“As someone who has lost touch with reality, I like to hold a firm grasp on it now,” Mary Cain says while we walk through a palm-tree spotted campus in California.
She’s telling me why she insisted she write her own memoir, This is Not About Running, without ceding the narrative to a ghostwriter, as happens with many athletes. “My story is so complicated … there are so many bad actors that I think it forces the reader to embrace nuance, and I don’t think you see that very often.”
At 29, Mary Cain is a decade removed from her experience as the United States’ highest hope for a middle-distance track star since Mary Decker smashed women’s world records up and down the stat sheet in the 1970s and 80s.
Cain set four different national high school records as a teen, and as a 17-year old made the world championships in the 1500m, finishing 10th in a field of pros. But instead of heading to college to run D-1, she was contacted by Alberto Salazar, a famed running coach at Nike’s Oregon Project, who convinced her to give up college track and go pro, with him.
What followed was, as she describes it in her memoir, a hellish four years for Cain during which, she says, Salazar became emotionally abusive. Cain details a coach who was obsessed with Cain’s weight, isolated her from her own parents, sent her to a sports “psychologist” who was not credentialed, and ignored her clear signs of suicidal ideation, disordered eating, and self-harm (Salazar has denied any wrongdoing and he and Nike settled a lawsuit brought by Cain in 2023 alleging the abuse).
While the media wondered what happened to Cain as her times got slower – assuming she’d lost her world-class talent because, as the stereotype goes, female runners flame out once they get hips – as she tells it, she was lucky to make it out alive.
The Cain who walks me through Stanford’s picturesque campus on an early spring day in Palo Alto, California, is almost unrecognizable from the young woman in the pages of her book, or the New York Times op-ed video in 2019 that gave her national exposure after she claimed Salazar was an abusive coach.
The second-year med student scootered across campus to meet me, wearing a bow in her long golden-brown hair, a flippy red skirt, and black Dr Martens boots. We go to the top floor of the building so she can show me the gym she goes to between classes. “I like to look out that window while I do squats,” she says, pointing at the view of the distant Santa Cruz mountains.
The day before, she’d taken a five-hour long exam – it’s finals week – but after, instead of going home to rest or study more, she met up with friends to watch Bridgerton. Staying up late and socializing instead of obsessing over school is a sign, she says, of her own growth. “I just think it’s really important to learn from what I went through and make sure that I never get sucked into the idea that this is everything, again.”
In This is Not About Running, Cain describes in an immersive present-tense her years as a teen phenom who says she was forced into an extremely unhealthy mentality. The tale begins, surprisingly, not with Salazar, but with a high school coach and teammates (and their parents) who bullied and ostracized Cain for her talent. When Salazar called, offering to start training her when she was just 16, she gladly dove in for a change of scenery.
At Nike, Cain describes a team of people who seem to have been fully aware of Salazar’s tactics but allowed them to flourish.
She writes scenes in which the performance coach for the Nike Oregon Project, who she was told was a sports psychologist, allegedly ordered Cain to toughen up when she revealed she was cutting herself. Salazar’s boss and the then vice-president of marketing also allegedly told Cain cutting her hair would help her lose weight but he wouldn’t let her, because then she would “not look good”, and that she needed a different bra because everyone could see how huge her breasts were. The woman who measured her body fat percentage asked Cain to submerge herself in water for at least 30 seconds four different times, because Salazar wanted the most accurate reading possible, and ignored her pleas that she felt panicked under the water.
Her teammates, she writes, were just as ungenerous. Once, on the way to training, one took a phone call while she sobbed in the backseat of the car on the way to a training run because she was suicidal, another described her depressive episodes as “acting like a child”.
Cain left the Nike Oregon Project in 2016 while suicidal, self-harming regularly and suffering from a severe eating disorder, but she spent the next three years thinking: “I hope Alberto still loves me … I am the failure. I was bad. I was fat.”
From there to here has been a long journey of healing mind and body. She kept running in those first years after leaving Nike, and kept getting injured. “I was still so deeply depressed and confused about my body.” The stress fractures common among women athletes who have experienced disordered eating and underfueling while overtraining (medically known as Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, or Reds) were one culprit, but there was another, more mysterious ailment, too. Cain’s lower right leg and foot were experiencing numbness that got increasingly worse if she ran for too long, and eventually, even after walking shorter distances.
The narrative that Cain had been saddled with by the media and her coaches as a phenom was a familiar one for a young woman runner: that her career could end at any moment from injury, puberty, or burnout. “That really gets in your head and I think it really damaged me more in the years where I was going through this really chaotic physical health issue where I couldn’t feel my leg,” she says. “I was desperate not to fulfill this prophecy.”
Then, in 2019, the United States Anti-Doping Agency released a 270-page report on Salazar that ultimately banned him from track for doping violations for four years.
Cain read the entire report in one sitting, and finally realized Salazar had not been honest with her about certain medications she had seen him give other athletes, like L-carnitine infusions in higher than allowed doses. The report also cited him for trafficking testosterone and attempting to tamper with doping results. It made her think about the thyroid medication and diuretics she says he often pushed on her.
The lightbulb went on: her coach, whom she was desperate to please between the age of 16 to 20, had not been who she thought he was. Weeks later, while texting Alexi Pappas, an Olympian and friend, about processing all of this news, Pappas sends her the contact information for a New York Times editor, who says she could write something up. Within hours, the editor asks Cain to come to the offices, where they shot a video of her describing her experience with Salazar.
Within days, Cain’s op-ed went live and lit the running world on fire. “The New York Times piece was almost more of a start versus an end,” she says.