Nancy Willard dusted off the home video of her little girl playing soccer in elementary school, and it wasn’t long after she pressed play that she realized it provided an early glimpse of what her daughter was destined to be.

The camera followed Anna. Anna only sometimes followed the ball.

“There’s Anna, running up and down the field,” Mrs. Willard said. “The ball’s over on the other side. She’s running, just running back and forth, doesn’t care if the ball is near her or not. Just running and running and running.”

Anna Willard is running her way into the history books these days. The Greenwood native and former Telstar Regional High School cross county star with the punky haircut has become a track and field star almost overnight due to her rapid rise in American and international steeplechase competition.

On August 15, Willard will compete in the first ever women’s 3,000-meter steeplechase to be held at the Olympic Games.

“It’s all I’ve ever wanted and more,” Willard said in an interview following her record-breaking performance at the U.S. Olympic Trials in July. “I had no idea this would happen four years ago.”

Just a little more than four years ago, Anna Willard hadn’t even considered running in the steeplechase, a distance race with barriers such as hurdles, beams and water jumps.

She was on the verge of becoming the most successful women’s distance runner in Brown University history in other events, such as the 800, 1,500 and 3,000 meters. But when the school’s top steeplechaser was injured during Willard’s junior year, she offered to give the grueling event a try.

After two weeks of training, Willard competed in her first steeplechase – and set a school record.

Willard went on to capture a total of 10 school records at Brown, but not before establishing what started out as a tense relationship with the school’s track and field coach, Craig Lake, who had just been hired before Willard’s senior year.

“Oh, man, did they butt heads,” said Anna’s mother, Nancy Willard. “Cross country season was not nice. Anna was the captain and they were just butting heads. It wasn’t until oh, December maybe, that the light clicked on for Anna that (Lake was) right. Craig is the one that really made her realize what she could do.”

“She really got in my face and harped on lifestyle and said this is what you need to do to become what you want,” Anna Willard said. “She really changed a lot for me. She started having me do tempo runs and really attacked the mental aspect of the sport and changed a lot of who I am today.”

Willard still had a semester of eligibility remaining when she graduated from Brown in 2006, so she enrolled in graduate school at the University of Michigan. After training through the cross country and indoor track seasons, she won three Big 10 championships and claimed NCAA titles in the 1,500 and 5,000 meters and the steeplechase (setting a new collegiate record in the process). Michigan named her its female athlete of the year and the Big 10 named her it’s female track athlete of the year. She finished second in the U.S. National Championships on a jammed left ankle and finished eighth in her first World Championships.

From farmhand to champion

If haying ever became an Olympic event, Al Willard believes he and his daughter would win the gold medal.

Anna was the only female on the hay crew on Willard’s farms in Greenwood and New Gloucester. She worked for him until the summer of her sophomore year at Brown, and she was one of the best workers her father ever had.

“She would stack the bales, leave a foot-and-a-half of space between them, make it neat,” said Al Willard, who has been farming for 37 years. “She’d get it just so. She never took any shortcuts. She’d do exactly what you wanted.”

Anna might procrastinate at times, Nancy Willard added, but when she decided to do something, she would give it her full attention.

“Whether it’s making a birthday card for somebody or doing a project for school or whatever, she would just put her mind to it and do it,” she said. “She might do it at the last minute and have me spitting nickels waiting for her to get something done, but she’d pull it off and it would be lovely.”

Her competitive edge developed early. Anna took great delight in challenging boys to recess races and beating them.

“She was always fast, even as a little kid,” said Al, who thinks his daughter inherited his speed and her mother’s determination. “When I was racing her before she became a teenager, I could beat her easily, and it used to make her mad. She just does not like to lose. She feels like she lets herself down.”

She ran track in middle school, then took up cross country her first day at Telstar. At her first practice, John Applin, who coached cross country at Telstar for 35 years, went out for a test run with his freshmen.

“We just kind of jogged, or at least I thought I was jogging, and she kept right off my shoulder. We finished the run, but she never told me until probably two years later that she felt like that was pretty tough. But she wasn’t going to quit, and that’s pretty much been her attitude,” Applin said.

“Even as a freshman, whenever she went to a race, she looked at it as her opportunity to be No. 1,” he added.

