[Editor's note: Jenny Simpson is planning to race 3,000m at the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix in Boston on Feb. 4 will run the NYRR Wanamaker Metric Mile for Women at the Millrose Games at the Armory in New York on Feb. 11.]
Shoes & Gear. Did it really happen? Did she really execute near-perfect race tactics and out-kick a dozen of the world's top middle-distance runners down the homestretch to win the 1500m gold medal at the world championships? Was she really atop the medal stand in Daegu, South Korea, listening to "The Star-Spangled Banner"?
Yes, all those things did happen last Sept. 1, but, as the national anthem played on, Simpson, the 25-year-old former American steeplechase queen, quickly snapped out of her moment of wonder and started thinking about how she could improve. She'd just surprised the world by winning gold--America's first in the metric mile since Mary Decker Slaney won it in 1983--and yet she couldn't get her mind off the fact that she knew she could run better in the 1500m. A heck of a lot better, in fact.
"What I was thinking was that, 'I don't know that I'm ever going to get here again'--winning a gold medal is a once-in-a-lifetime situation--'but I know this isn't going to be my best year as a runner,'" Simpson recalls over lunch on a cold November day at the Coffee Cup Cafe in her newly adopted home of Monument, Colo. "I know I can do better than I did this year. I know I can train more consistently. I know I can race better."
How does a relative rookie on the international circuit execute a near-perfect race and win a gold medal at the world championships when she wasn't having a particularly great season up to that point?
Tenacity, focus, great fitness, a wicked kick and even a bit of luck, of course. But how does a runner do that repeatedly, always rising to the occasion and running well in the races that matter most? The answer can be found in every footstep Jenny Simpson takes.
Despite her girl-next-door charm and affable smile, Simpson is anything but the girl next door, especially not in the sleepy bedroom community of Monument, where she and her husband, Jason, settled after getting married in October 2010.
"Most of my neighbors have no idea who I am or what I do," she says. "They must think I'm some kind of a fitness freak, a spoiled housewife who lives some kind of easy life, stays at home and likes to go running in the middle of the day."
Hardly. Simpson's effervescent personality and self-effacing wit belie the fact that she possesses an inner ferocity that would make a tomboy blush. As much as she's naturally gifted with a big aerobic engine and great leg speed, it's her relentlessness and determination that really set her apart as an athlete. Sure, most world-class athletes have those qualities, but in Simpson they're razor sharp.
Consistent training and gradual development since she was in middle school, combined with a rare mix of personal ingredients, have helped her achieve maximal results at every level of her career. Subtle and intangible but very real, it's embedded deep within her DNA and expresses itself in measured discipline and channeled aggression that
nearly always comes to the surface when she's racing, especially in big races.
Although her European track results after Daegu were OK, Simpson put an exclamation point on her season by beating a deep international field at the Fifth Avenue Mile in New York City with a hard-fought 4:22.3 effort.
"There's no question that there is a fierceness there that is very rare," says her coach, Juli Benson, the head cross country coach and assistant track coach at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, where Simpson often does workouts with the men's team. "She is one of the most competitive individuals I have ever met."
The daughter of a college professor and a nurse, Simpson won eight Florida state titles in high school, five NCAA titles at the University of Colorado and already has five U.S. championships to her credit. She certainly hasn't won every race she's entered, but there's reason to believe she's just scratched the surface of what she could do in the 1500m and 5,000m.
Despite having to overcome two significant respiratory illnesses as a kid, Simpson started running competitively in grade school in Oviedo, Fla. By the time she got to high school, she would often train with the top runners on the boys team during hard workouts. One such session during her senior year was a series of 4 x 1-mile repeats on a crushed gravel and seashell driveway through Oviedo Cemetery. As coach Jay Getty tells it, Simpson held her own during the first three reps in the 5:25–5:35 range, then on the last one ran right at the front of the lead group, kicking hard and beating most of the boys.
As you can imagine, that didn't sit too well with the guys, and it prompted a bit of yelling and smack-talking on both sides.
"I thought there might be a brawl at the finish line," Getty recalls. "But that's the competitive nature that she had back then and obviously still has now. She didn't like backing down to anybody. For the high school boys, it was a big slap in the face, and they didn't take to it too well, but for Jen it was just her working hard. I had to tell the guys that they'd understand later in life how special she is."
It would be easy to label Simpson as a classic overachiever with an enormous work ethic and hunger to succeed, someone who is always striving for more--and she always is, at times to a fault--but her success flows from far more than that. Her ability to focus on how she can continually improve and excel--whether it's running or playing piano or learning sign language or riding horses or finding time to earn two degrees in four and a half years at Colorado--is integral to her athletic makeup; so is her ability to put things behind her, whether good or bad, learn from her experiences and move on.
For example, Simpson remembers the critical details of her races--they're the best way she knows how to learn and progress--but she can't tell you any of the specific workouts she did leading up to last summer's world championships. The exception might be that, the week before she left for Daegu, she broke 2:01 in an 800m solo time trial on the oversized indoor track at the Air Force Academy in front of 100 or so screaming cadets.
