From Thursday's New York Times--front page
By LYNN ZINSER
Published: March 6, 2008
LEXINGTON, Ky.  From his lonely practice lane, a catwalk over a local gym and gymnastics facility, Dallas Robinson chases his dream of being an Olympic sprinter.
Dallas Robinson, who trains on a 60-meter strip of artificial turf at a gym, has a dream of competing in Beijing.
Robinson, 25, who quit a high-paying job to follow his heart, works at a tire store. Along with co-workers, his supporters include strangers who saw him on YouTube.
His 60-meter strip of artificial turf could not be more remote from the world of most elite sprinters, a world filled with big egos and endorsement contracts, where coaches fret over thousandths of a second and agents fret over millions of dollars.
And Robinson could hardly be more different from those sprinters. He is 6 feet 4 inches and runs remarkably fast despite being 210 pounds, roughly 40 more than many of the competitors he hopes to join at the Beijing Olympics this summer.
His dream sprang out of nowhere, prompting Robinson to quit a $100,000-a-year sales job so he could train. He left behind a comfortable, normal life for a job in a tire store, driven only by a nagging sense that this is what he is supposed to do.
"I believe I'm going to end up in the Olympics," Robinson, 25, said. "I don't know how I'm going to get there. But I guess if the mountain were smooth, you wouldn't be able to climb it."
Perhaps the most charming part of Robinson's climb is the band of believers that has started to form around him. Many are friends and co-workers at S&S Tire, as well as his coach from afar and the man who lets him train for free at a Lexington training center.
But some are strangers drawn by the video he posted of his workouts on YouTube. Robinson said it was mostly a way to motivate himself. He had no idea people would latch onto him.
The video starts with an introduction:
"Hey, y'all. My name's Dallas Robinson. I'm really nobody. I'm a 6-foot-4, 210-pound white guy that lives in Kentucky. I train myself. A lot like everybody else, when I got out of college, I went and started working. For a year, I was miserable. I wasn't doing what the Lord created me to do, and that's run."
It is vintage Robinson, charming in its honesty, filled with a self-deprecating sense of humor. He follows the introduction with clips of his races and his training, including jumping from a standing start onto tables stacked on top of each other. It has drawn him scores of encouraging e-mail messages. A man in Texas he had never met, Robinson said, sent him a new pair of spikes. He does not quite know why, but people have reacted to his dream.
"The way he comes across to people, you kind of attach yourself," said Al McKinney, who works with Robinson and was a high school sprinter in the late '60s. "He is that nice a guy."
His story also attracted Mike Young, an assistant track coach at Army who is developing an independent team of elite runners, HPC Sport. He met Robinson only once when he agreed to coach him long distance.
"There's a conviction there," Young said. "When you feel called to do something, there's a higher force at work. I don't underestimate that. To me, it isn't kooky."
Robinson has won over his small band of believers with his performances. He ran 100 meters into a headwind in 10.33 seconds last summer, after training for only six weeks and while weighing 225 pounds. In the past two months, he posted some of the top 55- and 60-meter times in the world.
"He's a freak of nature," said Rick Pounds, who allows Robinson to train for free at the High Intensity Training Center in Lexington. "I just had to do what I could to help him."
Pounds first met him when Robinson was in college. Robinson played football and ran track at Morehead State, then earned a track scholarship to Eastern Kentucky. He won a few conference titles, in the 60 meters and the 100, but showed few hints of greatness.
Robinson lived what he called a troubled childhood after his parents divorced. A series of stepfathers moved his mother and her four children around the country. They ended up in Richmond, Ky., his mother married to a man who put up fencing for a living. Robinson declined to discuss his upbringing in further detail.
"I don't want to paint anyone in a bad light," he said. "My parents cared for me. The way they knew how to love me was the way they loved me. I'm very appreciative of that."
None of his siblings went to college. No one in his family had graduated from college. No one expected Robinson to be any different. He said that he barely graduated from high school, but that he was determined not to end up installing fences like his stepfather or tending bar like his older brother. He said he found a well of stubbornness.
So when Robinson graduated from Eastern Kentucky, he gave up sports. He got a good job and bought a house and a nice car.
Then his new dream took hold.
"I would lie awake at night," Robinson said. "I decided I had to train again. People asked me why. I said, 'I can't really tell you why.'
"Is this stupid? Probably. But I know I am created with a limited amount of gifts. I don't have the straightest smile, the straightest nose. I'm not the smartest guy in the world. But my legs move fast. That's one of my gifts that I feel I can share with Kentucky, with my friends at S&S Tire, something that would hopefully make my family proud. It's the only thing I have to give back right now."
One day last month, Robinson had a rare training session with Young, his only visit in months. Robinson was poised for a start when a little girl wandered up to explore the catwalk. She stared at him from the middle of the lane, her wide eyes trying to make sense of the man preparing to rocket her way.
Robinson stopped, putting his head down to laugh. He flashed a crooked smile at the girl. "It's not the ideal place to train," he said.
In January, after six months of serious training and Young's coaching mostly over the phone, Robinson entered the 60 meters at the Kentucky Invitational, an indoor meet at the University of Kentucky. He said about 50 people  friends from college, former football teammates, his tire store colleagues  watched him beat the next-best runner, the Kentucky junior Gordon McKenzie, by two-tenths of a second and finish in 6.64 seconds, the eighth-best time in the country. In a race often decided by hundredths of a second, it was a remarkable margin.
His friends rushed to the track to congratulate him. It was the first time most had seen him run.
"I was impressed," McKinney said. "The competition that he had, some of those guys, they were the best in their schools. He basically whipped their butts."
Robinson started last summer with the hope of qualifying to run the 100 meters at the United States Olympic trials this June, which meant being among the top 32 sprinters who run under 10.28 seconds. After his first race, he upgraded that goal to making the finals. After his times this winter, he said, he hopes to make the Olympic team.
He is frequently asked whether he has taken performance-enhancing drugs, and Robinson said he laughs. "I'm trying to lose weight," he said.
He is available to be drug tested at any time by the United States Anti-Doping Agency, but he has not been tested yet. He said that he would probably be tested at competitions once the outdoor season starts. He plans to run outdoors for the first time on March 22 in the Texas Invitational in Austin. If his times are good, he will also be tested randomly.
Robinson said he believes that the fight against drugs in sports helps people like him. He knows he will not run the 100 in 9.8 seconds and threaten the world record, and the number of men who can run those times has been pared by drug suspensions, including the ones Justin Gatlin and Tim Montgomery are serving. That, Robinson said, opens the door for him to be competitive if he can lower his time into the 9.9s.
He says he's aiming to become the first white athlete to break the 10-second barrier in the 100. But perhaps his largest hurdle is his weight. Only a few great sprinters, Carl Lewis and Linford Christie in particular, have been close to 200 pounds. Heavier runners are slow starters who rely on building speed in the second half of the race.
"It's hard to get that weight moving," Young said. "But once he gets to top speed, it stays moving."
To reach his potential, Robinson knows he needs better training circumstances, ideally in a warmer climate with a coach by his side. To afford that, he needs a sponsor.
To woo one, Robinson needs to reproduce his indoor times in outdoor meets and start to make headway toward his Olympic dream. Until then, he remains his sport's curiosity. He is a fast guy from Kentucky who spends practices dodging 4-year-olds and collecting believers.
But they may have found something special in Robinson.
"How come when we're kids we want to be astronauts and firefighters and Indian chiefs, and then when we turn 20 years old we give up on our dreams?" Young said. "Dallas is a good example of a guy who's still trying to be an astronaut."
