‘I feel blessed’: Oft-injured Whittni Morgan realizes improbable Olympic dream

Not again. Not now. Just eight months before the U.S. Olympic track and field team trials, Whittni Morgan , the talented but fragile distance runner from BYU, learned that she would have to undergo surgery to repair her left knee.

It was only the latest in a string of injuries over the years, but the timing and the severity of this one was the worst.

“I was heartbroken,” she recalls. “I felt like I was grieving what could have been. I believed I had the talent to make the (Olympic) team, but it requires everything you can do. It requires time and training and health. I was grieving the loss of the ideal plan.”

The surgery put her on crutches for weeks; she couldn’t run until February; she couldn’t run intensely until March. She couldn’t race until mid-April — 10 weeks before the trials.

But here she is. In an unlikely turn of events , she will toe the line on Aug. 2 for the start of the 5,000-meter run in the Paris Olympic Games.

“It’s so surreal,” she says. “You don’t actually know if you believe it. Holy cow! It’s a miracle. I feel blessed .”

Morgan placed fifth in the 5,000-meter run at the Olympic trials. Normally, that would have been the end of her Olympic aspirations — the top three make the team — but then fate lent a hand.

Elle St. Pierre, the winner of the 5,000 and a third-place finisher in the 1,500, chose to drop the former event and focus on the latter. Parker Valby, the fourth-place finisher in the 5,000, was next in line to replace St. Pierre, but she declined and will focus on the 10,000. Morgan got the spot.

As coach Diljeet Taylor put it, Morgan had this coming after all that she has endured over the years to get here.

Never a doubt

No one who has been around the BYU track and cross-country programs ever doubted Morgan’s ability. You could make an argument that she is the most talented distance runner ever to pass through BYU, one of the nation’s top distance-running programs.

From 2017 to 2021, she won 10 All-America awards. During the 2019-20 indoor season, she broke the school record in the 5,000 by 29 seconds, the school record in the mile by six seconds, and the school record in the 3,000-meter run by 11 seconds.

There was only one thing that stood between her and national stardom: Morgan has had nine injuries in eight years, first as a collegian and then as a pro. Every time Morgan neared peak condition, she broke down. Most of the injuries were stress reactions (defined as precursors to stress fractures in which the bone is in the process of breaking down).

At BYU, it began as a stress reaction in her left foot, then there was one in her right foot, then one in her left tibia, then one in her right femur, and so it went. Each injury required Morgan to quit running for six to eight weeks.

The injuries were difficult to explain. No one can blame high training mileage. Taylor is a low-mileage, quality-over-quantity coach.

Even now, Morgan, a 26-year-old pro, runs only 40 to 45 miles per week, a little more than half the mileage of most world-class 5,000-meter runners.

“The crazy thing is I never got injured in high school,” says Morgan, a three-sport athlete all four years of high school, playing sports that required a lot of pounding on hard surfaces (basketball, volleyball, track).

Whenever injuries forced her to stop running, Morgan turned to cross-training — she swam, jogged in a pool and trained on stationary bicycles, elliptical machines, antigravity treadmills and arc trainers.

Morgan once determined, after looking through her training logs, that she had done more cross-training workouts than running workouts while at BYU.

It’s not ideal — specificity of training is always best — but she became proficient in the art of cross training, and it was remarkable how well she ran after spending weeks not actually running. But the injuries probably cost her national championships, and then bad timing cost her again.

At the end of that aforementioned, record-setting 2019-20 indoor season, she would have been a strong favorite to win one or two individual titles at the NCAA outdoor track championships, but the competition was canceled because of the pandemic.

That left Morgan with one more cross-country season of eligibility before her college running career would end. And she still had not won a national championship.

A small-town kid

Morgan (nee Orton) grew up in tiny Panguitch, Utah, a small lakeside town of about 1,700 that was named for a Paiute word that means “big fish.”

It’s difficult to resist the symbolism for Morgan. The daughter of a truck driver and one of six children, she was a big fish in a small town. Like most small-town kids, she participated in three sports, and she owned them.

She won 16 individual state championships — four per year, in the 800-, 1,600- and 3,200-meter runs and cross-country — as well as three state team championships in basketball and two more in volleyball, and she was voted first team all-state in basketball four times and volleyball three times, the 2014 1A Defensive MVP in basketball, the 2015 1A MVP in basketball and the 2016 High School Athlete of the Year.

All that notwithstanding, she had two strikes against her as a potential college athlete. She competed in the smallest classification of high school sports, and her times on the track — 11 flat for the 3,200, 5:05 in the 1,600, 2:19.99 in the 800 — were not the stuff of a Division I résumé. That didn’t stop Pat Shane, the BYU women’s distance coach at the time, from recruiting her.

“I had watched her win just about every time she competed for four years,” Shane recalls. “She was tall, had good (running) mechanics and competed in other sports. She was a winner, and that’s something you really can’t coach.”

During a home visit, Shane asked what it would take to convince Morgan to commit to BYU (as if she really needed a lot of convincing).

“She had one scholarship offer to Utah Valley,” says Shane. “I offered her $1,000 more and she committed. It was the last scholarship I had after signing Courtney Wayment and Anna Camp . There were some that felt like I had made a big mistake offering her as much as Courtney and Anna, but I was convinced she was a winner and worth the scholarship.”

“It was a big shock,” says Morgan. “I was thinking, there’s no way he wants me. It was a huge blessing that he took a chance on me.”

