North Carolina State University Athletics
She Keeps Going, And Going, And Going
4/20/2005 12:00:00 AM | Track
April 20, 2005
BY TIM PEELER
RALEIGH -- You can run as fast as you want, but you can't keep up with Josianne Lauber.
Oh, you might take her in a sprint. Or, if you have a little endurance and are an Olympic-caliber distance runner, you might be able to stay with her for a while in a 10,000-meter race.
But you probably can't keep up when the race is over.
Lauber, a senior distance runner for the NC State women's track team, is a molten mass of energy, one that hasn't stopped working, running or talking since the day she arrived on campus.
Maybe it's all the chocolate in her system.
Lauber's dad is a Swiss-born chocolatier who has his own chocolate factory - Neuchatel Chocolates - with retail stores in New York, Pennsylvania and Singapore.
And, before you ask - because Josi Lauber has answered this question a million times - no, the family doesn't have any Oompa Loompas.
"But Coach [Rollie] Geiger jokes that the reason they recruited me was for the chocolate," Lauber said. "My dad is always sending some down here."
Lauber clearly inherited a workaholic spirit from her global family. Her father, Albert, grew up and trained outside Bern, Switzerland. Her mother, Tessie, is from the Phillipines. Her older brother, Hernan, was born in Switzerland. She was born in Toronto, Canada. And her younger sister, Eve, was born in New York.
That makes Josi a dual Swiss-Canadian citizen with permanent residency status in the United States. But it's her Swiss background that makes her so hard to keep up with.
"I was working as soon as I popped out," said Lauber. "When I was little, and wanted to play, my dad said: 'You want to play - here, this is a game called wrap this ribbon around the chocolate bunny's neck.' That's just the way things are in my family."
So once she got to Raleigh, Lauber went looking for a little more to do than her 65-miles-a-week-running schedule.
An English major, she did an internship at WRAL-TV in Raleigh, which she hopes will look good on a resume if she decides to pursue a career in journalism. She spent a year working for the Exploris Children's Museum in Raleigh. She is a staff writer for Technician, the student newspaper, and a contributor to Agromeck, the NC State yearbook. And she's participated in the campus production of "The Vagina Monologues." Currently, her part time job is tutoring K-12 students.
 Lauber dedicates her spare time to helping local elementary school children  |
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"I have always worked my whole life," Lauber said. "It's a very Swiss mentality of hard, quality work, time management. It's hard for me to sit on my butt and not do anything." She keeps her schedule handy on a Palm Pilot - not so much because she can't remember her many appointments, but mainly because entering everything in the electronic gizmo gives her something else to do.
Lauber's energy - and verbosity - is legendary among her teammates, especially the distance runners who mostly like to keep to themselves in the solitude of their long runs.
"Her personality is about as opposite as you can get from almost every distance runner I have ever known," said Henes, a former Wolfpack All-America in track and cross country and the NC State distance coach for 14 years. "That's one of the reasons we brought her here. She injects so much energy into the team."
Granted, there are times that she injects a little too much. Twice as a freshman, Henes had to remove Lauber from the team's stretching circle because of complaint from her teammates.
"I had to make her go stretch by herself," Henes said.
No one knows if she actually stopped talking.
"I am known for being loud and bubbly and sometimes too much to handle," said Lauber, who took up running to burn off some energy because her high school in Oxford, Pa., didn't have a girls soccer team. "It's just how I have always been. I will say that I was so much louder and more obnoxious as a freshman. When I think back to then, I am like 'How did you people take me?' "
Lauber has also matured in her running. She helped the women's cross country team finish 12th in the nation last fall at the NCAA Championships. She's been a contributor in both the 5,000-meters and 10,000 meters this spring, despite having some health issues that prevented her from running at top form.
But heading into this week's ACC Track & Field Championships in Tallahassee, Fla., Lauber has one of the ACC's top five times in the 10K this year. She ran a personal-best 34:47.41 at the Stanford Invitational in March.
According to Henes, Lauber will likely need to hit the automatic qualifying mark of 34:10 to get to next month's NCAA Championships. She'll have a couple of more chances to get that mark, this weekend at the ACC and two weeks from now at the Penn Relays.
No matter how her senior season turns out, Lauber plans to keep running after college. She's in the process of finalizing plans to join the Swiss National Team this summer, taking advantage of her dual citizenship to live abroad and run in lucrative European professional track events.
"For me, it will be really cool to run for Switzerland," Lauber said. "It will make my relatives and my dad happy."
Perhaps in Europe Lauber can find someone who can keep up with her.
You may contact Tim Peeler at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
