"It's from a pie fight," she explains dryly, her housemate Alexi Pappas '12 laughing rascally in the doorway. "I realized last year that I'd never been pied in the face, so I took it upon myself to make it happen."
After her cross country team agreed to take part, Katie drove to Lou's, bought 30 pies, and even called a clown, who insisted she use shaving cream instead of whipped cream, because it washes out of clothing much more easily.
By the number of awards and race numbers crowding her walls, it seems that Katie approaches most goals with as much determination.
"Right now, I'm focused on HEPS," she said while fiddling with a pendant of St. Christopher the patron saint of travel that hangs around her neck and was a gift from her high school coach. "It's coming up. October 29th."
As I glance around Katie's room on the 2nd floor of Dartmouth's inveterate "Cross Country House," it's hard to find a single surface that isn't somehow streaked with the four letters. HEPS, short for the Cross Country Heptagonal Championships, is a much-anticipated event for competitive runners in the Ivy League. It's written in permanent marker all over her room. It's even on a bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies.
Once I get past all the mentions, I notice a peculiar number of labels huddling in seemingly-unrelated clusters across her walls.
"Those are the leftovers from my labels collection," she shrugs, explaining how when she was a kid she'd write to companies requesting they send her their stickers and other pieces of marketing ephemera the rest of us don't seem to acknowledge. Tide. Fyffes Gold Pineapples. Einhorn Beer Co. Spezial Pilsner? "I think I just liked to get letters in the mail."
As a member of Dartmouth's cross country team, Katie runs at 3:20 p.m. each day, gets her Achilles tendon massaged regularly (after tearing it in early September) and covers her off-campus room in fluorescent index cards that spit motivational, high-protein sayings like "Get after it" and "Your Shoes aint gon' run themselves." Aside from long distance, her signature event is the steeplechase, which takes its name from its origins in the British Isles, where runners used town steeples to mark their trail across long distances. She logs her mileage in marble notebooks (which I find scattered across her floor), goes through a pair of running shoes a month, and doesn't have time for her guitar, which leans a little dejectedly in a pile of laundry.
With all the athletic inspiration pinned up on the walls, it's a relief to spot a squealing Tracy Morgan dressed in a pink bathrobe on the cover of Rolling Stone's 2008 New Golden Age of Comedy issue. A member of Dartmouth's stand-up comedy group Sit-Down Tragedy, Katie hangs up anything that inspires good material. Shots of hopelessly romantic models swooning on bridges and park benches hang ironically above her bed, and everything from Roz Chast and Amy Sedaris to Robots and Donuts fill her bookshelf.
As I'm heading out, Katie offers me a Bagel Basement gift card and flips off her light switch. To its right, a fried egg hovers midair in front of a microphone on a poster she picked up at a Wilco concert. She takes a quick look at the hot pink notice hanging eye-level beside her door, this one reminding her, in capital letters, to "FOCUS." She smiles.
"It's the last thing I like to think of before heading out for the day."
