Ex-NSU runner Debbie Dunn training with conviction

Debbie Dunn had never run faster. At the USA Track and Field championships last month, she devoured 400 meters in 49.64 seconds, a personal best and the fastest time in the world this year.

Dunn claimed her first USA outdoor title after winning the world indoor title in March. At 32, the former Norfolk State runner is experiencing a breakthrough season that she credits to the man who phoned just after she walked off the track.

Dunn had been at a crossroads when she reached out to him. She had possessed the talent to run with the best in the world but lacked the discipline and confidence.

"He's more of a mental coach," Dunn said. "With me, it's always been mental."

Coach and runner talked just briefly after Dunn ran her world-best time, in Des Moines, Iowa. They never talk long over the phone. Minutes are scarce for Steve Riddick, the former NSU coach now serving a 63-month sentence at the federal prison in Petersburg for his role in a check-kiting scheme.

Riddick, 58, mails Dunn workouts that she follows to the letter. When home in Norfolk, she drives three hours round-trip to visit him about once a week. They talk about her training, which is proceeding nicely toward their goal of winning an Olympic medal in 2012.

Dunn stays a couple of hours, usually. She travels to meets alone but hears Riddick's voice in her head, she says.

For all that many people in her sport know, she has no coach. "Self" is what it says on her USA Track and Field bio in the coaching category. The truth, though, is that she's part of an unlikely pair, possibly unprecedented not only in track and field but in any sport.

A world champ, coached by a man in prison.

Riddick exudes positivity. You have to give him that. In a phone interview, the 1976 Olympic gold medalist is relentlessly upbeat, calling his current living arrangements a "little bump in the road in the scheme of life."

It will not break his spirit, Riddick says. Everyone has some rain fall in their life. After every storm, there's a rainbow.

Riddick awaits his. A three-judge panel has kept him hanging 15 months while it considers an appeal of his conviction. Riddick's wife, Zaneta, finds the wait agonizing. Even if the news is bad, she'd like to know one way or the other.

As for Riddick, he says it's OK. If his appeal fails, he'll continue to do "quite well" and be out "quite soon," he says. His projected release date is November 2012.

He serves his time in a dormitory-style lockup. Routine rules his day. He rises at 5 to exercise, eats breakfast, works in the prison library as a law clerk and reads and writes in the evenings.

"I'm not in Siberia or a concentration camp," he said. "I'm in a federal prison, or camp. Your ability to think is still there."

Coaching, Riddick said, keeps his mind on the outside.

In addition to Dunn, Riddick works with a small core of foreign athletes, mostly from Africa, who have remained loyal.

They are returning the loyalty Riddick showed them, said Malcolm Watts, a former sprinter from Guyana who ran under Riddick at NSU.

"If it's 5 in the morning and it's Sunday and you want to train, you want to work, he's going to be there," Watts said.

At least, that's what Riddick did on the outside, where he showed a remarkable capacity for compartmentalizing his life. He never allowed the turmoil so often swirling around him to disrupt the order on the track, where his mentoring usually produced results.

Riddick's coaching career was controversial from the start. The anchor of the 1976 USA 4x100 gold medal relay team, he returned to NSU, his alma mater, to coach in the mid-1990s. In short order, other coaches accused him of using ineligible runners, including future Olympians Tim Montgomery and Brian Lewis, who competed just one season at NSU after Riddick recruited them from a Texas junior college.

A training center he founded for international athletes had its funding pulled by the International Olympic Committee after complaints that it put the athletes up in substandard housing and failed to provide adequate food and medical care.

His contract was not renewed at NSU in 1999 after he was investigated for travel-expense irregularities. He pleaded guilty to one count of forgery in May 2001 and received a suspended sentence.

Riddick continued coaching after leaving NSU. He trained Montgomery during a comeback attempt after the sprinter was stripped of his 100-meter world record for using performance-enhancing drugs. He also worked with Marion Jones, Montgomery's then-girlfriend, who forfeited five medals from the 2000 Olympics after a doping scandal.

The trio became entangled in a counterfeit-check ring in which more than $5 million in phony checks was deposited. Riddick and Jones were sentenced on the same day in 2008, Riddick for his role in the check-writing scheme and Jones for lying to federal authorities about the scheme and her use of steroids. She received six months. Montgomery received 46 months for his role in the check scheme and was later found guilty of dealing heroin.

At his trial, Riddick said he believed the checks he received came from Kuwaiti nationals as payment to train sprinters from that country. He continued training athletes in the weeks leading up to sentencing and imprisonment, saying he was leaving his fate in God's hands. He maintains his innocence and awaits a ruling on his appeal.

