This Runner Has Already Gotten In Her Rhodes Work

Becky Spies-Swain is a medical student deep into a fellowship in the pathology department at San Francisco General Hospital. She also is deep into training for the U.S. Olympic track and field team. Having already qualified for the Olympic trials in the 1,500 meters, she has a morning training run planned.

But Spies-Swain gets beeped. Her presence is required at the hospital. Immediately. So the run is abandoned. Another hectic day takes another crazy turn.

Spies-Swain, 26, will be competing Saturday at the Los Angeles Invitational track meet in the mile. Al Franken, co-chairman of the event, says he can’t remember having a Rhodes scholar on his program. Yes, Spies-Swain is a Rhodes scholar. The Villanova graduate spent two years at Oxford studying social anthropology.

“You know,” Spies-Swain says, “it’s the study of cultures in a comparative, mathematic sort of way. In the go-live-with-Margaret-Mead-in-the-

jungle-and-write-about-their-customs sort of way.”

No, actually, most of us don’t know.

Most of us would be intimidated even thinking about trying to live the life of Becky Spies-Swain, medical student and Olympic aspirant in Emoryville, Calif.

She is up before dawn to run. Or to study. Or to rush to the hospital when pathology calls. She got married last year to Chris Swain, a stock trader. She speaks enthusiastically of her thesis on HIV clinics and interactions among patients, staff and, as she says, “the whole social milieu.”

In her two years in England, the study, the tutorials with eminent professors, the adjustment to a foreign way of schooling, were not enough. Spies-Swain also joined the British Milers’ Club and ran whenever she could.

“The whole experience was amazing,” she says.

She is talking and packing at the same time. Spies-Swain almost always does two things at once. In the morning she has an early flight to Greensboro, N.C., where she will try to qualify for the U.S. cross-country team.

“The education is so different, so formal,” she says of the Oxford experience. “You’d have one-on-one tutoring with very British professors instead of going to classes. You’d have weekly books to read and then you would sit down and discuss them and write a paper. At the end of two years, you have a big exam.”

At the end of those two years Spies-Swain was also hoping for another big exam, one at the 1996 Olympic trials in Atlanta. She had missed the qualifying standard by a tenth of a second, but had been told she was on a provisional list. If one person had gotten sick, pulled a muscle, fallen down the stairs, something, anything, Spies-Swain would have been at the Olympic trials.

On the day she flew home from Oxford, she said, “I literally didn’t know where I was going. Either to Boston to visit friends or to Atlanta for the trials. I spent the whole flight wishing . . . well, not that anything bad happened to anyone but that I’d land in Boston and get the call to go to Atlanta.”

But there was no call. Spies-Swain didn’t go to the trials and decided that her running career probably was over. She had competed at Villanova under legendary coach Marty Stern and had helped Villanova to an NCAA team cross-country title. Still, she knew she was getting better as a runner.

“But realistically, I just didn’t think I could combine medical school and running competitively,” she says. “It just didn’t seem possible.”

Running, though, is in Spies-Swain’s heart. She began medical school at UC San Francisco. She had deferred her admission for two years to attend Oxford and knew she could not now be a half-hearted student. But always, she has found time to run. Mornings, evenings, during an afternoon break, sometime, somehow. She qualified for the U.S. world cross-country team last year and as her times in the 1,500 have stayed in the top 15 in the nation, there grew the idea that the Olympics were worth a try.

“I don’t have a lot of illusions,” she says. “I don’t have the ability right now, with school, to just take a leave and train. I guess my hope would be to go to the trials, run my best in the qualifying and somehow get in the final heat. If you get in that final heat, you never know what will happen. Anything can happen.”

Anything can always happen. Spies-Swain met her husband on the commuter train in San Francisco. Turns out Chris had been a competitive runner in high school. She was able to land her pathology fellowship for this semester, a fellowship, she says, “that is flexible enough that I can arrange my schedule to take off for things like the cross-country trials or the meet in Los Angeles.”

Dr. Dot Richardson qualified for and won a gold medal in softball at the 1996 Olympics. Spies-Swain was thrilled to hear this.

“So it can be done,” she says. “That’s good to know.”

And it’s easy to understand how Spies-Swain may not have paid attention to those 1996 Olympics.

“It was hard for me to watch,” she says. “It hurt when I didn’t go to the trials. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have given up my experience at Oxford for anything.”

Oxford . . . Olympics. Oxford . . . Olympics. Tough choice, huh?

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Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.