Kevin Eastler gravitated to racewalking by following the crowd.

He returned to the sport as an Air Force Academy senior, in part, to get away from that crowd and gain a measure of freedom.

Now, the world’s largest congregation – one fortnight, every leap year – surrounds him. Eastler, 30, a native of Farmington and graduate of Mt. Blue High School, is an Olympian for the second time.

Eastler will represent the United States on Friday, August 15, at the 20-kilometer racewalk in Beijing.

“I’m going to appreciate it this time a lot more, even though it’s going to be difficult, if not impossible, to replicate my performance from 2004,” said Eastler. “I enjoyed myself in ’04, but I didn’t attend the opening ceremonies or watch any of the other events. I’m definitely planning to take all that in this time.”

A bumpy road back

Neither the naked eye nor the stopwatch would have unearthed a clue at last month’s Olympic trial, but Eastler’s second journey to the Games has been riddled by injury and uncertainty.

Months of nagging abdominal pain led to the diagnosis of a sports hernia in December 2007. With the Olympic year looming, Eastler chose surgery over indefinite rest.

The procedure was successful. Once he was cleared for training and competition, however, Eastler was confronted with knee tendinitis.

“It’s a pity that he had these health problems,” said Stephan Platzer, Eastler’s coach and an accomplished Norwegian racewalker. “They typically show up out of nothing. He has so much potential. There are so many good walkers out there that if you miss two to three weeks of training and have to start over again, it’s very difficult.”

Eastler had history on his side. As the lone American boasting a previous time beneath the ‘A’ qualifying standard, Eastler’s only requirement was to finish the 20K trial, unless three rivals beat both him and the standard.

A staunch believer in maintaining the momentum his body can handle, Eastler finished every kilometer of the event within a whisker of 4 minutes, 18 seconds.

One potential threat, John Nunn, went out at a blistering 4:13 clip but quickly stumbled off the pace. Two-time Olympian and close friend Tim Seaman, himself hampered by a hip injury, couldn’t keep up. Eastler wound up winning the race in 1 hour, 27 minutes, 8 seconds – actually faster than his 2004 trial time.

“He always knows exactly the pace he’s walking from muscle memory,” said Eastler’s father, Tom, a longtime college professor and Junior Olympic track and field coach. “He can walk a quarter-mile and be within a second of the goal he set for himself.”

Platzer will coach three athletes in Beijing. His wife, Kjirsti, was a silver medalist at the 2000 Games in Sydney. Brother-in-law Erik Tysse finished fifth in last year’s World Championship 50K.

Eastler and his mentor communicate almost daily during training, either by cell phone or Skype video conferencing. The miles are no obstacle thanks to the student’s self-discipline.

“He’s very smart in what he’s doing, whether it’s his job or whether it’s racewalking,” Platzer said. “He doesn’t do any stupid things. He knows his body, and he sets his goals appropriately. He will never go out at the start only to die at the end. He follows the strategy exactly. I haven’t seen anything else from him.”

“When you’re a racewalker ‘hitting the wall,’ you don’t know it yet,” Tom Eastler noted. “Kevin will keep his heart rate around 150 or 160 or even slower when everyone else’s is 180 to 190 for 1 hours. And the thing about coaching Kevin is when you tell him do to something, he does it.”

The family business

Eastler was born with two older sisters: Lauren, his senior by seven years; and Gretchen, by four.

As the baby but the only son, he defies most birth-order stereotypes. Kevin grew up with the intensity and self-direction of an eldest or only child, the quiet pensiveness of a middle kid and a youngest child’s penchant for getting everyone’s attention.

Track and field was a glue that connected the Eastler family; a thread that tethered weekends and seasons from each end of the calendar. It was no surprise that 9-year-old Kevin gravitated to the odd-looking, oft-misunderstood sport that came so naturally to Gretchen. No shock, either, that little brother’s memories all blend together.

