Her Strength Is Her Strength

Grace Moore was nervous when she toed the line of the Trials of Miles Half Marathon in Rockland Lake State Park on March 25, 2023. She didn’t know the course or any of her fellow competitors. The start time was early and she was accustomed to afternoon and evening races on the track. She hadn’t practiced fueling on the run. And perhaps most pointedly, she’d never raced a half marathon before – or any distance over 10k, for that matter. 

But by the time Moore arrived at the finish line one hour, 11 minutes and 47 seconds later, by her own admission, she’d “gained a whole lot of confidence.” After years of seeking the self-belief that would springboard her to the next level, not only was the race a pivot point for her psychologically, it also earned her an entry into the elite field of American distance runners who will compete at the US Olympic Marathon Trials in Orlando, Florida on February 3rd.

Moore is one of 173 women to earn a qualifier, but she’s one of only 15 women who qualified using a half marathon result rather than a time for the full 26.2 miles. The half marathon mark of 1:12 is an objectively tougher standard than the 2:37 mark for the full distance. (According to renowned exercise physiologist Jack Daniels, a 1:12 half converts to roughly a 2:30 marathon.) Every Olympic cycle, promising athletes who might not be quite ready to race a full marathon – recent college graduates chief among them – have the option of trying to clock a blistering 13.1-mile race to prove their fitness for inclusion in the quadrennial Trials field.

Even if Moore wasn’t quite sure she was ready – for either the marathon or the half – her coach Hector Matos believed she was. “As we prepared for our indoor season her workouts on the track were going really well,” he explained recently. “She was running 1,000- and 2,000-meter reps at 5:00–5:05 [per mile] pace throughout the late fall and early winter. And she was running her tempos at 5:20-5:25 [per mile] pace. That showed that on the right day and on a fast course she had the fitness to run under 72 minutes.”

Self-belief is an elusive and fickle creature. At times over the course of Moore’s impressive high school and college career she’d brought that beast to heel. But sometimes it had slipped its collar and stampeded off into the distance. As a sophomore, Moore had burst onto the running scene in her hometown of Merrick, New York, winning nearly every race she entered. But all those early victories exacted their price and nagging doubts began to surface with increasing regularity: “I began overthinking things. The expectations are where I struggled a lot,” Moore explains.

Moore still managed a hugely successful high school career, earning six All-County titles, being  named All-State in three consecutive seasons and setting school records at every distance north of 600m before matriculating at Temple University in the fall of 2016. As an Owl, Moore’s early college career was stalled by injury and then a pandemic, but she logged enough time in a Division I running program to experience the oscillating sine curve of breakout races and subpar performances. Despite some stellar results, the demon of high expectations hovered just off her shoulder.

“I always loved training, but I was a nervous wreck for racing, especially when it got to competition season and conferences,” Moore says. “I’ve always struggled with that. Basically I would have a good start to the season when there was less pressure and then I’d get to conferences and completely blow up.”

Moore’s college coach, James Snyder, saw it a bit differently. When asked to describe the ways in which Moore evolved as an athlete during her time at Temple, he said, “Her work ethic was unparalleled. And her ability to handle adversity head-on and keep coming back to attack training was really special…As she became more confident in herself, her performances on the track began to improve.”

With the benefit of a few more years in the sport, Snyder perhaps knew what the Kinesiology major Moore had yet to discover: that even though you can’t study the mitochondria of self-belief the same way you can observe the cellular-level adaptations of a body gaining fitness, the two can, in fact, exist in direct proportion to one another. Moore’s strength was her strength, in body and mind, and she was building it effort by effort, race by race and season by season.

Since graduating from Temple and joining Coach Matos’ Philadelphia-based Leonia Track Club, Moore has PR’d at every distance from 1500m to the half marathon. Even though Moore now has to fit her training in around her full-time job as a medical market specialist for InBody BWA, the schedule and the set-up agree with her.

“It’s definitely hard but I also think that I thrive off of having that kind of balance. Being out of college and just continuing to run really feels like I’m just doing it for myself. There’s less external pressure,” she says.

In her build-up for the Trials, Moore is running 90 miles a week: mostly outdoors, some on the treadmill, almost all of them alone. To keep her company, Moore has been known to tee up “The Real Housewives” series when she’s on the treadmill or to listen to “Chicks in the Office” or other good pop culture debriefs when out running solo on the roads.

She keeps it light in other ways, too, like her insistence on sticking with her Apple watch rather than using one of the data-driven smart watches commonly found on the wrists of elite distance runners. This has led to some funny mid-race moments, like when her watch asked her if she was working out in the middle of a 3000m at the Armory (in fact, she was en route to setting a PR of 9:02) and when a far-away friend sent her a TikTok early on a rainy Saturday morning, which she received while speeding around Rockland Lake State Park on the day she ran her inaugural half marathon and qualified for the US Olympic Marathon Trials.

That Trials of Miles event, more than any other race in her post-collegiate career, was a turning point for Moore. When asked to recall details of that day, Moore remembers the cold and the damp. She remembers, too, standing in the start area, debating whether she should do some quick pre-race strides, the way she would before a track race, but observing that no one else appeared to be going that route. So she stayed still and quiet and contemplated the task ahead.

Once the gun went off and the pre-race nerves evanesced, she settled in with a pack of men that she thought was running around her target 72-minute pace for the half. “I like running alongside men, because I feel like they’re not breathing as heavily and it doesn’t feel like there’s as much pressure to beat each other. So it just calmed me down being in a group of those guys,” Moore recollects.

The course was four laps of the lake and while Moore had a constant sense of where she was in the women’s field as the race unfolded, she was primarily keeping an eye on the clock and staying vigilant about her state of mind: “I knew I needed to be locked in mentally. I don’t like to run thirteen miles without listening to a podcast or chatting with friends so I knew there was going to be a whole lot of thinking and I had to try to pivot any thoughts that were negative.”

Though, by her own admission, she was fatiguing on the final lap, her strength carried her through the entirety of the thirteen miles, more than twice as far as she’d ever raced previously. When asked what she learned over the course of the race, she responded quickly: “It changed my perspective on how I can handle those longer distances.”

With the race completed and the OTQ achieved, it must have occurred to Moore how far she’d come: not the miles or the performance marks, but how far she’d come from the high schooler struggling under the weight of perceived expectations to the post-collegian planning and managing and executing a perfect race strategy on a high stakes day. Sometimes we run to prove how strong we are; sometimes we run to learn that we’re stronger than we know. 

When Moore steps to the line in Orlando, she’ll be back where she started her qualification journey: on an unfamiliar course, in an unfamiliar town, preparing to race a distance twice the length of anything she’s raced before. This time, though, she’ll take into the event the hard-won knowledge that she has been in that exact position before – and she knocked it out of the park.

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For Tracksmith’s Journal

photo cred: Brendan Davis