Jenny Simpson refuses to come out and say she’s training for a marathon. But all signs point to her training for a marathon.
This weekend, she’ll race the Army 10 Miler in Washington, D.C. She’s consistently running the highest mileage of her life (85 miles per week). And she has a new sponsor, Puma.
“It’s correct that my emphasis is on the roads,” she said on an October 6 call with Runner’s World. “These next few years is an exploration in the distances and some of the challenges in running that I haven’t tried yet. That’s what I’m most excited about.”
Simpson, 36, has been a stalwart on the track since she was in college at the University of Colorado, going to Europe every summer and building her training around Olympics and World Championships cycles. Between 2011 and 2017, she won four global medals: a gold and two silvers in the World Championships 1500 meters, and Olympic bronze in the same event.
Through 2019, she made every U.S. team going back to 2007. But the pandemic put a sudden halt to that streak. In 2021, she made the finals of the 1500 meters at the Olympic Trials for the postponed Games in Tokyo, but she finished 10th.
“I had such an incredible run on the track,” Simpson said. “And then, just like a lot of people starting in 2020, the vision that I had for those next few years of my career got derailed.”
That fall, she began her transition to the roads, racing the Cherry Blossom 10-miler and finishing second in a sprint finish to Nell Rojas. But at the end of the year, Simpson’s life was upended.
Simpson suffered a stress reaction in her right hip, which took a long time to heal. She was diagnosed with a sports hernia in one of her adductor muscles, which pulled tissue away from one of the pubic bones. “A lovely place to be injured and have people poking and prodding,” Simpson said.
It was by far the most serious injury of her career, but she was able to avoid surgery with hours of physical therapy, working on her adductors, hamstrings, core, and glutes—anything near the hips. When she returned to running, she had several months of stopping and starting until she was finally pain-free.
At the same time, she learned that her future with New Balance—the company that had sponsored her since the beginning of 2010—was not secure.
And then on December 30, 2021, a wildfire broke out close to Simpson’s home, an old schoolhouse in South Boulder, Colorado, that she shares with her husband, Jason, and their dog. They had to flee with little warning. Most of the Simpsons’ immediate neighbors lost their homes, and entire neighborhoods in the bordering towns of Louisville and Superior were destroyed. The couple was displaced for three months while damage was repaired.
“So many things in my life were disrupted at the same time,” she said. “Between the fire and no longer having a sponsor and an injury, all those things swallowed up the first half of my 2022.”
By late spring, things were starting to come around. The Simpsons were back in their home. Her injury was healing. And sponsors were still interested. Simpson, who had represented herself for years, enlisted an agent, Hawi Keflezighi, to help her with a new shoe deal.
“Parting ways with New Balance will be one of the great heartbreaks of my life,” she said. “It was really hard. I didn’t want to make a change. But life is full of surprises. The change to doing a different event felt like this is going to give me some new energy and a new scene. Now that I’m on the other side of a contract with a new brand, I feel very much the same way. Puma believed in what I want to do. That’s really invigorating.”
Puma has made a substantial investment in American women’s distance running over the past two years. The company has added marathoners Molly Seidel, Annie Frisbie, and Dakotah Lindwurm to its roster, and funds a Puma training group with Fiona O’Keeffe and others in North Carolina. But it’s not just 20-somethings. They’ve also signed track runner turned marathoner Sara Vaughn, and now Simpson.
To be clear, Simpson doesn’t intend to just dabble in the roads. She wants to be excellent. And that’s the only thing that’s keeping her from saying “yes,” she’s doing a marathon.
“I will do one if I believe I can be competitive at it,” she said. “We don’t have enough information yet to know if I’ll be really good at it. I have the desire to do it, if my body and mind can handle it.”
Simpson is relishing the chance to reimagine what the end of her career might look like. For a long time, she said, she laser focused on the 1500 meters (and yes, she still spikes up for track workouts). “I’ve been one thing, a very good one thing, for a long time,” she said.
But now it’s time to try something different. She sees American marathoners running well into their late 30s, and doing it after having children, and she realizes she has to adjust her own thinking about what’s possible.
“This new wave of women racing later and having families and racing competitively at the same time, I feel like people just don’t remember how much of a zero option that was when I was younger,” she said. “And it’s not just the world is progressing. I have to progress. I don’t have to just pack it in.”
Simpson said she wants to show that she can try to be good at something else.
“I don’t know if I’m going to be great at the marathon,” she said, “but I really want to try.”
Sarah Lorge Butler is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World since 2005. She is the author of two popular fitness books, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!