“I don’t remember the first day. There probably was a time when I just tried it and then slowly got more serious about it,” Eastler said. “I don’t remember having that (Olympic) goal. It wasn’t always easy for me. I definitely had the support of my dad and the benefit of watching Gretchen.”

Fortunately, parents are there to fill in the blanks.

“We were at a (Maine Jr. Olympic) meet up in Hampden. I wasn’t really paying attention, because Gretchen was racing and I was being a proud dad,” Tom Eastler recalled. “Somebody said to me, “Mr. Eastler, you should go see Kevin. He just beat the state record in his age group.’ I didn’t even know he was going to be racing. He’d been working on his own. I never knew he wanted to walk.”

Eastler continued to hone his skills throughout high school, accompanying Tom to numerous USA Track and Field competitions and camps.

At the same time, Maine became the first state to sanction both a boys’ and girls’ racewalk during the high school outdoor track season. It remains alone in that regard, according to Tom Eastler.

The rigors of being a service academy student persuaded Eastler to give up the sport for three years. Those demands ultimately prompted him to rediscover racewalking as an outlet.

“He started doing it again as an opportunity to get off campus,” Tom Eastler said. “This local racewalking group would pick him up and take him to races.”

Lonely at the top

And with that fateful decision, Eastler rapidly became his nation’s standard-bearer, setting the bar out of sight for an admittedly thin pack of pursuers. Eastler owns four national 20-kilometer titles. He swept the 20K and 50K crowns in 2007. The national 30K record is his, also.

His crowning achievement: Finishing in the top half of the field at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens.

“You finish 21st, and you figure two of the people who beat you are from Russia, two are from China, two are from Mexico. They’re qualifying from a pool of 10,000 walkers,” said Seaman, who competed with Eastler in Greece. “In America, you’re the top walker out of 20. OK, maybe 100. There are a lot of other distractions. Football, baseball and basketball are your big three. Hockey and soccer are always on TV.”

Racewalking taxes the attention span of television viewers and producers who think nothing of a four-hour Super Bowl or a five-hour Major League Baseball all-star game. Seaman noted that the combined winning times of every other Olympic track event, including the marathon, still add up to less time than the gold medalist of the 50K racewalk will compete.

In a country where a homegrown 100-meter or decathlon champion is assured of immortality on a cereal box, there’s also limited interest in an event where the top American finisher will be in double digits.

“It’s all about gold medals,” Seaman lamented. “You hear so many questions from people, and it’s not, ‘Did you win a medal?’ It’s, ‘How many gold medals did you win?’ And that’s because of idiots like Marion Jones who screwed up the system for us.”

Farewell tour

Put bluntly, Eastler harbors no hope of a medal in Beijing.

Ballyhooed as a goal-setter and go-getter throughout his career, Eastler will consider it a victory if he avoids injury during his final training walks and is around to hear the starter’s gun.

“My body’s not holding up the way I wanted it to. It’s made me appreciate the opportunity I had in 2004 even more,” he said. “I don’t have any high aspirations this time. I’m going there to do the best I can.”

Short of officially whispering the r-word that haunts every advanced athlete from Brett Favre to Dara Torres, Eastler conceded that the date circled on his calendar in two weeks will be his final earnest competition for a while.

He briefly expected Athens to be the end. Knowing that the early 30s are considered a racewalker’s prime, he persisted.

“I’ve always had injuries. Some people are just more susceptible to them. I used to recover a lot faster,” Eastler said. “I’m not that young anymore.”

“He’ll probably retire after this,” Seaman predicted. “That’s great, as long as we can keep him working in the sport. He’s a great resource, a great motivator of people.”

What next? More time to spend with his wife and 3-year-old daughter, for starters. At work, Eastler is assigned to the 566th Intelligence Squadron, Buckley Air Force Base.

Oh, and once competition is in your blood, forget it.

“I ski. I’m in a ice hockey club,” he said. “I’m already finding things to fill my time.”

Just the way that 9-year-old tagalong jumped in with both feet.