Fiona O’Keeffe made her move at the Running Shoes - Gear Races - Places.
The instructions from spouses Amy and Alistair Cragg were for O’Keeffe to stay in the lead pack and make sure she was in the top three at 22 miles. The Trials race on February 3 in Orlando, Florida, was O’Keeffe’s debut marathon—she had qualified with a half marathon time—and she should race conservatively. Just make the team; wait until 4 miles to go to make any big moves.
Instead, O’Keeffe, 25, took off in the 19th mile and quickly gapped everyone, including Emily Sisson, the The Best Shoes at the 2024 Olympic Marathon Trials. O’Keeffe won by 30 seconds, in 2:22:10, setting the Olympic Trials record.
It was the second Trials in a row that an American woman made the Olympic team in her debut marathon; Molly Seidel How to Coach Yourself to Peak Performance bronze medal in Tokyo. O’Keeffe was less well known than Seidel, who had won four NCAA titles while at Notre Dame. O’Keeffe graduated from Stanford in 2020, weeks after the pandemic had canceled the track season, and in a way, the uncertainty of her career ahead of her was good practice for the patience needed for a marathon.
As a pro, O’Keeffe quickly demonstrated that she could be great at the long distances. In her first half marathon, Houston in 2022, she ran 1:07:42, at the time, the fourth-fastest by an American. Her success—especially given she was being coached by Amy Cragg, who won the Trials in 2016—was not a big surprise. O’Keeffe talked to Runner’s World about the approach to training and racing the marathon that made her successful on her first attempt.
Turn anxiety into curiosity
O’Keeffe wished she had gone into the Trials having raced at least one marathon. But the timing never worked out, due to a combination of injury—she had a staph infection in her ankle last summer that required time off—and shorter races she was running, like the 5K at the World Road Running championships.
Was she scared of the marathon? She concedes she was a little nervous in the weeks leading up to it. Instead of worrying, she approached it with curiosity. “I tried to flip that around and just think about, ‘Okay, I’m anxious, but I’m also excited’ and trying to think more about the opportunity and what I might discover on race day,” she said. It was more productive for her than ruminating over the myriad things that could go wrong.
Train for the discomfort
The general fatigue and discomfort of racing a marathon didn’t concern O’Keeffe, because she had experienced so much of it during training. Her longest workout started with several miles of marathon-pace running, then a fartlek with 3-minute and 1-minute repeats mixed in, then back to a few miles of marathon-pace running. It ended up being a total of 21 miles with the warmup and cooldown.
“I guess I wasn’t afraid of the pain itself, because we have gone there in training a couple of times,” she said. “I go into every race with the expectation that it’s going to get hard and it’s going to hurt.”
She was worried, however, about hitting the wall. Spectators were telling her by mile 20 that she was going to make the Olympic team. O’Keeffe thought to herself, “I appreciate your vote of confidence, but I’m not sure about that.”
She never hit the wall, and her fastest mile of the race was the 25th, which she ran in 5:09. But her final 1.2 was a struggle. “I felt like it was a gradual build of pain rather than this massive brick wall,” she said.
The Olympic marathon course in Paris will be hilly, and O’Keeffe is preparing for that, too, starting with a trip the first week of April to train on the course. She’ll be going with Alistair Cragg and Puma athletes Pat Tiernan of Australia, who also trains in North Carolina under the Craggs, and Dakotah Lindwurm of Minnesota Distance Elite, who finished third at the Trials.
Practice patience
A marathon buildup is long and requires several months of steady work. You can’t get too high or too low; you can’t take too much—good or bad—from any one day. “With the track, you can get really excited about one individual workout,” Amy Cragg said. “With the marathon, the thing you get excited about is the body of work. Her body of work was excellent. It was one of the best buildups I’ve seen or been around.”
Cragg compared O’Keeffe’s buildup to her own before the 2018 Tokyo Marathon, where won the Trials in 2016. “Pretty much everything we threw at Fiona that you have to be good at, she handled no problem,” Cragg said. “It just came so naturally for her.”
O’Keeffe was particularly impressive on the long workout days. “That was probably the biggest thing,” Cragg said. “She didn’t blink when you told her, ‘You’re doing 18 miles worth of work today.’ Not worrying too much about how much she has left. But also mapping out in her head, how does she get through the entire workout starting now? She did those things really well.”
