At 17 years old, Mary Cain became one of few women to ever run 800 meters faster than two minutes. Later that year she became the youngest American runner ever to compete in the World Championships. And all the while she was facing bullying from coaches and teammates and emotional abuse from Nike Oregon Project coach Alberto Salazar. Cain has written a new memoir, “This is Not About Running,” and joins us to talk about her experiences.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. When she was only 17, Mary Cain became one of only a handful of females to ever run 800 meters in under two minutes. Later that year, she became the youngest American runner to compete in the World Championships. And all the while, she says she was facing bullying from parents and teammates, and abuse from the coach of the Nike Oregon Project, Alberto Salazar.
Cain went public with part of her story in an op-ed and video for The New York Times in 2019. She went on to start a nonprofit that mentors underserved girls in the Bronx through running. Last year, she started medical school at Stanford, and she recently published a memoir. It’s called “This is Not About Running.”
Mary Cain joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Mary Cain: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Miller: I was hoping we could start off by having you read us the preface to the book.
Cain: Yes, of course.
[Reading excerpt from her book, “This is Not About Running”]
“Nike loves Steve Prefontaine because he’s dead. They have immortalized his face in ads. Stores are filled with photos of him racing in an old school Oregon singlet. He is recognizable to both running fans and sneakerheads alike. But he’s not here to object to the use of his name and image by a multi-billion dollar corporation that perpetuates abuse. They can pretend he was theirs, despite how he stood against the exploitation of athletes. Nike will use his quotes to prop up their culture of overtraining and win-at-all-costs mentalities. How does Pre feel about it? We can’t ask him. He’s dead.
“I sometimes wonder if I had killed myself, how much the running world would have pretended to care. I don’t want to boost my ego and pretend I’d get the Pre treatment. I’d be a dead girl, not a dead man. Less glory in being a girl. It probably would have lasted a week. But I do think Nike would have loved me, even if just for that week. One or two splashy ads about mental health with not so subtle implications that they really tried to help me, but at least I died doing what I loved. Then, despite my contract expiring, or in this case, me expiring, I’d randomly pop up over the years in some remembrance of how they almost saved me. ‘Buy our shoes.’
“God, one woman actually did write about almost saving me in her book, and I didn’t die. So how many current runners would have pretended we were old pals? The same number who tried to monetize my pain after my New York Times piece by hitting up the podcast circuit. Who sold books by naming me as their friend, or worse, mentee. Who pretended they were an expert on mental health and chronic injury and the issues they currently have, but pretended they got over. Probably all the same people who said stuff behind my back when I was a child. Or to my face. Or on the internet. So yeah, like almost all of them.
“Does it count as talking behind someone’s back if they’re dead? Some runners convince themselves that the litany of drugs they take doesn’t make them drug cheats. They can’t even touch their toes, but in their heads, their mental gymnastics bend them so much that they can blank their own blanks.
“I didn’t die. And so unfortunately for everyone else, that means I’ve been here watching, listening and absorbing for the last 15 years. And you know what? You can ask me how I feel about it. I can speak for myself.”
Miller: Mary, many people who are familiar with parts of your story or who read your piece, saw the video in The New York Times six, seven years ago, they might assume that the bullying and isolation that you endured as a runner started when you began running under Alberto Salazar here, at the Nike Oregon Project. But you write that it started well before. When did you start running seriously?
Cain: I first joined a track team when I was a seventh grader. In the outdoor season, I joined the varsity track team and qualified for my first state meet. So I was around the age of 12.
Miller: This is after you’d already been a serious competitive swimmer, and then you switched. What did you love about running?
Cain: I think I just loved how hard, in many ways, running was. Swimming was something that was incredibly disciplined, difficult and skilled. But there was something about running that could exhaust you if you were sprinting truly all out for like 10 seconds in a way that I’ve just never been able to have matched by really almost any other form of exercise. It’s such a full-body depletion, and I felt there to be something just so pure and almost enlivening about being able to push myself to that sort of limit.
