VERMILLION, S.D.—Abby Ripperda has taken on the challenges of distance running with a resolve that gets past the normal clichés about hard work and dedication.
 
What if you were working really hard and it wasn't paying off? What if for the longest time, hard work was just hard work? 
 
It's where Ripperda found herself for the first part of her college running career and much of her high school career, too. There was always something going wrong. She was never given much of an opportunity to do anything other than wonder if this was ever going to work out right.
 
So when Ripperda won the Augustana Twilight race earlier in September, it was a long time coming. It was her first win ever in a college meet. Her time of 16:47 over 5,000 meters was the fastest time ever for the Twilight meet and more than two minutes faster than she'd run the race the year before.
 
More than two minutes. That would translate to well over a quarter-mile ahead of the 2018 version of herself.
 
"It's a little weird," Ripperda said. "I'm in better shape, but I'm doing the training the same way I always have, with the same effort. I feel like the same runner I was a year ago, but I'm just moving faster. That's kind of crazy."
 
Ripperda has twice won Summit League Cross Country Runner of the Week honors this season. This is after being somewhere around the 10th-best runner on the team last fall.
 
That kind of emergence goes a long way toward erasing all that early struggling as a freshman and a sophomore.
 
"It was very frustrating," Ripperda said. "There were lots of tears involved every time I got hurt. I had a series of femur stress fractures, I had a couple foot stress fractures, a couple bouts of tendonitis – a little bit of everything."
 
Ripperda, an O'Gorman graduate whose mother, Kris, was also a strong runner at O'Gorman, showed glimpses of being much better than her times suggested. USD cross country coach Dan Fitzsimmons recognized that, but also recognized it might take some time.
 
"I thought if we could have her come in and be very moderate and consistent with her training, good things were going to happen eventually," Fitzsimmons said. "And it didn't happen overnight. It took a little while. She had some ups and downs her freshman year."
 
The coaching staff noticed toward the end of the cross country season in 2018 that things were starting to pick up a little bit. It was not enough to decide to include her in the Summit League Cross Country meet – the Coyotes won their fifth straight title with seven runners among the top 21 – but it was a step in the right direction.
 
By the outdoor track season, she was one of the better distance runners in the conference, finishing third in the 10,000 meters last spring as a sophomore.
 
She had never been afraid of longer races. That helped. Even some talented college distance runners will tell coaches they're not crazy about going 6.2 miles at every meet.
 
"She was able to run a 10K at a pretty high level with what you would consider minimal training," Fitzsimmons said. "That gave me a pretty good idea that she has some talent."
 
At a 10K race at the Mt. SAC Relays in Torrance, California, she finished second last spring. Fitzsimmons was expecting to see his improving runner drag herself over the finish line and then collapse.
 
"Usually after you run a 10K, you're lying on the ground exhausted," Ripperda said. "And I was having a conversation with him. He was like 'Why are you not dying right now? That was a really good time and you're still able to function.' I think that was a moment where it was like 'Let's see what we can do here.'"
 
The transformation has gone outside the competitions. Ripperda is not just leading the team in the actual races.
 
"We had two runners graduate who were our No. 1 and 2 runners," Fitzsimmons said. "And Abby immediately took the mantle of leadership. Everybody accepted that and she has our program going in a direction we want it to go."

The medical biology major, a perennial Summit League Honor Roll member, is liking this new view of competition. She is liking where all this training and hard work is finally taking her.
 
"Last year, I was like the ninth, 10th or 11th best runner on the team," she said. "It's really awesome to make an impact. It's great to be able to help my team succeed."