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Brasovan, Unbroken: Ten years after Foot Locker, former champ finds her footing

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DyeStat.com   Dec 6th 2017, 8:26pm
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Brasovan, Unbroken

A decade later, the 2007 Foot Locker champ refinds her footing

 

By Dave Devine

 Supplemental photos courtesy: Duke Athletics; Bruce Adelsman/skinnyski.com

 

Colorado wasn’t meant to be a comeback.

Not some staging ground for a gutsy, quixotic return to glory. Not an athletic reinvention in a fresh and unfamiliar landscape. 

Those avenues had likely been exhausted. 

When, in early summer 2015, Ashley Brasovan moved to Golden, Colo., just outside Denver, the reasons were decidedly more prosaic. A combination of opportunity and instinct, calling and career. A sensible blending of personal and professional passions.

If two summers interning in Washington, D.C., during her graduate program in environmental management at Duke University had convinced Ashley of anything, it was that she had no interest in the fast pace and 80-hour work weeks she’d encountered on the East Coast.

Colorado seemed different.

More laid back. More supportive of the work-life balance she was seeking. The Centennial State offered, not only an outdoor playground for the active lifestyle she enjoyed, but a national model for the energy and sustainability field she was pursuing. Running would be part of the equation, something she continued to pursue for fun and fitness, but it was the job offer from McKinstry, a full-service sustainable construction firm, that brought her to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

There were, of course, occasional hints of the old fitness. A run that suddenly felt effortless. A few miles that slipped by exactly as they had when she was younger, when her stride was more exuberant and less wary. The kind of feedback that gets the wheels turning again.

Gives sudden rise to what-ifs and maybes.

But it had been — what? — six years since her last really good race? More than half a decade since the promise she’d shown as an audacious teenager had been on full display? Ashley had no reason to suspect that running in Colorado would bring her anything more than it had in the latter days of graduate school — a clear mind and a tangible connection to a sport she continued to love.  

A return to serious competition? National podiums or shoe sponsorships?

Not after all she’d endured as an undergrad at Duke. All the fractures and frustrations, dashed hopes and disappointments. Not after five years of false starts and unfinished seasons.

No, she wasn’t looking for a comeback.

But somehow, the comeback found her. 

*    *    *

This past September, at the USATF 20-kilometer Championship in New Haven, Conn., rising marathon star Jordan Hasay sailed to a comfortable victory in 1:06:35, more than a minute clear of her nearest competitor.

The race was merely a tune-up for the major effort to come, a month later in Chicago.

There, Hasay took third in the Chicago Marathon in a jaw-dropping 2:20:57, a new personal best that established her as the second-fastest American woman ever.

But in the same month as Hasay’s New Haven national title, and almost 1,300 miles away, another USATF championship event was contested to substantially less fanfare.

The USATF Trail Half-Marathon Championship was held Sept. 30 in Hayward, Wis. On the men’s side, trail stalwart Joe Gray picked up an unsurprising 13th national title.

The women’s winner was a trail newcomer — a familiar, if unexpected, name from the past.

HasayAshley Brasovan — Hasay’s former rival, most memorably in two riveting clashes at the Foot Locker Cross Country Championships in 2007 and 2008 — stood beaming atop the podium.

She, too, had won by a comfortable margin, besting the competition by more than five minutes on the undulating grass and single-track trails.

When the two stars clashed in high school, where they traded Foot Locker wins in successive years (Brasovan first, Hasay third in ‘07; Hasay first, Brasovan second in ’08), it seems possible — even likely — that their fortunes and trajectories would be entwined for years to come. 

But while that September victory was simply Hasay’s latest triumph in a storied and still-unfolding career, Brasovan’s trail half-marathon success was her first national title, of any kind, in a decade.

A prep phenom from Wellington, Fla., she had a celebrated high school career, accumulating Florida state titles, Foot Locker laurels, Nike Indoor and Outdoor championships, and a berth on the U.S. team to the 2009 IAAF World Junior Cross Country Championships.

But as is sometimes the case, especially with young female distance runners, those high school victories proved Pyrrhic.