Miller: And thinking back, remembering back to that experience when you were 11, 12, 13, it was that depletion that attracted you to it?
Cain: Yeah, I think in many ways. I think part of it was because, when something is so hard, you have to be really locked into it. You can’t multitask, you can’t be like trying to pull yourself in all these different directions. And I think one of the things that always attracted me to sports in general, was you could really seek that flow state and you could kind of push yourself into a way that … I’ve always been a big academic and I’ve always loved school. Learning can kind of be similar, but there’s not [always] the same satisfaction of being like, “And I completed the day.” Learning feels like a similar hardness, but there’s no end to it. But with sport, there was a way to exhaust yourself and be like, “I can’t do anything else now.”
Miller: You were a phenom. You were incredibly fast, incredibly young. How did your older high school teammates respond?
Cain: Not particularly well, to put it generously. In my memoir, I made the decision not to name anybody who was a minor during my experience. And part of the reason that I did that is because, although I experienced pretty horrible bullying as a young person, I extend anyone who was a minor a lot of grace. Because I think the main issue for me is less how the other kids were treating me, and more that it was stemming from their discomfort with how adults were speaking about me, and having to go back to home environments where parents were constantly frustrated that I was in some way faster.
So the behavior of the kids was problematic, but I think it kind of stemmed from a more systemic helicopter parent and problematic coach experience that I had.
Miller: For those of us who are somewhat familiar with the substantiated allegations against Alberto Salazar that go back a number of years now, we’re somewhat aware of his patterns of behavior. Reading about the parents when you were in junior high or high school ended up being one of the most shocking things about the book. And we’re not talking about world championships, we’re talking about high school sports. What did parents do?
Cain: So I think from a pretty young age, there was so much chatter amongst folks in my town about, like, “Who is this girl? Why is she fast? How did she earn this?” And “earn” wasn’t like “what was her training, how hard did she work,” but it was language around what is my pedigree, which is just rooted in this kind of disgusting perspective that these people had. The faster and the faster I got, the more this kind of negativity [occured about how], in some ways, I didn’t deserve, and it wasn’t right for me to be faster than, at a certain point, the parents themselves. Some of these folks would just, nonstop, be talking about their own running accomplishments when they would come to a high school girls’ track practice, and try to run with us.
This culture of vicariously living through their children erupted in ways where, at its peak, parents were yelling at me, parents were accusing me of being cocky and saying I didn’t deserve the successes that I had, and just outlandish behavior that unfortunately is quite common in sports. I mean, in so many ways, that’s why we even have the helicopter parent trope that we do when we think of youth sports.
Miller: How did your coaches respond to all this bad behavior on the part of your teammates and their parents?
Cain: Poorly. The girls’ coach really just fed into it. I ultimately left the team because we got into a confrontation where I was actively being bullied on a daily basis. He implied that it was my fault and my doing, and I should just listen to what the girls were saying. And I was like, “Well, they’re telling me to slow down, so I don’t know if you really want that.”
But I ultimately joined the boys team, where those coaches were, I think, much more horrified by the behavior and were really uncomfortable that I was being put through this experience at such a young age. Unfortunately, the town that I was a part of, and the athletic department and the school district, despite being very aware of what was happening and often saying they were sorry it was happening and it was really egregious, would not intervene, and ultimately pushed the boys’ teams coaches, I think, to leave. And so by my junior year of high school, I started the year without a coach.
Miller: And then relatively quickly, you got a call from Alberto Salazar. What did it mean to you for him to reach out to you?
Cain: I mean, the serendipity of it all in retrospect is wild, because I was truly about to leave the sport and just go back to swimming, despite being the national record holder and the number one girl in the country. But Alberto called me, and it felt like a savior calling. Not only was he such a hero in the sport and really the biggest figure, and bluntly one of the only people that I knew who he was on the professional end of things. But also, I was coming from this place of such extreme vulnerability, because I had just navigated this youth sports system in which the environment was really toxic, really cruel and unsupportive. And to have someone see me, a girl without a team, and be like, “I want you on my team,” just felt really emotional.
