On the brink of the NCAC Indoor Track & Field Championships, goyeo.com contributor Hal Sundt sat down with one of the best athletes in school history in senior cross country and track and field star Joanna Johnson. The Chico, California, native has already qualified for the 2011 NCAA Indoor Championships and should score some major points for the Yeowomen this weekend.

She's done this before.

Story after story has been written about three-time NCAA Cross Country All-American Joanna Johnson and her illustrious career as the greatest runner in Oberlin College history. However, this piece isn't about how fast she ran or what record she set, this story is about her story – the one she wants to tell.

We are sitting on a couch in the hallway of the first floor of Wilder Hall, Oberlin College's student union. Johnson is patient with me as I stumble over my first few questions, in part because I know very little about the sport of running.

“Was your recent race, like, an Oberlin team meet, or was it, like, a non-conference game?” I awkwardly and incorrectly ask, considering the fact that track and field teams have meets not games.

“It wasn't scored as a team, it was specifically for my individual race,” answers Johnson politely with a smile, choosing to put up with my apparent ignorance to her sport and showing the type of mercy that she never bestows upon her opponents when she is running.

As we continue to talk I learn that Johnson, a senior who is double majoring in Biology and French, has aspirations of running after she graduates and would also like to dabble in a career in Journalism. She's got a plan, and it all started when she was running across the pebbled streets of Europe. After graduating high school, Johnson delayed her admission to Oberlin College to study abroad in Belgium, where she lived with a host family and studied at a Belgian high school. She enjoyed her abroad experience so much that she decided to travel again the summer after her sophomore year at Oberlin. This time she went to Spain to study in a proteomics lab.

All the while she was abroad she kept running, and running and running.

But she had a problem.

“I really couldn't find any other women that were running that seriously,” Johnson recalls.

While attempting to stay in top-tier running shape, Johnson had to work extremely hard to find running communities abroad. So unique was her dedication to running, her lab partners began taking interest in her running career.

“My identifying characteristic became that I was a runner,” She explains. “Here (Oberlin) it's so normal for me to run. People don't really think twice about it, but in other countries that have cultural definitions of athleticism and the roles of women in those societies, they respond differently to it.”

The more Johnson raced abroad, the more she noticed the lack of women running alongside her. With only a few months to go before her time at Oberlin is up, she is in the final stages of developing a proposal to advance female running communities around the world.

“I'm planning a project to train with professional women marathoners in other countries,” says Johnson. “I'm hoping to establish an international network, for developing women runners, to help promote running as a means of empowerment for women.”

Johnson calls the project Women Running Around the World (WRAW). She has been working on a business plan for her project, which would involve her training with various female runners across the globe, interviewing them about their running experiences and then writing their stories. Johnson wanted to keep running after college, to tell the stories of other female runners, and to promote running throughout the world. She found a way to do all of it at once.

“I have aspirations to continue running professionally,” remarks Johnson “So as I kind of reflected on that, this idea came to me to run and visit different countries and to meet women who are from those countries. I'd like to learn about their thoughts and their experiences.”

At the very least, Johnson hopes that her project will make it easier for future college runners studying abroad.

“I think it would be really valuable to develop a network, an international network that would allow them to get in contact more easily so that if somebody wants to go abroad and they still want to train they can find people to run with,” says Johnson. “Or if they're just traveling and they want know where to run or a group that they can run with they can find those people.”

Johnson has already applied for the Watson Fellowship as well as the Creativity & Leadership Project of Oberlin College as a means of putting WRAW into action. Should her venture receive the green light, Johnson believes that her writing will influence a community of runners that has yet to be revealed.

“To write their stories not for myself but in order to share them with other people is an inspiration,” Johnson says. “There is not a whole lot out there for women runners to connect and hear each other's stories.”

It only seems fitting that after patiently sitting through countless interviews throughout her running career, Joanna Johnson wants a turn at writing the stories.

The NCAC Indoor Track and Field Championships will take place at the John W. Heisman Field House March 4-5. View The Championship Home Page here.