STARTING SLOWLY
But Salazar did give pause.
“I started telling her a few workouts to do and she did pretty well,” he said. “We kept talking a couple of times a week, and they asked me if I was willing to continue doing that. I had to think about that carefully. Just the responsibility of getting involved with a 16- or 17-year-old girl living across the country, and whether I had the time to put forth the commitment to do it. But then I said, ‘What the heck.’ It had gone pretty well for the first month so why not.”
Because Cain did not want to move to a boarding school in Oregon, Salazar needed to find a coach-in-residence, so to speak. He enlisted the help of John Henwood, a 2004 Olympian for New Zealand who works as a coach and massage therapist in Manhattan, to supervise her daily workouts.
“John Henwood has done a fantastic job,” Salazar said. “I feel like Mary has been well-monitored while she’s here.”
There was also ambitious goal setting from the outset.
“Alberto and I sat down in person when he was in town for an appearance,” Cain recalled. “He said his goal was for me to make the 2013 Worlds team and I actually kind of laughed in his face. I said, ‘That would mean running a 4:03.’
“When he left, I told my mom, ‘That’s what professional runners do. That’s crazy.’ But he had that confidence in me and put that confidence in myself. I took that to heart.”
Last year, at the Oxy High Performance meet, Cain finished second in the 1500m in 4:04.62, breaking the American junior and youth records at the distance and achieving the World Championships A standard.
“Little did I know that I only needed to run 4:04,” Cain joked.
Later last summer, she finished second in 4:28.76 in a tactical race at the USA Outdoor Championships to qualify for Moscow. At Worlds, she clocked 4:08.21 in the opening round, 4:05.21 in the semifinals and finished 10th in the final in 4:07.19.
Those performances, Salazar believes, were just the beginning of Cain scratching the surface of her immense potential.
“She’s got a tremendous amount of talent and has run very fast at a young age,” he said. “She has a lot of raw, natural speed. It’s hard to predict where someone’s going to be but I expect she’s going to be someone that’s vying for more U.S. teams and she’s already a finalist at 17 at the World Championships. Improving just a little bit would put her in contention for medals, hopefully at some point.”