Miller: What were your hopes for your running career at that point?
Cain: I wanted to be the fastest person ever. I think in many ways, I was … I almost used the word naive, but the truth is I was a child. I was 16 when Alberto called. And I think to me, the world was my oyster, and I saw no reason why I couldn’t keep getting better. And I looked at the caliber of athletes who Alberto coached, such as Galen Rupp, who is an Olympic silver medalist; Mo Farah, double gold medalist at the Olympic Games; Matthew Centrowitz, the number one 1500m runner. And I really just thought my new goal is to be like them, because that’s what he’s saying I can do.
Miller: The way you caught yourself with the language there is so telling. You said it seems like you were naive, but no, you were just a kid, you were 16. And that understanding now and lack of understanding from so many people, it’s sort of threaded throughout the book. Even when you’re 17, say, you were always the youngest or one of the youngest people in so many rooms and spaces that you ended up in. And people either treated you poorly because of that or conveniently ignored that fact.
But I’m curious at what point in making sense of your story you had that level of awareness where you could say, “No, it’s not a question of being naive. It’s that I was a kid.”
Cain: Yes, and I really appreciate this conversation because I think it’s the thing that people still struggle the most with when it comes to talking about abused children, keeping at the forefront of their mind that this person experienced what they were going through during such a key developmental point. I think for me, it was really just years of therapy that really helped me rewrite the societal language that we so often use, which is like, “she was immature,” or “what did she expect,” or “she signed up for it,” or insert all of this just gross language that society will use when hearing stories like mine.
I mean, I quite literally couldn’t vote. I couldn’t legally drink. Think of all of the things that our society has told us are the markers of adulthood. And now as a medical student, understanding the developmental pathways of young people, to kind of hold young people to the same accountability as an adult is just such an unfair practice. I think [this] is why, so often, it’s difficult for people to really work through the abuse that they experienced. And it’s because they’re kind of looking at their experience from the lens of their current adulthood, versus really putting themselves in the shoes of a young person and being like, “I don’t even need to forgive you because I understand you now.”
Miller: Looking back now, what were some of the early warning signs in Alberto Salazar’s behavior towards you?
Cain: This has been a really interesting discussion, both with myself and those around me over the last couple of years since learning of Kara Goucher’s accusations of sexual assault, which ultimately got Alberto Salazar banned for life with the U.S. Center for SafeSport. It kind of painted this whole new light onto our relationship that, even at the time that I came out with The New York Times piece, I just didn’t have, cause I didn’t have that knowledge.
Within a week of Alberto calling me on the phone and taking me on as an athlete, he sent me her old gloves, and then ultimately gave me her shoes. And very early on in the relationship, I can now see that, working from this lens of broader understanding, I think there were warning signs that I never could have interpreted at the time because I just didn’t have this deeper knowledge. But it just makes it very difficult for me to pinpoint a start, because in so many ways, from the beginning, there was this really dark undercurrent to our relationship.
Miller: Can you describe the lines that he crossed in terms of basic expectations of privacy?
Cain: Yes. He really overstepped in all of those ways. I think the most egregious example that I chose to write about in my memoir is that he would come into my room at night. He made a lot of decisions to almost create that power dynamic that I only really have been able to understand now in adulthood. He would tell my parents that his wife and daughter would be home, and then I would go out there and it would just be him and I in the house. And at the time, I wasn’t aware of the conversations he was having with my parents, my parents weren’t aware his wife wasn’t around. But there was always ways in which I was truly alone with him for quite extended periods of time.
And similarly, I did the cryo sauna a lot, which is this machine you go into and they blast you with nitrogen gas to get your body temperature down. He always wanted me to strip down in that. I felt very uncomfortable with that, and only years later, realized he could see the person who was exposed within the machine based on where he would stand. I think the truth about our relationship was it really was boundaryless. There was so much like direct contact, really at all times.
Miller: You write – and you were getting at this a little bit, but it’s worth returning to – that he groomed your parents, not just you. What do you mean by that?
