"Gabi's Why" - Chapter Four
Gabi Drummond is soft spoken. She will never tell you her Personal Bests unless you ask her—and even then, she does not give them up easily. She shuns her college results. She even says her twin sister, Dani, is a better version of her.
Where does that come from? Relativity.
“I feel like it’s all relative. I’m dating Louis and have a lot of friends who are faster than me…With school, I go to MIT and everyone there is way smarter than me. I’m just trying to keep up, you know?”
I don’t know.
Gabi is fast. Gabi is intelligent. And clearly, Gabi is humble.
While Gabi may be quick to shrug off her recent PRs of a 17:15 5k and a 1:17 half marathon this winter, her humility seems to fuel and endless pursuit of something great in the sport.
Her more recent training blocks have been characterized by more miles, more friends, and more playlists. 30 miles per week accelerated into 60+ miles a week. Running alone became running with Rav and then the training group as a whole. The one constant in her training from the beginning has been her running with music, or “music doping,” as Louis affectionately calls it. One of her proudest playlists include the playlist posted at the bottom of this page.
Gabi’s fun-loving attitude keeps training light-hearted and social, which may even result in her taking phone calls during her tempo workouts. In her words, if it wasn’t fun, there would be no reason to train like this. Her racing and goal-setting feels like it’s more for her and self-asserting than ever before. For someone who has nothing to prove to anyone, not even herself, she leaves us with her thoughts on the 2:45 Olympic Trials Standard:
“I would be sad if I didn’t run 2:45 and think, ‘What a waste’…but after that, I’d be fine…It’s an arbitrary number and none of us are going to the Olympics anyways —no offense—so it almost doesn’t even matter.”
Gabi knows that 2:45 doesn’t make or break her passion to run. Listen below: