Fast Women: Australia’s big week and Jessica Kain’s rise

Pamela Kosgei outkicks Elise Cranny to win the Beach to Beacon 10K.

Issue 414, sponsored by D+M Engineering PLLC

Led by Rose Davies, Australian athletes shine at the Commonwealth Games

Australia’s middle distance and distance runners have been gaining momentum for years, and their progress was on full display at last week’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Scotland, last week, where they dominated the medal tally.

Rose Davies kicked things off by winning the 10,000m in 31:39.32. Kenya’s Diana Wanza made a big move with 2K to go and gapped the field, but she misjudged her effort, and Davies used a strong kick to run her down. Wanza held on to earn silver in 31:50.13 and Florence Niyonkuru nipped Uganda’s Esther Chebet, 31:55.47 to 31:55.70, to earn Rwanda’s first-ever Commonwealth Games medal.

Wednesday’s steeplechase initially looked like it would be a battle between Kenya’s Faith Cherotich and Uganda’s Peruth Chemutai, but Chemutai went out at a pace faster than she could sustain. Cherotich, the reigning world champion, won comfortably in a Commonwealth Games record of 9:01.76. England’s Elise Thorner bided her time and was able to run down Chemutai and win silver in a PR of 9:05.45, while Chemutai held on for bronze (9:09.96).

After finishing a frustrating ninth in the 10,000m, Scotland’s Megan Keith took charge of Thursday’s 5,000m final and made sure that the pace did not lag. The race came down to a sprint finish between Davies and fellow Australian Jessica Hull, who had run the 1500m rounds earlier in the day. Davies had a little more left and held off Hull, 14:44.53 to 14:45.01, and became the first woman to win the Commonwealth 5,000m/10,000m double. Keith’s strategy paid off and she held on to win bronze in front of the home crowd in 14:49.10.

England’s Georgia Hunter Bell led Friday’s 800m final, which went out slowly, and used a big kick to negative split and win in 1:59.51 over reigning world champion Lilian Odira of Kenya (2:00.58) and Australia’s Sarah Billings (2:00.61), who earned silver and bronze.

And Saturday’s mile capped Australia’s excellent meet as Abbey Caldwell (4:39.31), Hull (4:39.86), and Claudia Hollingsworth (4:40.20) swept the medals, bringing Australia’s total (for the events that this newsletter covers) to seven. (All results)

Pamela Kosgei wins Beach to Beacon and Elise Cranny’s road racing career is off to a good start

Running her first road race, Kenya’s Pamela Kosgei took the lead late and outkicked Olympian Elise Cranny to win Saturday’s Beach to Beacon 10K, 31:50 to 31:52. Kosgei, 22, has represented the University of New Mexico for only two years, but in that time, she’s made a splash, winning the NCAA 5,000m and 10,000m titles outdoors in 2025 and racking up a total of seven top-three finishes at NCAA championships.

If Kosgei is done at the University of Mexico, I haven’t heard about it yet. Kosgei signed an NIL deal with Hoka last November, but I haven’t seen a pro announcement. This article about Saturday’s race referred to Kosgei as a former Lobo, and her NCAA status is significant, because it would affect how much of the $10,000 in prize money she could accept.

Cranny has been trying out the roads this summer—she also earned a runner-up finish at the USATF 6K Championships last month. She told the Portland Press Herald (link above) that she thought she had time to make up ground on Kosgei, but the finish came sooner than she was expecting.

Cranny provided a good status update on last week’s episode of the C Tolle Run podcast. Though she’s been back in the U.S. for most of this year, she said that she plans to resume training with the M11 Track Club in the fall. As someone who has competed at every outdoor global championship for the past five years, she’s using 2026 to reset and make sure she’s ready to keep chasing spots on U.S. teams in the coming years. The full episode is worth a listen.

Puma Elite’s Molly Born took third in 32:14, Meridia’s Annie Rodenfels was fourth in 32:19, and China’s Wuga He took fifth in 32:20. (Results)

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Thanks to D+M Engineering PLLC for supporting Fast Women this month

D+M Engineering PLLC is a woman-owned, Austin-based engineering firm owned and operated by Muna and David Mitchell, dedicated runners, supporters of Fast Women, and fans of women’s running. We are proud to sponsor the Fast Women newsletter for the month of August. Stay tuned each week for more about us and why we are in your inbox on Mondays this month.

We are a multi-discipline firm offering bridge, structural, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing services to public and private clients. We are a City of Austin certified Women-Owned Business Enterprise (WBE) and a TxDOT certified Small Business Enterprise (SBE).

From commercial to residential and public projects, from buildings systems to infrastructure, we deliver innovative and efficient engineering solutions tailored to our clients’ needs. We have designed bridge and other structures and lighting systems for infrastructure across Texas and beyond. We are passionate about sustainability and working with people to make their projects successful.

To learn more about our engineering services and community endeavors, please visit www.dplusmengineering.com or contact Muna Mitchell at muna@dplusmengineering.com.

