Running News Daily

After struggling with fatigue last year Amy Cragg is focused on making the olympic team

With seven weeks until the Olympic Marathon Trials, the defending women’s champion, Amy Cragg, is training well and putting in hundreds of miles in the mountains of Colorado. Despite a rough year in 2019, she expects to contend for a spot on the Olympic team bound for Tokyo. It would be her third Olympic team.

After the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, Cragg, who turns 36 next week, sat down with her husband, Alistair Cragg, and her coach, Jerry Schumacher, to talk about her future.

The results of that conversation: They decided everything in her training would be geared toward making the Games in 2020, even though she briefly considered stopping her career then.

“I’m still around,” she told Runner’s World.

Cragg had a spectacular seven-month stretch between 2017 and 2018. In August 2017, she won the bronze medal at the world championships in London. The following February at the Tokyo Marathon, she finished third in 2:21:42. It was a a PR by almost six minutes, and the performance put her fifth on the U.S. all-time list.

She was announced as part of the Chicago Marathon field for 2018 but withdrew with an injury. In 2019, she raced only twice on the roads and both times the results were disappointing. She was seventh in 1:13:27 at the Prague Half Marathon in April, after previously hinting she might attempt to break Molly Huddle’s American record in the event (1:07:25). In August, she struggled at the Beach to Beacon 10K in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, finishing 14th in 34:40. After that, she withdrew from the 2019 Chicago Marathon.

“It was just overall fatigue,” Cragg said. “I think we just went too hard for too long. I ‘cooked myself’ is what I’ll say. Took some time off when we realized it wasn’t coming around for Chicago. Now I’m feeling a lot better and ready to go.”

Cragg said she went through a period of weeks when she felt tired and worn down, but then she would have glimmers of hope in strong workouts and think she needed to “keep plugging away.” After Beach to Beacon, she realized her fatigue was getting worse instead of better and decided she shouldn’t attempt Chicago.

She took a full three weeks with no running—and followed that up with about a month and a half of slowly building into full training again. At times, she worried her career was ending.

“You talk to any distance runner, you go through those ups and downs regularly,” she said. “It’s like you just can’t seem to get out of the slump. You don’t know whether to push harder or let go. I’ve been used to it over the years. But there was definitely still that fear that I might have overdone it; I’d hope it’s not undoable.”