America’s Next Great Running Hope, and One of the Cruelest Twists in Youth Sports – The New York Times

It’s not clear exactly when a high school sophomore named Katelyn Tuohy became the next great phenom in American distance running.

Her coach at North Rockland High School, in Thiells, N.Y., about 30 miles northwest of New York City, said he knew Tuohy would eventually inspire the highest of hopes when she was in seventh grade. At the sound of the gun in her first race, a 1,500-meter competition for freshmen and sophomores, she sprinted to the lead, sparking snickers about how she needed to learn pacing. She finished in 4 minutes 54 seconds and won by 26 seconds.

Others say it was last October, in a cross-country race at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. Virtually every top scholastic runner in the Northeast has competed at Van Cortlandt in the past 45 years. Tuohy ran the woodsy, 2.5-mile course in 13:21.8, breaking the course record by 32 seconds.

Maybe it was in December when she won and set the course record at the cross-country team national championships in Oregon. Maybe it was at the meet in Virginia in January when she broke a national record for high school girls in the 5,000 by 18 seconds.

“She might be the best high school runner ever already,” said Jim Mitchell, a Bronxville High School coach who has guided dozens of elite female distance runners during his 40-year career, including, briefly, the last great phenom, Mary Cain.

Now comes the hard part, though, and that doesn’t mean this weekend’s New York State Public High School Athletic Association state championships in Cicero, where Tuohy won the girls’ 3,000 meters on Friday with a time of 9:09.71, breaking her own previous state record of 9:15.20. She will run the 1,500 on Saturday. She set the girls’ high school record in the 3,200 last month.

No, the real challenge for Tuohy is solving one of the cruelest puzzles of youth sports: Why do so many gifted teenage female distance runners fizzle out by their early 20s, unable to capture the speed of their youth?

“It’s actually pretty scary to be responsible for a talent like this,” Brian Diglio, her coach at North Rockland High School, said.

Tuohy, like so many exceptional girls before her, seems destined for national championships and Olympic medals. And yet, since 1980, just one female winner of the Foot Locker National Cross Country Championships has made an Olympic team, compared with seven male high school champions. Just four have won an individual N.C.A.A. championship.

Bill Pierce, a professor of health sciences at Furman University and the co-founder of the Furman Institute of Running and Scientific Training, said it was nearly impossible to project an elite girl’s future success in distance running because the female body changes so much during the teenage years.

Running fast over long distances requires great lung capacity, but also great strength relative to body weight, as do figure skating and gymnastics.

“They are nothing but skin and bones and lungs in their early years,” Pierce said. Then, he said, the girls mature but don’t necessarily develop the strength required to move a larger body so swiftly.

It’s hardly a coincidence that many girls at the top level of the sport as juniors have struggled with disordered eating and other body-related issues. They include Melody Fairchild, who in 1991 was called the greatest high school runner ever. Fairchild dreamed of making an Olympic team from the age of 12, and she was such a dominant runner as a teenager she was certain it would happen. It never did.

Now 44, Fairchild understands where her dream went off course. Her personal life fell apart the summer before college. Fairchild’s mother died of cancer 25 days after she graduated from high school. Her father battled alcoholism. Fairchild struggled with injuries her freshman year at the University of Oregon.

Looking back on those years, Fairchild said she, like so many other young, talented runners, failed to understand that the ups and downs she experienced as her body evolved were normal. Nature was doing what it is supposed to do for young girls as they become women — add fat and prepare the body for reproduction. That otherwise healthy development, however, does not help an elite runner maintain her speed.

Fairchild was 5-foot-4 and 95 pounds and essentially prepubescent when she was dominating in high school. After her freshman year of college, she took a year off. She gained 20 pounds. She returned to school and competition and had to learn how to run again with a different physique. She called the bodies that so many elite female runners compete with in high school “a terrible tease.”

“That is not a sustainable thing,” Fairchild said in an interview from her home in Colorado, where she is a personal running coach. Even more dangerous, she added, is the message young women get when they are encouraged to fight to regain their high school physiques. “We want them to embrace being in a strong woman’s body.”

Given those dynamics, Fairchild and others say, women who aren’t high school champions may actually have an advantage. Karissa Schweizer of the University of Missouri is considered the top college distance runner of the moment. Schweizer never won a state cross-country championship in high school and didn’t even qualify for the national championships.