Cain: I think this is such an important piece to my story that I hope people can really hear. Because I think so often, if people don’t make the step to victim shame me, they move on to victim shame my parents. Rather than question the systems, or Alberto, or my teammates, or anyone who was directly abusing me, they kind of go, “well, it was her parents.”
Miller: That they enabled this and put you in a position where you got hurt, and they’re responsible.
Cain: Exactly, instead of the people who are actively doing it. But in the case of my parents, they are incredibly protective people. But there were a lot of moments where they were just being lied to, where they were being told, “We’re going to be going on this trip. She’s going to be rooming with this person and she’s going to have all this support.” They’re getting this active reach out. And then that’s not actually what’s manifesting over the course of the trip. I don’t have this female roommate. I don’t have these support systems.
But I’m not necessarily going home and telling my parents that. To me, I’m thinking, “Oh, I’m allowed to go on this trip.” And probably during the times that I did have discomfort, I didn’t want Alberto to get in trouble. I didn’t want my parents to be mad at him. So there’s a lot of stories that I tell that, if you read them and go, “oh, I’m uncomfortable,” my parents didn’t know about those. They were put in this position where they so often thought they were checking the boxes of being like, “His wife is home, she’s also going to be staying with this other person. She’s gonna have these like safety and support systems.” And instead, that’s not what was happening.
And then the kind of classic groomer behavior that Alberto ultimately did was when I moved out to Portland and left home fully, really all contact with them shuttered. It went from this very open, he would reach out to them, give them updates, talk to them kind of relationship, to suddenly they’re iced out, and I’m expected to ice them out. And I now understand that’s a very classic grooming pattern.
Miller: Can you tell us what happened when you started feeling intense shin pain when you were getting ready for the World Indoor Championships?
Cain: I won the U.S. Indoor Championships in the 1500. And the next morning when I was getting out of the airport, I just experienced this really sharp pain in my left shin that I felt all day. And as soon as I got home and tried to go for a run, I had never felt pain like that before. And I’m so comfortable with pain. I’m so acutely responsive to it when I’m in sport. You just instinctively know that pain where you’re like, it’s my lungs burning, my legs are going lactic. That’s hard and hurts but almost feels safe. And I think my body’s response to this level of sharpness was [that] something’s really seriously wrong.
My parents were really concerned about it and were very like, “don’t run on something that hurts.” But I think I had already trained myself at that point to push through pain. And I was getting all this language from my team of “keep going, keep going.” And I ultimately just couldn’t because it was so extreme.
Miller: But as you write in the book … this is after you got an MRI through somebody that Alberto Salazar knew. And then eventually after that, when the pain kept getting worse, you had an MRI from a doctor back in the East Coast, who said, “wait a minute, how was this not caught before?” The implication is that it wasn’t caught because information was being withheld, wasn’t being shared with you. You don’t explicitly say that as I read the book, but that’s certainly a conclusion that’s hard to not come to as the reader.
Cain: And it’s astute of you to come to that conclusion, because I did not learn until years later, when I had my medical records ultimately pulled, that that initial MRI actually did show a stress fracture, but that was not communicated to me. I was pressured to continue to train through it and told that it was just shin splints, despite being a 17-year-old girl with a stress fracture. I made the decision in the memoir, at times, to be very honest. That doctor who I saw in New York was like, “there is no way that past MRI didn’t show a stress fracture.” And that experience has always sat with me. So it was wild to go through these experiences years and years later and be like he was correct, his medical reasoning was really sound.
I chose not to explicitly tell it because generally in the story, I’m trying to really keep it to like my point of view at the time. But it’s wild to know that was withheld from me.
Miller: How do you explain that decision on the part of this system that Alberto Salazar created?
Cain: I mean, I think they wanted me to finish the season. I think they wanted me to try to win a medal. And I think they were hoping to tape me up, push me on the track and get me through a week.
Miller: You’re just a racehorse, just win a medal. Make our system look good, even if you ruin your body in the process.
