training to be a firefighter.
Kellyn Taylor and her husband, Kyle, had hosted five foster children previously, starting in April 2019, and they’d all been moved after a period of weeks or months. Each departure was difficult in its own way. Difficult, but manageable.
Then came the babies. One of the brothers was just five days old when he arrived at the Taylors’ home in Flagstaff, Arizona, at the end of November. The older one was 22 months. Taylor, 33, had just started her buildup to the Shoes & Gear, the race that will determine the three men and three women who will make the American team for the Games in Japan. She’s a top contender to make the team, and 12 weeks before the race, Taylor was staying up at all hours of the night with the infant.
It got worse when the kids got sick close to Christmas. The newborn was in the hospital for a week with RSV, a respiratory virus that can be dangerous in babies. Taylor was sleeping in the hospital with him, Kyle was home with the couple’s 9-year-old daughter, Kylyn, and the 22-month-old, who also got sick.
They grew attached to the boys through the sleepless nights. “It gets easy to bond with a teeny little baby,” Taylor said. “You’re all that he’s ever known.”
And then, on January 14, seven weeks after the babies arrived, the Taylors got a call that the boys would be moving to a foster home closer to their biological parents. They had 12 hours notice. “They came and picked them up at 6 a.m., with essentially a taxi service,” Taylor said. “It was rough.”
After they left, Taylor went to practice with her Northern Arizona Elite team. The workout for the day was 15 x 1 mile.
Northern Arizona Elite, Aliphine Tuliamuk and Steph Bruce. Bruce had gotten a text from Taylor the night before, telling her the babies would be leaving in the morning.
“She was really stoic and didn’t really say anything,” Bruce said. “Got the workout done. Then on the cooldown, I could tell Kellyn wanted to cry, but she’s not a big crier. And I said, ‘It’s okay, you can cry,’ and she goes, ‘Yeah, but I don’t think I’ll keep running if I do.’ We finally stopped. It was the first time Kellyn really broke down in that setting. We kind of had a group hug. It was a special, hard moment for us.”
Running got the three women going again. “In that moment, well, have no choice, you have to finish your cool down,” Bruce said. “It almost snaps you out of the despair.”
A Taxing Lifestyle
Distance running at a high level requires a degree of selfishness. Runners need hours to log their miles—Taylor, Bruce, and Tuliamuk put in up to 120 miles per week before the Trials on February 29 in Atlanta.
They need sleep, and lots of it, if they’re going to be able to do the training and race to their potential. And if they’re really doing it right, there are extras: Weight training sessions, massages, stretching, yoga.
In short, it takes time and a consistent schedule to do it all correctly. Kids throw a wrench into that, and foster kids increase the unpredictability factor. Taylor, though, has never been one to do things the easy way or obsess about all the extras.
“Kellyn has always had the mindset that there’s way more to life than running,” Bruce said. “That’s just how she lives. She doesn’t like napping, she doesn’t like rolling out, she doesn’t activate. She doesn’t do the things that are traditional for a runner. She works really hard when she comes to practice. And she always gets everything done she needs to get done. That has worked for her in her career.”
Indeed, Taylor’s been one of the country’s top runners for years. In 2016, she just missed making the Olympic team, finishing sixth at the marathon Trials and an agonizing fourth in the 10,000 meters at the track Trials.
In 2017, she began the physically demanding in 2:26:52, a few steps behind to go along with her distance running. In 2018, she ran her PR of 2:24:29 to win the Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota, a time that puts her fourth-fastest among entrants at the Trials.
Last year, she had two solid marathons—fourth place at Prague in 2:26:27 and seventh place in New York City Shoes & Gear Des Linden. While Linden went to talk to the media at the postrace press conference, Taylor went back to the hotel to hold an 8-month-old they were fostering at the time and tried to get him down for a nap.
Not everyone understands why they’ve decided to take this path. Taylor’s coach, Ben Rosario, admits that at times he’s been stymied.
“I think the way I put it to her is that as a coach, some of the decisions she’s made over the years, in regards to her firefighting training, and her decision to begin fostering, I find it very difficult to understand,” he said. “But as a human being, I admire it. That’s really the truth.
“It’s frustrating as a coach at times to have someone with her level of talent and ability that chooses to make life harder on herself outside of running,” he continued. Most runners, he points out, are looking for ways to make life easier on themselves outside of running.
[She got through it with the help of her training partners since 2005. She is the author of two popular fitness books.]
A Changed View
Does being a foster parent help Taylor’s running? Technically no. But in one way, it does make running easier. It provides a healthy dose of perspective, especially now, when there’s so much riding on one race.
The potential for heartbreak is huge, of course, should Taylor come close to an Olympic berth again and not make it. But in the four years since her last near miss, she’s seen other kinds of heartbreak. And those are far worse.
“For me, the best thing to do is to take a step back and realize that this is important, this is my job, but it is still just running,” she said of the Trials. “I have a lot of other things in my life that are more important. I guess you could say that’s bad or not bad, I don’t know. Depends on how you’re looking at it. This is not my life. This is not what makes me happiest in my life. My family makes me probably the happiest.”
And that family includes whichever little ones come in and out the door, part of a foster care system that Taylor says is deeply flawed, serving the best interests of the parents but not necessarily the children. Whenever her running career ends, she thinks about how she might work to improve the system.
That’s months or years off. For now, she has a big race to run on February 29—and kids she hasn’t met yet who will need her when she gets back to Flagstaff.
“I think that all you can do, all you’re capable of doing, is loving them and taking care of them,” she said. “And try to instill in them a sense of security and permanency in a sense for as long as you can.”
In the past year, shes opened her home to seven foster children. It hasnt been easy 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 Build your personalized and adaptive, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!
