Apartment suits student's on-the-run lifestyle

Like many 20-somethings who move to a new city after college, Amy Mortimer lives in an apartment filled with other people's stuff.

She sits on her roommate's sofa, watches her roommate's TV, eats dinner at her roommate's kitchen table. Besides the furniture in her bedroom, Mortimer's sole contribution to the tidy West Roxbury apartment she shares with two other women is the table the phone sits on in the front hallway. Luckily, Mortimer, 23, shares her roommates' tastes. "This is how I would have done it," she says, looking around at the pale-yellow furniture and filmy, green.

Mortimer moved to Boston in September to train with coach John Mortimer (no relation) at Boston College, where she is a volunteer assistant track coach and is earning a master's in accounting. She runs 50 to 60 miles a week, mostly outdoors, even when it's 6 degrees. "I hate wintertime," she says. She has a race just about every other weekend and competes mainly in 1,500- to 5,000-meter events. On Saturday, she'll run the 3,000-meter in the Reebok Boston Indoor Games at the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center in Roxbury.

She and her mother drove out to Boston last summer from Kansas, where she grew up and attended Kansas State University on an athletic and academic scholarship. They looked at several apartments, including one in which her bedroom would have been a room with no closets and French doors that opened to the living room -- the dining room, in other words. She finally found what she wanted on craigslist.com: a quiet, clean place that "looked like it was well taken care of."

The apartment, half of a converted three-story house, opens to a staircase that leads to the main floor. Most of the decorating was done by Kimberly Byda, 29, who has lived there for five years. In the living room, magazines are fanned out just so on a glass table, and doilies hang over the arms of the easy chair. Baskets of fake ivy adorn several doors; matching snowman hand towels hang in the bathroom.

In the sunny kitchen, glass vases sit atop the cabinets, three candles stand at different heights in the corner, and three places are set at the table. A cleaning schedule -- a different roommate is up each weekend -- hangs on the refrigerator.

The wall-to-wall, blue-green carpet runs up the stairs to the third floor, which, besides a storage space for boxes and Christmas decorations, Mortimer has to herself. Between the slanted, attic walls, gauzy curtains cover the windows; a scented candle burns in the corner. A pass from the 2004 Olympic trials dangles from a bulletin board crammed with cards, pictures, and coupons. A silver plate from her second-place finish in the American division of last year's Tufts 10K for Women hangs on the wall.

Mortimer signed with Reebok on Jan. 1, and the plastic tubs in her room that serve as a dresser are partially filled with workout pants, tights, and tops given to her at a recent Reebok catalog photo shoot. Along with a salary and a travel budget, Reebok provides her with luggage, uniforms, and running shoes -- she needs a new pair about every 2½ months.

She has several framed pictures in her room: one of her as a girl hugging her mother, and others with her boyfriend, a runner for Kansas State; her sister, who ran for Kansas State for a year; and her father, who first encouraged her running talent. He was the one who, when she was dreading running the mile the next day in fifth-grade gym class, suggested she jog it instead of trying to sprint. She ended up beating everyone but one boy.

The thin, unfailingly polite young woman is remarkably humble about her ability: "Basically," she says, "I was really bad at all other sports."