Photo by Kathryn Boyd-Batstone

At the end of the Long Beach Poly cross country team’s annual training sessions on Catalina, the girls’ coaches have their runners write down their goals for the season on a notecard, and hand them in.  This year, Poly girls’ coach Nate Bershtel says his standout runner, junior Dynasty Gammage, turned in the simplest card.  She wanted to win the Woodbridge Invitational (she finished fifth), set a new personal record (which she did), and make it to State.

This Saturday, Gammage and slightly under 200 girls will take off at the State Meet at the Woodbridge Course in Clovis—her final goal of the year made a reality.  But you could have been forgiven for doubting her, if you’d heard that original goal.  After all, plenty of girls’ runners at Poly have probably stated making State as their goal, but in the school’s history, no other female runner has ever done it.  Making history is one thing; making history at a school like Poly, with 114 years of history, is another.

But Bershtel says Gammage has never been the kind of athlete you’d want to bet against.  “In her first race as a freshman, she finished third; then she finished first, and then just a half-step back in the League Finals, and she’s taken first place in every race she’s finished since.”  The one race she didn’t finish in that time was this year’s Discovery Well league meet, when illness forced her to stop before finishing.  Ironically, Bershtel says it was her struggles there that helped her transform from the quiet, focused runner she’s been in the past to the vocal team leader she’s evolving into now. 

“Everybody viewed her as something of a perfect runner who’d never had challenges, but seeing those challenges really brought our team together, and helped her become vocal…it’s usually not the front-runner who’s in that role.  That’s a bonus: she shows them what’s possible.”

Gammage originally got into cross country to help further her track career—she’s a top-level 800 meter runner.  “Now [cross country] is its own sport that I do,” she says, proudly admitting she got really into competing as a freshman, because, she says, “That’s when I realized I was good at it.” 

“Good at it” is of course an understatement, as Gammage’s coaches and teammates attest.  Rachel Pavey, a Poly varsity runner who finished second in the league behind Gammage in the El Dorado meet this year, recalls her teammate’s assessment of the State course in Clovis, which the team ran earlier this season in the Clovis Invitational.  “Well it’s flat according to her,” she says, “No hill whatsoever.  But not according to me.” 

The final hill of the course, deemed Killer Hill by Clovis locals, barely registers for Gammage, who beat her previous best time at the course by 43 seconds this year.  That mindset is a valuable tool for a runner to have, along with what Bershtel calls Gammage’s “ability to hurt,” and to push through the discomfort of long distance running.  “Sometimes I say, ‘Oh my gosh, I want to stop,” Gammage says of her training regimen.  “But I’m not going to.”

The running mentality runs in Gammage’s blood, as her older sister Destiny was an incredible sprinter for Poly, and is now a freshman at Boise State on a full scholarship, and her cousins, the Abdur-Rahims, ran track as Jackrabbits (and dabbled in a little football as well).  But Dynasty, still just a junior, has outpaced her family already with her accomplishments this season—which have her (and her coaches) excited at the possibilities with a full cross country season and two track season still ahead.  And even with so much road still in front of her, you can’t exactly fault her family for not keeping up.

“Other than Erica Sumi at Wilson, and Trina Hull at Compton, nobody’s had this type of success,” says Bershtel.  “Those three girls would have to be considered the three greatest female distance runners ever to come out of Long Beach.”

In other words, whether she’s lacing up her shoes this Saturday at Woodbridge, or filling out her notecard next Summer with her goals for her senior season, it’s probably wise not to doubt her.  Once could be forgiven—twice, though, would just be foolish.