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When it comes to American running royalty, Jenny Simpson is in a class all by herself.
For more than a dozen years, she was one of the top middle-distance runners in the world, first competing in the 3,000-meter steeplechase in the world championships and the Olympics while running for the University of Colorado, then becoming a top tier competitor in the 1,500-meter run as a professional runner. She won the world championship in the 1,500-meter in 2011 as a first-year pro, then won two world championship silver medals and an Olympic bronze medal over the next six years.
On February 3, when she toes the starting line at the U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon in Orlando, Florida, the 11-time U.S. champion will be a bit out of her element. Not only has the 37-year-old Simpson never run a marathon before, she’s only raced a half marathon once. In fact, she’s never run beyond 24 miles.
“It will be my debut in the marathon and the longest run in my life,” Simpson said with a laugh, from her home near Boulder, Colorado. “All of it is a bit weird to me, and it’s kind of an extreme exercise in faith, you know?”
The top three women in the race will earn a spot on the U.S. team that will compete in the marathon in the Paris Olympics on August 11. Simpson and those closest to her admit her lack of experience in the marathon make her a dark horse, especially considering the Olympic Trials field might have the best collection of American women ever assembled. But if you’ve witnessed the fierce competitiveness she’s exhibited throughout her career, you know it would be foolish to count her out.
“I don’t think I have any advantage, but if there’s anything that I bring to the table, it’s that I just love racing,” she says. “Thinking about race day might be intimidating because it’s something I’ve never done before—I don’t know what it’ll feel like when we’re two hours into it—but I love being competitive. So as far as getting to the starting line goes, I’ll be there and I’ll be ready to race.”
A New Beginning
Simpson could have easily given up two years ago after a challenging series of events rocked her world. In the summer of 2021, she had a hard time regaining her form after a year away from racing during the COVID shutdown. As a result, she finished a distant 10th place in the 1,500-meter final of the U.S. Olympic Trials in Eugene, marking the first time in her career—a remarkable span of 15 years—that she failed to earn a spot on the U.S. team for the ensuing Olympics or world championships.
In a surprise move, she ran the U.S. 10-mile championships on the roads that fall and finished second to marathoner Nell Rojas, one bright spot in what was otherwise the only lackluster season of her career.
Then, a few months later, on December 30, 2021, a devastating wildfire destroyed 1,000 homes near Boulder and narrowly missed the restored early 1900s schoolhouse Simpson and her husband, Jason, had purchased two years earlier. Their home miraculously survived, but they were displaced for several months while smoke remediation and repairs were being completed.
Two days after the fire, her contract with longtime partnership with New Balance expired, leaving her without a sponsor for the 2022 season, and her health insurance with the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee was terminated because she hadn’t met the performance criteria to maintain it. Then, after experiencing pelvic pain while training in the early days of January, doctors diagnosed her with a stress reaction in her right hip.
Reduced to cross-training in the pool and on a bike, it all took a huge mental, emotional, and physical toll. Although she was 35 and knew her days of running fast 1,500-meter times on the track were probably behind her, the competitive fire that fueled her to success on the track still burned inside. Retirement was not an option.
Simpson and longtime coaches Heather Burroughs and Mark Wetmore knew she could still be fast enough to compete with the best in the U.S. in the 5,000 or 10,000 meters on the track and aim for the 2022 world championships in Eugene, Oregon, but her difficulty to regain speed in 2021 and a series of injuries gave them pause. That led her to taking an entirely different approach to training and setting her sights on the marathon.
“There was a moment where I thought, ‘Do I want to do something entirely different?’” Simpson recalls. “I just needed a break from beating my head against the wall trying to be a four-minute miler. And so when I did the 10-mile championships, that was really the beginning of this long transition to the marathon.”
Making Transformational Changes
Simpson has been doing fast weekly long runs—typically in the 14- to 16-mile range—as part of her track training for 20 years. But to become a proficient and fluid long-distance road runner, she has had to go through quite a metamorphosis.
Whereas she typically ran about 70 miles per week when competing on the track, she’s been topping out at 100 miles per week for much of the past two years. She’s no longer doing the same kind of speed workouts she did in the past, but instead, her coaches assigned longer intervals and sustained tempo-paced efforts geared toward the marathon. She still does plenty of strength work every week, but not the explosive drills she regularly did to hone her powerful finishing kick down the homestretch of the track.
Simpson has put in a lot of work, and she’s made significant progress over the past two years, even though her chance to run her first marathon was derailed by another early injury last year.
“I don’t know what it’ll feel like when we’re two hours into it—but I love being competitive.”
