In his pep talk to Maggie Vessey the day before the Soquel High alumna stepped on the track to run her first 800-meter race of the 2016 U.S. Olympic Trials, coach Greg Brock told her to run it like it would be her last.
Vessey already knew it probably would be.
A series of injuries cropped up in the weeks leading up to what she hoped would be the defining race of her career. First, it hit her Achilles shortly after she ran her best race of the season at Stanford’s Payton Jordan Invitational. After she found fix for that, it hit her quadriceps. When Vessey, 34, lined up on the track at the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field for her preliminary race of the Olympic trials on July 1, it was the first time in seven weeks that she’d put on her spikes.
Considered a strong contender to reach the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, she finished last in her heat.
“When she raced at Stanford, it was one of the best races she’s done in a long, long time. A little after that, her body started coming up short,” Brock said. “It was its way of saying, ‘You can’t keep doing this.’ She’s put in 20 years on the track.”
Vessey saw the end coming five weeks earlier.
ONE SHOT
It was her first workout after a 10-day layoff to try to mend the Achilles injury. She jogged just a few steps and felt a stabbing pain shoot up her leg.
“I was in that moment and just terrified and crushed and felt like, ‘This is it. How am I going to come back from this?’” said Vessey, who had taken time out of her training to rest a calf injury earlier in the season and felt she couldn’t afford any more setbacks.
“I was in tears, I couldn’t believe it. It felt like a dream was slipping away in this moment,” she added. “It was like, ‘How could this be? How could this be?’ I worked so hard and this was what was going to take me down? It was so hard.”
Vessey has been chasing the Olympic dream for as long as she can remember. A standout for the Knights in the 400 meters — where she won back-to-back Central Coast Section titles in 1999 and 2000 — she went on to star in the 800 at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Her senior year she took second at the NCAA Division I national championships.
In her first Olympic trials in 2008, she finished fifth. A year later, she blossomed. Running as a last-minute fill-in, she became the surprise winner of the Prefontaine Classic. A month later, she set a then-world-leading mark of 1 minute, 57.85 seconds at a Diamond League meet in Monaco.
She couldn’t continue that success, however, and at the 2012 Olympic trials, a year after she switched from training with Brock to training with Rose Monday, she placed eighth. She previously said she wouldn’t count out making a run the team in 2020, but at age 38 in the most competitive country in the world at that distance, it would take a miracle.
So, it had to be 2016.
Of course, it couldn’t be an easy path. It seems as though it never is for Vessey, who herself notes the name Maggie translates to “pearl” in several languages “and with a pearl, irritants and agitation form something beautiful.” So it seemed to go with her push to the trials.
In 2014, Vessey lost her sponsorship deal with New Balance. Without another major sponsor in sight, she began to design her own racing kits with the help of Los Angeles-based clothing designer Merlin Castell. The kits drew a lot of attention, but they didn’t draw any sponsors. After two years without much financial help, Vessey moved from L.A. back in with her mother, Cheryl, in Soquel last January so she could put all her resources toward making the Olympic team.
Also early in 2014, Vessey dropped coach Monday and returned to Brock, who is the head distance running coach at Santa Cruz High. By the end of the year, she had run the three fastest 400 times of her career. She parlayed that success into confidence heading into the World Relays in the Bahamas, where Team USA won the 4×800 in record-setting time thanks in large part to her 2 minutes, 0.92 second leg.
A month later, she entered the 2015 USA Track and Field National Championships as a favorite. She was living up to that billing, ducking in right behind the leaders in the final as the pack came around the final turn. But a chain reaction ahead of her caused her to trip and go sprawling onto the track. She picked herself up and limped in for last place.
All those things, though, had made her more driven, more prepared for the 2016 Olympic trials.
PAIN
A week after racing at Stanford, where she finished in a season-best 2:00.82 for third place, Vessey had a workout that made her giddy with promise.
“I just aced it. It was a slam dunk,” she said. “After I finished, I was clapping, you know? I had worked so hard to get to that level of fitness, and it was coming out. Not that it was effortless — you always have to work — but it was coming so well.”
The next morning, she sensed some pain in her ankle.
An MRI revealed bursitis and tendonitis in the Achilles. Vessey did everything she could think of to mitigate the damage to her body and her training time. She stayed off of it for 10 days, taking up biking and swimming to keep her fitness. She tried massage and chiropractic work. She ran on a AlterG antigravity treadmill and even saw a specialist in shockwave therapy, which she says “simultaneously feels like someone is punching you in your skin and scratching you.”
Still, as the race neared, she was the one considering scratching. But she had three new Castell-designed outfits in her closet and a whole community of supporters who had rallied behind her to get her to Hayward Field. Quitting wasn’t really an option.
And deep down, she was holding out hope for a miracle.
“I heard Sonya Richards Ross say, ‘As athletes, we always have hope,’” Vessey said. “There have been times where I haven’t seen a way and I’ve come up with it and I’ve won. It’s worked out as much as reality is showing you something different.
“I know from experience that the supernatural could happen, but it just wasn’t my moment.”
CLOSURE
Brock also had an inkling Vessey would need manna from heaven to make it to the final. Still, he encouraged her to try, if only for closure.
“She said, ‘I didn’t want to go out like this,’” he said. “And I said, ‘You know Maggie, almost every athlete goes out like this. The only way to truly know when you’re done is when it happens. You have to add it all up, the return you get vs. the pain and the frustration.’”
Vessey is still doing the math. She escaped to the mountains of Utah to clear her head and gain some perspective and said she’s not yet ready to declare an end to her running career.
Still, she did something she normally would have found torturous after a disappointing race: She stayed and watched the semifinals and finals from the stands. She saw another hard-luck athlete, Alysia Montano of Oakland, trip in the final stretch of the 800 final, which she’d led for most of the race. She saw her friend Molly Ludlow finish fourth, one spot away from qualifying.
When she ran into Ludlow at the airport a few days later, Vessey said she gave her a hug.
It was a nod toward the person Vessey said she wants to be when she sheds her running cocoon. She’s not sure what she’ll emerge as, but she does know that after 20 years of taking, she wants to give back.
“‘You have to be selfish right now.’ I heard that so much as an athlete, and it always seemed wrong to me,” Vessey said. “But I guess that was my life. I don’t want to be that anymore. I want to be a support system and a mentor.”
Sentinel in Rio
Sports Editor Julie Jag and the Sentinel will be in Rio de Janeiro to cover the Olympic Games. If you’re going to the Games or have a story idea, contact her at jjag@santacruzsentinel.com or 831-706-3257. To follow our coverage from qualifying to the closing ceremony, visit santacruzsentinel.com/Topic/Sentinel-in-Rio.
