* Lauren Tolbert won the 800m state title at the 2022 NCHSAA Class 1A state meet in May.
Photo Credit: Doug Hague/MileSplit North Carolina
"I know that I've done my best this whole season to get to this point, so I'm just going to leave it out on the track when I get that opportunity."
- - -
By Ashley Tysiac -- MileSplit
The 2021 AAU Junior Olympic Games served as the big stage and a long-time dream come true for recent Highland Tech (NC) graduate Lauren Tolbert.
She sat in third going into the bell lap of the girls 17-18 year-old 800m championship a year ago, but a final push around the last curve proved enough for Tolbert to pull ahead.
Lauren crossed the finish line in 2:10.27, good enough for her first AAU national title. This one came amid the sweltering heat of Houston, Texas.
And that championship win also came after years of hoping that she would one day earn her spot at the top of the podium.
"I can finally tell my younger self that I finally did it," Lauren said. "I'm a national champion."
WATCH THE 2022 AAU JUNIOR OLYMPIC GAMES LIVE ON FLOTRACK
JULY 30 - AUG. 6
That first coveted title was a long time coming for Lauren, who has been competing in AAU track meets in North Carolina and across the country since she was nine years old, for the likes of the Gastonia Eagles and the Carolina Express Track & Field Club, for whom she currently competes for.
Flash forward to 2022, and Lauren has successfully chased down more of her aspirations. She'll stay in her home state to compete collegiately at Duke beginning this fall, and a 2:06.94 800m personal record set at Brooks PR earlier this month makes her one of the best in North Carolina history for the two-lap race. She's No. 2, in fact.
It's a progressional success story that she attributes greatly to those nine years of competing during long AAU weekends and making track and field a year-round pursuit.
"We didn't think it was going to turn out the way it did," said Tony Tolbert, her father and coach at Carolina Express. "When we first started, it was something where she was very energetic as a young girl, so we just thought we were just putting her in something to do. But it just even evolved from there."
The introduction to running for Lauren began early on as a second grader with the Girls on the Run program, a national non-profit providing empowerment to young girls through exercise. But soon her family realized she had a knack for the sport.
That's when AAU came in, only solidifying her love-at-first-sight attitude toward track.
"When I first started out, I just loved to run," Lauren said. "I ran everywhere."
Her talents showed out on the track from the get-go. At her first youth meet, she swept the distance events in the 9-10 year-old girls division with wins in both the 800m and 1,500m.
Just a year later, she joined thousands of other young athletes at her first AAU Junior Olympic Games. It was a shock to the system for Lauren, who toed the line against the nation's best girls in her age group for the first time.
That introduction to national competition only fueled her competitive fire further.
"She had the opportunity there to kind of say, 'OK, I can try to get back here again and hopefully you know, do better the next time around,'" said DeLisa Tolbert, Lauren's mother.
But a pivotal moment stands out to Lauren when reflecting on her development -- becoming an All-American for the first time as a seventh-grader at the 2017 Junior Olympics.
She entered the meet in Michigan with a respectable 2:25.55 800m personal best. Lauren went back home with a sizable PR of 2:16.97, a AAU All-American medal and a realization that perhaps the 800m could be her specialty.
"I was like, 'This is my event now,'" she said.
From Tony's perspective as both a parent and a coach, it made for an exciting moment, and he honed in on transitioning Lauren to specialized middle distance training.
"She had like a 12- or 13-second PR from one week to the next," Tony said. "It was like, wow, so really that's when we really started to really focus on the (800m)."
That meant trying her hand at new training approaches come high school. Lauren competed in cross country, something she openly said she despised at times, but it helped her improve her endurance.
Her time improvements in the 800m became smaller but more impressive as she began to win high school state titles while at Highland Tech. She ranked among some of the best middle-distance runners in the country.
Photo Credit: Jamie Mitchell/MileSplit
A 2:07.77 performance at the NCRunners Twilight Invitational during the 2021 outdoor season became the first time Lauren put Mackenzie Pierce's 19-year-old 2:06.66 800m state record on her radar. Then came the AAU JO Games' national championship performance last summer, which served as reassurance to Lauren that her years of growth finally were reaping significant rewards.
A year later, a trip to Brooks PR made for the best race of Lauren's career and the closest she has ever come to Pierce's all-time leading mark, running fractions of a second behind it in 2:06.94.
That puts her second all-time in North Carolina over 800m.
Ask 9-year-old Lauren if she would have ever grown into a stellar 800m specialist and an AAU national champion, and she may not have predicted that success.
But for Tony and DeLisa, it doesn't come as much of a surprise, as her dedication to the sport developed through years of AAU practices and competitions aided in Lauren's steady rise.
"She definitely has that passion and from a discipline standpoint, that's something that she's continued to work on," DeLisa said. "I think that is something that she is building on and it will definitely set her apart over time."
Now as Lauren's youth career comes to an end, she'll continue to put in the hours of year-round work as a Blue Devil beginning in the fall.
But in her final month competing on the AAU level, Lauren still has one final goal on the agenda to check off.
Why not go for that 800m state record once more?
"I'm almost there. 0.28 seconds away," Lauren said. "So let's try for it."
With just the AAU Junior Olympics left to go a month from now, she'll look to end on a high note as a repeat national champion and a new state record holder.
But record or not, Lauren will look to leave the track in Greensboro satisfied with the progress she's made over nearly a decade and with the dreams she imagined as a 9-year-old largely fulfilled.
"I know that I've done my best this whole season to get to this point," Lauren said, "So I'm just going to leave it out on the track when I get that opportunity."
Related Links:
