As recently as New Year’s, steeplechaser Emma Coburn wasn’t sure she would be healthy enough to race in the Rio Olympics.
She certainly wasn’t running. An Achilles injury she had sustained a year before was persistently bothering her — and despite time off and rest, there was no sign it was healing. In the fall, she could barely string together a few days of training before she was forced to stop running and cross-train.
On Saturday at the Prefontaine Classic in Eugene, Ore., a mere five months after some of the darkest moments in her professional career, the worry and apprehension dissolved.
The former University of Colorado distance standout crushed the American 3,000-meter steeplechase record, running 9 minutes, 10.76 seconds to break teammate Jenny Simpson’s mark of 9:12.50, set in 2009.
“There were many moments that I didn’t believe in myself, and I didn’t believe I would be in one piece in 2016,” Coburn told The Denver Post. “It was definitely one of the hardest things I’ve been through. To get through it on the other side, feeling stronger than I ever have before, is such a blessing. It makes me appreciate this so much more because I couldn’t have predicted this would have happened a couple of months ago.”
All she had hoped to do Saturday was go under 9:20.
“I wanted to just kind of get my get my feet wet and have a nice entry into the steeple, but I wasn’t anticipating an American record today at all,” she said.
Coburn first went under Simpson’s mark in 2014 during a Diamond League meet in Glasgow, Scotland. But USA Track and Field, the American governing body for the sport, ruled in 2015 that her mark of 9:11.42 wouldn’t be ratified as a record because Coburn didn’t take a drug test after her race — a requirement for a record to be deemed official. She had finished second in the race, hadn’t known the rule and wasn’t drug-tested.
This time, Coburn wasn’t going to make the same mistake. She sought a drug test on her own (she wasn’t required to get one, though she said the meet director had arranged for one anyway after the record). Long after the race and interviews, Coburn found her teammate Simpson getting a massage after her own race. Simpson leapt, gave Coburn a hug and told her how proud she was of her.
Read more: Colorado runner Emma Coburn sets American record in steeplechase | Denver Post