Fast Women: A new women's pro team, with a unique model
Nia Akins bounces back with the fastest U.S. 800m time ever indoors.
Issue 280, sponsored by SOAR Running
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The Heartland TC will be more than a pro running team
After winning the 800m at the USATF Indoor Championships on February 17, Allie Wilson cried tears of happiness during her post-race interview. She felt like she finally performed her best when it mattered most. Until that point, she often excelled in small meets with lower stakes, but at championships events she would fall just shy of her goals.
She was also emotional because she had taken a chance by leaving the Atlanta Track Club, giving up her sponsorship contract, and following her coaches to Indianapolis in November. Her performance was validation of her decision.
Last June, the Atlanta Track Club announced that they were parting ways with Amy and Andrew Begley, who had been coaching the club for more than eight years. Andrew says the split was due to philosophical differences and their departure was a mutual decision.
The Begleys explored a number of options, but Amy ultimately decided to take a non-coaching role as associate director of long distance running programs at USA Track & Field, which is based in Indianapolis. And Andrew got to work on his new venture, one piece of which is a new women’s pro running team—the Heartland Track Club.
The team currently has three athletes: Wilson, Emma Grace Hurley and Great Britain’s Gemma Finch, who were all previously with the Atlanta Track Club. And Bianca Martin, who has coached with the Begleys and been coached by them, left behind what she was doing in Portland, Oregon, to help Andrew with all aspects of the project.
So when Wilson broke the tape and won her first national title, it was a big moment for all of the Heartland Track Club. At the race in Albuquerque, Wilson’s coaches were in tears. Back in Indiana, Hurley was watching on TV, screaming, until she realized her neighbors might be annoyed. When Wilson began to cry, Hurley cried too. And Finch was in downtown Indianapolis for the NBA All-Star weekend, jumping up and down.
A different model
The Heartland TC will be much more than just a professional running team. It will have a nonprofit branch, Track is for Every Body, with Amy as the CEO, and the mission of promoting women in track & field. There will also be a for-profit branch, the Heartland Training Club, which will offer coaching and community building for recreational runners.
The foundation will have a mentorship component, with each of the members of the pro team adopting a girls’ middle school or high school cross country team and serving as a resource for the athletes. The Begleys are passionate about keeping more girls in sports, as so many of them drop out in their teens. In exchange for their mentoring, the Olympic development athletes will receive grants for travel and physio, to help support their running careers.
The nonprofit will also put on group runs in Indianapolis and, eventually, in the locations the athletes travel to for meets as well. And once the organization is funded, they’ll start an internship for female coaches. Each year, they will award a two-year internship, so they’ll always have one new intern and one returning one. Andrew’s goal is to give female coaches the opportunity to get meaningful experience so that after two years, they’re ready to coach anywhere.
Eventually he’d like to do such a good job of mentoring female coaches that some of them can take over his current role. “Over time, I want to teach other people to do the coaching, and I can focus on raising more money to help more pro athletes,” he said.
Martin is one of the women who could take the reins down the road. She’s working toward becoming a certified mental performance consultant, with the goal of having her own consulting practice. Andrew says Martin deserves as much or more credit for Wilson winning the U.S. title than he does. “Allie physically has been able to do this for a while,” he said. “But she’s never had the confidence to do it, and that’s where Bianca shines.”
The for-profit side of the business, the Heartland Training Club, will include a subscription-based service for women that will offer training programs and expertise from the pros, the coaches, and Amy. Age-group standout Sonja Friend-Uhl will help Andrew and Martin write the training. The club will target races all over the country, where members can meet up.
Amy’s job with USATF keeps her busy, but she plans to be involved with the Heartland TC wherever she can, including continuing to mentor the pro distance-focused athletes. Andrew and Martin will handle the day-to-day responsibilities, but when they’re in Glasgow for the World Athletics Indoor Championships, Amy will run practice. Martin’s salary will be funded through her work with the foundation and the training club, while Andrew’s will come solely from his work with the training club. “I think it would be disingenuous for a male coach to take money from a not-for-profit designed to help women,” he said.
