Calm down, people. Flagstaff’s Molly Seidel has not abandoned elite road marathoning and turned to the trail ultra scene.
Although, yes, it’s true, she is running The Canyons 50K on April 27 in Auburn, Calif.
When Canadian Running magazine recently “broke the story” of Seidel entering the trail race, speculation ran rampant that Seidel was trading the roads for the trails.
But as she explained to Dylan Bowman on his podcast, The Free Trail, Seidel explained that participating in The Canyons was some kind of a whim because her injured knee, which forced her out of February’s Olympic Marathon Trials, still wasn’t healed enough to get in the proper training for a spring marathon.
“Originially, dropping out of trials, my knee was really, really fucked up,” she said on the podcast. “For a while, the only thing I could do was uphill ski and climbing mountains in Europe for a few weeks. All I could do was just walk up and down mountains; I couldn’teven run yet, so I knew a spring marathon was going to be out. I know what it takes to be competitive in a road marathon nowadays and, like, it’s just not going to happen. I can’t run pain-free on straight ground early enough to make that happen. … Maybe a track 10K? It just wasn’t setting my soul on fire.”
What had set her soul on fire was watching the competitors at UTMB last summer, Flagstaff’s Jim Walmsley taking the victory, of course. UTMB told her she could qualify for one of its lower-mileage races by finishing high at The Canyons. So, Seidel put her name on the waiting list.
“My dumbass, I did not realize how big Canyons was,” she told Bowman. “… So, I accidentally signed up for Canyons. I don’t know how this is going to go. Obviously, it’s really competitive. Now, everybody’s like: Olympics to Trails! No, that was not the intention of any of this. It spiraled so quickly.
“It was actually scary to me. I had just been talking to John (Green, her coach) about … like, it’s so weird. I feel like people just find out about stuff. I can’t do anything under the radar anymore. He’s like, ‘Molly, you are being so dramatic. People do not give much of a shit about what you do.’ Then, all of a sudden, I get sent an article in Canadian Running right after I got off the wait list for the race.”
Seidel on what she witnessed at trail running’s premiere event in France last year: “It was almost like in the Wizard of Oz, when all the color gets switched on. Just like, oh my God, this is completely different than what I thought it was. Seeing the energy and how many even just normal people are doing this… with jobs and trail racing 100 miles around Mont Blanc. It took seeing it a little to realize, ‘Oh, this sport is going to take over everything.’”
In addition to taping the podcast, Seidel recently let Track All Access film her rehab routine in Flagstaff. Watch it below:
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