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Jessica Kain on her way to a big PR in the 1500m prelims at the USATF Outdoor Championships. (Photo by Gregorio Denny)

Jessica Kain is just getting started

Jessica Kain’s goal heading into her first USATF Outdoor Championships in New York City in late July was to qualify for the 1500m final. She was seeded 21st out of the 26 competitors, and only the top 12 runners would advance.

As she looked at the results from the first preliminary heat while walking out onto the track, the 25-year-old realized making the final would require the race of her life. “It was just this immediate game time decision like, ‘Okay, I guess I’m PRing by three seconds,’” she told Fast Women.

And Kain did just that, lowering her best time from 4:09.03 to 4:06.21. Two days later, she ran an even better race in the final. When the pace lagged early, she confidently moved to the front and put in a surge. Over the final lap, she hung on to finish sixth among some of the best middle-distance runners in the country, in 4:11.10. She covered the last 800m of the 1500m in 2:05.7, nearly two seconds faster than her official 800m personal best.

“This last year, I’ve really started believing that I can compete with the best of the best,” Kain said. “And to go to USAs and really show myself what I’m capable of was the best feeling ever. This feels like it’s truly only the very beginning.”

Finding her path

Growing up in Santa Cruz, California, running was always part of Kain’s life. Her father, Pete, is a four-time age-group world champion in triathlon, and her mother, Shari, is an XTERRA world champion and a Pan Am Games gold medalist in cycling. Her younger brother, Jeremy, is a 3:41 1500m runner for Duke. Kain competed in her first triathlon, with the cycling portion on a tricycle, when she was three years old.

Sundays in the Kain household usually meant doing a long run through the forest followed by banana pancakes at home. Kain excelled in both soccer and running, but the latter eventually won out. She was a good high school runner but not a top recruit. In her final high school race in the spring of 2019, she broke 5:00 in the 1600m for the first time, running 4:56.30.

Her freshman year at San Diego State was interrupted by the pandemic, but when she returned for her sophomore year, Kain became more serious about the sport. Over the next three years, her results reflected that commitment. By the end of her senior year in 2023, she had run 4:12.33 for 1500m, which would remain her personal best until this year.

Kain returned to school for a fifth year, but her 2024 season didn’t go to plan. “I truly believe in balance and that if you live a happy and good life, you will be running your best,” she said. “And I think I was almost too into it, expecting too much of myself and putting all this pressure on myself to do something crazy.”

Kain had a solid season, but she didn’t run any personal bests, and she finished her collegiate career without qualifying for an NCAA championship. There was no question she had talent, but there’s not a lot of support for athletes on the cusp. Regardless, she believed she had more in her, and she decided to keep racing.

In 2025, Kain signed a one-year pro contract with Saucony, but her first post-collegiate track season was another rough one. She felt scattered as she tried to figure out what she wanted to do with her life. Between assistant coaching at San Diego State, working as a social media manager, and trying to run at a high level, she was spread thin. Her best 1500m time of the year, 4:23.07, was far off what she knew she was capable of.

Kain considered moving on from professional running, but she decided she owed it to herself to go all in one last time. “I just felt like I wasn’t done,” she said. “I couldn’t [quit] with my PR being something I ran so long ago.”

It all comes together

Kain’s 2026 season has been one breakthrough after another. In April, she ran her first 1500m PR in nearly three years, lowering her time to 4:10.81 at the Bryan Clay Invitational. And at the Portland Track Festival in June, she ran 4:09.03 and secured her spot at the U.S. Championships.

At USAs, she took advantage of the opportunity to race against some of the country’s best. “Getting in the right races and having people around you to pull you is half the battle,” she said. “Racing the women who are already doing these things will help me level up.”

Because of her significant negative splits in both her races at USAs, Kain is confident she has faster times in her. She’s hoping to continue racing over the next four to six weeks. She’s currently on the waitlist to get into the Sir Walter Miler field, so she’ll only be able to race if someone scratches. She’s also hoping to race in Europe and plans to compete in next month’s Fifth Avenue Mile.

After USAs, Kain posted on Instagram that if someone told her a year ago that she would finish in the top 10 in the country in one of the most competitive track events, she probably would have believed them because, as she wrote, “I’m delusional when it comes to goals.” Her latest success has her dreaming of LA 2028. “I can genuinely see myself competing for our country at the LA Olympics,” she said. “And it’s the coolest feeling.”

Kain currently lives in Encinitas, California, and balances 60-65 miles per week of training with coaching runners, managing three different companies’ social media accounts, and working as a fitness model, an opportunity that she says kind of fell into her lap. She has modeled for a number of brands, including Vuori and On. While she was in New York City for USAs, images from her On campaign were displayed throughout the city.

Kain has had sponsor support from Currently Running, a small apparel brand, and she’s hoping to secure a shoe contract soon. She doesn’t have an agent at the moment, but that could change quickly.

Kain has continued to work with her college coach, Robert Lusitana, since graduating two years ago. Lusitana coaches her workouts in person, but Kain otherwise does all of her training alone. She’d love to find some training partners and is currently considering moving to altitude.