The organization’s website, HeartlandTC.org, just launched, and runners will be able to sign up for the training club soon.
Preparing for change
The Atlanta Track Club’s leadership told the athletes about the impending coaching change early in the 2023 track season, which created some stress. “I feel like as much as you want to be able to compartmentalize and focus on the tasks at hand, it was just very difficult to navigate knowing what was to come,” Wilson said.
Hurley, too, has run better now that her training situation has been clarified. She produced another big moment for the Heartland TC when she finished second at the USATF Cross Country Championships on January 20 and qualified to represent the U.S. at next month’s World Cross Country Championships. “I don’t know that we’re [significantly] more capable than we were last year,” she said. “But I feel like now we get to really explore what we were capable of but were too stressed to uncover last summer and last fall.”
Wilson considered staying in Atlanta and had a few conversations with the new coach, Tom Nohilly. But her trust was in Andrew. “It just felt so wrong to not leave with him. I felt like I would be throwing away all the work we had done over the past four years. Whether or not that’s true, I don’t know, but I wasn’t willing to do that. He plans things so meticulously and so far out that I feel that everything we’ve done is setting me up for this season, this year.”
Even though she wasn’t receiving a lot of support through her Atlanta Track Club contract, it was tough for Hurley to leave Atlanta. Her family lives there, as do many of her childhood and college friends. But she believed in her coaches and ultimately, she didn’t feel like she had much of a choice, partially because she’s hoping to focus on longer distances. “It just wasn't going to be something that was going to be sustainable for much more than the next couple of years, most likely, with what my goals are,” she said.
Finch felt the Heartland TC would provide the best environment for her to develop her running talent. And her contract with the Atlanta Track Club was ending, so it was a good time for her to make a move.
Wilson admits that she initially wasn’t thrilled when she learned that, of all of the places they could have gone, her new team would be based in Indiana. She had never been, and she wasn’t expecting much. Finch picked out housing for the two to share, and Wilson moved to Indianapolis sight unseen. “I’m very stubborn and I was like, ‘Coach, I’m going to move with you, but I’m not visiting. I don’t want to be there more than I need to,’” she said. “But the funniest part was I got here and I literally love it. It’s such a nice little city, and it has such good running.”
Hurley was more enthusiastic about Indianapolis. She spent the first half of her childhood living in St. Louis and still has some family there, so the Midwest was familiar to her. She now lives right along one of the city’s main running paths, and she sees people out training at all hours of the day. She’s been impressed by how runnable the city is. “I’m excited to do [everything the Heartland TC is planning] here because I feel like so many people are really invested in running,” she said.
Funding the dream
Wilson originally hoped she’d have a new sponsor contract in place by the new year, but when that didn’t happen, she and her agent, Ray Flynn, decided to wait and see if her indoor season opened up any new opportunities. It was a good call. Wilson won the 800m at the Millrose Games, and six days later, she won her first U.S. title. She expects she’ll be signing a new contract soon.
In the meantime, Wilson picked up a little bit of nannying work, to help pay the bills. Hurley works 25–30 hours per week at an office job. “I’ve always been someone who needed to kind of spin multiple plates to do my best,” she said. The company is based in Georgia, but she was able to keep her position and go fully remote. Like Wilson, Finch has been doing some babysitting to help pay the bills. She will also do some additional paid work for the Heartland TC.
Martin works as the creative director for Runner2Runner, and she’s a CycleBar instructor as well, but she’s looking forward to having another income stream. And Amy is helping support Andrew, for now. There were a lot of leaps of faith,” he said. “We joked that for a while there, Emma Grace, with her part-time job, was making more than the rest of us combined.”
Andrew initially talked to some shoe companies about sponsoring the Heartland TC, but he didn’t want to have a business model that would fall apart if the sponsor pulled out. And based on what he’s seen, both through Amy’s career and his own work, he believes that having the athletes line up their own contracts gives them more bargaining power.