If she runs 6 x 1,000m on a Tuesday, she won't remember the details by the end of the week. She doesn't hang on to that kind of mental baggage.
"I don't see it as a whole, I just see it as the task at hand and what I need to do next," she says. "Whether a workout or a race was good or bad, I have a really good knack at putting results away and moving on. When it's over, it's over. And I just want to do better than I have ever done, not just better than I did last week."
Simpson considers her faith her top attribute as an athlete and sees her fierceness and diligence as a natural extension of her unwavering pursuit of a virtuous life. As for her tenacity on race day, she draws on a passage that C.S. Lewis wrote in The Screwtape Letters. Courage, Lewis says, is not a virtue, but "the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality." That, in a nutshell, is Simpson with her race face on.
"I like to think I live a virtuous life: being honest, generous and all of these good things. But the courage comes out when those things are tested," she says. "And the point in my life when those things are tested is in races. You can be courageous or not courageous, but that in and of itself is not a virtue. It's when your virtues are tested that you rise to the occasion or not."
Under Mark Wetmore's Lydiard-oriented program at Colorado, Simpson gradually built robust strength-based fitness. Her mileage rose systematically into the upper 70s, b
ut she also benefited from Wetmore keeping her primarily in the steeplechase until her senior year and not doubling her in most Big 12 or NCAA meets just to score points.
As a senior, she set five NCAA records from the 1500m to the 5,000m, for the first time tapping into her latent middle-distance prowess.
"I don't have any regrets at all, but if I had a chance to do things differently, I probably would have focused on some other events earlier," Simpson says. "At the same time, I really appreciate that I wasn't a workhorse. I learned a lot from Wetmore and really respect the way he helped me progress."
Surprisingly, in the days before Simpson officially turned pro and signed with New Balance, the coach and athlete suddenly parted ways. Hindsight is 20/20, but it appears to have worked out for the best for Simpson. In joining up with Benson (nee Henner), a 1996 U.S. 1500m Olympian and established elite middle-distance coach, Simpson has started to develop the missing skills necessary to become a world-class 1500m runner, and eventually, Benson thinks, a top-tier 5,000m competitor.
Like Wetmore, Benson believes that speed primarily comes by way of aerobic strength, yet she knows the only way to be successful on the world stage is to have sub-60-second closing-lap speed on tired legs. And that means developing leg turnover with explosive power and short-distance speed work at Simpson's 800m goal pace.
In the last two years, Simpson's fitness has still been strength-based, even though she's running slightly fewer miles than she did under Wetmore in Boulder. (Her weekly totals ranged from the upper 60s to the low 70s during the past year.) Her long days vary from 10 to 16 miles, often on smooth trails at 7,000 feet with husband Jason, a former NCAA Division II runner who's become a 2:32 marathoner. She might also add an hour of plyometric work, form drills and strength exercises on the track or in the weight room. Weekly tempo runs of 4–6 miles have remained a staple of her training under Benson, though she's been doing more on the dirt roads and fewer on the track in recent years.
Simpson had high hopes entering 2011 after her previous season, her first as a pro, ended prematurely because of a femoral stress reaction in her right leg. She started off by winning U.S. indoor titles in the mile and 3,000m, but came down with the flu in mid-June and had to miss the Prefontaine Classic and the Diamond League meet in New York City.
In what was probably her second-best race last summer, Simpson turned in a gutsy effort to finish second at the June 25 U.S. championships 1500m final behind Morgan Uceny and punch her ticket for Daegu. From there, Benson recalibrated her training, racing her into shape in Europe and getting her into peak form for the start of the world championships in late August.
"It's so easy for those things to get you down as an athlete, where you start to think, 'Oh well, now I have to train for next year,'" Simpson says. "But I didn't and it has a lot to do with Juli telling me that 'this year hasn't happened yet.'"
Perhaps most importantly, Benson is teaching Simpson the complicated craft of racing. Even during her record-setting senior season at Colorado in 2009, when she turned heads with a 3:59.90 second-place effort at the Prefontaine Classic, Simpson wasn't racing strategically as much as she was just running hard from the gun. That's partially because she was focusing on the steeplechase, but also because Wetmore typically doesn't double his top runners in conference or national championships.
"Obviously, the things she did in college were unbelievable; she had a storybook career," Benson says. "But she didn't come to me with any good racing skills. She had never been in a field with nine or 10 women in which everyone was pretty equal and she had to worry about tactics and pace changes."
As an athlete, Benson had good closing speed, but she became a better runner as she learned how to race tactically. She's been trying to instill the same skills in Simpson, putting her protege through various racing scenarios on a regular basis in practice.
As the 1500m final in Daegu shows, when Simpson combines tactical mastery with her deadly kick, she can be unbeatable. Although her final lap was only a 64.8, it was enough to keep a strong field of women at bay as she roared back from ninth place with a lap to go.
"She has a monster kick," says former University of Colorado runner Kenyon Neuman. "She's got ridiculous speed over the last 400. You can work hard to get better, but that kind of speed and the ability to close like that is put into your legs at birth."
