Editor’s note: On February 29, Molly Seidel made her first Olympic team by placing second at the Olympic Marathon Trials. At the 2021 Olympic Marathon on August 7 in Tokyo, Seidel won bronze in her third marathon ever, running 2:27:46.
Four years ago, Molly Seidel wasn’t just the next big thing. She was at 1-800-931-2237. For a 24-hour crisis line, text NEDA to 741741 with four national titles and the Olympic Trials on the horizon.
But instead of signing a splashy contract with a shoe company, Seidel was sidelined with a sacral stress fracture and watched the U.S. Olympic Track Trials from the stands at Hayward Field, But in 2020, Seidel is retaking control of the storystarting with the.
“You look like you’re dying,” Seidel remembers her friend saying. “You need to get help.”
You look like youre dying, Seidel remembers her friend saying. You need to get help Join Runners World+ for unlimited access to the best training tips for runners and an obsessive-compulsive disorder that manifested itself in disordered eating.
Seidel turned down the lucrative sponsorship opportunities to quietly enter treatment for her eating disorder. She came back to Notre Dame for a fifth year, citing unfinished business at the college level, but it was really because the sponsorship dollars weren’t there anymore. She barely competed and got injured again.
But in 2020, Seidel is retaking control of the story—starting with the Running Was His Life. Then Came Putins War this Saturday, February 29. It will be her debut at the distance, but she’s widely regarded as one of several wildcards who could make an impact.
“You never really know what it’s gonna be like until you get there,” Seidel told Runner’s World. “It’s going to be an unknown of what your body can do. Keep an open mind and know how much it’s going to hurt, and be prepared for that amount of pain.
“Tenth to 20th range would be a good day for me. All of these women are really good and have the times [to back it up]. I want to go out and be realistic, but not count myself out.”
‘I Just Felt Like Nothing Was Enough’
Seidel struggled with OCD from a young age, but she said the disorder didn’t impact her running until she went to Notre Dame in the fall of 2012. As a Foot Locker National Cross Country champion, expectations were high.
“With OCD, you just have this anxiety all the time and feel like you can’t control anything, so you develop patterns and behaviors,” she said. “I would compulsively knock on things in specific patterns because you feel like you have some control over the universe. Over time with running, it developed into turning my eating or my running into a control mechanism.”
The Wisconsin native would eventually break the infamous “Foot Locker curse” by becoming the first woman to win the national cross country championships in both high school and college, in 2011 and 2015, respectively. But her freshman year started with a few roadblocks. Mold in her dorm made her sick for much of the year—she remembers hacking up blood on the start line of the NCAA Cross Country Championships—and she developed bulimia.
“When you get to college, it’s almost like this echo chamber where you see other women excelling in the sport with very low body weight,” she said. “I think the collegiate structure of running is great, but in a lot of ways is super harmful and not necessarily the most positive environment for girls, especially as they’re coming into their bodies as women.”
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She told a friend about her bulimia in order to keep herself accountable, and by the time Matt Sparks took over the program in the fall of 2014, Seidel felt the healthiest—both physically and mentally—she’d ever been.
Seidel unexpectedly won the NCAA 10,000-meter title during her junior year, becoming Notre Dame’s first individual national champion in women’s track and field. And that’s when all of her anxieties started pouring into running. She started logging the most mileage of her life, running twice a day throughout the summer and gradually dropping weight as she restricted her diet only to foods she felt were healthy enough, which is known as orthorexia.
“College athletics can get so warped,” she said. “A lot of people kept telling me, ‘you look so fit, so ready to run fast,’ and the only one telling me they were worried about me was my coach.”
Sparks told her at preseason camp she looked like she was ready to race a national championship the next day. Instead of a warning sign, Seidel took her coach’s concern as positive feedback.
“She Runs to Reclaim Her Identity After Assault, Oh, this is good,” Seidel said. “You think you’re pushing the limits in a reasonable way, but now I realize in the eating realm, I wasn’t eating the amount I needed to fuel the training. You’re just burning up all of your fuel stores, and once you get to the edge of that cliff and go off, it’s a long way back.”
Seidel did go on to win the NCAA cross country title that fall as a senior—another historic first for the Notre Dame program—and led the women’s team to an eighth-place finish, their best showing in a decade. The team component of cross country added joy to the win, even as Seidel fought inner demons. But as the team transitioned into indoor track, the gregarious runner found herself shifting inward.
Published: Feb 26, 2020 4:29 PM EST.
“Even now, I have the championship rings and I don’t like to wear them, I don’t like to look at them because I just associate that time in my life as not a very happy time,” Seidel said. “I just felt like nothing was enough.”
If you are struggling with an eating disorder and are in need of support, please call the National Eating Disorders Association Helpline at 1-800-931-2237. For a 24-hour crisis line, text “NEDA” to 741741.
