Former Oregon Runners Corroborate Accusations Around Track and Field Program – runnersworld.com
Katie Rainsberger, a top distance runner at the University of Oregon from the fall of 2016 until she transferred to the University of Washington in the summer of 2018, confirmed the allegations in an October 25 Oregonian report that said head coach Robert Johnson’s focus on body composition fostered disordered eating among team members.
Despite efforts by the women’s distance coach at the time, Maurica Powell, to protect her from the Oregon track program’s focus on weight and body fat, Rainsberger said she thought constantly about what she could and could not eat, stopped getting her period regularly, and missed almost five months of running during her sophomore year.
She had a stress fracture in her right talus (a bone in the foot), and a tear in her right Achilles tendon.
“I do think I got hurt my sophomore year, because my freshman year I got too lean and I wasn’t fueling properly and I wasn’t getting my period,” Rainsberger told Runner’s World. “I wasn’t told by team nutritionists and the head coach that that was unhealthy.”
A disturbing report
After extensive interviews with five athletes, the Oregonian broke the news that Oregon track athletes were required to undergo DEXA scans at least three times per year.
DEXA scans are valuable diagnostic tools for measuring bone density, but physicians use them infrequently, no more than once a year, because bone density changes so slowly.
The scans can also assess body composition. Johnson was looking at runners’ body fat percentages after the tests, athletes say.
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Rainsberger said she had three DEXA scans during her freshman year at Oregon, and an athletic department nutritionist was complimentary when her body fat dropped by six percentage points between the fall and winter, even though the nutritionist knew that Rainsberger had stopped menstruating.
One runner, who trained directly under Johnson, told Runner’s World that she had DEXA scans monthly one year and was subjected to frequent weight checks.
“He would weigh me all the time,” said the runner, who requested anonymity to preserve her privacy. “I was on the scale a lot in front of him. I developed a full-fledged eating disorder from that.”
She would skip dinner the night before a scan. “As soon as the scan’s over, then you overeat,” she said. “So you’re undereating, overeating, undereating, overeating. No one wants a bad scan.”
The anonymous athlete and Rainsberger confirmed to Runner’s World that Johnson wanted all athletes at 11 or 12 percent body fat.
Experts say that successful female athletes can have a range of body fat percentages, usually between 14 and 20 percent, and no single number would ever be appropriate for an entire team.
The University of Oregon did not respond to questions from Runner’s World about Johnson’s strategies around DEXA scanning and body composition, instead providing the same statement it provided to the Oregonian:
“The health and safety of our student-athletes is always our top priority,” the statement reads. “There are numerous sports performance professionals on our staff who work closely in supporting student-athletes, including our medical team, athletic trainers, sports scientists, mental health counselors, and nutritionists. All coaches undergo annual training from the University of Oregon Title IX office on a variety of topics including communication with student-athletes.”
Johnson defended the use of frequent DEXA scans to the Oregonian, saying that a data-driven approach removed human bias from judgment about athletes.
“Track is nothing but numbers,” he told the Oregonian. “A good mathematician probably could be a good track coach.”
A culture of restriction
Rainsberger showed up at Oregon as one of the country’s top recruits. She was the Nike Cross Nationals champion while in high school, when she also played soccer. In high school she regularly consumed Chipotle burritos and large servings of pasta to provide enough fuel for her level of activity.
“I had a milkshake every night after dinner,” Rainsberger said. “My dad would be like, ‘What flavor do you want tonight?’” She said she “paid no mind” to her calorie consumption. Her mother, Lisa, won the 1985 Boston Marathon and raised her daughter to eat well and eat when she was hungry.
Going to Oregon, Rainsberger was naive to the culture and environment surrounding collegiate women’s distance running. She observed what her teammates were eating at the dining hall and at team dinners: nonfat yogurt, small portions, few carbohydrates, no dessert. Coaches don’t always see those subtle interactions between women over meals.
“All fall, I was just learning through observation,” Rainsberger said. “I was like, ‘Huh, okay, I won’t be the first one to ask for the bread. Okay, we’re not having a milkshake every night. Got it.’”
At Oregon, the looming scans intensified some of the behaviors.
By the winter of her freshman year, Rainsberger, already very lean, learned from her second scan that her body fat had dropped further.
“It was glorified,” she said. “It wasn’t glorified from the coaches; it was the nutritionist that Robert Johnson had hired.”
Powell, she said, was concerned and would try to cut a few miles off her long run or tell her to go get ice cream at night, in an attempt to keep her from becoming too thin.
Resources for student athletes
Rainsberger took advantage of the mental health and nutrition resources that were offered to the team, but she felt they further steered her in the wrong direction.
She was speaking to Darren Treasure, a sports performance coach who also worked with the Nike Oregon Project.
“Darren Treasure said that Nike Oregon Project athletes got down to four percent body fat and that’s what it took to be an Olympian,” she said.
