When Nicole Tully lined up for the 5,000-meter final at the USATF Outdoor Championships on June 28, she had raced just one previous track 5K, a 15:05.58 the previous month. Her relative lack of experience proved to be a non-issue. By .01 seconds, she edged Marielle Hall for the win and national title in 15:06.44, and earned a spot on the U.S. team for the IAAF World Championships in Beijing next month.
In another sense, Tully, 28, had the most experience in the field. She has a full-time job, with flexible hours, handling advertising and public relations in the marketing department of Canon Solutions, the printer division of Canon. She ranked first in her undergraduate class in Villanova’s business department, and then earned a masters in corporate communications from Rutgers. Running, she said, “isn’t something that I need to be doing for survival. It’s really just something that I want to be doing. I’m just a regular girl and I’ve got nothing to lose.
“As long as I get everything done, it doesn’t really matter when I do it,” Tully said of her work for Canon.
Her professional and athletic lives sometimes overlap. In January, she was in Las Vegas Monday through Friday for a trade show, and then flew across the country for a Saturday indoor two-mile at New York City’s Armory. (She finished second.) She’s accustomed to sitting in hotel rooms on conference calls for Canon while waiting to go to her races. Among her training group, she said, “I’m the person at the track who, when we’ve finished a workout and are sitting around, will whip out my work phone and I’m checking emails, firing things off.
“I do well when I have a lot going on,” said Tully, an Englewood, New Jersey resident who works out twice a week with the New Jersey-New York Track Club and competes for the New York Athletic Club. Her running aspirations remained lofty, but rather than postpone her marketing career for as many as six years while being an athlete, she is “really happy to be able to build my professional career and my running career” simultaneously, she said.
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Tully is from a dyed-in-the-wool Villanova University family. Her father, Ken Schappert, was a star middle-distance runner there and competed in the 800 at the 1972 and 1976 Olympic Trials. Her mother, Jane Ackerman, was the school’s first female All-American swimmer, and her younger sister, Stephanie, just finished her collegiate running career at the school. For good measure, she’s married to former Villanova runner Sean Tully.
“To us, Villanova track and field was myths. It was our bedtime stories,” said Tully. But after winning multiple state titles in high school in Florida, she initially chose to attend Wake Forest.
“When you’re 18 you don’t always see things as wisely as you wish you would,” said Tully, who was attracted to Wake Forest’s academics, young team, and enthusiastic coach. But she found herself struggling with running “to the point where I wasn’t really sure I wanted to do it anymore.” Her father encouraged the transfer to Villanova, which she credits as “the one thing that saved my running.”
At Villanova, coach Gina Procaccio taught her that races were not occasions for nervousness. If “you knew you were in good shape, you knew what you were capable of,” Tully said. “I used to build races up with the idea that you needed to pull out some superhuman effort, but the reality is you just need to do what you do every other day of the week.”
Tully’s best individual NCAA performance was finishing sixth in the indoor 3,000 in 2010. Finishing 30th, she was part of the Wildcats women’s squad that won the 2009 NCAA cross country team title.
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Tully was 10th in the 1500-meter final at the 2012 Olympic Trials, but failed to make the final in the event at last year’s U.S. championships. Not long after, she had an operation to remove neuromas from between the third and fourth metatarsals of both feet. That enabled her to train consistently for a year, build her distance base, and ponder the possibility of a 5,000. The president of her shoe sponsor, Hoka One One, supplied encouragement after Tully did well in a low-key five-mile road race in New Hampshire.
Professionally, “I wouldn’t say I had a breakout race until Payton Jordan,” Tully said about her 5,000-meter debut at Stanford on May 2. Her goal was 15:20, the pace at which she’d done her interval training.
“There was as little bit of ‘ignorance is bliss’ going on in that race,” she said. “I was questioning myself for a lot of it, waiting for the hurt to set in, waiting to feel terrible.” But with a kilometer remaining, Tully felt unexpectedly strong and took off. The difference between 15:20 and her 15:05 came mostly in the final 800 meters.
So at the U.S. championships, Tully liked her chances.
“I always count myself in the race,” she said. “If I’m there with 400 meters to go, I always think I have an opportunity, because I can usually put together a good last lap, if I’m not dead.”
Tully reconfigured her pre-Beijing schedule when she gained entry to the 5,000 at a Diamond League meet in London on July 25. To her, it is vital to keep up her ability to close in longer races like a miler. She opened her European campaign in Kortrijk, Belgium, on Sunday with a fourth-place 4:09.27 in a 1500. She’ll do another 1500 in Heusden, Belgium, on July 28. Tully wants to achieve the 2016 Olympic standard of 4:06.50 for the distance; her best is 4:06.87.
Looking to her 5,000 in London on the 25th, Tully said, “I still feel I need to learn the 5K, to just get comfortable with hurting for that long and running a fast pace for that long. But I’m hoping if it’s a fast pace, I can jump in the pack somewhere and get pulled to sub-15:00.”
