Williams track coach Ralph White called Caroline Cretti “the greatest female distance runner in school history.” This Sunday, she will be racing the OT marathon in Boston alongside Michelle Rorke ’06 and America’s top 161 other marathoners. Caroline has more All-American certificates than I could reasonably count up right now. Here is her profile on the Boston Trials website, and here is an excerpt from an interview with her:

Was it difficult to make the decision to pursue professional running, or was it something you knew you wanted to do?
ZAP actually contacted my coach, Pete Farwell, and I thought it sound like an amazing opportunity. You can’t really get a better setup than ZAP. After that, my eyes were opened and I started looking at other places around the country, very superficially—just sort of looking at their web sites. I came down to ZAP, checked it out, and we liked each other. Once they made the first move, it wasn’t a hard decision for me to make.

Did you get strange reactions from anyone when you told them what you’d be doing after college?
Oh for sure, from pretty much everyone [laughs]. I got a couple of reactions at Williams that were like [Cretti puts on a condescending tone], ‘Oh, so you’re just going to be running?’ It was sort of the what-a-waste-of-a-degree reaction. And then, of course, there was the ‘That’s amazing! Congratulations!’ reaction. And then a couple people who I knew in the running world were skeptical, but they looked into it and took it upon themselves to make sure I was making the right decision, which was helpful. And then a lot of people just had no idea what I was talking about. You get all sorts of reactions.

What would you say has been the biggest difference so far between being a professional runner and being a collegiate runner?
This is a roundabout way of answering your question, but being a division III runner, you are surrounded by people, situations, and experiences that are dramatically different from the professional world and the division I world. Every other athlete here ran division I and their experiences in college were so unbelievably different than what I had at Williams that I think, for them, the adjustment is a lot less dramatic.

But in terms of my own experience, the difference is that right now I’m doing a couple of writing [jobs] on the side, but basically all I do is run. By that I mean that my life is based on running. If I’m not running, I’m doing something that will help me run better. Versus, at Williams, it was go to practice—and I worked really hard at Williams for running, don’t get me wrong—but at the same time I had papers and I had social [obligations]. Here it’s just running.

To see Caroline run, come to Boston (details) on Sunday morning.