The challenges began in earnest the spring of her senior year, after she qualified to compete on the junior women’s team at the IAAF World Cross Country Championships in Amman, Jordan. Already nursing a lingering case of Achilles tendonitis, she elected to race anyway, merely taking a week off from training in the run-up to the meet.

It became the first visible manifestation of a complex injury cycle that would plague her for years. 

Even as Ashley skimmed across the course in Jordan, racing toward a 26th-place finish against the best young harriers in the world, her body was already breaking down.

*    *    *

Duke

The plan seemed sound. 

With the Achilles tendonitis showing no signs of improvement, Ashley consulted with Kevin Jermyn, women’s distance coach at Duke University, where she’d committed for college, and developed a strategy for recovery.

She would take a six-week break after the World Junior Cross Country meet, scratch her senior track season while allowing the tendonitis to subside, and then begin a gradual summer build-up to prepare for her first year on the Blue Devils cross country team. 

Largely self-coached in high school, Ashley had the latitude to make a decision like that.

And it made sense. 

Duke had a vaunted class of incoming recruits; Ashley was at the top of the list. The sort of blue-chip talent that might contribute immediately if she entered healthy and fit in the fall.

She never had that opportunity.

While the tendonitis gradually resolved, within two weeks of arriving on campus Ashley was battling hamstring issues brought on by the hillier Durham landscape. A short time later, she experienced her first femoral stress fracture.

After a lengthy recovery, she made it through the first week of training her sophomore year before suffering a second femoral fracture.

Eventually, over five years, she would experience four femoral stress fractures — three in her right leg, one in her left — and a broken metatarsal that she mentions, almost as an afterthought, when recounting her succession of serious injuries.

“I never had a consistent string of healthy training,” Ashley says now, “from the moment I stepped on campus freshman year through midway of junior year.”

Duke was instrumental in helping her to assess and understand the underlying cause of all those broken bones.

“Of course, we did bone density tests,” she says, “and we tried to get my hormones back in line. There were a lot of those issues stemming from high school. Getting back on track with eating healthy, getting hormones in balance, getting bone density up. Duke really made a big push to help me get all of that in line over the four years that I was there.”

On a campus with world-class resources, Ashley was encouraged to meet with a growing list of specialists — endocrinologist, nutritionist, psychologist — an overwhelming experience for a first-year student, far from home in a new environment.

“It’s tough, when you’re a college student, being told all of this…It was a lot of damage that I had done to my body in high school, and then getting the message through my mind that I needed to reverse this damage in order to be able to run for the rest of my life.”

Her Duke teammates, and the coaching staff, stuck with her through each crushing disappointment.

“My coach, Kevin Jermyn, was probably my number one champion through all of that,” Ashley says. “Without him, I don’t know if I’d still be running today.”

Jermyn, who spent 14 years as the head women’s distance coach at Duke, and now mentors the runners at Elon University, realized early on that he had to balance his young charge’s independence with gentle redirection toward the resources she needed.

“You always have to figure out,” he says, “What’s the next thing this person needs? Ashley’s a very independent person; she needed the freedom to focus on her health, her happiness, and the time it would take to redefine her relationship with running.”

He saw, in Brasovan, an uncommon talent and passion, but also a work ethic that, by the time she arrived at Duke, exceeded her body’s structural ability to handle the load.

“Not having the structural health to be able to work as hard as she wanted, while she saw other people progress in their training, that was really challenging. I’m sure that was a tough pill for her to swallow.”

Brasovan didn’t compete for Duke until halfway through her junior year.

By then, her bone density had doubled from the initial measurements taken her freshman year.

Still, each time she came close to a full return — debuting on the track, competing on Duke’s NCAA cross country squad her senior year — there was another setback. 

Another devastating blow to her confidence.

And for Jermyn, who’s spent a great deal of time considering the sources of athletic confidence, that process was both difficult to observe and uncomfortably familiar.

“Ashley, in high school — her talent was her ability to work hard,” he notes, citing the 60 to 70 miles she tallied per week. “But then all of the sudden, it doesn’t feel that way when you see these other people, how they work, how diligent they are. You can’t just go on one-upping it before your body and your mind breaks down.”

