Back On Course

Fate can be determined by the simplest of daily activity. For Columbia University star Kyle Merber, it came down to a simple step.

Jogging alone on a road about a half-mile from his family home in the summer of 2010, he felt a quick sting in his foot. A quick look revealed the problem. A broken neck of a bottle was sticking through his training shoe. "I thought, 'This sucks, I am going to have to take a day or two off.'"

Merber pulled out the glass and the blood poured. But even as he limped home, he still didn't think it was a big deal. "I ran through three painful weeks," he said before discovering that his flexor tendon had been torn.

"It wasn't a good junior year," Merber offered. In fact, athletically, it wasn't a junior year at all. Seven months on the sidelines. By February there were rumors floating around The Armory, where he'd run a sub-four mile a year before, that the former Millrose Games' high school mile champ's competitive career might be finished.

But as spring took hold, he was ready to try it out again, "but I was only running like a mile a day." And it was a mile that still involved considerable pain.

"The big move was when I could start on the soft surfaces and that was up and down for a little while," he said. "Every other day I was feeling it, but now I don't feel it six out of seven times out. That's exciting."

As his health and fitness improved into the summer, he did something else to expedite the comeback. He moved to Maine for five weeks to train with some of the nation's top college milers — teammate Mark Feigen, Maine's Riley Masters, Stanford's Chris Derrick and Binghamton's Erik van Ingen.

"We spent five weeks together in Maine ... where we were able to focus solely on training and living the lifestyle," Merber said. "For me personally, having been out for the year, this was the perfect way to make up for the lost time away from training."

But he knew he needed to be patient. No more injuries, no more setbacks. And now he is back to competition. Merber runs Friday with his Lions at the Brooks Paul Short Invitational hosted by Lehigh University. He reports that in his year off, "The guys on the team jumped to a new level."

As for himself. "I don't know if my foot will ever be a non-issue. There is still scar tissue there," he said following a workout run on the Lehigh course on Thursday. "I'd say that I am at 99 percent ... I guess we find out for real tomorrow."