The track prodigy made it to world championships at 17 and joined Nike’s Oregon Project. At 29, Cain is detailing the hellish years under coach Alberto Salazar in her new memoir
“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.