It was an approach he witnessed, and tried to counter, often in his time at Duke.

“The ones that took all their confidence from being the person who simply outworks everyone else, they tended to break down…You have to develop confidence from other sources than simply trying to outwork or out-grind everybody. You have to find that balance.”

But balance was something Brasovan was still learning, even near the end of her time at Duke.

Hoping to utilize a redshirt eligibility year as she embarked on a Master’s program at Duke, she was diagnosed with her fourth femoral stress fracture.

By then, she felt more resignation than devastation.

“It honestly got easier,” she says. “The first one was the hardest, and then after that, you — ” Here she pauses, knowing how unlikely this might sound. “You get used to it.”

She elected to focus solely on graduate school, running post-recovery only when she felt the urge — no pressure — taking a long and much needed physical and mental break.

Nothing like the outcome she’d imagined when she arrived at the Durham campus as a bright-eyed student in the autumn of 2009, but it was a necessary act of self-preservation. A step away from a college experience that had wrung the joy from running, toward a promising career in a field that inspired her.

“Still,” Jermyn says now, “she was an unbelievable teammate. And a joy for me to coach, even though it had to probably be four to five of the hardest years of her life.

“Thankfully, she didn’t walk away from it completely.”

*    *    *

Matt Hensley vividly recalls the first time he saw Ashley Brasovan race.

They were both in high school in south Florida. Hensley was a senior; Brasovan would have been a freshman at the time. He thinks he won his race that day, but it’s definitely not what he remembers most clearly.

“I was like, man, who is this?” A fearless ninth grader had demolished the high school girls’ field. “There was no thinking, just racing, and you could tell she enjoyed it.”

Ten years later, Hensley flashed back to that moment when he learned through a mutual friend in Colorado that Brasovan had relocated to his adopted home, and that she was no longer running.

“I coached about six to eight runners at the time,” he says, “and I thought, ‘Wow, she’s not running? How cool would that be to reach out and get her back enjoying the sport again, and maybe competing again?’”

He messaged her on Facebook, asked if she’d be open to meeting.

“It was sad to see someone step away from it that I know — I saw at a young age — just love it. You saw the talent immediately, and that doesn’t go away.”

Ashley agreed to meet for coffee, but was initially reluctant to divert from the run-for-fun plan.

“At first, I was hesitant, but I decided I’d try it,” Brasovan said.

The truth was, she’d been thinking about dipping her feet into competitive races again, but she knew she would need some help.

And she didn’t want a team environment again — not so soon.

“I just wanted to do my own thing, listen to my body, and keep it very, very low key,” she said.

Hensley was willing to meet her at those expectations, so they started working together in the summer of 2015.

“Our focus was, A — keeping her healthy, and B — getting her back to enjoying it. Once we did that, things started to fall into place,” Hensley said.

The first indication for Hensley that Brasovan might be shaking the rust from her latent talent came at a November 2015 half marathon in Las Vegas. While a modest 1:18:10 finishing time left Ashley doubting her progress, her coach knew, based on the challenging winds and the company she’d kept at the finish, that she was ready for a big effort.

He kept circling back to that first race he’d watched her run. 

“I just kept reinforcing: Everything you did, and everything you are, hasn’t gone away,” Hensley said. “We just have to make adjustments to figure out what works best for you now…I knew she was back. It was more of her knowing that as well.”

The breakthrough came only a month and a half later. Brasovan, home in Florida for the holidays, entered the Jacksonville Half Marathon on a whim and ended up running 1:14:30.

Fast enough to qualify for the Olympic Trials in the marathon.

For Brasovan, it was a deeply cathartic, emotional moment.

“People told me that I was never going to be able to run again,” she says. “Or compete again at a high level. That it was over. So qualifying for the Trials was — not only shocking, because it was a four-minute PR at that point — but it was one of those things that proved everything everyone had said the past several years to be wrong. I can still be competitive, and I can still get out there after everything I went through in college.”

With the Trials only six weeks away, Hensley discouraged Brasovan from toeing the line in Los Angeles. He was concerned about her limited training block and lack of familiarity with the distance, but she was determined to race.

