EVERETT — Could you draw a picture?
It was an unusual request near the end of an interview.
Valerie Massie didn’t hesitate. She made her left hand into a fist, laid it on a desk and began to draw.
Fifteen minutes later, she was done. And there, on the tablet, was a perfect depiction of her hand. The two middle fingers slightly curled, the thumb overlapping the forefinger.
Such talent.
In the not-too-distant past, she had done portraits of her Snohomish High School teammates on bus trips to track meets.
Some people are blessed. Valerie Massie is one of them.
The 19-year-old Everett Community College sophomore is not only a gifted artist, but has a talent for running that has just begun to show itself in the past couple of years.
One year ago, she did something that must have stunned her former high school teammates and coaches. Running in the Northwest Athletic Association of Community Colleges (NWAACC) cross country championships, she crossed the finish line second, 17 seconds behind teammate Shawna Schooley. It was the best performance of Massie’s life.
It left her with a different kind of emotion. “I wasn’t ecstatic,” she said. “I felt a buzz.”
It was a buzz that must have pulsated from her head to her feet when she realized she had helped the Trojans bring home the school’s first NWAACC championship.
“I felt,” she said, “finished.”
Perhaps it was as if she had just completed a chapter of her life. A very fulfilling chapter.
What a struggle to write it, though.
Not until her senior year of high school did she do anything to distinguish herself in running circles, placing fourth in both the mile and two-mile at the district track meet.
Her mile time was a stunning 5 minutes, 6 seconds, more than a minute faster than her best previous clocking. There was a very good reason she had never run that fast before.
She had what is called iron-deficiency anemia, a common nutritional deficiency among female athletes, especially endurance athletes, such as distance runners. “I felt like it was the end of the race all the time,” she recalled.
Some time off and iron-replacing supplements made a difference. She became a runner, rather than a slogger, but too late to attract the attention of any college coaches when she came out of high school.
Not even Matt Koenigs, who was about to begin his fourth year as the EvCC cross country and track coach, was aware of her.
Koenigs, a graduate of Marysville-Pilchuck High School and Western Washington University, was scouting talent at a track meet one day when he got to talking with Tuck Gionet, Snohomish High’s head track coach.
Gionet told him about one of his runners named Valerie who was going to attend EvCC. “Who’s Valerie?” Koenigs admitted thinking. “She was not on my radar.”
Once he learned who she was and how far she had come in a short time, Koenigs said “to have Valerie fall into your lap was like a dream gift.”
What a gift it turned out to be. For most of last year, she finished fourth among Trojan runners. Then in the North Region meet, she was second behind Schooley. And then she repeated that performance in the biggest meet of the year, the league championships.
She had forcefully put herself on every opponent’s radar screen.
“She,” Koenigs said, “is a fighter.”
She’ll bring that same zeal to the league championships Saturday at Clackamas Community College in Oregon City, Ore.
One other thing she’ll bring: a free spirit.
Gionet recalled days when his distance athletes would go out for a run and everyone would return to the stadium but Massie. “Her stuff would still be in the locker room,” the coach said with a laugh. “I’d say, ‘Where’s Valerie?’ A half-hour later, she’d come running into the stadium wearing a flower necklace she’d made. You couldn’t get mad. That was just her style.
“She has a very genuine innocence. It’s always so refreshing.”
Then there was the time she pushed the envelope just a bit. The Panther team was at Monroe and doing a cool-down lap at the end of the meet.
“The team comes around the track and all of a sudden Valerie leaps this fence and runs up a hill to this water tower on prison property,” Gionet said.
When Massie got back to the track, she said to her coach, “I’m in trouble, aren’t I?”
Her explanation for her frivolous flight: “I just wanted to run up the hill.”
“It was like ‘Why does someone climb a mountain?’” Gionet said with a chuckle. “Because it’s there. I couldn’t get mad at her. It was total innocence.”
Her cross country coach her senior year, David LeWarne, said, “She’s such a free spirit that we’d go places and she’d disappear and rather than ask ‘Where’s Waldo?’ it was ‘Where’s Valerie?’
“Her teammates just loved her.”
Koenigs echoed that sentiment. “You can’t find anyone on our team who doesn’t like Valerie.”
After the recent NWAACC North Region meet, a race in which Massie placed fourth, she greeted one of her male teammates with a herky-jerky dance move that had him in stitches.
The young lady has energy to burn.
Gionet remembers seeing her in Snohomish during the summer either riding her bike or running. “She’s never standing still,” he said. “She has a motor that won’t quit.”
LeWarne lives near EvCC and one day he saw this girl running down the street bare-footed: Who else but Valerie.
Another time she’s riding her bike with one foot on the pedal and the other foot straight out behind her. LeWarne’s observation: “She’s an absolute riot.”
With gifts galore.
She did a touching portrait of Koenigs and his young son, Chase. She also designed the team shirts last year.
The gift of running is still developing.
“She has so much more to give,” LeWarne said. “She’s very green. What she’s accomplished so far is based on a career maybe a year or a year-and-a-half old.”
So we ask: Where’s Valerie?
Maybe someday, she mused, in the Peace Corps.
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