Fast Women: Super Bol Sunday—Femke Bol makes her 800m debut
Kayley DeLay takes the slow route to her place among the country’s fastest.
Issue 394, sponsored by WHSP Medical
Femke Bol’s 800m career is off to a promising start
I love that Femke Bol has moved to the 800m. With Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone out this year due to pregnancy, Bol could have dominated the 400m hurdles. But Bol, 25, decided (well before McLaughlin-Levrone’s pregnancy announcement) that she wanted to take on a new challenge to keep things fresh. She made her 800m debut at the World Athletics Indoor Tour meet in Metz, France, on Sunday and ran a Dutch record of 1:59.07.
Usually the races at these meets are relatively low stakes, so it had been a while since I tuned into a non-championship race with such a sense of anticipation, mostly because I had no idea how it would go. I figured she would let rabbit Anna Gryc set the tone early, and she did. Because when one can run a 400m in 49 seconds, it’s very easy to go out too quickly in an 800m.
Gryc’s first 200m was a bit hot, and she hit 400m in 56.66, with Bol not far behind, right on the pace lights, splitting around 57.0. After that, Bol was in uncharted territory. She appeared to intentionally back off a bit in the third 200m before picking up the pace slightly on the final lap. I don’t know how she was feeling, but she looked very relaxed throughout.
I’d call her initial test run a great success. She’ll have work to do if she wants to become one of the world’s best in this event, but I wouldn’t count her out. The current world lead is 1:57.43. Bol will have to learn how to best distribute her effort throughout the race, and she’ll have to learn how to do so when she’s surrounded by other runners. (In yesterday’s race, she ran unimpeded.)
But I’m excited to tune in for the next episode of the Femke Bol Show, because who knows what will happen. It’s fun to watch one of the world’s best runners be a beginner at something. Meanwhile, had she stuck to the 400m hurdles and the relays, odds are that she would have kept winning, but with far less drama. Next up, she plans to race a 600m at the World Indoor Tour meet in Liévin on February 19. (Race replay | Results)
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How patience carried Kayley DeLay to the top of the sport
Kayley DeLay finished last season on a high note, earning a runner-up finish at the Fifth Avenue Mile in a blazing 4:17.4. She’ll look to carry some of that momentum into her 2026 season, which she’ll open this weekend at the Sound Invite in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. DeLay, 26, didn’t realize she had the potential to become a professional runner until late in her college career, but she’s now in her third year with the Seattle-based Brooks Beasts.
Growing up in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, DeLay showed a talent for the sport early, going head to head in the mile with the fastest boy in her elementary school PE class. She did a variety of sports, but soccer was initially her favorite. She played through her freshman year at Fletcher High School before switching to cross country and track & field.
She wasn’t surprised to learn that running was her best sport. Both her parents ran collegiately for Florida International University, and her mother was particularly fast. An athletic scholarship made it possible for her to attend college, and from the beginning, DeLay felt the expectation that running would fund her college education, too.
Despite that, she didn’t put too much pressure on her running, and she credits her parents for doing the same. “Being people who knew about running, they did a really great job of not making running too intense for me,” she told Fast Women.
Though she knew some of her competitors were doing more, DeLay was content maxing out around 35 miles per week during high school. She made steady progress each year, and she thinks it helped that she got her first period in middle school, before she became serious about running, so she didn’t have to navigate many of the body changes her peers were dealing with while trying to get faster.
DeLay won the 2016 4A state title in the 3200m her junior year and finished high school with PRs of 4:55 (1600m) and 10:30 (3200m). There were some disappointments, too. DeLay hoped to win more state titles, but she was up against some excellent competition. She regularly raced Bailey Hertenstein, now a professional runner for Nike, and also faced Krissy Gear and Sinclaire Johnson, now both pros for HOKA, here and there. And despite her best efforts, she never came very close to qualifying for the Foot Locker Cross Country Championships.
Her team was small—living in a beach community, swimming was more popular than running—so going to meets was a little lonely at times. But she had a great high school coach and a wonderful high school running experience overall. DeLay went on recruiting visits to Yale, Columbia, Florida, and Florida State. The Yale trip was her first time ever on a plane, and she ultimately decided she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to attend the school, where she would be coached by Amy Gosztyla.
