NAZ Elite’s Tyler Day talks about his three-year ordeal dealing with Achilles tendon surgeries, his doubts and fears, and hopes for the future
The young man with the scruffy beard and flaming red hair out by the mailboxes on Lake Mary Road on a Tuesday morning in late February must have made quite a sight.
His run over, his first workout in about three years just completed without pain, without limping and without gnawing doubt and intrusive thoughts of existential angst interfering, Hoka NAZ Elite runner Tyler Day stood there letting the moment sink in. Day’s teammate, Krissy Gear, happened to be parked close by and saw the end of Day’s eight-mile run, an out-and-back with four easy miles, followed by a cutdown on the way back, each mile ramping up his effort: 5:48, 5:36, 5:17, 5:22.
Afterward, physically spent along the roadside, with campers and pickups and all the usual Lake Mary Road traffic whizzing past, Day was approached by Gear, who said, simply, “Good job.” Then, she drove away.
In that moment, Day sort of lost it. Emotions overwhelmed him. His face was wet. Tears, not sweat. Finally, at long last, tears of happiness, of relief, a gush of positive feelings so long suppressed came forth.
“All I remember,” Day recalls now, “is breaking down on the road by the mailboxes, just crying. I was thinking, ‘I can do this again!’”
A three-and-a-half-year ordeal, a nightmarish lifetime for any professional athlete, finally seemed to be ending. Three reconstructive Achilles tendon surgeries, the dreaded Haglund’s deformity that has dogged distance runners since, well, perhaps the time of Achilles, were behind him. Three years of wearing a boot, trying to do calf raises amid stiffness and pain, of just trying to walk normally without even a thought of running, of being an enthusiastic but reluctant support guy on a bike for his NAZ teammates during workouts, of doubting his very self-worth and reasons for even continuing on what seemed a fruitless, Sisyphean rehab journey, of thinking that, at any moment, Hoka would wise up and cut him loose from his contract – all that seemed behind him after that cutdown workout.
Tyler Day was, indeed back.
Other promising workouts soon followed. By April, Day was running six days a week. By late May, seven days.
“Dude,” Day said, blue eyes shining, “I hit 65 (miles per week) that first full week back, then had a couple of weeks of 70, last week was 80 and this week 90 miles. I’m starting workouts again. Did an 8-by-Mile workout this week at Lake Mary, running 4:55s. I can’t remember the last time I did that, except when I was wearing the blue and gold of NAU.”
His progress has been so steady that Day actually has a race schedule pending. He’ll make his comeback Aug. 31 at the George Kyte Classic cross-country race at Buffalo Park – fitting, since Day’s first high school race and first college races were at the same venue. That will be followed by the Medtronic Twin Cities 10 Mile in October, the USATF 5K Road Championships in New York in early November, followed by the Sound Running Cross Champs in Austin, Texas, the week before Thanksgiving.
“Man, I’m trying to push to do a BU (Boston University) indoor race (in winter),” he said. “It’s an ego thing, you know. My career almost ended on the track; I just can’t wait to prove it on the track again.”
If Day, who’ll be 28 in December, sounds ebullient, he has every right to be. For years, he’s been a fixture in the Flagstaff running community as an integral part of the building of the Lumberjack cross-country dynasty, winning three NCAA titles and earning All-American status. His best shot at an individual NCAA title, in the indoor 5,000 meters was cruelly snatched from his grasp on the morning of the 2020 championship meet in Albuquerque, when Covid led to its cancellation. Then, after the prolonged pandemic shutdown, Day signed with hometown NAZ Elite in August, 2020, and immediately made an impact. In his second race, in late October of that year, he ran 1:02.17 to finish third in the Michigan Pro Half Marathon, his half debut, ahead of then-teammates Scott Fauble and Rory Linkletter.
The future, then, looked as bright as Day’s signature flowing red locks.
It would all collapse, like a once-sinewy tendon turned to spaghetti, on the night of Dec. 5, 2020, at the Sound Running Track Meet at JSerra High in San Juan Capistrano. Seven kilometers into the 10K, in which runners such as Day, Joe Klecker, Pat Tiernan, Wesley Kiptoo, Alex Masai and Clayton Young all were aiming for the Olympic standard, Day was negotiating the first turn on the track, passing another runner. Klecker then passed him, yelling, “Yo, TDay, let’s go.”