She was also operating under the assumption that her individual conversations with Treasure were confidential, but she said that confidentiality was breached.
In a phone call with Runner’s World, Treasure denied Rainsberger’s account.
“In my group sessions with athletes at Oregon we would talk about what it took to be an Olympian, but it was always within my area of mental performance. I would never talk about body composition,” Treasure said. “I never, ever talked to an athlete about a percent body fat that they would need to get to make an Olympic team.”
Treasure also denied ever sharing information from one-on-one sessions with athletes.
“The only time any information would be shared would be if it was in the benefit of the athlete and it was okay with the athlete,” he said.
Treasure said he worked with Oregon alumnus Galen Rupp while he was an undergraduate and started working with the rest of the Oregon track team in 2012.
In an email, a university spokesperson wrote, “Darren Treasure served as a sports and mental performance consultant for the track and field program. His engagement ended on December 1, 2019.”
Treasure’s time with Oregon ended a couple of weeks after pro runner Mary Cain alleged in a New York Times video that Treasure and her then coach, Alberto Salazar, ignored her when she told them she was cutting herself.
Treasure denied those allegations to Runner’s World.
By November of her sophomore year, when Rainsberger was sidelined with injuries, she started cross training in the pool for more than two hours a day, terrified she would gain weight before she could return to running.
Powell and her husband, Andy Powell, who coached the male distance runners at Oregon, took jobs at Washington in the summer of 2018, and Rainsberger decided to transfer.
“That honestly saved me,” she said. “It gave my body the time and the space to put on a healthy amount of weight, to rediscover my love for running, to enter into a whole new environment.”
In June, she finished third at the NCAA championships in the steeplechase. Rainsberger, now 23, trains in Boulder, Colorado, with Team Boss.
A valuable tool
Powell emphasizes that DEXA scanning can be a useful tool when used properly for bone density readings. At Washington, where she now coaches, women entering the program as first-year students get a bone density scan as part of a physical with a physician.
The DEXA scanner is at a hospital, not in the university’s training facilities. The findings from the DEXA scanner test go to the athlete and her physician, and they are shared with Powell only if the athlete wants to share the data.
“If bone density is tracking well, that’s a good thing,” Powell said. If it’s not, she works with the physician and the athlete to make changes to training: reducing mileage, for instance, and replacing it with lower-impact cross training.
She said she used DEXA scans at times when she worked at Oregon for bone density readings. “Coaches of different event groups handled the data differently,” she said.
Powell believes there are times when conversations about body weight and performance are appropriate with female athletes.
“I think there’s a right way to do it,” she said. “There’s a way to empower women with information about their own bodies that’s really purposeful and intentional and meaningful and not shameful.”
Alli Cash, who graduated from Oregon in 2018, said she had only one DEXA scan during her time there. She now is a volunteer assistant coach at Washington and running professionally for Asics. She continues to be coached by Powell.
Cash worked as a medical scribe before she signed her Asics deal, and she teaches online training classes in the field now. That background has helped give her insight into the powerful uses of DEXA scanning.
Measuring body fat percentage is “not what they’re meant for at all,” Cash said. “They’re a great tool, honestly, for endurance-type athletes. If somebody is not getting their period regularly or has a bunch of stress fractures, it’s such a great tool.”
Checking bone density lets an athlete and physician know if any athlete is going down a dangerous path toward osteopenia—when bones are weak and often a precursor to osteoporosis, when bones break easily.
Athletes reacted in different ways to scans
Not every athlete at Oregon found herself struggling under the frequent body composition surveillance.
Kylee O’Connor, a heptathlete who graduated in 2018, wrote in a text message to Runner’s World that her experience with the DEXA scans was largely positive.
“I would lower my body fat percentage by sleeping better, eating healthier, consuming more protein—essentially, I would aim to gain pounds of muscle and lose pounds of fat,” she wrote. “Our nutritionist was a lot of help.”
O’Connor said she never deprived herself in pursuit of a lower body fat percentage and the scans were just one piece of the puzzle.
“[Robert] Johnson cultivates a winning culture that takes into account all aspects of being a good athlete,” she wrote. “You have to eat right, get lots of sleep, get treatment with trainers and focus on your mental health. It all matters.”
For many, though, the fear of the DEXA scanner contributed to an unhealthy environment around fueling and weight.
Rainsberger is glad to have come out the other side. Happy with her new training situation in Boulder, she wants to spare future generations of runners the experience that she went through.
“If we don’t speak up and we don’t talk about these things, then I’m not doing any future girls any help. If someone had told me going into it, ‘Hey, focus on how you feel, focus on fueling to perform, focus on getting your period,’ I don’t think I would have gone down the path I did go down.
“I don’t regret anything, because I learned a lot about myself,” she continued. “And I think that it was a part of my journey. But I think if we don’t start having these conversations, these things are going to keep happening.”
Sarah Lorge Butler 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 since 2005.
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