"Track keeps him going," his wife, Zaneta, said. "I don't know how he does it, but he's one of those people who are always optimistic."

Dunn was a different type: quiet and prone to self-doubt. She's still on the quiet side. Before her induction in the NSU Athletics Foundation Hall of Fame in June, she fretted about having to give a speech. It turned out that she didn't need to.

Asked at the time about her recent success, she credited her coach, who she said was "away." She talked about him only after Riddick consented to an interview for this story.

Born in Jamaica, Dunn moved to Maryland at 13, where former NSU coach LaVerne Sweat discovered her. Dunn never visited the school - she couldn't get the time off from work - and took the word of three high school teammates who were also being recruited.

She enrolled with those same high school teammates. While two quickly left, Dunn excelled, becoming the school's first Division I All-American in any sport. She majored in early childhood education and hoped to teach.

Instead, she launched a pro track career that kept her on the move. After leaving NSU, she trained in North Carolina and Arizona before returning to Virginia in 2007. She wanted to train under Riddick, who had been at NSU when she was a student, but he was working with Tonique Williams-Darling, a Bahamian who won the gold medal in the 400 at the 2004 Olympics.

Williams-Darling soon left the area though, and Dunn began working with Riddick shortly before he went to prison in April 2008. He quickly noticed that she had more raw speed than Williams-Darling, but lacked endurance.

That was no accident. Dunn struggled to find motivation, she said, so she didn't train as hard as she needed.

"Mentally, I just wasn't there," she said. "But you get to a point in your life where you realize you're not getting any younger and you want it more, you try harder."

For Dunn, that point came in 2008, when she failed to make the Olympic team for the second time.

Under Riddick's direction, she began doing more endurance work. She ran hills to build her strength and also worked on her mental toughness.

She read motivational books. She pledged to surround herself with positive people.

Riddick is one, she said.

"When you're in the situation he's in, you can sit around and mope all day, or you can make the most of it," she said.

Riddick writes out the times he wants Dunn to run in training and tells her how to go about it. He mails his workouts months in advance. Dunn is set through September.

Watts, who was a former assistant at NSU, acts as Riddick's eyes and ears on the track, supervising Dunn's workouts.

"I just look at it as helping out while he's not there, until he gets out," Watts said. "I consider it an honor."

In a sport in which confidence is at least half the battle, Riddick's strength is his ability to inspire athletes to believe in themselves, Watts said. Part of the process is technical. When athletes like Dunn hit the training marks Riddick sets for them, their confidence naturally grows. They see progress and buy into the plan.

Coaching from prison hasn't diminished Riddick's abilities as a motivator. If anything, it might have enhanced them, Watts said.

"Steve doesn't let his head drop, and as an athlete, you see that," he said. "He's in a worse situation than you are, and he keeps telling you it's going to be all right."

Dunn said she hears Riddick's voice in her head, telling her to pump her arms. She also hears it on those days she does not feel like training.

"Trust me, it's very, very hard," she said. "It's real hard. Some days you just don't feel like doing it, and your coach is the one that helps you and pushes you.

"He always wants more and more."

Riddick said his unusual arrangement with Dunn works because she is a veteran athlete who knows what she wants. What makes her "a little bit exceptional" is her ability to process information, he said.

"She knows how to run the (400)," he said. "She didn't have the information or the workouts or the drive - somebody to push her."

Now she does. Riddick talked Dunn through the rounds at the USA championships. Dunn finished fourth the following week at the Prefontaine Classic but clocked 49.91 in Lausanne, Switzerland, on July 8 - the second-fastest time in the world this year - to win in a meet there. She took second in Gateshead, England.

It is a quiet year in track and field, with no major outdoor championships on the calendar. Things heat up next year with the outdoor world championships, followed by the Olympics in 2012.

Riddick's projected release date is about three months after the conclusion of the 2012 London Games. Dunn said she prays he'll be out sooner.

Riddick's lawyer, Marjorie M. Smith, declined to comment on his appeal.

Riddick will continue coaching either way.

"What it says is you can do anything you want to do," he said. "Having some restrictions can be used in a positive way."

He receives a steady stream of visitors. He's able to watch many of Dunn's races on television. She's developed a following in the prison.

Riddick predicts that she'll continue to thrive, no matter where he coaches her from. He's hoping he'll soon be doing it from a more conventional locale.

"I'm ready to go home," he said. "It's a big world waiting out there, and I've got a lot of things to do."

Ed Miller, (757) 446-2372, ed.miller@pilotonline.com