If you've grown tired of all the noise in collegiate athletics these days-- NIL, the portal, conference jumping—I have a remedy.

Spend some time visiting with Katelyn Mitchem, and she will help you get your mind right about what being a student-athlete is all about, and where our focus should be. 

Katelyn is something very special.

You can rest assured that collegiate athletics is alive and well when you talk to her.  She is a very real student and a sensational athlete. 

Katelyn is a distance runner for Wyoming's track and field program so she doesn't spend a lot of time in the limelight like other sports' student-athletes. But her accomplishments are what legends are made of. She has shattered, I mean for real, shattered just about every Cowgirl school record when it comes to distance running.

And, by the way, she just graduated with a 4.0 GPA while double majoring and double minoring in Environmental Systems Science and Range Ecology/Watershed Management.

Not only can she run for great distances as well as just about anybody in the country, but she wants to save the planet too.

Simply put, Katelyn wants to excel…at everything.

"She's amazing," says her coach Scott Dahlberg, who himself was an All-America distance runner at Western State during his collegiate days. 

"She has run an impressive steeplechase during the first day of a meet, and come back the next with a great 1500. Her range is amazing. We will plan a practice for her that we think is difficult yet manageable, and she blows it out of the water.  She impresses us weekly."

Katelyn has yet another opportunity to impress this Thursday (June 8) and Saturday (June 10) as she competes at the NCAA Track & Field Outdoor National Championships at Austin, TX.  She will run her specialty, the 3000M Steeplechase, during the Championships' evening session that day.

Here's what she has been doing at Wyoming while we've been hearing all that other noise. She has set the Cowgirl Indoor standard in the 800M, and the mile; she owns Wyoming's Outdoor records in the 1500M (by six-plus seconds), the 3000M Steeplechase (by 15 seconds), the 5000M Record (by 23 seconds)! She is an Elite 90 winner in cross country too.  That's the kind of noise we like to hear. That's the stuff of legends!

Why is she so good?  Says her coach, "her work-ethic has always been there.  But she has gradually increased her workload, while being very intelligent about her training. She is a unique athlete who is special when it comes to training.  She has natural speed, but she has worked hard to add strength to go along with her other gifts.

"Her range is what makes her special," Dahlberg continues.  "She is amazing, she can run any distance well.  But maybe the most impressive thing about her is that she has been able to overcome the mental aspect of racing. Every athlete is different, but Katelyn was putting a lot of pressure on herself. She was, maybe, a little too analytical in her approach.  To a degree she was fighting herself.  But like everything else, she worked hard at it, and with a little help she broke through and simplified things."

Once she figured out that mental thing, she became elite.

"I remember the meet when it finally clicked for me mentally," Katelyn says about conquering that aspect. "It was during the Indoor season at a meet at CU. I had been struggling a little bit mentally. I had been working with a psychologist about getting over being too anxious, and trusting myself.  It was that CU meet where I broke through."

Katelyn, who has a twin sister, Emily, comes from a family of runners.  Both her mother, Randi, and her dad, Jeff, ran for exercise. Emily ran in college for one year, their oldest brother, Joe, ran the 800 and mile at CU, and their other brother, Jake, ran middle distances.

None of the family, however, has reached Katelyn's lofty heights that Katelyn has. But everyone has been a tremendous support group for her, and all are extremely proud of what she has accomplished.

"Growing up, I ran track for fun.  I was into different sports, especially soccer and basketball.  I really loved soccer, but I had to make a choice at the high school level. I chose track because I felt it would be what I could do in college."

The Broomfield, Colo., native had several collegiate offers, but she wanted to stay closer to home, and Wyoming was the perfect fit.

She had a difficult start to her career.  She injured her heel during her freshman year and was sick as a sophomore, so she really wasn't able to reach the level of which she was capable. "It was tough, but I think the time away helped me adjust especially on the mental side," she says.

While she was recruited primarily as a steeplechaser, and it is favorite race, Katelyn says she has the most fun running the 1500M.  "I have fun running that because it gives me an opportunity to use my speed. I'm proudest of that record," she says. "I think the steeple record was more of an expectation, but I wasn't expected to break the 1500. I just felt I could, and was extremely happy that I was able to. The steeplechase is my best race, and I'd rather run that than anything else."

The training and the miles these distances runners put in weekly has always amazed me.  Katelyn is no exception, although her training regimen might be even more special than most. 

"I like to put in 95 miles per week," she says, "and adjust that before meets.  For the NCAA's, I'm going between 55 and 60 miles per week. It's all about putting the work in.  I know I'm lucky to have the range that I have, and the ability to be resilient. But it's all about the work, and how you approach it. You must be willing to put in the work, but you have to be smart about it. You have to increase your mileage and intensity without breaking yourself down."

Obviously she is very excited about the Championships this week in Austin. "It's really exciting to go against the best girls in the country," she says. "I know a lot of them because I've raced against many of them. It's probably a little different with distance runners than a lot of other sports.  Of course we want to win the race, but I think we want each other to do well. I do have a lot of friends I run against.

"I'm going to go out and run my race.  It's going to be so cool to be there, but I have to approach it as just another race."

How about the mental part? I'll try not to think about it too much until maybe three hours before.  But I'll start to mentally prep during warm-up which is usually about 55 minutes prior to the race. It'll be exciting and I can't wait!"

While Katelyn would like to run professionally, she wants to do it while having a job, preferably working on the environment. Currently she is interning for the Department of Environmental Quality.  "I'm really enjoying it," she says, "and I wouldn't mind if it turned into a full-time position.  We are working on mining regulations and reclamation. But eventually I want to do research on vegetation ecology, working on the conservation of plants. I worked at the botanical gardens in Cheyenne and really had a lot of fun doing that. I would really like to do that while staying in this part of the country.

"The beauty of distance running is that you can train, and still have a job.  I will always run, but I can't imagine running competitively while working on the environment.  That would be a dream of mine."

Thankfully there are student-athletes like Katelyn who give us a break from all that noise!