LARAMIE, Wyo. (April 14, 2020) – Paul Roberts spent the first two years of his college career becoming a Division II All-American at CSU-Pueblo before transferring to Wyoming for his junior season. In his first season wearing the Brown and Gold in 2018, he was a cross country All-American. Last month, he likely wrapped up his career as the Outstanding Performer of the MW Indoor Championships.
 
In between those major accomplishments, he battled calf, foot and ankle injuries all the while maintaining a positive attitude. He just wanted to keep running for his teammates.
 
"I definitely pay attention to my body, and I listen to it, but when it's time to run for the team, and it's time to put all the hard miles to the test, sometimes I just suck it up because I'm excited about the team," Roberts said. "That's been instilled in me by my family in how we were raised. I love competing for a cause."
 
Growing up, Roberts was home schooled. School didn't start each morning until Paul and his siblings each finished a 20-minute run in the morning. The discipline of that daily routine shaped passion for running and helped him forge a tolerance for pain that few people have.
 
"Paul is absolutely tough," said cross country head coach Scott Dahlberg. "When I was recruiting Paul, his dad, who is very honest, had said Paul has an ability to go to places pain-wise that few do. That's very much the truth."
 
Coach Dahlberg would eventually see first-hand how far that toughness would carry Roberts.
 
The Cowboys had a dream cross country season in 2018, and Roberts contributed to that success in a major way. He was named an All-American, and the Cowboys returned to the NCAA National Championships as a team for the first time since 1986. Roberts' teammate, Laramie native Christopher Henry, earned the sport's top academic honor, the NCAA Elite 90. Wyoming placed 12^th as a team at the championships, and the Cowboys had strong momentum heading into the indoor track & field season.
 
However, the track & field seasons didn't quite go as planned for Roberts
 
"Cross country season, we've talked about it a lot over the past year," Roberts said. "It was a blast, everything went right and everyone ran well. We were all excited and having a good time. It was a good thing for that season. Going into indoor, we were all a little complacent. You get into that, you don't get enough sleep and you don't take care of your body as well, and I ended up getting a little injury. It was definitely tough. I had high expectations for indoor and outdoor last year, and it ended up, obviously, not turning into much. I had a decent indoor season with a PR in the 5k, finally. But it wasn't the indoor or outdoor season, especially, that I wanted. It was definitely frustrating."
 
The little injury was some soreness in his left foot which led to Paul running with a slightly different motion. This in turn resulted in calf pain. However, to Roberts, the calf pain was just something else to run through. He ran two 10,000m races – the longest race for outdoor athletes – on that injured calf during the 2019 outdoor season. It wasn't until the team flew to Fresno for the MW Outdoor Championships that Roberts knew something was wrong.
 
"We went to conference and it swelled up really bad," Roberts said. "We went and got it checked. I ended up having a partial second-degree tear in my calf, so I had to go see Dr. Boyer, and he took a whole bunch of fluid out of there."
 
Even the news of a partial calf tear didn't stop Roberts from wanting to compete for the Cowboys. He was all set to run with his teammates at the conference championships.
 
"It was tough to separate a calf injury from just calf soreness," Roberts said. "It was conference, and I had to go compete for the team. I love this, and I put a lot of work in to it."
 
"The sport already requires a toughness to push personal limits and the pain threshold, but throw that in the mix and it requires quite a bit extra," Dahlberg said. "He was all-in to run the conference 5k on his 'tight calf' but we finally had to pull the plug the day before because the plane ride had made it quite a bit worse. We ended up taking him to a hospital in Fresno to get scanned. We left and he still wanted to race. Part toughness and part team guy."
 
With the MW Championships out of the question, Roberts turned his attention to recovery. After all, cross country season was just around the corner. Rehab involved stepping away from running for about five or six weeks. During this time, Roberts was driving from his hometown in Lyons, Colo., up to Laramie for updates with Dr. Boyer.
 
"It was definitely tough," Roberts said. "It's nice to have that mental break. The problem is, when you have an injury, you're taking care of it, driving up to Wyoming to get stuff sucked out of my calf and doing rehab, so it's not much of a mental break. It was definitely tough getting started late in the summer. I didn't really think about that. It probably affected my season a little more than I thought, but I tend to get pretty fit pretty fast."
 