Under the current system, the most lucrative contracts tend to go to athletes who are big high school or college stars, and it can be difficult to find support when one’s success comes a bit later. But Kain is confident that there’s a lot more where her last two races have come from, and her recent success has reassured her that she’s on the right track.

“I think so many people get so caught up in thinking that they need to do something right now, or that this year has to be their best year,” she said. “Looking back, I’m so glad I didn’t peak in high school or even college, for that matter. Things just continue to get better if you just trust your training and believe in yourself.”

Madie Boreman (Photo by Gregorio Denny)

Other News, Links, and Results

• Remember the name Saida Tsehaye. The 18-year-old Ethiopian won the 800m at the IFAM Oordegem in Belgium, running 1:57.96. She has had some solid results before, but this was a breakout performance for her. Georgia Griffith, another Australian standout, won the 5,000m in 14:44.64. Alicia Monson opted to skip the U.S. championships but showed that she’s in good form, running 14:50.63—her fastest time since 2023—to finish fifth. And coming off of a fourth-place finish at USAs, Rachel McArthur won the 1500m in a one-second PR of 4:02.90. (Results)

• Following her breakthrough 2:24 marathon at this year’s Boston Marathon, Elena Hayday announced that she has signed with Puma.

• Sinclaire Johnson’s latest vlog has a good update on her year so far. After the USATF Indoor Championships, she developed a stress reaction in her sacrum, but the first round of imaging didn’t catch it. She wound up taking 10 weeks off, so she’s had a very late start to her outdoor season. She had only been back to running for about five weeks when she ran a 2:03 800m at the Sunset Tour. That race convinced her she wasn’t ready to run USAs, but she’s healthy and she’ll race this weekend at Sir Walter Miler.

• Coming off of her third-place finish in the steeplechase at USAs, Madie Boreman won the Bklyn Mile, running 4:31 on the roads. (Results)

• After writing about some of the struggles Aubrey Frentheway faced during her pregnancy back in April, I was thrilled to see the news that her baby has arrived.

• I appreciated this update from Krissy Gear, who fully intends to return to professional running when her body is ready, but she is also going to be working as a case manager at a residential reentry center. I don’t know if others experience Instagram the same way, but many of the posts I see from pro runners tend to have a very supportive comment from Gear at the top. Despite her recent struggles with running, Gear continues to be one of the sport’s greatest cheerleaders.

• I appreciated Taylor Werner opening up with her struggles with race-related anxiety in this post.

• I also appreciated this post from Keira D’Amato, who did her first 10-mile run last week after undergoing hip surgery in February.

• Amanda Vestri shared that she developed an injury in early June, but it sounds like things are back on track now.

• Former BYU standout Sadie Sargent Mitchell announced her retirement from professional running.

• Olympian and world championship medalist Kara Goucher has been open about her struggles with dystonia in recent years, and it’s been inspiring to see her continue to race out of love for the sport. On Sunday, she and her friend Carrie Birth-Davis essentially tied for the win at the Queens NYC Half Marathon, running 1:32:41. (Results)

• I intentionally don’t include a lot of high school content here, but I thought this was a nice article about the long-term approach Ellery Lincoln’s high school coaches have taken throughout her career. The 17-year-old 4:27 miler will compete at the World U20 Championships in her home state of Oregon this week. (The meet begins on Wednesday, the full schedule is here, and the event will air on Peacock in the U.S.)

• I was pleased to see that Alison Mariella Désir, author of Running While Black, has launched a Substack.

Additional Podcasts

• The Mangonada podcast returned for the start of season two last week. It’s been so disappointing to watch much of the running industry follow national trends and put less emphasis on DEI in recent years, and I appreciate how hosts Carolina Rubio MacWright and Vanessa Chavarriaga Posada continue to call that out and use running as a lens to discuss broader social and political issues.

• I enjoyed hearing from Jay Holder, USATF’s chief content and communications officer, on the Ali on the Run Show. He discussed the behind-the-scenes efforts to get Zohran Mamdani to the USATF Outdoor Championships. And I, too, am not a fan of the term “on home soil.”

Additional Episodes: Emily Mackay on her coach’s podcast, On the Record: The Elite Running Podcast | Atalanta NYC’s Emily Richards, Susan Aneno, Leah Anderson, and Devon Martin on NYRR’s Set the Pace podcast | Molly Seidel on For the Long Run | Karissa Schweizer on Pending Ratification (recorded a while ago) | Bobbi Gibb on Starting Line 1928

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I am so grateful to D+M Engineering PLLC for supporting Fast Women this month—talk about a non-endemic sponsor! (And I’d love it if it actually turned out to be a good business move on their part.) Though I haven’t written about it in the past couple of newsletters, things are still really tough here, and they’re going to continue to be for quite a while.

I am so grateful for, and blown away by, all the ways in which the Fast Women community has supported me, even though most of you don’t know me. I thought I generally had a sense of how my life was going to go, and that has all essentially imploded. I still have so much to figure out, but so far, I’ve had time to focus on only the most pressing tasks. In the meantime, working on this newsletter is a little bit of a break from all of that. (If I’m being honest, sometimes in a good way, sometimes in a more stressful way.)

I hope all of you have the best week possible.

Alison