He doesn’t want the Heartland Track Club to get too big. He envisions taking a maximum of 10–12 women. And as of now, he doesn’t plan to recruit; he wants to focus his attention on the athletes he already has. He says the shoe companies and agents know Heartland is a place they can steer high-level athletes who are in search of a team. And having had much of his success with developmental athletes, who aren’t ready to earn their own contracts yet, he wants to make sure that there’s always room on the team for a couple of up-and-comers.
“I hope it’s one of the teams that everyone’s wanting to join down the road, because Andrew really knows what he’s doing,” Wilson said. “And I think it’s really cool that he wants to help out in the community and have an impact beyond what we’re doing on the track. I’m looking forward to [the time when] all these things come together.”
Thanks to SOAR Running for supporting Fast Women in February
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Nia Akins runs the fastest U.S. 800m time ever indoors, but it’s not an American record
On Saturday afternoon at the University of Washington’s Ken Shannon Last Chance Invitational, Nia Akins ran 1:58.27 for 800m. Her time was 0.02 seconds faster than Ajee’ Wilson’s American indoor record from 2020, but because the UW’s 307m track is considered “oversized” for an indoor track, the time will not count as a record.
Regardless, it was an impressive performance. Akins’ previous indoor 800m best was 2:00.16. Her time is the third-fastest anyone in the world has run indoors this year. The race was essentially a rabbited time trial. Rebecca Mehra led Akins through 400m before exiting the track. The race allowed Akins to end her very short indoor season on a much more positive note, following a rough outing at the USATF Indoor Championships one week earlier.
Behind Akins, Stanford sophomore Juliette Whittaker ran 2:00.09, which moved her to second on the NCAA descending order list, behind only Michaela Rose.
NCAA conference meet highlights
A number of impressive athletes won conference titles last week. Some of them are so good that they won’t truly be challenged until the NCAA Championships in two weeks. (Notre Dame’s Olivia Markezich is one who comes to mind—her ACC wins looked like a really good workout.) Here are some conference performances that stood out:
LSU’s Michaela Rose won her second consecutive SEC Indoor 800m title. She led wire to wire and ran 1:59.25, taking 0.24 seconds off of her personal best. Rose is the second-fastest woman ever in the NCAA. Only Athing Mu, who holds the indoor collegiate record of 1:58.40, has run faster. Rose said after the race that she had hoped to break 1:59. She also ran the second leg of LSU’s 4x400m relay, splitting 52.16 seconds. I hope someone will be able to challenge her this season, because it would be fun to see what she can do when she’s pushed.
Florida’s Parker Valby hadn’t raced since her 14:56.11 collegiate 5,000m record on December 2, but her performance at SECs showed she’s ready for NCAAs. On Friday, she split 4:31.45 for 1600m in anchoring her team’s winning distance medley relay. “I did this as like a fun meet—two off events,” she said on the TV broadcast. (Valby doesn’t run the mile often. Her official PR, 4:51.64, is slower than her 5,000m pace.) The following day, she ran the 3,000m, but she was in the first and traditionally slower heat, because she didn’t have a seed time. The field was massive and around the mile mark, she began lapping runners. Valby’s teammates, Amelia Mazza-Downie and Elise Thorner, ran the early laps to help prevent her from going out too quickly. Valby put on a great show, running a meet record of 8:42.29, the second-fastest time in the NCAA right now, behind only Markezich. It’s TBD if she’ll do the 5,000m/3,000m double at NCAAs, but now she has the option.
Houston’s Kelly-Ann Beckford produced a breakthrough performance to win the Big 12 800m title. She went into the meet with a season’s best of 2:03.06 and a personal best of 2:02.59, from last year. She was in danger of not qualifying for the NCAA championships until she won the race in 2:00.99. Her time was a 1.6-second personal best, and she’s now ranked third in the NCAA. (Her time is the fourth-fastest, but because the meet was held in Lubbock, Texas, 3,217 feet above sea level, the NCAA converts her time to 2:00.65.) Beckford, who is from Jamaica, won the 2022 NCAA DII outdoor 800m title for Lincoln University before transferring to Houston.