Though Ivy League schools don’t offer athletic scholarships, they offer excellent need-based financial aid. “To my parents, it was no different if I got a scholarship somewhere or was on aid to go to Yale,” she said. “So it was pretty awesome that it worked out. I was pretty naive about all of it and running just opened doors for me in ways I never imagined.”
DeLay knew by her senior year of high school that she wanted to become a steeplechaser. Jeff Pigg, her teammate’s father and the University of North Florida coach, taught her how to hurdle, and she got to try the event a couple of times. Her father built her a hurdle that she could use to practice (and spray painted Yale on it) and also built her a mini steeple barrier, so she could get experience stepping on it.
Working her way up
DeLay spent her first year at Yale adjusting to life away from home, which included having a bunch of faster runners to push her and challenging academics. She tried to enjoy all aspects of college life, which meant not sleeping much. “For me, running was something that allowed me to go to college. Once I was there, I was like, ‘Running is just a thing I do.’ There was no next step. I didn’t think I was going to go pro.”
But over time, the sport became a higher priority. She loved having many people to train with, and as a competitive person, she loved seeing the progress she was making. As things clicked, her confidence grew. At the end of her sophomore year, she finished second in the steeplechase at the Ivy League Championships. Then coach Taryn Sheehan took over DeLay’s junior year, and the new training stimulus helped take her running to the next level.
She won her first Ivy League title in the fall of her junior year, and followed it up with another one in the 3,000m indoors. And then the pandemic shut down college sports for the remainder of the school year. The Ivy League was particularly cautious about returning to in-person activity, and when they announced that they were canceling all sports for the 2020-21 academic year, DeLay decided to take a year off from school. Other Ivy League athletes transferred to schools where they could compete that year, but DeLay wasn’t ready to be done at Yale, and she didn’t want her senior year to be mostly online. It helped that a number of her friends made the same decision.
She lived in New Haven for much of the year and worked at the Yale School of Public Health while continuing to train. In the spring, she lowered her steeplechase time by more than 30 seconds, to 9:40.81, and qualified for the U.S. Olympic Track & Field Trials.
She returned for her final year at Yale in the fall of 2021, and it was worth the wait. She earned her second Ivy League cross country title and finished 10th at the NCAA Cross Country Championships, earning her first All-America honor. The race was extra special because it was held at Apalachee Regional Park in Tallahassee, Florida, where she had raced in high school.
And during the outdoor season, she closed out her Yale career with her biggest performance yet—a runner-up finish at the 2022 NCAA Outdoor Track & Field Championships. She ran a gutsy race and PRed by 15 seconds, running 9:25.08 behind Courtney Wayment’s collegiate record.
DeLay had one season of outdoor track eligibility remaining, and she opted to use it at the University of Washington. It was there that she really started to believe that professional running was a possibility for her. And because UW coach Maurica Powell had coached so many athletes who ultimately went pro, she had a lot of connections and was a great help.
Running at a top Pac-12 school with a much larger athletic budget was a dramatic change of pace, but it was ultimately a helpful step in DeLay’s transition to professional running. “Everyone was really intense and really cared about running in a way that I think was good for me at that time and place,” she said. “I don’t know if I would have thrived in that environment as a freshman, but as a 23-year-old, it was perfect for me.”
DeLay put in some excellent training that year, and enjoyed being part of such a strong team, but she fell short of her goals in her one season of racing in the UW uniform. She hoped to win the NCAA steeplechase title and instead finished 10th. The remainder of her summer racing went better, and the training eventually paid off, just a little later than she had hoped.
Becoming a Beast
DeLay knew she wanted to remain in Seattle, which is also her boyfriend’s hometown, so when considering her professional running options, she looked only at the Brooks Beasts. She signed with the team soon after her final collegiate race, and the team has turned out to be an excellent fit.
“I thought running was going to get really stressful once it was my job, but it’s been way more fun than I thought it was going to be,” she said. “I love my teammates and I feel really well supported by them and our staff. At the end of the day, it’s an individual sport, but I don’t think I would be enjoying it nearly as much if I wasn’t on the team.”
In her first year as a pro, DeLay lowered her 5,000m PR by 47 seconds, to 15:05.96. In her second year, DeLay ran a 3,000m PR of 8:44.01 indoors and was building momentum. But at the end of March 2025, an accident temporarily derailed her season.
