorter races of 15K and under and will focus on the grand prix again this year, and starting earlier. Coming up she’ll be running the Exercise 5K in Chester again and the Miles for Matheny in Peapack.

She needs a Category Three race after having missed the Newark 20K, but she will not be at the Indian Trails this morning. The reason is somewhat ironic.

Corbin is in California this weekend, defending her doctoral dissertation for a PhD in clinical psychology. The topic? Pet loss and the human-canine bond. While her beloved Cecilia was dying, Corbin was in the middle of writing up her dissertation.

“I was living my topic,” she said. “It was a really difficult time for me but running and racing was a time for me to connect and to keep her memory alive.”

Postscript: the Corbin household welcomed a new golden retriever into the household a few weeks ago. Soon Bridgit will be out with Corbin, running in the footsteps of Cecilia.

Published in the DAILY RECORD of Morris County New Jersey on Sunday, April 2, 2006

Copyright, Madeline Bost, 2006