CALLING PLACED ON HOLD
Cain returned home from Europe for the start of her junior year at Bronxville High, but while her peers were readying for the start of the cross-country season, she was a runner without a home.
She had parted ways with her high school coach, a situation she chooses not to delve into specifically, only saying that it “was not healthy and it had nothing to do with me or my family; it was just other outside influences that were making it difficult for me to continue.”
While Cain never lost her passion for running – “I told my parents, ‘I can’t not run. I have to. I can’t just leave it,’ she said – she was lost navigating the world of running. Without a coach directing her course, she wrote her own workouts but was clueless as to how or where she could race.
“I wouldn’t have known where to go on the local circuit,” Cain said. “I don’t even know what that means. I had absolutely no guidance. I was out there training myself, doing my own thing. I wanted to do local stuff but we didn’t know what to do. We were at a loss.”
The predicament seemed so hopeless that Cain gave serious consideration to giving up running for the remainder of her high school years.
“My parents and I were literally contemplating calling up college coaches, calling Oregon, Georgetown, Stanford, all of those places and saying, ‘Hey, I am going to stop running for two years,’” Cain admitted. “We were at the point of telling coaches, ‘I’ve run 4:11. I know I can run better. I can’t do it right now, but remember me in two years!’”
Salazar says that had Cain been forced to make that decision, she might not have been able to fully reach her potential.
“If she had decided to not run at all and then try to start again in college, it would have obviously been a huge step backward for her,” he explained. “She would have lost all of that conditioning and momentum she had going forward. Not that it would have been impossible to start up again but taking a two-year break is pretty tough.”
For her part, Cain isn’t sure what would have happened.
“Honestly there is a very good chance that Mary Cain wouldn’t have run at all her junior or senior years of high school,” she said. “I’d like to think that the college coaches would have called me two years later. There might be some excitement this weekend to see what I would be doing in cross country because you wouldn’t have seen me since that day I ran 4:11.”