Day went, full send, for maybe a stride or two. Before stepping off into the infield.
“I was like, ‘I have no power in my right ankle,’” he recalled. “I tried walking on it, and there was this fire radiating from my Achilles.”
What followed was more than three years not in hell, but purgatory, hurting but not knowing if he’d ever run competitively again. Day has always been known for his exuberance, his way with words, biting humor and hyper-literacy. In just a single 45-minute interview, he referenced Dante, Dylan Thomas and the ancient Greeks.
And, indeed, Day visited all the circles of hell during his rehab (he, tellingly, calls it his “resurrection”) but all along vowed to rage against the dying of the light.
“We’re not going gently into that good night,” he said, “We’re going to kick and scream.”
Not that there weren’t moments of doubt and sorrow, a big-time crisis of confidence from which only now he is emerging. There wasn’t one low point, but a series of them.
Times when doing a simple calf raise exercise was too daunting. Times when he’d walk haltingly on the canals near his parents’ home in Gilbert and be jealous of “hobbyjoggers” plodding along, when he’d see kids frolicking on a playground and wonder, Why can’t I have their ankles? Times when he’d feel jealous of the success of ex-NAU teammates Luis Grijalva, Abdihamid Nur and Geordie Beamish – all thriving while he was cast adrift. Times when at every NAZ Elite meeting he thought they’d call him in and not renew his contract. Times when he, frankly, was in despair.
“There was a lot of anger,” he said. “There was a lot of jealousy. There was a lot of self-loathing. There was a lot of self-pity. There was a lot of anything you could think of – that was me. There was little positivity, and if there was, it was just me trying to be a good teammate. … I’d find myself looking at old NAU videos (of races), thinking it would pump me up, but it only made me more sad.”
Although open about dealing with depression, Day believes he will emerge stronger from the experience. He’s not at all religious and is nothing if not pragmatic and blunt, but the ordeal has made him better – not just as an athlete, but a human being.
“If there’s anyone I need to talk to about purgatory, it should be Dante,” he said, laughing. “I mean, this shit sucks. But now, when I toe the line, I know I’m a mentally tougher athlete, from all the crap I’ve been through. I’m not saying other people haven’t had been injuries, but I don’t know anyone else who had three Achilles surgeries and (1) had a shoe company that still kept them; and (2) had a coaching staff that still believed in him; and (3) was able to resurrect a career.
“That’s not me blowing my own horn; I’ve done research and found no one like that.”
Truly, a new Day is dawning.
Looking back at the dark days, though, is not wallowing. People, Day included, need to know the hard times to appreciate any good times that might be forthcoming. So, to fully understand the severity of his Achilles injury and the painful rehab journey, it takes some dwelling.
You might think it all started at that Dec. 5 meet in San Juan Capistrano. But, in hindsight, Day realizes the genesis may have been as far back as January and his final indoor track season at NAU.
Day, a fifth-year senior for indoor track in 2020, had a breakout season. He ran 13:16.95 in the 5,000 at the Terrier Classic on Jan. 24, an NCAA best at that time. He also ran 7:45.70 for 3,000 indoors a month later in Boston. Day, Grijalva, Nur and Beamish were gearing up for the NCAA Indoors finals in mid-March, with hopes of securing NAU’s first men’s indoor title.
That was when the right ankle soreness first reared itself. Nothing serious, just a niggle. Day didn’t think much of it.
“When I competed, it (the soreness) somehow went away,” Day said. “But when I stopped, I was constantly sore.”
He kept running with the soreness because, well, that’s the single-minded way Day was. Covid had shut everything down – Day couldn’t do rehab at NAU because the facilities were closed – and Day “chilled” in Gilbert at his parents’ house, wondering about his future. He recalled that, on the drive back from Albuquerque he and Beamish, both seniors, were commiserating in the back of the van when NAU associate coach Jarred Cornfield looked at his phone up front and called back to them, “My phone is blowing up with agents wanting to represent you guys.”
