MOLLY SEIDEL
Molly Seidel Might Always Be a She’s Totally Okay With That
‘I’m this incredibly f lawed person who struggles so much. I look at all the athletes around me who have their s*** together and I’m like, “One of these things is not like the other”’
ON A DECEMBER NIGHT in 2019, Molly Seidel was at a rooftop party in Boston, wearing a black velvet dress, doing what many 25-year-olds do: passing a joint between friends, wondering where she was going with her life.
‘You should run the Olympic trials,’ her sister, Izzy, said, as smoke swirled in the frigid air. ‘It would be hilarious if you did that for your first marathon.’
Seidel, an elite 10K runner who’d spent much of 2019 injured, laughed. Why the hell not? She’d just qualified for the trials, winning the San Antonio Half with a time of 1:10:27. (‘The shock of the century,’ as she’d put it.) True, 13.1 miles wasn’t 26.2, but running a marathon was something to do. If only because she never had before.
After a glittering college athletics career, Seidel had moved to Boston in 2017, where she’d worked three jobs to supplement her fourth: running for Saucony’s Freedom Track Club. Saucony’s $34,000 (around £27,500) a year didn’t go far in one of America’s most expensive cities. Babysitting, driving around as an Instacart shopper and standing for eight hours as a barista – when you’re running 20 miles a day – wasn’t ideal. But she had compression socks, she was downing free coffee, paying her rent and occasionally f lying to Flagstaff, Arizona, for altitude training camps, and doing what she loved. The only thing she’s ever wanted to do, she says, since she was a kid clocking six-minute miles at her small-town Wisconsin school.
‘I was hustling and I loved it,’ says Seidel. ‘It was such a fun time of my life.’ Listening to her speak with such clarity and conviction about her struggles since, it’s easy to forget that she’s still only 29.
After Seidel had hip surgery on her birthday in July 2018, her doctors gave her a 50-50 chance of running professionally again. By summer 2019, she’d parted ways with Saucony, which left her sobbing on the banks of Boston’s Charles River, getting eaten alive by mosquitoes and uncertainty. Her biggest recent achievement at the time was being named #2 Top Instacart Shopper. In Flagstaff.
The day after that rooftop party, Seidel asked her friend, former teammate and new coach, Jon Green, if she should run the marathon trials. Sure, he shrugged. Maybe it’d help her train for the 10K, her best shot, they both thought, at making a US Olympic team.
‘I’m goi