Cain: Exactly. And what I find so fascinating is there is such a normalcy to that. You will see the pro athletes who admit, “Yeah, I’m running on an ACL [tear].” I’m like, gosh, if you’re an adult and you get a fracture the day before the Olympics, I don’t think it’s healthy to go out there and run. But I kinda get it.
Miller: But a key part to what you just said is if you’re an adult who’s making that decision.
Cain: Exactly. But if you are a minor, not being given full information, being pressured to run through something, and bluntly, anytime ... At the end of the day, it’s just a March race. Like, yeah, World Indoors is a big deal but not to sacrifice your whole career for. I just find this normalization of running when you are broken to just be so deeply problematic. And I think it’s part of the reason a lot of people are ultimately pressured into doing performance enhancing drugs, is because that’s really the only way you can stop your body from breaking, hypothetically.
Miller: I want to turn to food issues and a weight obsession, which is a big part of the book. Just broadly first, in general, can you give us a sense for the level of Alberto Salazar’s focus on weight and eating for the athletes he was coaching?
Cain: It varied, admittedly, from person to person, and I think it was mostly gendered and very much age-based – at least while I was a part of the program. Alberto was always like, “leaner is better, leaner is faster.” But the way in which he would communicate that to my male teammates was much more, “hey buddy, stop with the Skittles, ha ha ha” kind of language. While with me, it was much more like, “What are you doing? Why do you look like this? Why aren’t you taking this seriously? Your butt has gotten five pounds bigger in one day.” This just really disturbed language. And I know I’m not the only athlete to have experienced that while a part of the Nike Oregon Project. But it wasn’t as all-consuming for all athletes as it was towards me.
Miller: How did that end up affecting you? What are the different ways?
Cain: It affected me really, really deeply. I mean, of course, from the emotional and mental perspective, it was really damaging because I so desperately wanted Alberto to care for me. He was this savior figure to me from my own experience and also just this hero in the sport. So, feeling like I was disappointing him and that he was seeing me lacking was really hard. And also emotionally and mentally, the relationship that I was developing with my body, the more I struggled to essentially look the way he wanted me to look, was really problematic. So many girls in our culture are pressured to look a certain way based on the way ads are and social media, etc. But here I had this figure in my life who I cared for so deeply constantly telling me I look horrible.
And then physically, the effects of so massively undereating were really damaging to so many different bodily systems, including my bones, my hair, my nails, really almost everything in some ways was affected.
Miller: Do you think that coaches at the elite level should be paying attention to weight?
Cain: I think at the elite level, coaches should have a team of experts. And if there are ever concerns from an athlete of how to optimize their performance, and they want access to tools and resources, they should be able to go to a registered dietitian who can support them in their performance goals.
But I don’t think weight in and of itself is indicative of performance. We are all built differently. We’re all going to be different heights. We’re all going to have different body compositions. And if the point of sports is to maximize performance, that’s not intrinsically linked to weight. It’s not like an arbitrary ideal number like Alberto thought. It should be more like: how am I appropriately fueling my body? And that resource, I think, is really important. But for most athletes, if anything, that just means when are you eating, and maybe trying to eat more versus under fueling the output that you’re giving.
Miller: It’s striking that you talk about a team of experts that a coach should have, because you write about the fact that you and your Nike Oregon Project teammates were expected to talk to a man, who I guess was put in that category of being an “expert.” His name was Darren Treasure. He was ascribed to you and in all kinds of media outlets as a sports psychologist. Turns out he was not a clinical psychologist at all. What were your sessions with him like?
Cain: They were bizarre, in retrospect, because as time went on, I would go into those deeply vulnerable. I was like, “this is a therapy session.” I would tell him about what was stressing me out or making me uncomfortable, or if a teammate was being mean to me, I would tell him about that. And so many of our sessions would devolve into, “you’re competing with that other girl who’s your teammate, you should be having this intense mindset,” all of this sort of stuff that became very unhealthily competitive. I write about that a little bit in my memoir because one of the first times I ever met one of my teammates, as soon as she left, he turned to me and was like, “she hates you.” And I was like, I don’t even know this girl, I literally just met her. He had this way of really getting off on pitting people against each other, I think in particular women.
