When Missy Buttry talks about her coaches, teammates and experiences at Wartburg College, she speaks excitedly about qualities such as friendliness, spiritual support and having fun.

And when she talks about running cross country and track for the 1,600-student school in Iowa, she's speaks just as enthusiastically about becoming a tougher competitor and beating opponents -- which she routinely does by breath-taking margins in Division III competition.

"She's just intensely competitive," said coach Steve Johnson. "If you sit and visit with her, she's so personable and laid back, and just a regular person. But you put the spikes on and line people up at a race, and she's just a tiger."

Already a two-time Division III cross country champion and seven-time indoor and outdoor track titlist, Buttry seems destined for even greater accomplishments in national and -- she hopes -- international competition.

But she still has at least one significant bit of business to tend to during her final collegiate cross country season.

Buttry could become the first woman in any NCAA division to win three individual titles in cross country with a victory November 13 at the Division III Women's Cross Country Championships at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire.

In fact, Buttry would join three legendary Division I men as the only triple titlists in cross country, and she could even exceed their accomplishments in one respect. None of the three -- Gerry Lindgren of Washington State University (winner in 1966, 1967 and 1969), Steve Prefontaine of the University of Oregon (1970, 1971 and 1973) and Henry Rono of Washington State (1976, 1977 and 1979) -- won three consecutive years.

It would cap a 12-month period that saw Buttry gain national attention with a win last December at the USA Track & Field National Club Cross Country Championships. She then won her second straight 5,000-meter run at the Division III Women's Outdoor Track and Field Championships in May (to go with two earlier 1,500-meter outdoor titles, a pair of 1,500-meter indoor titles, and the distance medley title she won with her teammates at the 2003 indoor championships).

She also qualified for and competed in the Olympic Trials in Sacramento, California, in hopes of qualifying for the Athens Games. She fell short, finishing eighth in the 5,000 meters, but the experience firmly confirmed that she's in competitive running for the long haul.

"I learned a lot from that race out in Sacramento," she said. "It gave me the perspective of what I want to do in the future. I realized how much of a passion I have for the sport, how much I love being in meets like that and how much I love the atmosphere."

Of course, she also learned that she has a ways to go before achieving her dream of competing in the Olympics.

"It definitely taught me how I'm going to have to work on the last part of my race, and how much stronger I'm going to have to become at the end of the race to accomplish my goals," she said. "It taught me how much harder I'm going to have to work and how much more dedication I'm going to have to put into it."

Division III a quality level

Just as she's done since arriving at Wartburg in 2001, she's working under the patient tutelage of Johnson, who always has counseled Buttry to bide her time and approach running as a long-term career.

"Missy's probably only getting to the type of (weekly) mileage as a senior that I think a lot of Division I coaches would be pushing her to as a freshman," said Johnson, who once coached at Oregon State University. "We learn math by doing addition and subtraction and then multiplication; we don't go from addition to calculus. I thought it was an important thing; let's just take our time and build in the right way."

It is obvious that Buttry could have succeeded in a Division I program. She finished behind only Providence College standout Kim Smith at the recent Roy Griak Invitational in Minneapolis and outpaced highly regarded Arizona State University junior Amy Hastings in a race featuring more than 260 Division I competitors.

But even though she won an Iowa state championship as a high-schooler (she was home-schooled but ran for Shenandoah High School), she gave only fleeting thought to attending a Division I institution before settling on Wartburg.

"I had struggled a few years with stress fractures and stuff like that, so I think my mindset was more that I wasn't good enough to go to a Division I program coming out of high school," Buttry said. "That put me on to looking at smaller schools."

It turned out to be a happy choice, not just for Buttry but for Wartburg.

"When I first saw her run, I saw a tremendous amount of potential," Johnson said. "I remember coming back from the first meet I saw her run in and telling our track coach (Marcus Newsom), 'Wow, she has a ton of talent. She'll run faster than anybody I've coached' -- and I coached at Oregon State for several years and coached some pretty fast Division I people."

"I liked the small campus atmosphere; everyone was so friendly," Buttry recalls of her first visit to Wartburg. "In talking to the coaches, my faith in God is the most important thing to me, and both of them are strong Christians. I think that is pretty much what led me here, because I knew they'd be able to help me keep my focus on God and grow my faith."

"She was a small-town kid, in home school and a good Christian kid, and just really seemed a good fit for Wartburg," Johnson said.

There have been no regrets, even as the competitive Buttry routinely wins races by a minute or more, rather than by mere seconds, against Division III competition. In fact, Buttry staunchly defends the quality of competition in the division.

"People put Division III out there as lower quality," she said. "But if you look at Division III and the athletes we have, four of us qualified for the Olympic Trials, and Andrew Rock (a sprinter from the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse) ran at the Olympics (winning a gold medal as a member of the U.S. 1,600-meter relay).

"So, just because we're at Division III schools, that doesn't mean we're not good athletes. It might be a better atmosphere for us, and what we needed to excel in our sport."

Finishing fast

Still, Buttry has dominated Division III cross country in unprecedented fashion, winning her first title as a sophomore in 2002 by 55 seconds. And it wasn't as though she snuck up on anyone, after winning a Division III indoor 1,500-meter title as a freshman.

"I knew I had a pretty good meet, but I didn't know I had that big a lead," she recalls about that first cross country victory and her time of 20:17.3. "I expected Mary Proulx (of Keene State College) to be right up there with me, and Melissa White (from State University College at Geneseo). So I definitely was surprised."

What did she do for an encore? She won the 2003 Division III race by finishing more than a minute ahead of Liz Woodworth of the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh -- like Buttry, a qualifier for this year's Olympic Trials.

Buttry just missed -- by two-tenths of a second -- breaking the 20-minute mark in that race, and she fully expects to improve on her time at this year's championships.

"My goal is to run into the 19s, like a 19:30 or in the 19:20s; that's what I'm setting up for. I'm hitting between 70 and 80 miles a week in mileage, just trying to get a really strong base going. When we do hill or speed workouts, I always set my pace under 20 (minutes), around that 19:30 pace, so my body can get used to that and adapt to that, so it will be easier to go out and do that in a race."

And, keeping her eye on future goals, she is working with Johnson on her finish. Johnson said Buttry likely will experiment with holding back in a couple of races, then finishing fast.

"She's a very intense competitor and will go out with anybody," he said. "But if she's going to be good at the international level, the people who are successful and make Olympic teams are great finishers.

"She's proved she can finish well; she outkicked Katie O'Neill (a former cross country standout at Yale University) in the club championships last fall. But Katie's a 10K runner, and it's different kicking against Katie and (two-time Olympian) Shayne Culpepper. So that's one of the things we'll be working on this year."

The 2008 Olympics are squarely in Buttry's sights, and Johnson thinks she can make it -- though he's a little reluctant to say that to the many people who ask him about her prospects.

His counsel to Buttry hasn't changed in four years -- take things one step at a time.

"Lots of people are asking about the future," he said. "She's a college athlete working on a college degree, and we can only live in today's practice; we can't live two years from now or four years from now in the next Olympics.

"And so we've talked about that; let's enjoy our senior year, let's have some fun. It's the last time she's going to be in a team setting and doing team things. I think that's really important."