At 16, Mary Cain was pulverizing decades-old school and age-group track records. She was, as this week’s headline on her New York Times video op-ed put it, “the Fastest Girl in America.”
The rest of that headline: “Until I joined Nike.”
Now 23 and long absent from the elite running scene, Cain has cited Nike’s Oregon Project, the training system of recently banned coach Alberto Salazar, as emotionally and physically abusive. His emphasis on weight loss, she said, led to low bone density that caused five broken bones. She didn’t get her period for three years and battled suicidal thoughts.
Should we have seen this coming? On Feb. 18, 2013, Cain, then a high school junior in the New York City suburban of Westchester, set high school and under-age-20 records in a single race, the women’s mile at New York’s Millrose Games. That came just three weeks after she shattered a high school mile mark that had existed for 41 years, and three weeks after she crushed a 35-year-old high school two-mile record by a disorienting 17 seconds.
There were 44 events that night in the world’s oldest and most prestigious indoor meet, mostly featuring professionals and experienced collegians, but it was the spindly 5-foot-6 Cain—including her long ponytail, she was barely more than 100 pounds—who stole the show.
She was bound for Olympic glory, already appearing fearsome on the sport’s horizon. She was still 18 months from taking her driving test, already a running prodigy. And yet, in covering that event, I was compelled to include this paragraph:
Some veteran observers and coaches worry that Cain might be experiencing a case of too-much-too-soon, as if she were trying to play the One Minute Waltz in 30 seconds. There are too many tales of promising young careers knocked out of orbit by injury, over-training, eating disorders and the complications of maturing bodies.
And here we are. In the Times op-ed, Cain said Salazar, three times New York City Marathon champion in the early 1980s and mentor of 2012 Olympic gold (Britain’s Mo Farah) and silver (American Galen Rupp) medalists at 5,000 meters, was “constantly trying to get me to lose weight.”
Known for pushing limits with his own training, Salazar last month was handed a four-year ban by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency for “multiple anti-doping rule violations” he had pressed on his athletes (though none of his charges were named or penalized). His skeleton key for opening the door to success was turning Cain into a skeleton, demanding she become “thinner and thinner and thinner,” she said. She found herself “just trying to survive.”
In 2015, two years after joining the Oregon Project, she returned home to New York and enrolled at Fordham University.
When she had burst onto the track scene as a high school junior, Cain appeared thoroughly self-assured. She recounted how, at 10, she had been a competitive swimmer who wanted to follow Michael Phelps’ watery path to the Olympics. Her event was the butterfly until a sixth-grade after-school track program hooked her and, the first time she was timed in the mile, ran a startling 5:47, an age-group performance that would leave any of track’s stopwatch-loving crowd misty-eyed and weak-kneed.
She met Salazar at the 2012 Olympic track and field trials at the University of Oregon—Salazar’s alma mater and near his Portland home—when she advanced to the 800-meter quarterfinals. She had Just turned 16. Salazar immediately arranged to coach her long-distance, from her home’s opposite coast, and quickly fashioned training specifics for her final two high school years.
One tactic was an attention to her “core strength,” recognizing the torso is the body’s center of power. Another was to have her train wearing a contraption called “ShoulderBack,” a harness to promote ideal posture.
When Cain chose to turn professional rather than run collegiately upon high school graduation, it was a decision many of the running community questioned. She enrolled at the University of Portland to be near Salazar’s training base, but insisted that “to be completely consumed by track might be a little bit out of my comfort zone.” She said she wanted to have college friends “who are less track-y.” But she also said she “totally won’t have a roommate, because I sleep in an altitude tent,” one of those newly-fashionable athletic accessories to enhance the body’s production of more red blood cells, boosting endurance.
She also said then, in the midst of posting times she never again achieved with the Oregon Project, “At this point, I just kind of roll with it. I don’t really know what to expect these next few years. And I kind of like that. I kind of like it being a little bit of a mystery. For me and for everybody.”