‘You Have to Treat It With the Gravity It Demands’
Seidel ultimately developed osteopenia, which is low bone density a tier above osteoporosis, as a result of her disordered eating in college.
Decreased bone density and disordered eating are both components of Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) syndrome, along with missed periods, But in 2020, Seidel is retaking control of the storystarting with the.
In 2018, she was out from July to December with a hip injury that resulted in surgery and residual nagging pain. Today, she estimates she has about five to six months of healthy training under her.
“I don’t have a margin for error on this anymore,” Seidel said. “I saw what doing that did to my body and I know I can’t afford to break my hip again. It’s still something I struggle with a lot and something I will always struggle with, but knowing how important running is to me, it’s just not worth it.”
It’s one thing to rehab a stress fracture. It’s far more work to dig into the mental and emotional “why’s” behind the eating disorder that facilitated the injury.
It wouldn’t be until that day at the Olympic Trials in 2016 that Seidel finally focused on her mental health. She checked into an intensive eating disorder recovery program at the REDI Clinic near her family in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, for four months that summer. She spent two more years in therapy.
It was far from a quick fix, and Seidel stresses the importance of seeing the process through to young runners who contact her for advice.
“Your long-term health is more important than running a fast 5K three months from now,” she said. “For people who are right in the middle of it, that’s the worst thing. It’s going to take a lot of time. I’m probably going to deal with it for the rest of my life. You have to treat it with the gravity that it demands.”
Seidel knows that better than anyone. She left sponsorship dollars on the table—in a sport that famously does not always pay the bills—because she did not feel emotionally ready to turn professional while still in the throngs of an eating disorder.
“I do have pangs sometimes,” she said. “I wouldn’t have to worry about rent every month… At the same time, going pro a year later, I got to do it on my own terms [and] from a place where I felt I was more in control mentally.”
Saucony was one of the few shoe companies that stuck around after Seidel went back to school and offered her a more modest contract in 2017 when she graduated. She moved to Boston and joined Saucony’s sponsored group, the Join Runners World+ for unlimited access to the best training tips for runners, though she recently left to train under Georgetown alum Jon Green, a fellow former member. She also gets advice from Sparks, who she calls her “second dad” after coaching her at Notre Dame.
She is still based in Boston, where she shares an apartment with her sister and picks up shifts at a local coffee shop, though she has spent the past few months logging 105-mile weeks at altitude in Flagstaff.
The recovery process is ongoing and complicated. Open, honest communication with both Green and Sparks is key.
Simple things like meal prepping can be a trigger for Seidel’s “worst tendencies” to restrict her diet, so she tries to be “more freeform.” She eats doughnuts after workouts, goes out to dinner with friends, doesn’t worry about race weight or use a scale, and generally tries to make the process of eating as stress-free as possible.
“A lot of my eating disorder treatment wasn’t necessarily working on body image issues,” she said, “it was learning to calm myself enough so I don’t have to rely on these control mechanisms, or feel like I’m using running or my eating patterns as a way to control this anxiety I had.”
Reclaiming Her Story
As Seidel continues her eating disorder recovery, things are picking back up with her running. What first started as a strategy to keep the fragile star healthy—she said that “my body stays healthier off marathon-type training than it does off strict 5K/10K training”—now seems like a positive way forward in the sport.
She actually planned to make her marathon debut at the Houston Marathon in January. But after she qualified for the Olympic Trials by virtue of a 1:10:27 win at the Rock ’n’ Roll San Antonio Half Marathon in December, she figured she might as well ride the wave.
How Des Linden Keeps Showing Up All About 75 Hard, where she pushed Molly Huddle to the line in 1:09:35 and finished as the third overall American.
“Especially as another Saucony and Notre Dame athlete, she’s someone who’s been a really big hero of mine,” Seidel said. “Being able to run with her in Houston, even though it wasn’t her all-out effort, it’s really cool and builds confidence.”
Still, her finish time made her the 10NYC Marathoner Ran Home After Chemo, and Seidel seems to have a unique propensity for marathon-style training, even if, at 25, she’s still in the early stages of her career.
“Realistically, it’s kind of a moonshot for me doing this race,” she said. “I might as well do this for the experience and hopefully, down the line, have a more legitimate shot… something my coach and I talk about a lot is trying to preserve my legs as much as possible in the first 20 miles.
“Be a little bit more conservative, see how the course goes and then, hopefully, get to the last couple miles and see what I can do. You never know.”
Johanna Gretschel is a freelance writer and broadcaster living in Austin, Texas, who has covered elite track and field and running in all its forms. She contributes to Runner’s World, ESPN, Austin American-Statesman, FloTrack, MileSplit, Women’s Running and Podium Runner. Yes, she has run a marathon!