No program is more dominant in any event right now than Arkansas is in the 400m. Teammates Amber Anning (50.43), Nickisha Pryce (50.83), Kaylyn Brown (50.83), and Rosey Effiong (51.00) swept the top four spots at the SEC Championships, and they now occupy the top four spots on the NCAA descending order list as well. And yes, Arkansas has the top 4x400m relay time as well.
Also at the SEC meet, Texas A&M senior Lamara Distin set a collegiate record of 2.00 meters (6 feet, 6.75 inches) in winning the high jump. She became the first NCAA woman to clear two meters, indoors or out.
Other News and Links
Betsy Saina has been added to the Tokyo Marathon field. She’ll line up for next weekend’s race one month after dropping out of the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials during the 22nd mile. Saina is the first of the top Trials contenders to give the distance another shot.
I appreciate Keira D’Amato’s openness in discussing her Marathon Trials race and preparation, in this Runner’s World piece. “I think normalizing failing and falling short is helpful for other people, and arguably a better lesson for my kids to learn than if I would have hit [my goal]," she told Sarah Lorge Butler.
Kellyn Taylor wrote in an Instagram post that last week she found out she has a grade 4b stress fracture in her femur. She pointed out that this is the second Olympic Marathon Trials in a row where she raced on a stress fracture, which, she added, is never a good idea. Taylor is still breastfeeding, which could be a major contributing factor this time. She adds her name to a growing list of pro runners (including Aliphine Tuliamuk, Molly Huddle, Elaina Tabb, Lexie Thompson, and Rachel Drake) who have developed bone injuries in the last several years while training for long-distance races and breastfeeding.
Jessie Cardin of Hansons-Brooks, who ended up in the hospital following her last two marathons after collapsing during the late miles of the race, wrote that she has a hole in her heart. She is still gathering more information, but she believes this won’t be the end of her running career, and she’s exploring treatment options.
Dennis Young wrote a very long piece about last-place finishers at the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials over the past 44 years. I loved learning about Lea Finck and Michelle Davis, who both ran, and finished, the first U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials for women, in 1984, six months into their pregnancies. They apparently got a lot of attention at the time, and I wish this piece of history had been passed along more effectively, because this is the first time I’ve heard about it. It’s fun to learn well after the fact that Rachel Hyland, Lauren Philbrook, Maegan Krifchin, and others were carrying along a Trials tradition (Runner’s World). One of the more bizarre details of Finck’s story is that when she finished, they took her to the medical tent, found her baby’s heartbeat, and put it on the loudspeaker so the crowd could hear it.
The running community is mourning the loss of Laken Riley, a 22-year-old student at Augusta University, who was murdered during a run in Athens, Georgia. (Runner’s World)
Results Highlights
Nia Akins wasn’t the only athlete to run fast at UW’s Ken Shannon Last Chance Invitational. Susan Ejore of Kenya and Under Armour Dark Sky Distance produced an excellent kick in the 5,000m to win in a big PR and facility record of 14:55.35. Another Under Armour athlete, Lauren Ryan of Australia and Baltimore Distance, finished second in a big PR of 14:57.67. Stanford first-year Amy Bunnage took sixth in 15:11.68, which moved her to third on the NCAA list. Gracie Hyde of Adams State won the mile in 4:30.90, the fastest time a DII woman has ever run, indoors or out. It won’t count as the record because of UW’s oversized track, but it was a strong run. (Results)
Ethiopia’s Tsigie Gebreselama won the Ras Al Khaimah Half Marathon in 1:05:14. (Results)
Kenya’s Faith Chepkoech won Spain’s 10K Facsa Castellón in a speedy 29:50. (Results)
Ethiopia’s Waganesh Mekasha won a close race at the Osaka Marathon in 2:24:20. And three weeks after finishing 91st at the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials in 2:44:56, Hailey Bowes took 13th in 2:43:43. (Results)
Dani Moreno ran an impressive 1:10:46 to win the Ventura Half Marathon, which is a point-to-point, net downhill race, by more than three minutes. (Results)
Ethiopia’s Atsede Bayisa Tesema won the Cowtown Half Marathon in 1:12:24. (Results)
Bethany Sachtleben won the Gasparilla 15K, in Tampa, Florida, in 52:24, and the local paper did a good job of summarizing her journey and why feeling like herself again means so much to her. (Results)
April Lund, 41, was the top finisher at Sunday’s USATF Masters 5K Championships in Atlanta, running 16:58. You can see a list of the other age-group winners in the results.