And then as my mental health dissolved, I really was often going to him for interventional support, asking him to please tell Alberto to stop with weighing me, stop shaming me. It was always like, “You’re not taking this seriously. You need to buy in, buy in, buy in.” And to this day, I have no idea what anybody on the Oregon Project meant when they said “buy in,” because I think I was doing everything I was supposed to do. But it seems like that was some secret code that I didn’t have the answer to.
Miller: You write in depth about two bad coaches that you had. We talked briefly about, in high school, when you got no support from bullying from all quarters from your high school coach. And then obviously a lot of the book is focused on Alberto Salazar. Have you experienced any great coaches?
Cain: That’s a really good question. I have had the opportunity to work with some really good swim coaches when I was younger. I did have some good role models, and I actually had a female coach when I was growing up who was the sort of person who could be really intense, and I was kind of scared of her. But at the end of the day, if she got upset, it almost always felt like a safety related thing with like a bunch of kids in the pool, versus it being like a personal attack of “you’re failing.”
But I often tell people, in a very funny way, that it took years for me to realize [that] I think my best ever coach was my dad. And not in running, not in swimming. He was just the kind of weekend soccer coach for my team. He stepped in to do it because he just witnessed so many parents in that role who would just yell at kids and make kids cry, and who really just cared about winning. And he had the mentality of, “These girls are 7 [years old]. I think the point of sports is for them to develop the lifelong love for movement and for teamwork.” So he took over as somebody who didn’t know that much about soccer in terms of rules or anything like that. He created a program where girls, for years, stayed a part of the team. We became undefeated in our random weekend backyard soccer league.
And I now reflect, and I think the truth is, that is a great coach. And I think there’s a lot of coaches who have pushed back at me, being like, “competition needs to come in at a certain point, and at some point, it needs to be intense.” And what I always say to folks is that a child who is going to be competitive doesn’t need you to create that competitive energy.
Miller: You mean, like with you, it was internal. You were a kid who loved, as we were talking about at the beginning, the feeling of depletion, of putting everything into it, which clearly seems like a necessary ingredient for athletic greatness, that internal drive.
Cain: If it’s not intrinsic, you shouldn’t be forcing that upon a kid. You can’t make them want that. But if you make them feel safe, if you make them have fun, if you make them want to keep coming back, then maybe as they grow and develop, they’ll find that fire within themselves. And then they’ll be ready for that next step of how do I keep making this competitive? But kids’ sport isn’t about creating competition in a kid. That should be nourished because they’re just happy and healthy.
Miller: Your book though, it’s about both kids’ sport, and sport and drive at the very highest levels. To be the best in the world at a sport, I guess probably [more than] anything, it requires both natural talent, and a level of training and dedication that very, very, very few people are capable of. As you said, an exquisite understanding of pain, for example, if you’re an endurance athlete. You were getting at this a little bit, but I want to hear more about it – it does seem that coaches have used the fact that you have to, in a sense, punish yourself. They use it as an excuse for pushing their own athletes to dangerous extremes, basically saying if you don’t do this, you can’t be the national champion, the world champion.
What does safety look like in the context of the highest levels of sport?
Cain: What I often say to people is I am the sort of person who thought it was fun to write a memoir while I was in medical school. I’ve been top 10 in the world in sport, that is just who I am. And there’s a certain point where safety, usually at the highest levels, the role of a great coach is actually usually the person who’s telling you to slow down, pull it back, let’s take an off day, versus telling you to hit the gas. Because as you said, there’s really two things that get you to the top. There’s a certain point where it’s just talent, not everyone is going to have the same form, not everyone’s going to be as tall – insert whatever the thing is that helps give them that extra oomph. Some of it’s just luck.
And then of those who have that luck, there is an intrinsic ability to really grind. And I think that ability is often celebrated and twisted into, “we need to be competitive and in a harmful way,” instead of looking at this person and going, “you almost have the easy talent to do way too much, and I need to be that guardian who makes sure that you’re ready at the right time.” And to do that, it means almost being able to be the person who tells you to go fast the same amount that they tell you to go slow.
