Health - Injuries.
She hadn’t run in months, her fitness abandoning her in the wake of a stress fracture. As she poured her heart out to family, friends, and teammates, her frustration was visible. “I cried to everyone,” she says. “I was so low, lost and emotionally crazy.”
On Monday in Beijing, more than 5,000 miles away from her training base in Portland, Oregon, Infeld cried tears of a different kind after capturing a surprise bronze medal in the 10,000 at the IAAF World Championships.
The 25-year-old had been in fourth for much of the last lap. But in a last desperate lunge for the line, she overtook U.S. teammate Molly Huddle Australian Sprinter, 16, Runs Record-Breaking 200m.
Afterward, Huddle was inconsolable, but when she came across her younger teammate, she couldn’t help but congratulate her on the achievement. “Those better be tears of happiness,” she told Infeld.
Infeld first got into running in middle school, mostly because it was what her older sister Maggie did. Though she was a promising talent during her days at Georgetown University, few thought of her as a potential global medalist. One of those who did was Jerry Schumacher, the head coach of the Bowerman Track Club, who started working with Infeld in the fall of 2012.
For a long time, though, it looked as if Infeld was on a fast track to becoming a has-been, or worse, a never-was. Joining Schumacher’s group involved training alongside Olympic medalist Shalane Flanagan on a daily basis. At first, Infeld’s biggest enemy was her own determination.
“It was hard,” she recalls of those first two years. “Jerry is really focused on strength, and the training was a lot more than I was used to. I’m the kind of person who just won’t complain, but there’s a difference between complaining and telling someone you’re redlining every single day.”
Infeld was often laid low with fatigue or injury. In November 2013, she got a stress fracture on the left side of her sacrum, a bone at the base of the spine that inserts between the two hip bones. She spent three to four hours a day on an elliptical machine trying to maintain fitness, but instead prolonged her recovery.
Eventually, she was forced to take 10 weeks of complete rest. By last fall, she was up to 95 miles per week in an effort to make up for lost time. She soon got another sacral stress fracture, this time on her right side, and had to take another 10-week break.
“I talked to my parents, my agent Tom [Ratcliffe], my coach Jerry, Shalane, and I told them, ‘I think I’m done. I don’t think I can do this,’” she says. “I hit a super, super low point.”
“We’re not going to give up on you,” she recalls Schumacher saying. “You’re young. You have it in you. We’ll get you back.”
In February, Infeld took to the grass at the Nike campus to complete her first run since November. “I did five minutes,” she says. “I was so embarrassed; I didn’t want anyone to see me.”
For the next few months, Infeld slowly increased her mileage, supplementing it it with runs on an anti-gravity AlterG treadmill. To regain fitness, she cross-trained “like a fiend,” she says, swimming for 90 minutes to three hours each day. “I’m the worst swimmer ever,” she says. “I was forcing myself to go. It literally felt like I was drowning.”
By late April, Infeld had been back doing workouts for a month. To gauge her speed ahead of the 5,000 at the Payton Jordan Invitational on May 2, Schumacher had her run an all-out 400 in training.
Beforehand, Schumacher told Infeld about a seventh-grade girl he coached who did 64 seconds the previous week. “So long as you can match that,” he said, “you’ll be okay.”
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“It was so embarrassing,” says Infeld. “After that, Jerry was like, ‘Let’s try you in the 10,000.’”
At Payton Jordan, Infeld surprised herself by running 31:38.71, well under the qualifying standard for the U.S. championships in late June and the world championships.
Before the U.S. championships, she went to Park City, Utah, for altitude training, running every step alongside Flanagan and progressing rapidly in the weeks that followed. “She does it the right way,” says Infeld of her training partner. “It’s a whole lifestyle with her. I just follow suit.”
At the U.S. championships, Infeld finished third in 31:42.60, one meter behind Flanagan, who was second.
After the race, Flanagan told Infeld that Infeld should have won their sprint, but that Infeld had eased up approaching the finish. In the weeks that followed, the point was made several times to her in workouts: run through the line.
Infeld returned to Park City in July, doing nothing much besides training, resting, and getting to sleep before 10 every night. Running 70 to 80 miles a week, she did three hard workouts in every 10-day cycle. One was a long run, often 1:45 or longer, with the last five miles at an increasing pace, finishing at 5:20 per mile. The other two were four to six miles of long track intervals, and a pure speed session, two miles worth of short intervals, “basically all out,” Infeld says.
On Monday, Infeld drew on all of that speed work over the final lap, which she covered in 62 seconds.
When she crossed the line, the first person to embrace her was Flanagan, who finished sixth. “You did it,” she told Infeld with tears in her eyes.
“I don’t know what I did,” came the response. “I wasn’t sure. I was in such a daze.”
When Infeld finally had time to look at her phone Monday evening, she was greeted with a deluge of messages from those closest to her, along with many from relative strangers who felt a connection with her journey.
“I spoke to a lot of people who had been through struggles who messaged me,” she says. “I think you bond with people when you have an injury.”
When she finally made it to bed, considerably later than usual, she barely slept.
“It’s something I’ve dreamed about for so, so long,” says Infeld.
Cathal Dennehy is a freelance writer based in Dublin, Ireland, who covers the sport for multiple outlets from Irish newspapers to international track websites. As an athlete, he was Irish junior cross-country champion and twice raced the European Cross Country, but since injury forced his retirement his best athletic feat has been the Irish beer mile record. He’s happiest when he’s running or writing stories about world-class athletes.
