Long Beach Poly’s Camille Lindsay hopes to take another big step as a runner in the fall
Blog June 25, 2020
Long Beach Poly’s Camille Lindsay rocketed onto the high school running scene last September with a spectacular effort at the prestigious Woodbridge Cross Country Classic, dominated all three Moore League races — winning the final by nearly a minute — and was set to challenge the state’s best at the CIF championships.
She hasn’t raced since, and there’s no certainty when she will race again.
An ankle injury two days before the first CIF Southern Section meet ended a sensational freshman campaign, and the coronavirus crisis canceled her first track and field season before it started, the decision arriving just hours before her debut with the powerhouse Jackrabbits.
Lindsay is one to watch, perhaps the most promising middle-distance runner to emergefrom Long Beach, if there was actually something to watch. The 2020 cross country season is set to start in late August, but it could be pushed back or possibly canceled because of the pandemic.
“I think anything is better than nothing …,” she said this week. “I’m just hoping if we can’t have normal invitationals and all of the Moore League races, that there’s still a state we can go to and compete in. But if we could have a normal cross country season, that would, obviously, be the best scenario.”
CIF has pledged to determine by July 20 whether high school sports will “continue as currently scheduled” or “offer alternative calendars.”
In the interim, Lindsay and her teammates have gathered for training runs — “not running together, but social-distancing running,” she says — and through the Zoom app, “just motivating each other” and slowly ramping up toward whatever is to come.
Lindsay, who will be 16 in October, discovered the joys of running in a school program in fourth grade. She joined Lightning Youth Running Club (now Long Beach Flyers) two years later, and won district cross country titles all three years at Hughes Middle School.
She burst out in her third varsity race in the fall, finishing second at Woodbridge Classic. She went on to win her class at the Palos Verdes Invitational and was runner-up at the Mt. SAC Invitational, then dominated the Moore League runs, setting a personal best of 17 minutes, 43 seconds for 3 miles in the league final at Heartwell Park.
Expectations were high for the CIF runs, but Lindsay sprained her left ankle on a training run two days before the preliminaries. An MRI revealed stress reactions, which often precede stress fractures, atop both feet, and she was done running for a time.
“I thought, oh, it’s probably just a rolled ankle, but then I couldn’t walk on it, and it was pretty bad,” she said. “Then the sentence was made, and I wasn’t able to run. I was really disappointed. It’s, like, my first year, and I was excited to just put myself out there and have everybody see me and everything.”
Lindsay was surprised by her rise — “I mean, I always thought that I wasn’t going to be quite last, but I didn’t see (so much success) coming much at all,” she said — but Poly coach Gabrielle Bournes saw something special from the outset.
“She’s different. She’s one of those rare athletes that come, they stay for a while, and their legacy stays for a while,” said Bournes, who was a star runner at Poly and UCLA. “She has the opportunity to do that, for sure. She’s one of those special athletes that we talk about for a long time.”
Bournes praises Lindsay’s work ethic and calls her “fearless,” “completely self-motivated” and a “joy to be around.”
“You have to tell her to slow down,” she said. “She does not stop. She has one switch, and that’s 100 percent. She’s like a perfect athlete. I don’t know if that’s possible, but she’s up there.
“She’s still learning, technically. She’s still young. There’s so much she can do as she gets stronger and a little more knowledgeable and learns how to race a little better. We’ve barely tapped into her potential, which is incredible to think about.”
Lindsay figures to excel in the 1,600 and especially the 3,200 for Poly’s powerhouse track team, which has won or finished second in the Southern Section’s highest division 26 of the past 28 seasons. She prefers cross country to track, but figures to run both, in college and perhaps professionally, if the opportunity is there.
“I’ll run a few marathons, but that won’t be what I specialize in,” she said. “I enjoy running the mile and 5K and those kind of races.”
She’s hoping she can do so soon. Running is her world.
“It’s always constant,” she said. “It’s just something you love. For me, it’s like breathing … you just feel like you can’t live without doing it. Running isn’t easy, it’s painful, but, you know, you just love doing it.”
