Demanding nursing major doesn't slow down Blue Hen runner McGroarty

Liz McGroarty was doing a lot of running around last week.

Some of it was on the track, where she ran the 1,500 meters faster than any University of Delaware woman ever had and earned a spot in next week’s NCAA East meet.

Much of it was in her busy academic life as a nursing student. As a senior, that meant McGroarty has spent this school year doing her clinical immersion program, which basically means living the busy life of a nurse.

“Senior year, you get it full force, all year,” said McGroarty, a 22-year-old Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, resident and Garnet Valley High grad. “You do three days a week, 80 hours in a four-week block.”

Those segments are spent in various area hospitals getting experience in different types of nursing, such as psychiatry, surgery, maternity and pediatrics.

Yet she still found time to train and put together one of the most stellar seasons, both in cross country and track, that a Blue Hen runner has had.

“You’ll talk to coaches all over the country,” said second-year Delaware distance coach Ryan Waite, a former Brigham Young University runner. “When they hear that one of their athletes wants to study nursing, it’s like one of the most dreaded conversations.

“The time commitment, being on their feet a lot. It makes it so they’re not as fresh for the workout, they don’t recover as well or their hours are really weird because they have to wake up really early or go to bed really late.

"But with Liz, I really wasn’t worried about it because I knew that she’s just a balanced person. She’s not the kind of person you’d worry about not studying for a final and then staying up all night the night before.”

McGroarty, who had indeed been turned away by some schools in the recruiting process because of her plan to study nursing, had the dedication, discipline and determination to make it work at Delaware. She has done so in impressive fashion.

“She wanted to make sure I knew early on,” Waite said, “that ‘I will make this work. This is not going to be an issue,’ so I never thought it was.”

Last weekend was a prime example.

McGroarty has been working a 3-11 p.m. shift at Christiana Hospital, making typical late-afternoon practices with her teammates difficult. So she trains in the morning, usually on her own.

After working that shift last Friday, she woke up Saturday and drove to Princeton, New Jersey, for the ECAC Track and Field Championships. Fortunately, her race wasn’t until 4 p.m.

McGroarty churned out a school record 4:19.92 in the 1,500 meters and finished second to reach the NCAA East qualifier at the University of South Florida. McGroarty broke the UD mark of 4:21.65 set by Lindsay Prettyman, the Newark resident and St. Mark’s High grad, in 2014.

She then dashed off to her cousin’s wedding reception in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania.

“I knew I was in good shape. I knew I was in 4:20ish shape,” said McGroarty, whose previous best had been a 4:23.52 at April’s Colonial Relays at William & Mary. “I just knew I hadn’t been there yet. Every race I was in this year I was kind of doing a lot of leading from the front, and it’s hard to run fast that way ... This past weekend at Princeton there were about five girls who had run 4:23 or faster so I knew it was going to be a competitive and fast race. It’s the last meet before regionals so people are going for fast times.”

McGroarty got hers, though she was nosed out for first place by Cornell pace-setter Shannon Hugard (4:19.79).

“About 100, 150 to go, I was closing in on her,” McGroarty said. “I came up a tad short. I almost didn’t even care I didn’t win. I wanted that time and the fact I got it, I was ecstatic. Something we’ve been working on for a while.”

At NCAA regionals, she’ll be joined by teammate Ashley Bailey. The junior pole vaulter out of Middletown High placed third at ECACs by clearing 12 feet, 6 inches.

Her nursing and athletic schedules made McGroarty’s life a juggling act.

“It was a week-by-week, day-by-day, depending-on-the-rotation basis,” she said. “Ryan was great in being really flexible. In the fall, during cross-country, I probably wasn’t at practice two or three days a week. That’s really hard, because cross country is such a team atmosphere, so doing the workouts alone was really hard.’’

Yet she excelled on the trails while putting in 60 miles a week of training, often galloping out of her Newark apartment on her own in the morning.

Last fall, McGroarty placed fifth in the Colonial Athletic Association Cross Country Championships, the highest finish by a Blue Hen woman in 12 years. She was then 34th in the NCAA district meet, equaling Delaware’s second-best finish in 12 years.

“It made me extremely focused and extremely driven and when I was running it was like that’s all I was doing,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking about anything else. There were definitely days where I got up and said ‘I don’t really feel like going on this eight- or 10-mile run that I have, but ... the two days a week I could run with the team were nice because I could be normal again.”

This spring, McGroarty has shown her versatility.

“I knew it was my senior year and I wanted to go after just about everything,” she said. “I upped the mileage, I upped the intensity of the workouts. I wanted to make sure I was getting everything I could out of myself. Nursing or clinicals aside, I didn’t care. I wanted to do it all or do as much as I could.”

McGroarty succeeded, clocking Delaware’s No. 2 all-time outdoor times in the 800 (2:08.74) and 3,000 (9:42.24). Mainly an 800 runner at Garnet Valley High, she’d been part of a 4 x 800 relay foursome that clocked a UD record 8:55.47 last year.

In one-on-one meetings with each of his athletes after arriving at Delaware, Waite had been impressed with McGroarty’s ambitiousness.

“She said ‘I want to make it to NCAAs,’ ” he recalled. “She told me later she was afraid to tell me that because she was afraid I would laugh at her ... It was the opposite. I was pumped. I was like, ‘Good. This is what I want.’ When I got here and looked at the roster I had circled her name as someone who had the potential to make some big steps.”

McGroarty did qualify for the NCAA East qualifier 1,500 last year, running a 4:25.09, which was the 29th best time. The top 24 advanced to the NCAA Championships.

Her goal this year is to advance and she feels like she’s on the right track after Saturday’s stellar run.

“I’d love to PR (personal record),” she said. “It’ll be a great opportunity to. Everyone there is so good and so close in times that I think the pace will just be rolling. Just to see what I can do is my goal, end things on a high note.”

Contact Kevin Tresolini at ktresolini@delawareonline.com. Follow on Twitter @kevintresolini.