Great, Day thought, but shoe companies and teams were locked down, like every other business. No one was signing new athletes; in fact, some had shed runners. Day got an agent – Stephen Haas – and waited. Eventually, Hoka and On brands made inquiries. Beamish went with On, starting a new team in Colorado, and Day stayed in Flagstaff and signed with NAZ Elite.
“During Covid, I do believe Hoka took a chance and an investment in me at a time when shoe companies weren’t doing that,” Day said. “I remember talking with Mike (Smith, NAU’s head coach) and he said, ‘Don’t go pro unless they give you an offer you can’t refuse. And I talked with (Hoka’s director of global sports marketing) Mike McManus and he gave me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
That lingering right ankle soreness? Pshaw! Nothing to fret about.
Eventually, Covid restrictions lifted and Day’s dream of becoming a pro runner came to pass. His first race was running the first leg (10K) of the Michigan Pro Ekiden with a time of 28:46, giving NAZ Elite a 12-second lead. A week later is when he ran the 1:02 half marathon.
Day already had the Olympic standard in the 5,000 from his collegiate times, but he wanted to secure the 10,000 standard as well. He seemed primed. At the team’s final workout before the race, a session in Camp Verde that included 1K repeats, a 5K time trial, followed by 600 (-meter) repeats, Day crushed the 5K in 14:02.
“And I broke away from my teammates,” he recalled, wistfully. “I felt strong, but my ankle was weird — if I was working out, the niggles went away, but when I stopped, it was constantly sore.”
Driving back to Flagstaff from Orange County the day after the Dec. 5 race, Day’s right ankle was “swollen up like a grapefruit.” Still, he didn’t think it was a ruptured Achilles. He waited another couple months, taking time off to heal, and did another workout in Camp Verde with the team in April, 2021.
“It was K repeats (kilometer) and I was struggling to hit the times, times I should’ve been hitting consecutively without breaks,” he said. “My ankle got worse with each step to the point where I couldn’t even do the cooldown it stung so much.”
An MRI confirmed a seven-millimeter partial tear “running north to south, fortunately,” Day said, meaning vertically. He spent three months in a boot, but then two surgeons told him he had Haglund’s Deformity (an enlargement of the posterosuperior calcaneus bone leading to irritation or tearing of the bursa and Achilles tendon) and recommended surgery. He had an arthroscopic procedure in Mesa on Sept. 21, 2021, by a surgeon who had earlier repaired Haglund’s in a Nike Bowerman Elite runner.
“I’m thinking one-and-done with the surgery,” Day said. “It’s like the Tommy John (baseball pitcher) surgery for runners, only getting better. It was my first surgery ever – I never even had my wisdom teeth out. I asked the surgeon when I could come back, and he said, ‘You’ll know.’ Well, I’ve never had Achilles surgery, so how was I to know? I came back pretty quick and was doing workouts.”
Quick was relative. Day began doing workout again with NAZ Elite in March, 2022, as executive director Ben Rosario handed over coaching duties to Alan Culpepper.
“Second track workout, I was hitting my times,” he said. “Great! But then, on the other side of my calcaneus (the inside), it was feeling exactly like the other side of it did before. Pain.”
For his second surgery, Day sought noted Bay Area sports orthopedist Amol Saxena, who has treated runners such as Jacob Ingebrigtsen, Matt Centrowitz, Cam Levins and repaired Galen Rupp’s Haglund’s Deformity. He went under the knife – no mere arthroscope this time – early in 2023.
Day, between bites of his burrito at lunch, reeled off highlights of his second surgery and rehab in rapid-fire fashion, as if being a TV play-by-play commentator (Day was, after all, a journalism major at NAU):
“They sliced the back of my heel open to show the tendon, then detached the tendon from my calcaneus. Then they took something — a sander, a rasper, I don’t know what, I was asleep on the table, dude — and chipped down all the bone, and they said remnants from the last surgery on my right side of the bone were there, too. They shaved down my whole calcaneus, which now looks smoother than a baby’s ass, and then slapped on my tendon and put four pins in there to make it stay in place. For the next 5 months, I didn’t walk for a month, then was on crutches, then wore a boot month and half.