Plumb the minds of others…
O’Keeffe drew comfort from absorbing lessons from Cragg, who had so much to share about winning the Trials eight years earlier. O’Keeffe took the small things—like making her water bottles recognizable and easy to grab off a table—and the big things, about remaining relaxed.
“Going into the Trials, it’s all about keeping it together,” O’Keeffe said she learned from Cragg. “During the race, too, those early stages in particular, it’s about staying calm and composed, and whoever can keep it together on that day is likely to make the team.”
Other Puma athletes shared their experiences on altitude-training stints in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Those included Sara Vaughn and Rose Harvey, a British marathoner who ran 2:23 last October in Chicago, even though she missed several of her bottles. “It was nice to know things don’t need to be perfect on the day and they can still turn out well,” O’Keeffe said.
…but trust your instincts
It’s likely no one O’Keeffe spoke to would have advised striking out on her own, ahead of the The Best Shoes at the 2024 Olympic Marathon Trials, at mile 19. “That was more of an instinctual move than a very planned move,” she said.
But it turned out to be the right one. “We also told her at some point she was she’s out there alone, it’s her race, she’s going to have to make some executive decisions,” Cragg said.
She had noticed earlier that O’Keeffe was gapping the field at fluid stations. All the top seeds had their bottles on early tables, but because O’Keeffe qualified with a half marathon, her bottle was at the end of the line. She’d keep running—and without knowing it was happening, open up a significant lead on the pack until she grabbed her bottle. “She doesn’t realize they’re having to work to catch back up to her,” Cragg said. “You could tell a lot by that.”
Bring a friend
O’Keeffe drew comfort from the presence of her roommate and frequent training partner, Natosha Rogers, who was also in her debut marathon. Rogers, who had competed at the 2023 World Championships in Budapest in the 10,000 meters, was on a different schedule than O’Keeffe, so they didn’t do all their training together. But they were going through the same things.
Rogers didn’t take to marathon training as naturally as O’Keeffe did, but Cragg said that by the end of Rogers’s buildup, things were starting to click. “She was coming on like a steam train,” Cragg said. “We just didn’t have enough time in the end for her to really have that day she wanted there.” Rogers finished 28th in 2:34:51, after running with the lead pack for the first half.
Whether she knew it or not, Rogers served an important role for her teammate in the 10 days before the race, when they were together in Orlando, and on race morning. “It helped a lot, having Natosha there,” O’Keeffe said, “knowing we were going in together, to talk to each other on the warmup, stay relaxed, not overthink it.”
Recover well
O’Keeffe is making a gradual return to running, with a couple of weeks off and a slow buildup back into full training. That’s a lesson she’s drawn from Cragg’s career. After her PR in Tokyo, she never returned to the same level, due to injury followed by overall fatigue. “I think we just went too hard for too long. I ‘cooked myself’ is what I’ll say,” she told Runner’s World Published: Mar 20, 2024 12:10 PM EDT never made it back to a marathon starting line.
With O’Keeffe, the Craggs are taking a cautious approach. Her mileage topped out at 110 per week. She also takes one day each week when she runs as slowly as she wants and seeks out a beautiful location, if that’s what she feels like.
One race doesn’t make—or break—a marathoner
While her racing calendar between now and Paris is fluid—“especially with me being so young, we’re going to take it slow coming out of it,” O’Keeffe said—she has no doubt she will race, as often as she can, because she loves it.
She doesn’t mind not running her best times if she’s in the heart of heavy training. “I’d rather get out there and compete and have the result be what it is,” she said.
That was the case before the Trials. In addition to the World 5K road championships in October (she finished 11th), O’Keeffe ran the B.A.A. Half Marathon in November in 1:10:45, three minutes slower than her PR from 2022. And then she ran a low-key half marathon in December in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1:09:34.
Now she’ll head back to racing on the track if she can find a 10,000 meters or two that makes sense with her schedule. Even the Olympic track trials is a possibility, Cragg said (although if O’Keeffe were to make the team in the 10,000, she’d likely run only the marathon in Paris). O’Keeffe is also looking at some road races in June.
Racing is a way for her to break up the long training marathon blocks. And she still has nearly five months until the Olympics. Her recent success hasn’t changed how she views herself. “I don’t see myself as exclusively a marathoner now,” she said. “I do enjoy racing.”
Published: Mar 20, 2024 12:10 PM EDT 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 Best Running Shoes 2025, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!