The fact that Simpson won a gold medal last summer doesn't by any means suggest that she's completed her apprenticeship. True, she ran better in every round of the world championships and pulled off a near-perfect race in the finals. But Simpson is the first to admit she has a long way to go.
She wasn't even the top American 1500m runner last year; that distinction went to Uceny, who dominated the Diamond League series and posted a world-leading 4:00:06. Uceny was in the world championships final, too, but wound up 10th after getting tripped up and crashing to the ground with 550m to go.
What Simpson needs this year is consistency to match her competitiveness. In the 1500m race at a meet in Monaco last July, she was in the thick of things with 200m to go, but reacted late as the leaders started winding things up and had to move all the way out to lane 4 to get in position to unleash her kick. She wound up fifth in a season-best 4:03:54, but it was hardly a textbook race. Afterwards, Oregon Project coach Jerry Schumacher told her it was the most inefficient 4:03 he'd ever seen. "I had to do what I had to do; otherwise, I was going to get stuck," Simpson says. "I knew when I was in lane 4 it was a bad move. I have never run in lane 4 in my life."
At the Diamond League finale on Sept. 6 in Brussels, where Simpson was introduced at the starting line as the newly minted world champion, she was in contention but made the rookie mistake of trying to pass on the inside along the backstretch with 250m to go. "It was a stupid mistake," she says. "If you watch the video, you think, 'This girl has no idea what she's doing.'" She wound up 13th in 4:03.68, almost 4 seconds behind Ucency's Diamond League-sealing victory.
"Juli has definitely helped me realize that I have to get myself in sticky situations, and that you have to know how to get out of those situations without causing a pile-up," Simpson says. "I know there are times in some of my races where she thinks, 'What in the world is she doing?' And then there are times she has me practice things and I think, 'Why would I ever do that?' We approach things differently, but I think that's why we're a good team."
''I was the really annoying kid who came in with the best poster project in grade school," Simpson says. "And you know when you go to class in college and you're sure no one has done the reading? I was the one person who did the reading. That's me."
That's how Simpson explains her zest for pursuing excellence at everything she does, whether it's a track workout or a volunteer project. Simply put, if there's something worth doing, for her, it's worth doing with every ounce of her soul. That's a great outlook, but it borders on obsessiveness and can become overwhelming.
Case in point: In the fall of 2009, Simpson put off turning professional so she could chase the individual and team cross country titles in her final semester at Colorado while finishing up her schoolwork to complete two undergraduate degrees. Coming off a fifth-place American-record effort in the steeplechase at the Berlin world championships in August and her record-setting college track season from the previous spring, she was the overwhelming favorite to win the NCAA individual title.
But aside from running and schoolwork (which included a class in applied econometrics at the calculus level, in which she had to learn Java Script to perform economic functions), she was also mentoring teammates, planning her wedding, taking piano lessons, preparing for her post-collegiate career and volunteering for a variety of causes. To top it off, she played a big role with her church's efforts to bring a Burmese family to Boulder for medical treatments.
When it came time for the NCAA meet, Simpson was anxious and overextended. She was the prohibitive favorite but, despite going out crazy fast, she found herself in a dog-fight with Florida State's Susan Kuijken near the halfway point of the 6K race. That she literally crashed and burned (eventually getting back in the race and finishing 163rd) was a humbling way to learn she needed to make running her primary focus if she wanted to achieve anything as a pro.
"It was the hardest semester of my whole college career," Simpson says. "Mark was always telling me to simplify my life but I never thought I needed to."
Her current schedule reveals that she is learning to say "no" and to stop piling so much onto her plate. Although she volunteers at the library in Monument and serves as a volunteer assistant coach to the AFA women's track and cross country teams, most of her time, focus and energy center on her running.
Not surprisingly, it's given her a bit of clarity.
"I've realized that living a productive, fulfilling life doesn't mean I have to be a crazy busy person who is running around wild and doesn't have five minutes to relax," Simpson says. "It doesn't mean sitting around doing nothing and watching TV, either."
What lies ahead for Simpson? With her talent, drive and focus combined with Benson's guidance, the sky appears to be the limit. Given another season building speed and explosive power, a sub-2:00 800m seems imminent, as do lower PRs in the 1500m and 5,000m. She might even be a candidate to take down Mary Slaney's long-standing 3:57.12 American 1500m record, but that, of course, will require a special race.
Really, though, 2012 is all about the Olympics and there will be more pressure and less margin for error this year, especially because the 1500m should be one of the deepest events at this summer's U.S. Olympic track trials in Eugene. With Uceny, Shannon Rowbury, Christin Wurth-Thomas, Anna Pierce and Erin Donohue, at least six women will be legitimately fighting for the three spots on the London Olympic team.
Bring it on. Situations like those are where Simpson runs best. She's never failed to qualify for the U.S. national team. And now she knows she can run with anybody in the world.
"I think what sets us apart as competitors more than any kind of training is what happens in the call room moments before you go out on the track to race," she says. "At that point, it's who's the best prepared for man-to-man combat. Our journey isn't equal up to that point, but standing on the starting line is the great equalizer. That's the essence of racing."