Eventually, the coach relented.

“There’s no one I know,” he says now, “that has seen the highs that she’s had, and the lows that she’s had. So, no one can really relate to that feeling of having made it once — and the endless possibilities of where the sport might take you — and then going to a place that’s pretty difficult, where it’s injury after injury, and you’re quickly thinking about getting out of the sport. And then, somehow, resurrecting it all, and overcoming all of that.

“It was just really a testament to her perseverance.”

Brasovan finished 55th at the 2016 Olympic Trials in her marathon debut, managing 2:48:32 in the notoriously difficult Los Angeles conditions.

In the months since, she’s continued racing at a high level, including a recent foray into mountain and trail running which delivered that first senior national title in Wisconsin.

In January, she picked up a sponsorship from Brooks Running.   

Last spring, seeking greater flexibility in designing her training, she stepped away from Hensley’s tutelage, and now coaches herself.

“We decided to go different ways,” Hensley acknowledges, “and a lot of that was her. She’s a free spirit, and what’s going to work best for her, at least in the moment, is to have that flexibility.”

Both assert there are no hard feelings. In fact, last weekend they shared a return flight from California after the California International Marathon (CIM), where both were racing.

Brasovan, still a neophyte to the distance, set a new personal best of 2:40:19.

Perhaps more importantly, she met the B-standard for the 2020 Olympic Trials. 

Effectively out of the sport two and a half years ago, Brasovan has now qualified for two straight Olympic Trials.

*    *    *

She still loves to run in the morning.  

That hasn’t changed in the last 10 years.

Still loves to slip from her Westminster home and stride off into the pre-dawn mountain darkness. Appreciates the solitude, the way it clears her head. Gives her space to unpack the week.

Plan the day as she covers the miles. 

Sometimes she’ll listen to music. The playlist is admittedly “all over the place.” Her standard approach is to download a song, fall in love with it, play it to death.

And then shelve it and start over again.

The song du jour is “What Lovers Do,” by Maroon 5. It’s been a cold autumn — lots of 25- to 30-degree mornings — so the beat helps to get her moving. Three minutes and fifteen seconds of bouncy pop fluff, anchored by Adam Levine’s ubiquitous, radio-ready voice.

Say say say, hey hey now baby—

In many ways, that 2007 Foot Locker victory seems a long way off. It’s hard to believe a decade has passed.

So much has happened in the seasons since.

A college experience that went sideways for years. A passion realized, in the midst of those painful days, for a rewarding new career. A move across the country. Dreams abandoned or recalibrated. 

Joy, rediscovered.

All of it capable, as she churns through a cold Colorado morning, of relegating that bright Saturday in San Diego to something like a distant memory.  

Oh mama, don't play now baby

When she thinks back now to that first Foot Locker final, her high school-self roaring home at Balboa Park after overtaking Hasay on the final hill, there are certain things she wishes she had known. 

FL Champ“Running is still a big part of my life,” she insists, “and that piece has grown a lot more than it had been in college, but the biggest difference is that I do have other things that make me really happy. And if for some reason, I got injured now — it’s always devastating — but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

“I have other things I enjoy in life, that can hold me up, and keep me from the hole that a lot of runners go in. And in high school, that wasn’t necessarily the case.”

Running can still feel like a tightrope walk — “Every time something feels off, I feel like it might be over. That fear is definitely still a reality.”— but she has better nets now.

She’s come to embrace the sort of confidence that emanates from balance. Come to appreciate the ways in which a body, with time and support, can be an extraordinary healer. Can repair and reinvent itself, in sometimes unexpected ways. Knit together even the most terrible fractures. 

The ways a body can unbreak itself.

True, Colorado wasn’t meant to be a comeback, but here she is anyway.

Leaning in to the possibilities, soundtrack bouncing in her ears: 

Say say say, hey hey now baby

Said let's get one thing straight now baby

Yes, let’s get one thing straight, now. 

Ashley Brasovan isn’t done. She’s not over.

Maybe she’s just getting started. 

Again.



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1 comment(s)
bradapeters
Really well written article Dave. Thanks!!
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