The world’s sixth-fastest indoor 1,000-meter time this season belongs to Anna Shields. Shields is a four-time national athlete of the year. She has won national titles in 800 meters and 1,500 meters outdoor, mile and 1,000 meters indoor, and 5K for cross country.
If it’s surprising that this runner attends Point Park, rather than an elite Division I program, that’s just the beginning.
Ten years ago, Anna Shields had committed to North Carolina. A Nike indoor national champion in the 5K, Shields had her choice of top programs.
But her senior year at Lewis S. Mills High School in Burlington, Conn., went poorly.
“I didn’t really understand it at the time, I just started getting slower,” said Shields. She now knows she struggled with iron deficiencies and anemia.
The top schools pulled their offers. Instead, she joined Central Connecticut, where her struggles continued.
Shields hit a nadir in October of 2009, running a 22:58 in the 5K and finishing 88th in the Northeast Conference championships. She left the team after one season, and couldn’t afford to stay in school without her athletic scholarship. She went home to Torrington, Conn., and began working full time.
“I thought ... that my talent was just gone, I couldn’t be a runner,” Shields said. “And it was just heartbreaking.”
Shields stopped running altogether. For about five years, she ignored recurring dreams of racing and barely even went for a jog, until an unlikely event changed her life.
While working as a bank teller, her office had a pedometer challenge. Whoever counted the most steps would win a free week of groceries.
“I could probably at least run. I could jog. And I could try and win this,” Shields said she thought to herself. “And when I went for a long run for the first time in years, like five years, I felt surprisingly good.”
“When I kept feeling good [running], it made me want to try to race,” she said. “What did I have to lose?”
In June 2015, more than five years after leaving her college track team, Shields entered her local 5K.
She won.
“It felt like living a dream again,” she said. “Like finding a part of myself that was missing.”
She kept training, at one point working three jobs a day and running alone in the dark for hours.
Shields had lost her NCAA eligibility, but under NAIA rules, she had three more years. She reached out to schools, including Point Park in Pittsburgh.
“She was such a star runner in high school,” said coach Kelly Parsley. “I knew she still had it in her.”
After enrolling at Point Park, though, she struggled in competitions through cross country season.
“But my first track race was something different,” she said. She placed second in the mile, breaking five minutes, and began a meteoric rise.
“I had set goals for her to run, and she totally crushed them,” Parsley said. “Then I knew that, once track season came, it was going to be a whole new Anna.”
As a sophomore at the NAIA championships in March 2017, nine years after winning a national championship in high school, Shields finished second in two races.
The next year, she remembered when she was caught on the mile’s last lap. “I did not want that to happen again,” she said.
She won the race by eight seconds with a time of 4:37:30, just off the NAIA record.
“That made me readjust my expectations,” Shields said. “Maybe, I can go further than just doing well in the NAIA.”
Right now, Shields is the reigning NAIA Athlete of the Year in outdoor track, indoor track and cross country. At a race last week, she won the 800 by nearly 10 seconds over Division I runners.
“It’s not typical for a runner to really just improve every single week,” said Parsley. “And she looks stronger and faster every single week.”
Shields’ success has opened new doors. Now 27, she hopes to make the Olympic Trials.
For now, Shields is focused on the rest of this season, including the March NAIA indoor championships and the outdoor championships in May, where she’s likely to dominate.
She’s also still waiting for those free groceries.
“They actually canceled it halfway through, because most people’s pedometers weren’t working,” Shields said. “So I didn’t win the steps competition, but I ended up winning a lot more.”
First Published: January 30, 2019, 12:00 p.m.