“She’s got so much will and talent that goes beyond her mitochondria, or her actual running ability,” Burroughs says. “It’ll be intriguing for all of us to see what she can do. It’s a big unknown for anyone, but for someone with her background on the track, it’s a bigger unknown. But she’s really dug her teeth into it, and she’s done a lot of things very well. No matter what happens, she’s thoroughly impressed me with how she’s transitioned to this type of training.”
Simpson has benefited from having a built-in training partner, trusted advisor and race-day pacer in Jason, who’s run 10 marathons over the past decade, including a 2:18:44 personal best that qualified him for the 2020 U.S. Olympic Trials Marathon in Atlanta. He’s not only been able to answer her questions and reassure her when she’s had doubts, but he’s run alongside her for countless training runs and paced her stride-for-stride when she ran her half marathon debut (1:10:35, or 5:23 mile pace) in Houston last January.
While making the leap to the marathon has been the equivalent of “transitioning to a different sport,” he thinks the grit and resilience she honed as a track athlete has paid dividends in this new phase of her career. “I think she is as resilient as she’s ever been, and that’s one thing that’s critical to being a marathoner,” he says. “She’s had several training cycles, several years to get herself ready for this, and now that she’s been healthy since the spring, we’re really pleased with the transformation she’s made. I’m super excited to see how all that translates and how she’s able to execute on race day. I think she’ll be competitive and be in the mix.”
For Simpson, racing in Orlando is a return to her roots. She grew up 20 minutes away in Oviedo—in 2018 her high school renamed its track in her honor—and will have the on-course support of dozens of friends, high school teammates, coaches, and others who played a role at the start of her running journey.
But make no mistake—this isn’t a farewell tour. Simpson hasn’t been training for the marathon just to keep hanging around.
“I think everybody who loves me and cares about me at some point said, ‘Oh, she just can’t let this go.’ And I just felt so strongly the last few years, it’s not that I can’t let it go, it’s that I know I still have something to give,” she says. “It’s not over yet. I’m not holding onto this for dear life because I have nothing else to do. In fact, there are big things in life I am really looking forward to when my running career is over. But I know I have more to give, and I really want it to be in the marathon.”
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‘I’m Not Afraid of the Unknown’
After years of racing the 1,500 meters against the world’s best, can Simpson make the U.S. Olympic team in the marathon?
Few middle-distance runners have been able to make that leap so profoundly, although New Zealand’s Rod Dixon famously won the 1983 New York City Marathon and finished 10th in the 1984 Olympic marathon a decade after he had won a bronze medal in the 1,500 at the 1972 Olympics.
The biggest unknowns for Simpson are how her body will feel and perform running just below the red line deep into the race, and how well she can offset glycogen depletion with on-course fueling. That’s something she never worried about during her 15-mile long runs, and she says she consumed only one gel during her half marathon last year.
She’s been practicing taking in carbohydrate-rich fluids and gels during long, simulated race efforts for the past year, but how her body adapts on the fly is undoubtedly still the biggest question mark as she heads to Orlando.
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Although the physical aspects of racing a marathon will be entirely new to her, she’s banking on her ability to maintain a positive mental outlook and capitalize on her well-honed racing skills.
“I can close my eyes and imagine being in third place with two miles to go and knowing you have to keep running hard because someone is coming,” says Simpson, who signed with Puma in late 2022 and will be racing in the brand’s new Fast-R Nitro Elite 2 shoes. “That’s the easiest scenario to think about because it’s so obvious. But I probably spend as much time or more thinking: There are eight miles to go, and you’re in 12th place. How do you want to finish?”
Aside from that, she’ll be racing against a stellar Olympic Trials women’s field that includes 173 runners, a dozen of whom have run 2:25 or faster. Among the favorites are Emily Sisson (2:18:29), the American record-holder, Keira D’Amato (2:19:12), the former American record-holder, Betsy Saina (2:21:40), who was fifth at the Tokyo Marathon last March, Sara Hall (2:22:10), who was fifth at the world championships in 2022, Molly Seidel (2:23:07), the Olympic bronze medalist in 2021, and Aliphine Tuliamuk (2:24:37), the 2020 U.S. Olympic Trials champion.
Simpson is excited to see how she measures up in a new event against women she’s never raced. She’s appreciative of the tradition and legacy of the marathon, as well as the congenial nature of long-distance runners—something that doesn’t exist amid the feisty intensity of the middle-distance runners on the track. More than anything, she’s grateful to be running at a high level again with an opportunity to be competitive.
“I’m not afraid of the unknown,” Simpson says. “People talk a lot about being afraid of the unknown, and there’s some uncertainty that is frightening for sure. If I knew how it would turn out, I don’t think I would’ve worked as hard. But what else is there to live for? What does tomorrow hold? To me, that’s why you wake up and you do the work the next day. That’s what it’s all about, and that’s the attitude I’m taking into this race.”
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