My friend Katie Veldman graduated from college a year before I did. On her graduation day our cross-country coach told her it would be tough to continue running post-collegiately.

Katie felt slighted by this comment, so she created a demanding routine in effort to prove him wrong. In that first year she improved her 1500- meter time by 10 seconds, a considerable PR.

The truth of the matter, though, is that Katie is an exception; she has intense focus and determination. Most people, as our college coach had tried to explain, don't create the kind of structure and support system to keep them running competitively, or, sometimes, running at all.

Now I'm a year out of college, a lot of guys who I used to run against have changed priorities or gone the way of the west: commercialized, suburbanized and fenced in. Staying on the frontiers of running after college requires an extreme kind of sacrifice most won't make.

On the NCAA Division I and II level, attrition rates can be attributed to a routine lesson in Marxism: For most athletes, there is no money in continuing to run after college. No shoes, no free anything (without angles). Without financial motivation, it's over.

On the Division III level, continuing to run after college is more about structure. When you graduate, your running family is taken away. What do you do now? Stay poor and dream big - real big, like pipe dreams? Run a couple of 5Ks every year to prove you're not in that bad of shape - not yet?

This is where we get to Darwinism. A lot of DIII runners stick around because they never adapted to free shoes or free anything to keep running in the first place. I see a lot more of Division III runners out there still.

Every time I visit someone who has recently stopped running and put on, say, 30 pounds (sometimes more), I get this mournful feeling when we talk about running: "I remember when ..." This is like hearing the last rites of a body that has ceased to do something we used to love.

It's not that life has stopped for these people. But a part of their life, the part I used to be in, has.

Running after college is difficult because few people understand spending so much time on an unnoticed sport. Eventually, a lot of your friends start feeling the same way.

People continue running after college competitively because they love to. A small handful become professional runners. Michigan, as a state that produces stellar high-school athletes and molds great collegians, has been unusually successful at producing the latter group. For this reason there is now a polarity in the field of post-collegiate runners, even in less-known races.

When I lined up at the Eastern Michigan University Fall Classic Nov. 21, the unattached runners were put to the far right side of the starting line.

Gavin Thompson, a former EMU All-American and Reebok-sponsored athlete, and Nick Willis, an ex-University of Michigan All-American and Olympian who also runs for Reebok, stood casually by waiting for the gun. After the start, that was the last I saw of those two.

They, of course, finished more than a minute - maybe it was two - ahead of me. My time wasn't slow, but these guys are world-class runners.

The only thing we may have in common is that none of us are in college anymore.

Peter Derby graduated from Hope College in 2005 and Cadillac High School in 2000. He ran cross-country and track and had what he calls modest success (14:43 5K PR, 3:53 1500-meter PR). Although he has never qualified for a national competition in either sport, he continues to run because he believes he has not hit his potential. He currently runs for the Universal Sole Team out of Chicago's north end and lives in Cadillac. He is applying to graduate school in education and creative writing, and hopes to help with a college team while attending graduate school. MR