Courtney Dauwalter won the Transgrancanaria 126K and finished 13th overall. The 78-mile race features 22,000 feet of climbing.
Podcast Highlights
I’m not going to attempt to sum up the final episode of The Build Up with Molly Seidel and Julia Hanlon. I highly recommend listening to it, and it’s too good to boil down to a couple of sentences. I appreciate that Seidel talks about much of what she learned in trying to make it to the starting line of the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials.
On the Ali on the Run Show, Sara Hall discussed her habit of throwing off her watch mid race and said it was partially because she just wanted to focus on racing. She also ran the Olympic Trials without her wedding ring and shaved her arms pre-race, to help her feel more “light and free.” (That was also part of the logic behind tossing her watch—one less thing to carry—although she acknowledged that a cheaper option would be to just stop the timer.) Hall said she really felt the love from her supporters after the race. “I was like, man, I may not be going to the Olympics, but I’m rich in relationships.”
Emily Durgin discussed finishing ninth at the Olympic Marathon Trials, despite falling just before the finish line, on Women’s Running Stories. She said that she and her coach are going to work on developing more efficient running form by improving her core strength. And she’s hoping to run a fast fall marathon and have a shot at representing the U.S. in the marathon at the world championships next year.
Makenna Myler was great on I’ll Have Another; I love her outlook on the sport. And in her appearance on Lactic Acid with Dominique Smith, I learned that Myler used to work at an aquarium in Hawaii, where part of her job involved swimming with stingrays, sharks, and fish.
Additional Episodes: Allie Wilson discussed more details of her USATF indoor title and recent story on Citius Mag | Even if you’ve listened to all the other Jess McClain interviews, she was good on the Ali on the Run Show | Maegan Krifchin talked more about running the Olympic Trials 7+ months pregnant on What’s Inside the Box? (This was also a nice news story on Krifchin, from last week.) | Trials qualifier Sofie Schunk talked about many aspects of managing Type 1 diabetes while running at a high level on The Rambling Runner Podcast | It was interesting hearing from Trent Stellingwerff, who coaches some of Canada’s top female marathoners, on The Shakeout Podcast
Something that made me laugh
Laura Green’s video from last week about hunting season—no, not that kind of hunting—was great. If you haven’t already contributed to the 2.5 million (!) views it has received, it’s definitely worth a watch. And I particularly appreciated Molly Seidel’s response. In an Instagram story, she wrote, “What the F*CK Laura. I have nothing left but my Boston Strava segments and now you’ve taken those from me too.” In a subsequent story, she posted this photo and wrote, “My vengeance will be swift and merciless.”
I’ve run out of space to say much more, but the Tokyo Marathon is on Sunday and will stream live on FloTrack in the U.S. beginning at 6:30 p.m. ET on Saturday, because of the time difference. The USATF 15K Championships will take place on Saturday in Jacksonville, Florida. The entries aren’t posted yet, but Keira D’Amato is among the athletes who have said they’re racing. And the World Athletics Indoor Championships begin Friday in Glasgow. You can find the schedule and results here, and the meet will stream live on Peacock. (Search for World Indoor Champs.)
Thanks to SOAR Running for their support this month and remember to enter our giveaway, which ends today, to have a shot at winning free shorts. And thank you to everyone who helps keep Fast Women going with their support via Venmo and Patreon.
I hope you have a great week!
Alison