Shane retired and Taylor arrived in 2016, just in time to oversee the training of Morgan, as well as Camp and Wayment, the next five years. All three won individual NCAA championships and were part of a program that won the 2020 NCAA cross-country team championship.

Everything finally came together for Morgan during the 2021 cross-country season. She remained healthy and was able to string together months of training without injuries forcing her to interrupt her routine.

Taking no chances, Taylor decided less was more for Morgan and lightened her workload. Morgan ran only two races during the regular season leading up to the 2021 NCAA cross-country championships.

“It was for injury prevention,” says Morgan. “I could have done the races. Coach Taylor knew I had a shot to win, and she wanted to keep me fresh.”

In the final race of her collegiate career, Morgan won the NCAA cross-country championships, recording the second-fastest time in the 40-year history of the event. She signed a contract with Adidas and continued her running career as a professional.

During her first year as a pro, she cut five seconds off her 1,500 PR to 4:04.64 and two seconds off her 5,000 PR to 15:10.20, and she placed eighth in the 5,000 at the U.S. championships. Given her improvement, there was hope for more of the same in 2023.

Another injury

In January 2023, while preparing for another season, she was doing a plyometric exercise — “a small explosive jump” — and when she landed, she felt a sharp pain in her left knee. She was injured again, and this was the worst of them all, although she wouldn’t know it for months.

She continued to train with the pain, hoping the knee would eventually heal. In February, she placed second in the 3,000-meter run at the prestigious Millrose Games in New York City and second in the 3,000 at the U.S. indoor championships (which qualified her for the U.S. world championships team, but the meet was canceled).

“I prayed for it. I said, I’m going to need a miracle. I said, I would love it if I could get a miracle, but, if not, it’s OK. I’ll give it my best effort. It’s a miracle that I’m an Olympian. I can’t put glory anywhere else but on God.”

Whittni Morgan on qualifying for the Olympics

She took two weeks off after the indoor season, hoping that rest would heal the knee. “But then I had to start up again for the outdoor season,” she says.

Doctors provided her with exercises and doses of Diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory that’s often used for treating arthritis. Nothing helped. She had to spend 15-20 minutes daily doing specific exercises and stretches before she could run “to take the pressure and pull off my knee.”

She managed a sixth-place finish in the 5,000 at the U.S. championships in July and two weeks later she won the 5,000 at a meet in Los Angeles with a personal-record time of 15:02.07, “which was crazy,” she said, considering the injury limitations she had experienced.

That was her last race of the season, and the knee had not improved. “I thought if I took time off after the outdoor season, it would go away,” she says.

It didn’t. She finally made an appointment to meet with Dr. Eric Heiden, the world-renowned orthopedic surgeon and former Olympic champion speedskater. He told her she could continue to train, but the injury — a tear in the patellar tendon — wasn’t going to get better. She would have to undergo surgery. Morgan was devastated.

“When I had surgery,” says Morgan, “I knew I was going to need a miracle (to be ready for the Olympic trials).”

16-week build

Morgan underwent surgery on Nov. 20. She was on crutches and wore a brace on her knee for four weeks, discarding them on Dec. 19.

On Jan. 4, she ran for the first time, albeit in an antigravity trainer at 60-70% of her body weight for just six minutes.

On Feb. 6, she ran on the ground for the first time. On Feb. 20, she did her first light track workout.

In March, she began running more intense track workouts for the first time. She had just four months remaining to train for the Olympic Games.

On April 13, she ran her first race in nine months.

“She trended two to three weeks ahead of schedule,” says Taylor. “She healed really well. … After the surgery, our mindset was getting to the Olympic trials in the best shape we possibly could. It was just a 16-week build. With anyone else I might have been hesitant, but we had done this quite a few times in college.”

That meant more cross-training instead of running, and Morgan and Taylor knew from past experience how to make the most of it.

“That woman worked harder than anyone I know,” Taylor says. “She was very committed to her cross-training, and she had great support from doctors and the (physical therapists) around her. It was definitely a group effort.”

Morgan ran just four outdoor races before the Olympic trials and had only the 12th-fastest time heading into the meet. If all this weren’t enough, the depth of talent in middle-distance and distance running has never been deeper in the U.S. than it is now, and the 5,000 was loaded with Olympians, national champions and American record holders.

Morgan ran aggressively but smart, and when a six-woman pack began to gap the rest of the field with a kilometer to go, she went with them. When another runner fell out the back, Morgan was still hanging onto the back of the five-woman train.

NBC announcer Kara Goucher, a former Olympic runner, told the TV audience, “Whittni Morgan is … coming back from surgery. Started (racing) again in April. This is impressive out of her on such a shortened buildup to this Olympic trials.”

With about two laps to go in the 12 ½-lap race, Morgan, still running fifth, began to lose contact with the lead group, but she ran the final laps fast enough to hold her position behind former Olympians St. Pierre, Elise Cranny and Karissa Schweizer and four-time collegiate champion Valby.

“She fought to keep that spot,” Taylor said. “I think in the back of her mind she realized there could still be a chance.”

“Holy cow, it is a miracle,” says Morgan. “I feel blessed. I prayed for it. I said, I’m going to need a miracle. I said, I would love it if I could get a miracle, but, if not, it’s OK. I’ll give it my best effort. It’s a miracle that I’m an Olympian. I can’t put glory anywhere else but on God.”