Indeed, Paul was ready for the cross country season. In the first meet of the year, he won the Wyoming Invite and was named the MW Cross Country Athlete of the Week. However, the rest of the season wasn't quite what the Cowboys were hoping for, and as a team, they were on the outside looking in when teams were picked for the National Championships. Howver, when Henry earned a spot as an individual, and Roberts was ready to cheer him on.
 
"I was super psyched for Chris to be able to run there his senior year and win the Elite 90 two years in a row," Roberts said. "That's a unique accomplishment. That was the bright spot of the season. We learned a lot as a team and as a group. We still had a good time and enjoyed the process, but Chris being able to make Nationals and go and compete there was a cool end to the season."
 
With the 2019 cross country season over, Roberts turned his attention to the indoor season. He still wasn't completely healthy, as he had come down with some plantar fasciitis in his left foot. Over the winter break, Roberts started cross training on an elliptical as part of the rehab for his foot.
 
"I think he was motivated by his teammates and the season approaching. I also think he was motivated to break the elliptical in the training room," Dahlberg said. "As he was able to run more, the harder part was probably keeping him reigned in. Motivation has never been an issue, that's just innate to who he is for whatever he's pursuing."
 
Roberts ran in two meets during the indoor season before this year's MW Indoor Championships. He was still on the elliptical and battling through the foot injury. Except by now, the foot injury had led to a small ankle injury, and he wasn't quite where he wanted to be.
 
"For like the first five weeks, it was pretty rough," Roberts said. "I was running, but I was still doing some cross training. I felt out of rhythm. We went to Colorado, and I didn't have a great meet. We went up to Washington, and I had really high expectations because I started feeling good, but we just weren't focused like we should have been. It was a tough weekend. That was definitely disappointing. But, I think right after Washington is when I started feeling healthy again."
 
Roberts was finally off the elliptical and running full time again. With just two weeks until the conference championships, Roberts had to ask coach Dahlberg if he was ready to run with some of the best distance runners in the nation.
 
"I'd say two weeks out from conference I started feeling pretty good," Roberts said. "A week out, I asked coach 'Hey, do you think I'm fit? Can I go run with the top guys?' and he told me I was fit enough. I had to trust coach more than I usually would, because usually I would have run well at Washington. But, he told me I was in good shape, I just had to put it together. It wasn't a bad indoor season, I just didn't run the times I needed to run to be confident about it. Thankfully, I have a good relationship with coach, I trust him and he knows where I'm at based on workouts. That was a time that I had to lean on him and trust that coach knows where I'm at, and he knows where I can be in the races."
 
Dahlberg gave Roberts some good advice. At the league championships, Roberts started off by placing second in the 5,000m race with a strong time of 14:04.91 – just 0.8 seconds off his personal record and seven seconds off the school record. Roberts' personal record is the university's second-best time.
 
Roberts came back the next day and won the conference's 3,000m title with a personal-best time of 8:09.36, which is fifth-best in Cowboy history. With his first- and second-place finishes, Roberts had earned 18 points for the team's total. After battling injuries for almost a year, he had raced 8,000 total meters over two days in one of the nation's top distance conferences.
 
Roberts was named the Mountain West Indoor Championships Outstanding Performer.
 
"Obviously we want to see all our athletes overcome obstacles and succeed," Dahlberg said. "But wow, when he crossed the finish line in the 5k, it was like the last year of ups and downs flashed in front of you, and in an instant, you felt an overwhelming amount of happiness. It was a redemptive moment for him, it was impossible not to get emotional over it. Then the guy goes and does it again the next day for the win in the 3k with a massive 600m kick, beating one of the top runners in the nation and All-American. Even two weeks earlier, things weren't going the way we thought they would but what a testament to his consistent hard work, positivity, and faith through it all."
 
Roberts wasn't aware of the possibility he might have won the award. He was off the track, with the team getting ready for a post-meet chat with his teammates and coaches. Quincy Howe, the jumps coach, told him to head back out to the track for something.
 
"I definitely wasn't expecting it," Roberts said. "I definitely wasn't thinking about it. I wasn't running, necessarily, to get it, but it's a cool cherry on the top of the meet. It was exciting to see the whole team come around it. I feel like it's a team award rather than an individual one. I really appreciated the cool recognition at the ending of my career."
 
With the COVID-19 outbreak, Roberts' senior season was cut short. He will earn an economics degree in May and is ready to take the next step in life.
 
No matter where he heads next, one thing will always be clear about Paul's career: he did it all for the Brown and Gold.
 
"I love being on a team," Roberts said. "That's why I do it."