P: Do you think your runners get the same thing out of it?

JS: That’s my goal as a coach-not only to make them better runners but to help them gain the experience as an athlete.

P: Why did you want to come back to Elon to coach?

JS: I think Coach [Bill] Morningstar was a good role model for me. He enjoyed what he did, and he made us enjoy it as athletes. When I came back, at first I was working with teammates I ran with, so I knew half of the team anyway. I just wanted to see if [coaching] was an environment I wanted to continue to work in.

JS: The easiest part is having the team, track and cross country, take some responsibility in their work ethics and performance and how cohesive the team is. It makes my job easier. The team takes on small roles, including extra things they want done for the team as far as volunteer work and captains lead parts of practices. My hardest [part] is that I don’t have a full-time assistant. It makes my job harder in that I’m doing the job of what other schools do with four or five people, but let me add to that we are a new track program. In time we will have full-time assistants. It’s very hard to recruit because days of competitions for your own team are also days where I need to go recruit. It’s hard to be in two places at once. I need to be cloned.

JS: I do plan on continuing coaching, but I’m also getting my masters [degree] and hoping to teach classes as well. I’m getting my master’s in nutrition so anything with wellness and nutrition.

P: Do you think it’s cool that your hometown was featured in a Visa commercial? (The commercial said you needed a Visa card in case you couldn’t find a mechanic in Mechanicsville or had trouble in a town called Paradise.)

JS: That would be very cool. I don’t think it was ours. There are four other Mechanicsvilles in the U.S. When I saw it I thought if it’s Mechanicville it’s us, but if it’s Mechanicsville it’s not. That is how we got our name. It’s a very small town [with a] population of about 6,000. On that same line when I get home everyone expects to see me running in the street with my dad and my sister.

P: How many marathons have you run? How’d you do?

JS: Fourteen, number 15 in January at Disney with my youngest sister Megehan and my father. I actually won my age division in my very first marathon. My second marathon, I came in twelfth overall on the female side. I’ve run Boston twice finishing in the top 2200 in my gender.

JS: The challenge and the training. You get that far through training and you want to finish it on race day. It’s the challenge of accomplishing a goal you’ve set and trained for the past four or five months. And of course the camaraderie. You meet great people at races and have support along the way.

JS: It exists to a point. I think some people experience runner’s high and some people never have. It’s not experienced in the typical shorter distances but it’s experienced in longer distances. It’s an uplifting feeling.

P: Have you ever had it?

JS: Yes, a couple of times. It’s a feeling of newness and it’s a surge of energy. Then again a lot of runners hit the "wall" and that usually does happen in marathons around the 20th to 23rd mile.

P: Do you think running is the hardest sport?

JS: I don’t think it’s the hardest sport in the sense that it’s easy to do and easy to learn the correct form and technique. Yes, it’s one of the hardest sports to dominate. There is no money in running. Very few elite athletes out there can make a career of it. I’ve done marathons where the winner wins $60 to $70 thousand dollars. But you definitely have to be a top elite runner to make a career of it.

P: How many pairs of running shoes do you go through in a year?

P: You’ve worked with the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society for three years. Why was that something you wanted to do?

JS: I did that as a volunteer coach when I first started at Elon, and it was very rewarding. I loved, and still do love, getting people involved in running, and running for different organizations, raising money for the community and corporations that benefit from the events. The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society has raised millions and millions of dollars through runners. It was great to be a part of something so rewarding.

P: What is something you do that would surprise people?