DeLay crosstrains one day per week, and she had been working on getting more into cycling for the change of scenery, except she hadn’t quite gotten the hang of clipping in and out of her pedals. As she was finishing up a 20-mile ride with teammate Isaiah Harris, she was creeping forward at a stoplight, barely moving, when she leaned the wrong way.
“I yelled to him, ‘Oh, I’m going down!’ as I was slowly falling,” she said. “He turned around, looked at me, and I landed with my arm straight out, and it immediately broke. I feel like I should be more embarrassed, but it was so funny. I had never broken a bone and it broke so easily.”
She went to the ER, where she learned that she had broken both her radius and ulna. A week later, a surgeon placed two plates and 13 screws in her arm. Remarkably, DeLay had never had a running injury before, so this was her first experience with trying to maintain fitness while injured. She missed about a month of running, but after about nine days off, she was able to crosstrain.
She borrowed a spin bike from her former teammate, Marta Pen Freitas, and put it on the deck of her houseboat to make her workouts more fun. It was Pen Freitas who turned DeLay on to houseboat living. DeLay spent a month cat sitting and living in Pen Freitas’ houseboat during the summer of 2024, and within months, DeLay was convincing her housemates that paying a little extra rent was worth it for the perks of living on the water.
DeLay returned to running at the end of April and things were rough for about a month, but then her running-specific fitness began to show again. For the sake of her arm, she decided to focus on flat events and mostly avoid the steeplechase. In the process, she lowered her 1500m personal best by more than six seconds, to 4:04.99, before capping her season off with her stellar run at the Fifth Avenue Mile.
DeLay isn’t ready to let the steeplechase go, but focusing on flat events went well last year, so she plans to do more of that in 2026, with an emphasis on the 5,000m. Just as DeLay gradually worked her way up through the college ranks, she’s now doing that with professional running. It’s been an adjustment, because at the pro level, there are more situations where competing for the win isn’t necessarily realistic. “I like the competitive part of racing, so it’s hard when you’re just happy getting 12th in a race because you ran a good time,” she said. But with each season, she’s finding herself in more races where she can contend for the win.
Since her sophomore year at Yale, DeLay has had four different coaches in less than seven years, and all of them have brought her training along gradually, which has likely contributed to her lack of injuries and left her room to grow. At Yale, she ran less than 40 miles per week, at UW, she ran 40 miles. And with each year of professional running, she has increased her mileage by five miles per week, so now she’s up to 55, which is still on the low side compared to some of her competitors.
DeLay does much of her training with teammate Allie Buchalski and Chloe Scrimgeour, who is a new addition to the team. But she’ll join her other teammates on recovery runs. Unlike some pro teams, the Beasts meet up to train, whether formally or informally, most days. “It’s cool to have a close-up view of everyone else’s training and have them be invested in mine,” she said. “I want us all to do well, because I want our team to be really good. It’s different than college, but it’s a similar sentiment. And I love the people, that’s what makes it really special.”
Other News
The chatter began when Weini Kelati, who had been an Under Armour athlete since the start of her pro career, showed up to the World Cross Country Championships press conference wearing Nike shoes. Though she raced in UA spikes that weekend, it became clear that there was a change coming. And last week, Kelati announced that she has signed with Nike.
In an effort to help increase the diversity in the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials field, Renegade Running is planning to support 12 BIPOC athletes as they attempt to qualify for the race. Applications for the Renegade Elite team are open until February 15. More information here.
I didn’t realize when reporting on it last week that when Clemson’s Gladys Chepngetich ran 1:58.81 to take third at BU’s Terrier Classic, she broke Pamela Jelimo’s Kenyan indoor record by 0.02 seconds. With all the changes in the sport, it’s tough to keep track of all of the records that have fallen in recent years.
Australia’s Catriona Bisset continues to have what is probably the most entertaining Substack in the sport. And I always enjoy Nikki Hiltz’s race day vlogs. Their latest is a recap of their Wanamaker Mile win.
Elise Beacom wrote a nice article for The Guardian about Australia’s Jessica Hull.
Erin Donohue LiVecchi, a 2008 U.S. Olympian in the 1500m, has been named the head girls’ outdoor track & field coach at her alma mater, New Jersey’s Haddonfield High School.
Providence College announced that Director of Cross Country and Track & Field Ray Treacy will be retiring in June, after 41 years at the school. He also coaches American marathon record holder Emily Sisson.
