10.16 looks different to Michael LeBlanc now than it did 19 months ago.

Then, it was a blistering fast 100-meter dash time the Syracuse sprinter clocked at the 2007 NCAA Track and Field Championships. Only three men beat him in the finals. All were Olympians last year. Head coach Chris Fox said the time put Syracuse sprinting on the map. LeBlanc, then a redshirt freshman, had shocked the track world.

Since then, he’s run only one 100-meter dash in a Syracuse uniform: a 10.60 Saturday at the UNC Invitational. A string of compounding injuries has kept him sidelined from days after the 2007 meet until this season.

Now, as he sits in a brown folding chair in Manley Field House after a practice, talk of that time still elicits excitement in his voice. His legs begin to shake. It’s been too long since his trip to the sprinting pinnacle. And if his time off has taught him anything, it’s that just getting back to that 10.16 won’t be enough.

‘It’s amazing that as soon as you do something, it suddenly becomes inadequate,’ LeBlanc said. ‘Then you need to do better. That’s at least my mindset. I think that’s both a good thing and a bad thing.’

He experienced the bad right away. Days after nationals, he drove the 18 hours to his home near the New Brunswick/Nova Scotia border. The day after the drive, still amped up about his new position as an up-and-comer in the track world, he did a prolonged session in the weight room. On his last set of the day, he collapsed under the weight of a squat bar and ravaged his back.

He spent the summer and fall recovering from the injury and thought he would be healthy for the 2008 winter season. But just after Christmas that year, he started feeling pain in his heel. Everything was back on hold.

The injury wasn’t what was most troubling. What frustrated him was the lack of answers. He saw numerous doctors, none of whom could provide a clear diagnosis. The general consensus was some sort of stress fracture. But even now, over a year later, he’s still not sure what exactly happened.

Even worse, nobody could give him a timetable for his return to competition. It’s that uncertainty that got to him the most. LeBlanc maps out every minutia of his path back to the top of the sprinting world. Now, that plan was on hold, and nobody could tell him for how long.

He became, SU sprint coach Dave Hegland said, ‘part robotic and part neurotic.’ He spent his days convincing himself that he would be able to make his comeback that season. But he couldn’t help worrying that he wouldn’t.

‘He’s a lot more serious than your typical college athlete, that’s for sure,’ Hegland said. ‘When things aren’t going well, then I think that side of him that’s really obsessive is certainly a detriment.’

When he broke his arm during the summer following eighth grade, LeBlanc couldn’t bare the recovery time. He tore his cast off so he could play golf. This time, though, there was no cast to tear off. When he tried to practice on the sore ankle, the injury worsened. Soon, he was limping around campus. Within a few days, he was in a protective boot.

Then, his back was flaring up again. He couldn’t lie to himself anymore – the season was a wash.

‘You can sit here forever just thinking ‘Why the hell did that happen?” LeBlanc said. ‘But we don’t know.’

Not knowing goes against LeBlanc’s nature. As a philosophy major, he doesn’t thrive in chaos. Everything is part of a master plan for him, and nothing is left to chance. He asks for his workout schedules in advance, and he keeps a copy of it in his pocket. He admits to being neurotic about nutrition.

For LeBlanc, training is all one big equation. In philosophical terms, he calls it a series of premises that produce a result. ‘If I do these workouts for X amount of time in this order,’ LeBlanc said, ‘I should arrive at performance or conclusion X.’

His daily workouts are filled with questions. Teammate Shamel Lewis said LeBlanc never stops asking ‘Why?’ There’s no question it’s a major contributor to his success. But there’s a limit to that.

‘That sometimes is a big problem,’ Lewis said. ‘He’s thinking like, ‘Why am I doing this? What’s going on here?’ This guy can take a four-hour practice and turn it into eight, just because he’s thinking so much.’

On race day, though, there are no questions. Sprinters say the race is won or lost before the starting gun sounds. The key is to be mentally stronger than your opponent, and not to doubt your ability. Because of that, 100-meter dashers are known for being ultra-competitive, and sometimes cocky. LeBlanc fits the bill.

‘People’s feelings are at stake, and that’s just too bad,’ LeBlanc said. ‘I don’t ever worry about upsetting people at practice, at meets, at anywhere. I don’t set out to upset people, mind you. I’m not trying to be an asshole. But I certainly don’t try to accommodate anyone, ever. I accommodate myself.’

In his head, he’s the star of every race. The Michael LeBlanc Invitational, as he calls it. No one else matters. When he looks down the line at his competitors, he can already tell who is mentally weaker than him.

‘You see losers, to put it frankly,’ LeBlanc said. ‘Just people at the line who kind of just submit themselves to you. When I was running really fast, people at meets, at Big East, would be like, ‘Oh you’re Mike LeBlanc, that’s great.’

‘To me, that’s stupid behavior. I don’t care who’s in my race, I’m never going to walk up to someone and be like ‘You’re the best.”

Off the track, though, the brain is turned back on. Lewis said LeBlanc seems like a different person outside of race. In the team hotel, he spends the bulk of his time glued to his laptop – watching track videos and networking.

He’s a prototypical student of his sport. Yet in the classroom, it isn’t always the same story. LeBlanc calls his transcript ‘erratic.’ He can get an A in a 400-level philosophy course, and a much lower grade in a freshman survey course. If something doesn’t interest him, he won’t waste his time.

‘I’m not upset, I just don’t care,’ LeBlanc said. ‘I have other priorities. If it was really bothering me, I suppose I would act differently. But I kind of thought about it one day and was like, ‘If this was a serious problem, I would have already addressed it.”

Yet for everything he knows, one fact LeBlanc has no interest in knowing is his own IQ. In high school, he scored highly on quantitative skills assessments, suggesting he could do the same on an IQ test. But knowing that would be like knowing the fastest 100-meter dash time he will ever run: a limiting factor in the limitless world he creates in his head.

‘I feel like, whatever comes out, it would encapsulate me and say: This is what you are,’ LeBlanc said. ‘Whether it’s 105 or 165 or 95, it’s going to say something about me that I’d like to leave unknown.’

The dichotomy is there, and LeBlanc knows it: the intelligent, introspective philosophy major competing in the one race where the last thing you can do is think. ‘If you’re thinking in the race, you’re probably going to lose,’ LeBlanc admits.

But the thing about sprinting is that there are few uncertainties. Upsets are rare, as opposed to distance events, which operate in more chaos. LeBlanc doesn’t like chaos. He learned that from spending 19 months in it, wallowing in injury.

The best sprinters are the ones who shut their brains off when they hear that gunshot, and let fate do what it will.

For someone who wants to know everything, that can be a comforting feeling.

‘It’s kind of like you’re just living out destiny,’ LeBlanc said. ‘Once you’re in the blocks, everything that’s going to happen has already happened. There’s nothing you’re going to change. You just have to make sure you execute properly.’

kbaustin@syr.edu

Published on April 14, 2009 at 12:00 pm