THE RIGHT CALL
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Cain thought back to that day she met a running icon and got her picture taken with him at the Trials. Call it a dream or a prayer, but she wondered if Salazar would ever consider coaching someone like her.
“I joke with Alberto that at the time I was actually looking for his email to reach out and say, ‘Hey, I know you’re super-cool and I’m just a random kid, but if you could even just give me some advice, I would be forever grateful,’” Cain said. “I literally told my mom the week before that I was going to do that. I said, ‘He seems like such a nice guy. I’m sure he would at least email me back.’
“And then he called me.”
Upon hearing the name “Alberto Salazar,” come through the answering machine, Cain’s mother, also named Mary, leapt to her feet and dove for the phone like she was lunging across an Olympic finish line.
“I did the 100-yard dash in two seconds,” she told espnW last April.
“The only thing I heard was my mom bolt for the phone,” Cain said, adding that the noise startled her for a moment, but did not fully wake her.
“I ended up calling (Cain’s) parents and said whoever is coaching her, or if you can find some club coach, have them work on her mechanics,” Salazar said. “Her mom asked me if I knew of any coaches out there and I said that I didn’t really know but that she could ask around and maybe there were some club coaches.
“She asked if I would be willing to give her some workouts at least temporarily to get her through the cross-country season, and I said ‘Okay, yeah. Fine. I can do that.’”
Two hours later, Cain was woken by her parents and let in on the conversation.
“When he actually called, I can’t tell you the level of excitement,” Cain’s father, Charlie, told The New York Times in 2012. “Mary was very excited. It was quite literally an answer to a prayer.”
“My mom still jokes about this, but when we got the call from Alberto she was the most excited because she was like, ‘I watched your marathons! I know who you are!’” Cain said. “And of course we watched the London Olympics. I was actually at the beach when the 10-K was going off. Nobody else in my family runs besides me, and they were all there sitting and watching it. I come home five minutes later and was like, ‘You didn’t call me?’ So I had to watch it myself online.”
A few days after Salazar’s initial phone call, Cain spoke to him on the phone and the two “just really clicked pretty instantly.”
"The first time we sat down he said, 'This is a 10-year program. I don't want you peaking at age 16,'" Cain told espnW last year.
Salazar added: "Mary knows what I told her; she has as much talent as any young athlete I've ever seen in running -- in my life."
After those initially conversations, Cain began getting direction from Salazar. It didn’t take long for word to spread that the two were working together.
“When everybody found out about it, it was probably two or three weeks after we had first met,” Cain said. “There were a lot of people saying, ‘Oh, you were meeting secretly in the summer.’ That was all me coaching myself. I was doing my little random workouts there. They were pretty good. I was proud of those. But finally he was like, ‘Okay, we’re going to start giving you workouts and building up to it.’”
When the Cains realized they had found the perfect coach for their daughter, they proceeded quickly, but not star-struck.
“We were all big fans of Alberto, but the big thing with my parents was that they wanted to make sure that it worked,” she said. “They didn’t want me to get into a super-intense program that is crazy that early. Alberto is the best coach in the world. When we sat down and talked to him, we also realized that he is the nicest guy in the world, and is really there for his athletes. He pours 110 percent into each of us. It was like, how could I say no? We had no real reservations.”