Additional Results
Ethiopia’s Birke Haylom won the 1500m at the Czech Indoor Gala, running what was, at the time, a world-leading 4:00.62. Runner-up Saron Berhe of Ethiopia set a pending world U20 record of 4:01.23. Nigist Getachew, also of Ethiopia, won the 800m in a meet record of 1:59.98. (Results)
Three days later, Haylom also won the 1500m at the World Indoor Tour Gold Madrid, running 4:02.37 to Nadia Battocletti’s 4:03.59. Switzerland’s Audrey Werro won the 800m, edging out Getachew, 2:00.68 to 2:00.76. (Results)
And only two days after that, on Sunday, February 8, Haylom also raced the World Indoor Tour meet in Karlsruhe, Germany. This time, she was up against Great Britain’s Georgia Hunter Bell, who was opening her season. On what were likely tired legs, Haylom was unable to hang with Hunter Bell, who won the race, 4:00.04 to 4:00.88, and took over the world lead. France’s Agathe Guillemot finished third, improving her own national record to 4:02.12. It was fun to see Elise Cranny racing somewhere new as she made her M11 Track Club debut. With just over two laps to go in the 3,000m, Cranny took the lead, but with 300m to go, Canada’s Gabriela DeBues-Stafford made a bigger move, and she cruised to a win in 8:35.94. Cranny held on to second (8:37.06). (Results)
Last week, I neglected to mention that at the Meeting de L’Eure on February 1, Werro won the 800m in a Swiss record of 1:57.49, so her season is off to an excellent start. (Results)
Jamaica’s Kelly Ann Beckford won the 800m at the Penn Classic, running 2:01.83. (Results)
Stephanie Moss of Duke and Great Britain won the mile at the Camel City Distance meet, running 4:29.99. (Results)
Carrie Ellwood won the Kook Run 10K in Encinitas, California, running 31:47. (Results)
Remember how Michelle Rohl set a world indoor mile record of 5:26.65 for the 60-64 age group at the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix? Well, Great Britain’s Clare Elms lowered the record further last week, running 5:25.07 at the Ayo Falola Dream Mile.
New Jersey high schooler Blair Bartlett ran 9:42.38 for 3200m on Saturday, becoming the second-fastest U.S. high school girl of all time, behind only Jane Hedengren’s high school record.
Podcast Highlights
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the Mangonada podcast, and I really appreciated the episode that hosts Carolina Rubio-MacWright and Vanessa Chavarriaga Posada put out last week. “I love running groups, because you meet people from so many different walks of life and you share vulnerability and it humanizes the other,” Rubio-MacWright, said. “Because ultimately, the biggest thing that this government has done [is that] in the last 10 years, [immigrants] have been dehumanized.”
Roisin Willis hit the podcast circuit last week and I really enjoyed her appearances on both the Ali on the Run Show and C Tolle Run.
There’s a lot of content about REDs out there, but I thought Project RED-S founder Pippa Woolven told her story well on The Fueling Forward Podcast.
It was fun to hear ski mountaineering relay partners Anna Gibson and Cam Smith tell the story of how they became Olympians on The Freetrail Podcast.
Citius Mag’s Chris Chavez caught up with many of New Balance’s new signees. I enjoyed getting a Victoria Bossong update, and he also talked to Roisin Willis, Margot Appleton, and former Providence College runners Kimberley May, Shannon Flockhart, and Alex Millard.
Additional Episodes: Kara Goucher and Des Linden discussed their Olympic experiences on Good Game with Sarah Spain | Great Britain’s Issy Boffey discussed her recent 800m breakthrough on Podium Athletics | Sinclaire Johnson and her husband/coach Craig Nowak on House of Track | Elise Cranny on I’ll Have Another | Olympic Marathon Trials qualifier Lisa Goodin on Road to the Trials
For those who are interested, Saturday’s Sound Invite will stream live on RunnerSpace, subscription required. The pro events begin at 4:40 p.m. ET.
Thanks again to WHSP Medical for sponsoring Fast Women this month and to all of you who help keep this newsletter going with your support via Venmo or Patreon. I hope you all have a good week.
Alison
Loved the profile on Kayley! Coach Any G was an amazing coach when I ran collegiately in the Northeast (before her time in CT), and it was so cool to see her name again, and again! Go Kayley!
thanks for the shoutout! hopefully i can feature on your page for my results one day hahaha