Willard finished fourth in Class D as a freshman and, step by step, climbed the ranks from there. Third in the state as a sophomore and second as a junior, she set five course records in the Mountain Valley Conference before capturing the state crown her senior year. She also won state track championships in the 800 and 1,600 and starred on the Rebels’ basketball team.

More than just a steeplechaser

Now 24, Willard has signed a professional contract with Nike through the 2012 Olympics. She is also “the most versatile combination runner in the U.S. right now,” according to her coach, Mike McGuire.

McGuire said her blend of speed, stamina, coordination and fearlessness, plus her improvement in the middle distances during the semester she ran for him at Michigan, showed that she could win at the national level in whatever discipline she focused on.

“She’s kind of a jigsaw puzzle, only it’s framed and filled in,” McGuire said. “She’s a very unique person in the fact that she can hang her hat on the steeple and get her accolades there, but she is a very, very accomplished middle distance runner. There’s no question in my mind she could have contended, if not qualified, for a spot on the 1,500 meter team if she was trained specifically for that.”

Willard had to scramble through some leg injuries early this year and was seeded fourth heading into the U.S. Olympic Trials in July in Eugene, Ore. But she and her coach were confident her time had come.

“There was no question in my mind that she was ready to run the American record at the trials,” McGuire said. “We just needed to have the early pace there. We needed to have a good evening weather-wise. All those elements factored into the equation.”

Sporting short hair dyed blonde with a pink streak and showing the same finishing kick that she had in the NCAA championships in Sacramento in 2007, Willard made her move going into the penultimate water jump of the final. She took the lead and broke away in the final 500 meters to win and set a new American record 9:27.59, the fastest time ever run on U.S. soil.

If setting the record wasn’t a shock, the sudden realization of what lay ahead was. Willard had been so focused on winning at trials and breaking the American record that she hadn’t considered setting goals for international competition.

“It’s amazing. I can’t even comprehend it,” Willard said after the race. “Especially four years ago, thinking about where I was. I sucked four years ago. So to see how far I’ve come, it feels really, really good.”

Out of alignment

“Once she gets the lead, it’s going to take a pretty extraordinary person to run her down,” McGuire said.

As fate would have it, that’s what happened 17 days later in Belgium in her last steeplechase race before the Olympics. U.S. Olympic teammate Jenny Barringer came from about 15 meters back to edge a shocked Willard at the tape and break her record with a time of 9:22.73. Willard ran a personal best 9:22.76 for second. Those times made them eighth and ninth fastest steeplers in the world this year.

Willard later competed in the London Grand Prix and ran a personal best 8:58.07 in the flat 3,000 meters to finish fourth. Despite doing some of her best running, the trip to Europe took a toll on her physically and mentally.

“She had a rough time in Europe,” said Mrs. Willard, who spoke with her daughter on Wednesday, two days before she departed for Beijing with the U.S. Track and Field squad. “The travel didn’t do well by her. She didn’t have the usual ice baths for her legs. She gets out of alignment really easily and the athletic trainers have been really good at keeping her in alignment. There was nobody there to do that, so she felt horrible. She didn’t sleep on the plane back and has just plain been exhausted this week.”

“She was bummed, as low as I’ve ever heard her,” she added. “Hopefully, she will get some sleep. She’s in good hands now.”

Nancy Willard said her daughter was disappointed by the lack of international competition in Europe. When she competes in Beijing, she’ll face steeplers from Eastern Europe, Russia, Ethiopia and Kenya who have dominated the event on the world stage for the first time.

Racing in China will present other challenges to Willard and her fellow competitors. One of the great unknowns is how the thick smog in Beijing will affect all of the athletes.

“You just don’t know, but the bottom line is everyone is going to be exposed to it,” McGuire said. “There’s no question it’s not going to be a great scenario, but it’s not like she has exercise-induced asthma or anything like that. She doesn’t have any pre-existing breathing issues that could put her in a compromising spot.”

McGuire is confident Willard’s whirlwind last six weeks won’t put her in a compromising spot, either.

“There’s no question in my mind that there’s still plenty of gas left in her tank,” he said.

Al Willard said Anna told him she’d find her stride again in Beijing.

“When she says she’s going to do something,” he said, “you can pretty well take it to the bank.”