The piece to it that I think a lot of people are actually really uncomfortable with is actually more that first piece, where not everyone is going to have the ability to be top 10 in the world. And when you’re training professionals, they do. But for most people, if you’re equating coaching high school kids and being like, “I need to yell at them because I need to be able to push them or they’re never going to be world class,” well, maybe they just never will. But maybe they could be a 40-year-old who still loves to run. But you could really take that from them if you equate sports into this really horrible, toxic thing.
Miller: You’re calling for a systemic change now and you have been for years, not just to focus on a “single bad apple” or “a few bad apples.” What specific systems are you most focused on right now?
Cain: I think the ones that I’m really most dedicated [to] – and part of it is just because it’s been my own experience – are the youth sport and professional end. I think in professional sports, there needs to be a culture change in which we actually call out bad behavior. And I think, the truth is, there’s been way too much silence. And I understand that it’s really dangerous. It’s scary. It’s hard. It’s career damaging to do what I did, which is come out against Nike, come out against my program. But I do believe the more people step up and say, “I’m witnessing this behavior, this is bad,” the more systems are actually going to be forced to create internal change.
But organizations, whether it’s these universities who are supporting top athletes, these professional programs, places like USATF, they need to be instilling safeguarding practices into all of their teams and systems and the ways that they’re setting up contracts, that actually give athletes the protection and the safety to come forward when they’re experiencing things like I did. Right now, how sports is set up, you’re really vulnerable, because if you leave, there’s nowhere else to go. And there aren’t necessarily HR departments that you can turn to. Most companies prefer to kind of say, “we’ve had a lot of success” with this coach, with this person, with this teammate, “so we’re not going to intervene,” instead of being mandated to have even an HR department, where people can report to and have systems in place that creates courageous cultures where there actually are protections.
And then similarly on the youth sports, I think high schools and also ultimately colleges need to have some pretty strict, safe sport guidelines of basic stuff, like coaches shouldn’t be directly texting minors. Or if you’re traveling to a meet, an adult should never be in the room alone with a kid. Some of those things are just policy that I think we can enact. But right now, there’s almost been this culture of, we’ll only do it if you complain, instead of coming out upfront and doing it to protect people.
Miller: How would you describe your own relationship to running right now, just for yourself?
Cain: I have really redeveloped my relationship with running, in that, at this point, I just do it for fun. I do it because I now can. I had a surgery that really helped with a chronic medical issue that I had that made it so I couldn’t really run for years. And ever since then, it’s been trying to redevelop my relationship so that I am a person who runs and not kind of feel myself get sucked into this “I am a runner” mentality. And I try to do that with all things in my life, where even as a med student, I’m really proud to be a med student, but I try to frame my like relationship with it as, “I am someone in med school.” It’s not my only identity.
I think as I continue to kind of work that with running, I’m just excited to see how the relationship kind of continues to adapt. But right now it’s been fun, and I’ve been happy with it.
Miller: What you’re describing almost seems like a different activity, based on the kind of running you used to do: the 200 repeats, that crazy pace over and over and over, the impossible to imagine training. Now, running for fun, it almost seems like it’s a completely different physical activity.
Cain: Yeah, in some ways, it is. In some ways, I’m not training as hard as I once was. But in other ways, I’m kind of setting myself up to make it hard again if I want to. And I say that because I think sometimes we have this mentality of the only way to change something is to do it completely differently. And I don’t necessarily mean this in a way of like ever competing again, like that’s a whole other thing. But I do sometimes do speed work. And I sometimes do run faster, and I sometimes do push myself. But it’s still so different, because it’s the relationship that I have with myself and therefore with running. Some of the training I was doing with Alberto was so stupid and I’m never going to do it again, because it’s designed for you to break down. But in the idea of running hard, I’m not scared to do that again.
Miller: Mary Cain, it was a pleasure talking with you. Thanks very much.
Cain: Thank you.
Miller: Mary Cain, who is the author of “This is Not About Running.”
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