Side by side, Laura and Jackie Zeigle run past the pavement to the soft jogging path that cuts behind their high school. Laura glides past with long, graceful strides; Jackie stands tall and straight, her arms tucked tight against her ribs.
The identical twins are hard to tell apart in the Bingham High School hallways, but they look quite different running shoulder to shoulder, each with her individual style, ponytails bobbing in unison.
In minutes, they disappear in the distance, with the Wasatch Range on the horizon. Ground fog hides the mountains’ lower slopes, leaving a row of peaks in view over the valley.
“This is supposed to be a slow run,” sighs their father, Kevin, who jogs behind them while his daughters disappear like the mountains, reappearing occasionally to make sure he’s still following.
The twins, from South Jordan, Utah, were born just minutes apart 17 years ago and have been neck-and-neck ever since. The two high school seniors are among the fastest girls in America now, a powerful pair consistently ranked among the top girls in high school track and field.
“Nobody will run with the Zeigles,” says Jeff Arbogast, their coach at Bingham High School, in this community of nearly 30,000. “As far as a dynamic duo, I don’t think anybody would disagree, there’s not a tandem like them at any high school in the country.”
Jackie is the defending national indoor champion for the mile, Laura for the two-mile.
They ended their high school cross-country season the way they’ve ended plenty of races, with a one-two punch that left a pack of followers in their dust: Laura crossed the finish line first, Jackie followed seconds later.
“We were running stride for stride,” Laura recalls. “That’s cool. We were that close.”
These twins are close on the track and close in the rest of their lives. They share the same friends, the same interests, and the same religious devotion. Devout Christians, they credit God for their racing success. They train together, play together, and pray together.
“They’re each other’s best friends,” says sister Kit, 15, a Bingham High freshman runner following in her older sisters’ footsteps.
The girls’ twin passion for running not only means that each has someone to join her on those long training jaunts, but has somebody to celebrate with after a win—or comfort after a bad showing. “Sometimes bad days can get a little less bad if somebody else does well,” says Arbogast, known as “Coach Arb” to his Bingham Miners.
Last December, a back injury kept Laura from qualifying for the national high school Foot Locker Cross Country Championships. She had spent six months training for the race, which would have been her third consecutive appearance. Previously, she placed third.
Although Laura failed to qualify, she was there on race day, looking nervously for her sister in the pack and rooting her on to a seventh-place finish. “I got to cheer for her,” Laura says. “I just said, ‘This is for Jackie.’”
Natural runners
The pair started running at about age 7 in the South Valley Track Club, spurred on by their parents. “We opened the door for them,” says mother Laurie, a special education aide at Bingham High, but she and her husband never pushed them to run.
The girls found they had a gift for speed, often trading victories with each other. As they aged, they built up distance and trimmed their times.
Arbogast headed up the league, but he didn’t realize the twins’ potential until, as ninth-graders on his high school team, they started to beat nationally ranked runners on his boy’s varsity team. “When they started to gap my seniors by a factor of minutes in the 5K,” he says, “I thought, my main goal for the next several years will be to stay out of their way.”
He credits the Zeigles’ success to their innate abilities. The Zeigle family credits their wins to him. Arbogast, a 22-year Bingham veteran, is one of the country’s top high school running coaches. Both boys’ and girls’ teams are consistently among the top ranks, and have been for a dozen years.
For years, Laura took racing more seriously than her sister, consistently winning their one-two finishes. “I like it when she wins,” Jackie says. “It’s, like, weird when she’s behind me. Sometimes she’ll have a bad race and I’d be, like, ‘This is not right. I want her to be up there.’” Lately, though, Jackie says she’s become more intent on running, and winning, and her times have shown it. These days, Arbogast says, “Both girls are kind of evaluated together. Now they’re a formidable duo. Either one of them can strike fear in anybody’s hearts.”
Even seated side by side, the Zeigles are hard to tell apart. They are twins in more than just their oval faces and runner’s physiques. They’re considering the same colleges, and although both say they won’t base their choices on each other’s, both expect to share the same school, maybe even the same dorm room. Even on their achievement tests, they scored just a point apart. Almost in unison, they insist they’re “way different.” Jackie stands an inch taller; Laura cuts her straight blonde hair a couple inches shorter. Laura says Jackie is more outgoing. (Jackie denies it.) Jackie says her sister is messier. (Laura agrees.) Often, they say, they like the same things, just in different ways, much like their approaches to running.
In Jackie’s room, “TOP 5” written in racing tape on her wall is a reminder to run her fastest. Also scattered on her wall are inspirational biblical messages. Reads one: I will run and not grow weary, a prayer she sometimes utters as she trains. In Laura’s room, a Belgian newspaper clipping from last year’s world championships hangs among her own biblical verses and photos of friends, teammates, and running superstars.
Family tradition
Jackie and Laura are two in a fleet-footed family. Father Kevin was a high school runner and often joins them on their training runs, on foot or by bike. Brother Ian, 19, was also a runner, and Kit posts times that beat her sisters’ freshman runs.
Only their mother, Laurie, doesn’t stow running shoes in the overflowing basket by the door. “I’m just the mom who holds the water bottle and yells, ‘Go!’” she laughs.
Race footage makes up the family’s home video collection, and a tub of vitamins serves as the kitchen table centerpiece. The refrigerator door is dotted with racing bib numbers and a milk ad featuring Olympian runner Marion Jones.
Natural Running
One day, the girls say, they may be Olympians, too. While the Winter Olympics were staging in nearby Salt Lake City, they were thinking about future Summer Games when they might be competitors.
Before then, though, come plenty of other races, and each one gets full attention and a rigorous training regimen. Sometimes it means sprints. Sometimes it means jogs.
Tonight, it means an “easy” three miles around the neighborhood with Dad, who watches as his 17-year-old twin daughters disappear before his eyes.
David M. Frey is a regular contributor to American Profile.
