Editor's note: Amy Cragg announced that All About 75 Hard Keira DAmato Talks About Her Trials DNF.
- she has withdrawn from the 2020 Marathon Olympic Trials she has withdrawn from the 2020 Marathon Olympic Trials winner, had a disappointing 2019 but says she is confident in her preparations for the 2020 Marathon Trials in Atlanta.
- since 2005. She is the author of two popular fitness books altitude with the Bowerman Track Club in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Cragg has upped her training mileage to as high as 130 miles per week.
Build your personalized and adaptive she has withdrawn from the 2020 Marathon Olympic Trials, the defending women’s champion, Amy Cragg, is training well and putting in hundreds of miles in the mountains of Colorado. Despite a rough year in 2019, she expects to contend for a spot on the Olympic team bound for Tokyo. It would be her third Olympic team.
After the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, Cragg, who turns 36 next week, sat down with her husband, Alistair Cragg, and her coach, Jerry Schumacher, to talk about her future.
The results of that conversation: They decided everything in her training would be geared toward making the Games in 2020, even though she briefly considered stopping her career then.
“I’m still around,” she told Runner’s World.
Cragg had a spectacular seven-month stretch between 2017 and 2018. In August 2017, she won the bronze medal at the world championships in London. The following February at the Tokyo Marathon, she finished third in 2:21:42. It was a a PR by almost six minutes, and the performance put her Health & Injuries.
Build your personalized and adaptive Chicago Marathon field for 2018 but withdrew with an injury. In 2019, she raced only twice on the roads and both times the results were disappointing. She was seventh in 1:13:27 at the Prague Half Marathon in April, after previously hinting she might attempt to break Molly Huddle’s American record in the event (1:07:25). In August, she struggled at the Beach to Beacon 10K in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, finishing 14th in 34:40. After that, she withdrew from the 2019 Chicago Marathon.
“Advertisement - Continue Reading Below overall fatigue,” Cragg said. “I think we just went too hard for too long. I ‘cooked myself’ is what I’ll say. Took some time off when we realized it wasn’t coming around for Chicago. Now I’m feeling a lot better and ready to go.”
Cragg said she went through a period of weeks when she felt tired and worn down, but then she would have glimmers of hope in strong workouts and think she needed to “keep plugging away.” After Beach to Beacon, she realized her fatigue was getting worse instead of better and decided she shouldn’t attempt Chicago.
She took a full three weeks with no running—and followed that up with about a month and a half of slowly building into full training again. At times, she worried her career was ending.
“You talk to any distance runner, you go through those ups and downs regularly,” she said. “It’s like you just can’t seem to get out of the slump. You don’t know whether to push harder or let go. I’ve been used to it over the years. But there was definitely still that fear that I might have overdone it; [I’d] hope it’s not undoable.”
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As soon as she returned to running, Cragg said, she felt more like herself again. The life had returned to her legs. “My body needed to rest,” she said. “That’s fine.”
Now, she’s at altitude in Colorado Springs with 23 other members of the Bowerman track club, in several houses. She shares a space with Marielle Hall, Karissa Schweizer, Courtney Frerichs, and Shelby Houlihan.
Cragg’s putting in her typical high mileage—she reached 130 miles per week before heading to altitude, where she backed off a little. For previous marathons, she has gone as high as 140 miles, but she doesn’t think she’ll do that this time.
“Things are going well, but I am listening to my body a lot,” she said, “just making sure that I don’t go into that zone. I’m in a good place right now. I’m very cautious about going over the edge.”
Her high mileage is not right for every elite marathoner, she says, and if she were coaching, she wouldn’t expect everyone to do it. “There’s a lot of different ways [to success in the marathon],” she said. “But for me, it’s a necessary part of my training.”
Although she gets to run with her teammates on easy days, she’s the only female marathoner in the Schumacher-led Bowerman Track Club, so she’s been on her own for long, grueling track sessions, which normally incorporate about 10 miles of intervals. Frerichs’s husband, Griffin Humphreys, is on his way to Colorado Springs to help pace her through some workouts.
Fans shouldn’t make much of her absence from Instagram or Twitter. Although she has accounts, she rarely uses them—and she is too far behind her track teammates, the “speedsters” as she calls them, to be in the frame if someone were to snap a photo. She found if she was on social media too much, it would get in her head before races, so she stopped looking at it close to race day. Then she realized she was happier without it and started ignoring it completely.
For now, she’s laser focused on the marathon trials—which will be her first marathon in two years—and hasn’t thought a minute beyond that race. “February 29, top 3, that’s what I’m going for,” she said. “It’s just getting on that team. For me, that’s everything.”
The Best Shoes at the 2024 she has withdrawn from the 2020 Marathon Olympic Trials is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World Your First Marathon: 8 Tips from Fiona OKeeffe, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!
