richburg

t Lansingburgh High School in Troy in the late 1970s, Diana Richburg decided she would run for freshman class president. She had never been in student government before, and the decision raised the eyebrows of her friends.

     "Why did I want to do it? Because no other minority had ever tried and it seemed like a great challenge," said Richburg, B.S.’97, who is an African-American and now a graduate student in the University’s School of Business.
     Richburg won the class presidency in the predominantly white school, both in her freshman and sophomore years. But by her junior year she was concentrating on a new challenge—and again, one rarely traveled, particularly at that time, by an African-American teenager.
"I think the success in the class election and my duties as president gave me confidence for the other things I pursued in life, like becoming a middle-distance runner."
     Richburg had been named her class’s outstanding sportsman/athlete in junior high school. "As a freshman in high school, I was immediately thought of as a potential track athlete —but naturally as a sprinter. But I elected to run longer distances. I started training with the boys’ cross-country team fromthe beginning."
     By her junior year in 1980, she had graduated to another world, both athletically and socially. That summer, she began training with a local coach, Rodney Wilshire, and joined the Gazelle International Track Club. "My improvement as a runner that summer was dramatic," she said, "and I decided that having a social life with friends was going to have to be put aside."
     Richburg qualified for the National Junior Scholastic Championships in the spring of 1981 by winning the New York State championships in both the 800 and 1500-meter runs, a feat never accomplished before by a U.S. high school athlete. That drew national attention, but so did the fact she ran the 800 with only one shoe on, the other having been torn off when another runner stepped on it at the start.
     At the nationals at UCLA’s Drake Stadium, she took first in the 800 and second in the 1500. That spring Troy Assemblyman Neil Kelleher proposed and the State Legislature passed a resolution honoring Richburg’s achievements.
     Yet with those achievements went a mind-set she would not relinquish for the next 11 years. "I had been a very sociable person in high school my first two years, but that changed," she says now with no trace of regret. "Running at an elite level required an enormous amount of discipline and individual effort. I trained 85 percent of the time with no other runner. So, when I began running seriously, I became a very introverted person.
     "When I left the sport in 1992, I almost instantly became the kind of person I’d been before: extroverted and friendly."
     But 1982 was all business. She eschewed high school competition entirely her senior year in order to step up her mileage and increase her cardiovascular strength in preparation for national competition. Local newspaper reports often viewed her as another Helen Wills, the great tennis star of the 1920s dubbed "Miss Poker Face." But Richburg was unfazed.
     She entered the University at Albany in the fall of 1982 as a business major through the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP). Running on an international level, however, eventually won out over college, despite her 3.1 freshman cumulative grade point average. In the spring 1983 U.S. Nationals, she finished second in 800 meters, becoming one of the favorites to place on the 1984 U.S. Olympic team.
     "I always wanted to be a business major. But by 1983 I was unable to dedicate appropriate time to my studies," she said. "I remember vividly in the early fall, doing a workout on the University track, and suddenly just stopping and saying to myself, ‘I’m withdrawing from the University to train for the Olympics.’"
     In June of 1984 she won a berth on the team in the 1500 meters. At Los Angeles she got as far as thesemi-final heat.
     "I got caught up with the excitement," she admitted. "At 20 I was the youngest athlete to ever make the U.S. team in the event: I went out quickly, as I usually did, but I learned a lesson—in international competition, you have to change strategies." She laughed. "I’m learning that’s true in business, too."
The experience had other rewards. "Being on the starting line in the first heat, and hearing the announcer in the stadium saying ‘Diana Richburg from the U.S.A.,’ and then the roar of the crowd — that was just so gratifying: to know that the whole country was behind me. The experience made me all the more determined to devote myself to track as a full-time career."
     In 1985 she won the U.S. title in the 1500 meters, and missed the national record by less than a second. In 1987 she finished seventh in the 1500 at the World Track and Field Championships in Rome, Italy, and was rated No. 1 in the event in the U.S. and 10th in the world by Track and Field News. She failed to qualify for the Olympics in 1988—"I went out with Mary Decker’s fast pace in the trials and wore out. A foolish mistake."
     Over the years, despite her international reputation, Richburg never opted to leave the Northeast for warmer training sites until 1990, when she relocated to Gainesville, Fla. Many of her workouts were on the University track or around Perimeter Road.
"People in the sport would ask, ‘Why don’t you train somewhere else?’ But to me, it was like my early years in track when people expected a black runner to run sprints. I didn’t want others establishing boundaries for me."
     Her move to Florida, however, coincided with leg injuries and training cutbacks. She opted for the shorter 800 meters at the 1992 U.S. Olympic trials, winning the first heat in a very quick 2 minutes, 1.6 seconds. "Reporters and photographers from here and Europe were all around me, as they used to," she said.
     "The next day I didn’t advance. I’ll never forget walking out of the stadium. Suddenly one photographer, from England, came up to me and asked for my autograph. I remember smiling and thinking right then, ‘This is it.’ I said to him, ‘I’m retiring.’ He said, ‘Good luck.’ I thought it was a wonderful ending."
     Richburg came back to the Capital Region and got a job as a manager in a copy center, but she kept pointing at a career in marketing. After two years, in 1994, she decided to re-enroll in the University. After ten years, her writing and reading skills had slipped, but Richburg remembered that Albany’s EOP had been very supportive and generous with tutoring help. "It’s like a family, and it helped me make the transition back to college."
     In May 1997, at the age of 33, she graduated cum laude in business administration, winning the President’s Undergraduate Leadership Award in ’96 and the Dean’s Award from the School of Business for distinguished academic achievement by a returning undergraduate in ’97. She enrolled in the graduate program in marketing last fall, pointing toward an eventual corporate career.
     Now, along with school and career, her priorities include participation in the community. She volunteers time as a grant-writer and marketer with the Frank Chapman Memorial Institute, Inc., a not-for-profit after-school enrichment program, which she co-founded in 1985.
     "It’s an organization I want to grow with," she said. "We target inner-city youth and supply them with tutoring, computer training, performing arts classes, and workshops. It’s enriched me to provide administrative support for this organization."
     Not surprisingly, Richburg has been requested as a motivational speaker and would like to do more of it. "Especially for women," she said, "whom I want to speak to about the importance of goal-setting and commitment."
     A better exemplar could not be imagined. Her next set of goals? "Immediately, to get a corporate marketing assistantship this summer. Then, my master’s in 1999. After that, career, marriage, and family." She even ended a five-year absence from running, and plans to add some real training to her schedule.
    Any doubts on doing it all? She smiled, and told a story about Carson Carr, Albany’s EOP director and associate vice president for academic affairs, who said to her one day about a year ago, "Diana, I’d see you running around campus all those years, and just say to myself, ‘She’ll never come back to college.’ Now I know Diana Richburg will excel in anything in life she puts her mind to."