MORGANTON -- Freedom's Casey McGraw shares something with ballerinas, but she hardly feels like dancing these days.

McGraw, who won the N.C. 4A cross country girls' championship last fall, is slowly recovering from a stress fracture in her left foot.

"It was the second metatarsal (bone); they call it a `ballerina fracture' because it's similar to what they get," said McGraw, a junior. "It's hard to predict how the season will go."

How McGraw's season fares will depend on when it begins. She'll miss about the first month, could be back in early October and could be full speed for the Northwestern 4A meet in mid-October. That leads to regionals, then the state meet the first Saturday in November.

She's been running a week, and slowly building endurance. McGraw said her longest jaunt has been three miles. Last fall she'd knock off six or seven miles daily.

The pain heightened during the outdoor track season last spring. Despite the injury, McGraw ran in the conference meet and finished second in the 1,600-meter run. She stopped running, and began a medical odyssey.

Resting the foot helped. She had numerous magnetic resonance imaging tests. She'd run, but feel pain. Two months ago doctors discussed surgery to graft a piece of her hip bone into her foot (the procedure wasn't necessary). More rest. She used a machine to send electro-magnetic waves through her foot for three hours nightly.

"That really helped, in two weeks my foot didn't hurt at all," McGraw said. "Some days it hurts, some days it doesn't. It's been such a long process. It's very hard to train around it."

McGraw's winning time of 18 minutes, 1.4 seconds at the 4A state meet at Charlotte's McAlpine Park was the third-fastest since the meet began in 1980. Before she moved to North Carolina, she was the Minnesota 1A cross country champion as a freshman, and finished third in the state as an eighth-grader.

Her high point last season came when she qualified for the Foot Locker National Championships at Disney's Wide World of Sports Complex in Orlando, Fla. The meet drew the top 32 runners nationwide, and McGraw finished 21st. Seven North Carolina girls have qualified for the meet in its 21-year history.

"I'd love to make it to Foot Locker again this season, but because of the miles I'd need to run (training), I just don't know," McGraw said. "I wanted this year to be awesome. Sometimes it's frustrating."

"Saturday I went for a run, and I never felt so horrible. I was crying, I thought I'd never recover. It's been a huge setback. I'm not used to taking that much time off. I've never taken more than two months off. But I will be positive, I know it'll come. This will just make me stronger."

Freedom coach Rob Ford said McGraw's diligence should help her recovery.

"She puts in the time like nobody else," he said. "She's been lifting, doing Stairmaster, just about anything you can do outside of running. She's working 21/2 to three hours every day. She's in tremendous shape, just not running shape."

The team misses McGraw, Ford said, and asks him every day about her return.

"She's not just an athlete, she's the state champion," he said. "We try to keep her confidence up, and tell her this thing's going to go away."

high school cross country