This Is Not About Running

Mary Cain's memoir opens with a defiant preface criticizing Nike's exploitation of athletes and those who monetized her pain. She states that the book is not about running but about "how sports normalizes the abuse of young athletes" (1).

Cain grew up in Bronxville, New York. At 12, she was already one of the fastest swimmers on her high school varsity team, but she discovered her extraordinary running speed during a dry-land training session and transitioned to track. Her coach, Jim Mitchell, was past 60 and had led the Bronxville program for roughly 30 years. Early signs of his troubling behavior emerged: He had girls prop their legs on his lap for spike-taping, engaged teenagers in conversations about sex, and punished Cain for choosing swimming over cross-country by refusing to acknowledge her in hallways for months.

As Cain became one of the country's fastest high school runners, Mitchell pitted teammates against one another and lied at an awards ceremony, describing Cain's performance but giving the honor to another girl. A toxic parent culture festered. Teammates Brittney and Chloe and their parents directed hostility at Cain. Brittney screamed in Cain's face at practice while Mitchell watched without intervening, and the bullying spread into school hallways. Despite this, Cain won a Class C state championship as a freshman and later the state championship outright, setting a state record in the 1500m.

The hostility escalated. Chloe's mother stepped onto the cross-country course as Cain passed her daughter, two years in a row. When Cain's six varsity teammates refused to race at a regional qualifier, Cain raced alone and qualified for Nationals. After a confrontation, she screamed at Mitchell for the first time, calling out years of bullying. He told her she was "the problem." She left the track in tears, vowing never to return to the girls' team.

Mitchell arranged for the boys' coach to take Cain on, and she thrived. But Mitchell told a reporter Cain chose to leave, a narrative that haunted her career. The school acknowledged the bullying but called Mitchell "a work in progress." When the boys' head and assistant coaches and a local pro coach all declined to coach her, the pro coach citing fear of losing donations from Bronxville parents, Cain was left without a coach.

While Cain was still a high school junior, her mother asked Cain whom she would want as a coach if she could have anyone. Cain named Alberto Salazar, the legendary Nike Oregon Project coach and three-time New York City Marathon winner. To her astonishment, Alberto called the family, visited their home, told Cain she could be the greatest of all time, and set two rules: She must work with the team's sports psychologist, Darren Treasure, and commit to a 15-year plan.

Integrating into the Nike Oregon Project (NOP), Cain encountered an insular, Alberto-centric culture. Darren told her on their first meeting that a teammate hated her because she would be Alberto's favorite, and sessions with him left Cain feeling worse, every concern redirected to one mantra: trust Alberto. Red flags about Alberto's boundaries accumulated: He entered Cain's bedroom at night while she stayed at his house on at least three occasions, accompanied her into women's restrooms for drug testing without asking a woman to chaperone, and controlled her food, counting out chips at meals and telling her to nap instead of eat. Cain began secretly stealing Clif Bars at night, eating them in the bathroom with the water running.

Cain's junior-year performances were historic. She won the US Indoor Championship mile, broke 2:00 in the 800m as the first American high school girl to do so, and at 17 became the youngest American to qualify for a Senior World Championship. A stress fracture in early 2014 revealed Alberto's priorities: He arranged an MRI through his doctor friend and told Cain she was cleared to run, but a second MRI in New York revealed a stress reaction the doctor said would have shown on the first scan. Alberto told Cain not to wear the prescribed boot.

After going pro with Nike, Cain enrolled at the University of Portland and moved to Oregon for full-time training. At the World Junior Championships, she won gold, but Alberto told her before the race that he expected her to run slow because of how heavy she looked. His obsession with her weight then escalated. He put her on a plan to cut 500 calories per day, targeting 112 to 114 pounds for her five-foot-seven frame. He weighed her in front of teammates, including male athletes, gave her laxatives and enemas, and took her to a doctor who prescribed birth control pills solely to help her lose weight. When her weight fluctuated between 113 and 119 pounds, his frustration turned to open anger.

Cain's mental health collapsed. She had breakdowns during almost every workout, collapsing on the track in tears. She began cutting herself and imagining killing herself daily. During a workout on the Nike track, she ran toward a road intending to throw herself in front of traffic; Darren pulled her back and told her to finish the workout. After cutting herself in a hotel bathroom, Cain told Alberto and Darren she wanted to kill herself. Darren sighed and said it was late. Alberto said they should go to bed.

Cain called her parents and came home. Alberto told a reporter she had "taken a leave," making the story public without her consent. A Runner's World article quoted competitors dissecting her weight; Cain cut herself after reading it. Her mother discovered Darren was not a licensed psychologist. Cain remained on the team for another year, hoping to regain Alberto's approval, but he spoke to her less. She left the NOP in summer 2016, not out of empowerment but because she believed she was "too broken to stay" (279).

In the years that followed, Cain accumulated 11 injuries between 2014 and 2023, including multiple stress fractures and an Achilles tear. In 2019, she was diagnosed with Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDs), a condition in which energy expenditure exceeds energy input, causing decreased bone density, fatigue, and loss of menstruation. She had lost her period for three and a half years.

Also in 2019, Alberto was banned from track for doping violations. Cain read the United States Anti-Doping Agency's (USADA) 270-page report and found falsehoods. For the first time, she stopped defending him. With encouragement from her friend, Olympian Alexi Pappas, Cain published an op-ed and video in the New York Times about her experience. In 2021, the US Center for SafeSport banned Alberto for life for sexual abuse of other athletes, forcing Cain to re-examine his behavior toward her, including why he entered her room at night.

After seven years of losing feeling in her foot, Cain was diagnosed with functional popliteal artery entrapment syndrome (fPAES), a condition in which an artery in the back of her leg closes during exercise. Her mother discovered the condition through online research after doctors attributed the problem to trauma. Dr. Jason T. Lee at Stanford University performed surgery, and Cain enrolled at Stanford University School of Medicine.

In her closing chapters, Cain argues that her story is not about one bad individual but about structures that enable abuse, noting that Bronxville High School named its track after Mitchell and the University of Oregon retained Alberto's photo at Hayward Field. She founded the nonprofit Atalanta NYC and advocates for systemic reform. She confronts the gap between her real self and the public narrative of her as an "abused, infantilized, cautionary tale" (313), closing with the declaration that no one can tell her story for her.