“After that, I was just trying to teach myself how to do calf raises. I never thought in my life that it would be so mentally draining to do calf raises. I got mobility in my ankle again, everything was going great, except I had a hole in my heel, this little bump that wouldn’t go away. … It kept pussing, leaking out (infected). I went to urgent care they drained me, packed it. Let the wound heal, you’ll be fine. But I looked at my heel and saw legit threads there. I thought it was tendon. So, of course, curiosity killed the cat and I pulled on it and thinking, ‘Fuck, this isn’t part of my body.’ Amol said it’s a suture abrasion. He was like, just pull on it, it will come through. So I pulled on it, but it kept coming back.”
“I’d wake up in the morning and feel so bad. During that time, I was relearning how to walk and I’m seeing my teammates do what I wished I could do and it killed me – every time. I had to force myself to look in the mirror and put a smile on my face before I walked out.”
Tyler Day
Enter surgery number three this past January, again with Dr. Saxena in Palo Alto, again with the same pre-op and surgical team. Before they put Day under, again, he joked to the medical professionals, “I hope I never see you again.”
“(Saxena) went in there and cut out a ball of sutures – a ball,” Day said, wadding up his napkin as if to provide a visual. “He said he’d never seen this before, it’s never happened to him.”
Throughout his prolonged convalescence, Day dutifully did his rehab and rode a bike on Lake Mary Road following teammates, sometimes filming them for social-media purposes. He had mixed feelings – grateful that NAZ Elite didn’t cut him loose, despondent over his bum Achilles.
“My coaches and teammates have expressed gratitude for that, but to be completely honest, I hated doing that,” he said. “I’d wake up in the morning and feel so bad. During that time, I was relearning how to walk and I’m seeing my teammates do what I wished I could do and it killed me – every time. I had to force myself to look in the mirror and put a smile on my face before I walked out. Each time, whenever I got out of a meeting with the coaches, I was like, ‘Is this where they’re going to cut me?’ No, they were just checking in to see how I was feeling.”
Day comes off as an upbeat, positive soul. But these were dark times.
He went to not one but two therapists to deal with the stress of not running and the stress of contemplating life without running – should he not be able to resume elite training. His depression hit its peak after the second surgery, he said. He felt guilty that he was still with NAZ Elite and felt the axe would fall at any time. (For the record, Rosario said: “There was no thought of not offering Tyler another contract at the end of 2023. He had worked so hard, and the company had invested so much, we/they were determined to see it through.”)
“I used to joke about it in college, that I tried hard so I wouldn’t get cut, but now, this was serious,” Day said. “I feel that if I were with any other company, I’d be in a cardboard box in downtown Flagstaff off San Francisco Street (begging). Hoka has been a great company. Although I am an asset, business-wise, for them, I’ve been treated more as a human being. They treated me better than I treated myself during that time, that’s for sure.”
In therapy, Day gained perspective. He said he’s suffered from low self-esteem throughout his life to prove he belonged as an elite runner, and the multiple surgeries threw him for a loop, a spiral of despondency.
“After the second (surgery), I learned (through therapy) that, OK, I can care about running but I need to know that the world does not revolve around me,” he said. “There are other people in my life I need to let into my life, and that running isn’t everything. It’s something. I care about it. My paychecks come from there, but I can’t be an egotistical a-hole like I once was.”
Once he finally was cleared to run and do workouts, Culpepper was long gone as coach, replaced by Jack Mullaney. Day wanted to “white-knuckle it” and try to qualify for the Olympic Trials this June, but Mullaney and Rosario put the kibosh on that.
“I was like a caged animal set free,” Day said, laughing, “and they were like, ‘You need to chill out.’”
To say Day has a greater appreciation now of life as a pro runner can be reductive, too simplistic. He knows his story is not over. Injuries and adversities beset athletes all the time. But he feels now closer than ever the being the runner he once was. He has one more year left on his contract, and he’s hoping to prove himself worthy.
“Let’s face it, after three Achilles surgeries, I’m going to have to be constantly proving myself,” he said. “I don’t want my high watermark to be what I did as an amateur; I want it to be for more. I do believe I’m finally on the path to get there.”
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