By the time the women’s 5,000-meter race at the 2019 NCAA championships began, it was 94 degrees in Austin, Texas. Chris Miltenberg remembers the sun shining at an aggressive angle at the track in the late afternoon, making it even hotter.
“Just brutal,” Miltenberg recalled to USA TODAY Sports five years later.
He wasn’t worried, though. The former Stanford coach, now at North Carolina, knew that Fiona O’Keeffe, even as a northern California runner, became better as the conditions worsened.
“This is suited for her because it's going to be really fricking hard and she's tougher than most people,” Miltenberg said. “And I think she was going to be in the top three that day for sure.”
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For the first half of the race, O’Keeffe hovered in fourth to sixth place. She waited to make her move. But then she fell. The ESPN broadcast didn’t show it because they aired another interview during the race, but O’Keeffe was out of the lead pack by the time the cameras cut back to the action on the track. She battled to finish seventh.
“I think that it’s been long enough that the sting has worn off some from that one,” O’Keeffe said during a media roundtable in April. “But I did go into that race thinking I had a shot of getting on the podium and maybe even winning. So that definitely was a little fire for a while.
“But yeah, I’ve always tried to harness those disappointments and let them fuel me.”
They powered the American distance-runner all the way to Paris. Running her first marathon ever, O’Keeffe dominated the U.S. Olympic trials in Orlando six months ago. She crossed the finish line in 2:22:10 and set a new record in the event. O’Keeffe beat runner-up Emily Sisson by more than 30 seconds.
With some encouragement from her coaches and a trust in them and her training, O’Keeffe entered trials believing she could make the team. But she didn’t expect to win or run that time.
“I was a little surprised that I ended up by myself as far out as I did,” O’Keeffe said. “I was a little bit concerned that I went too early. I didn’t know what was going to happen.”
It wasn’t until the final miles that she allowed herself to believe she was winning. O’Keeffe didn’t look back until she rounded the final corner.
“I just knew that I couldn’t let up,” O’Keeffe said.
She added: “Definitely seemed a little surreal, but a lot of excitement in it. I was just trying to remember, ‘OK, this is a crazy moment, but it’s also a race, and I do know how to race.’”
Before that race, O’Keeffe had little conception of setting goals. Now she has expectations for Paris, where the women’s marathon will be held Sunday, Aug. 11, the day of the closing ceremony.
“Nobody deserves it more,” Miltenberg said. “And it's funny, that's a word I'm reluctant to use because I always say in our sport, there's no such thing as 'deserves.' You put in the work to the best that you can over time and that's all that matters in the end. And you're not entitled to anything just because you've worked hard.
“Nobody has stayed the course longer, been more a testament to just consistency, steadiness and self-belief than Fiona.”
From the track to the road
In middle school, O’Keeffe said, a track coach from a nearby high school team spoke to a group of athletes and told the youngsters something along the lines of “in this room is a future Olympian.”
“I don’t know, for some reason, I always thought that could be me,” O’Keeffe said.
A lot of other kids probably thought the same thing. O’Keeffe actually did it.
“I’ve always just been competitive,” said O’Keeffe, who would race her sister on family hikes and wanted to be the fastest in her class in grade school.
O’Keeffe entered Stanford as part of a highly-touted recruiting class for distance running. Christina Aragon and Ella Donaghu, two of her closest friends, went on to have better overall college careers than her. They’re the ones who received the calls to join Nike’s professional team once their amateur careers ended.
“But Fiona was the ultimate model of consistency and dependability, and just steady year-over-year and progression over time,” Miltenberg said.
O’Keeffe joined PUMA Elite Running Team, based in North Carolina, during its infancy; she took an entry-level contract as the second female with the group. The move allows her to regularly see Miltenberg – the PUMA athletes use the Tar Heels’ facilities quite often – and they can continue their coach-pupil relationship, although Miltenberg does not coach her day-to-day.
What O’Keeffe has discovered since college is that the longer the race, the more success she has. That meant she had to transition from the track, where she thought she’d have a longer career, to the road.
The night before Olympic trials, O’Keeffe – who doesn’t believe in hoping for the best – practiced positive visualization. She woke up calm. She had nothing to lose.
“It was kind of reassuring to be in there with so many women who are so experienced at such a high level, because I felt like I was in good hands in a way,” O’Keeffe said.
The most difficult aspect for O’Keeffe that day turned out to be picking up the water cups along the course and drinking them while in stride. She’d practiced a little bit but had to watch others to figure out that the first cup is for dousing oneself over the head and the second is to imbibe.
“That’s a good idea,” she thought to herself.
In Paris, O’Keeffe expects temperatures to be hot – forecasts days before the race expect the highs to hit 90 degrees that Sunday. O’Keeffe saw the course during the spring and said that it won’t be conducive to any record-breaking times. She’ll be trying to give the USA a second straight podium in the women’s marathon after Molly Seidel won bronze at the Tokyo Games three years ago.
O’Keeffe wants to run every major marathon across the world. She also said she hopes her career will bring her back to the track. She has designs on running the 5,000- and 10,000-meter races in the future, which would give the mild-mannered runner another shot at redemption on the national (or perhaps even international) stage following her fall under the blazing sun in 2019.
Most people would have not stayed in that race after going down, Miltenberg said.
“That right there sums up who she is … (others) would've either dropped out or just jogged around and finished last and gotten the sympathy clap on the way in,” he said.
Not O’Keeffe.
“She's not going to walk in a room and be the most outspoken, loud person,” Miltenberg said. “But underneath all of that, when the gun goes off, she believes in herself.”
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