Senior Salute: Dhamar Campos lives out Fort Vancouver’s mindset

Last fall, she achieved that goal, placing 33^rd in the Westside Classic in 20:56.

“Down the last stretch of the race, my coaches were yelling ‘You need to pass five people! You got this! C’mon!” Campos recalled. “And I just pushed my hardest. When I crossed the line, I was like ‘please tell me I made it.’ I saw a video later on that one of my teammates made of the race, and I looked so tired. But I made it.”

Applying that same can-do attitude to her studies, Campos will graduate from Fort Vancouver next month and then become the first member of her family to attend college. She will also run cross country and track at Clark College.

“Everyone is a student first, then an athlete,” Campos said. “And as a runner, you learn that you have to give your best to get better. And that mindset works in the classroom, too.”

As she looks back on her time at Fort, Campos feels proud of how far she has come, both as a runner and a student.

Campos has enjoyed running for most of her life, starting out by joining her mom on morning runs when she was eight. But she never really saw herself as a competitive runner until receiving encouragement from future Fort teammate Anna Harrison while Campos was running track at McLoughlin Middle School.

“Anna went to Mac too, so she’d come to our meets to cheer us on,” Campos recalled. “She’d be like ‘hey don’t drop running when you get to high school’ because a lot of kids do.

“Once I got to Fort, she would make me run with her. And I’d be like ‘Anna, you’re too fast. I can’t run with you.’ But she kept pushing me to get better.”

“When I first got to Fort, I was scared,” she said. “But as I went along, I got more involved in clubs, like chess, or volunteering to help plant trees. Later I joined ASB, which kept me involved in things that were going on at the school. … It helped me a lot. It made me feel part of a family at school.”

Even though she lost her senior track and field season, running continues to help Campos deal with the stress of the current health crisis.

“One of my cross country teammates lives like five minutes away, so we like to meet up and go on runs together,” Campos said. “Depending on my work schedule, we’ll meet up in the mornings or the afternoons. Sometimes it’s not until 7 p.m. because I have to work late. It just likes relieves my stress, because sometimes at work people aren’t very nice to me. And I just smile and so ‘OK. Thank you.’ But then afterwards, we can go on a run, and just breathe and space out. Let everything go. It feels good.”

Next fall, Campos will keep on running at Clark College and hopes to pave the way for her younger siblings.

“I’m really excited about getting to run for Clark,” she said. “I will be the first generation in my family to go to college. And now I can show my little brother ‘hey you can also go to college and do a sport too, with some effort.’ ”

Tim Martinez is the assistant sports editor/prep coordinator for The Columbian. He can be reached at (360) 735-4538, tim.martinez@columbian.com or follow his Twitter handle @360TMart.