There's only one sight Paige Higgins yearns to see when she travels abroad for the first time next month.
The finish line. "With no one in front of me," she confidently adds through a sparkling smile.
Higgins, a member of the Flagstaff-based McMillanElite running team, will represent the United States in the World Marathon Championships Aug. 23 in Berlin, Germany.
It's a quantum leap for a former high school art teacher who once viewed snowplows as her primary competition. Higgins, 27, traded lesson plans for race plans a year ago, moving from Denver to Flagstaff to pursue a blossoming Olympic dream.
The payoff has been nothing short of staggering.
"The World Championships is the stepping stone to the Olympics," said Greg McMillan, Higgins' coach. "For Paige, this is a very big first step toward realizing that Olympic dream."
If Higgins' performances since she moved to Flagstaff are any indication, her Olympic dream could very well become a reality.
Since the move, Higgins finished 10th at the United States Track and Field 20k Championships. She finished eighth overall and was the third American to cross the finish line at the 2008 Chicago Marathon in 2:33:06, and this year, she took 13th at the USATF Half-Marathon Championships in Houston.
Before her move to Flagstaff, Higgins' dream of reaching the Olympics resembled more of a sleepwalk.
The former University of Kansas standout juggled her running schedule around a full-time teaching job at Mullen High School in Denver. She would train before dawn, report to the classroom, nap on her lunch break and run again after school.
"Come wintertime, I'd have to get up at 3 a.m. to beat the plows out," she quipped. "It's a good hard-worker story but it was just terrible. It was really the demise of every single spring season I've had."
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