Diglio, Tuohy and Tuohy’s parents don’t need to look far for cautionary tales. Not long ago in Bronxville, about 20 miles from Tuohy’s home, Cain was a lock to become the next great American distance running sensation. But she slowed down, and has battled injuries. Her downturn coincided with her decision to turn professional after high school and skip the collegiate running experience that has produced so many champions.

“That has been a learning tool for both Katelyn and her parents and for us to use,” Diglio said of Cain’s trajectory.

In fact, Team Tuohy — which includes only Katelyn, her parents, Diglio, and Kyle Murphy, the outdoor track coach at North Rockland — is essentially doing the opposite of Cain, whose career has largely stalled.

Cain, now 21, entered the national spotlight in 2011 when she broke the high school freshman record for the 1,500, running a 4:17.84. Within two years she had the national junior records in the two-mile and 1,500 and the high school records in the 800 and the 5,000. She and her parents were featured prominently in the national and running media.

Other than a few comments about her races in the minutes after they finished, Katelyn Tuohy has spoken little with the news media since February. That was when a disappointing fourth-place finish in the high school mile at the Millrose Games followed her first major media exposure. Her parents, Patrick and Denise, declined to be interviewed for this article.

“The amount of attention received over the last year has been very flattering but also a bit overwhelming,” Patrick Tuohy wrote in an email. “We have made a family decision to limit her/our media exposure and keep her life off the track as normal as possible.”

In 2012, Cain began working remotely with the former champion marathoner Alberto Salazar, who is based in Portland, Ore., and has coached Galen Rupp and Mo Farah as part of his Nike Oregon Project. Salazar enlisted a professional coach based in Manhattan named John Henwood, a 2004 Olympian for New Zealand, to serve as his eyes on the ground.

Diglio’s and Murphy’s track accomplishments are modest by comparison. Diglio, a history teacher at North Rockland, had a “completely undistinguished” career as a half-miler at William & Mary. Murphy, a personal trainer, threw the javelin and did pole vault, long jump and the sprint relays in high school, but did not compete in college. They are the only coaches guiding Tuohy, who plans to attend college, Diglio said.

Salazar remains the subject of a United States Anti-Doping Agency investigation into whether his runners were injected with illegal amounts of a supplement. He has denied any wrongdoing and declined to comment for this article. Cain, who did not respond to messages seeking comment, has not been accused of any illicit tactics. She stopped working with him last year. She has not run a personal best at any distance since 2015.

A wiry 5-foot-4 with naturally powerful legs and a seemingly massive motor, Tuohy appears to be a specimen crafted for her sport.

Diglio first saw her run when she showed up at his local running clinic when she was in fifth grade. Even at that age, she had a remarkably clean technique. She powers her foot off the ground with such force that she nearly kicks herself in the rear end with her heel on every step. Most young runners, even fast ones, barely get their feet above their knees. If Tuohy were running barefoot, the bottom of her feet might be sunburned by the end of a long race.

Tuohy’s steps always appear to land directly under her center of gravity, in perfect position to maximize power in every step. She would run all day, every day, if her coaches let her. Running that fast, and winning with such dominance that often, can be addicting. Diglio and Murphy have limited her to 45 miles a week. In August, Diglio allowed a hard 10-mile run weekly in the lead-up to the fall cross-country season for the first time.

The biggest challenge is trying to persuade her to rest rather than run. At track meets, she is in a constant state of warming up or cooling down, or walking the grounds with her friends and teammates. “She’s incapable of sitting still,” Murphy said.

At the outdoor track state championships last year, near the end, Murphy asked her what the distance monitor on her watch said. Her answer — 12 miles. She won the 1,500 meters anyway.

Is she running too much?

Mitchell, the Bronxville coach, tells his girls to stay below 35 miles a week during the summer and keeps them below 25 miles each week during the school year. “The idea is to run your best during the last four weeks of your spring senior season,” he said.

Tuohy’s long-term goal is to qualify for the Olympic trials in the 1,500 meters in 2020. That would mean another trip to Oregon, where she traveled with Diglio and the North Rockland cross-country team last fall for the national championships.

Before that race, Salazar walked into a room where Diglio and Tuohy and her teammates and competitors were passing the time. Diglio’s fellow coaches warned him, half-jokingly, not to let Salazar talk to Tuohy.

“It was fine,” Diglio said of what turned out to be a brief interchange with Salazar. “He just came over and said hello.”