Emily Infeld’s 4th-Place Finish at Beach to Beacon Is More Than a Comeback

Runner's World ^ | August 6, 2019 | Taylor Dutch

[Tolerance Sucks Rocks]

For the first time since February 2018, Emily Infeld embraced the hard effort of competing in a race. Paying no mind to the clock, she trusted the cues her body provided her as she continued to battle her way through the final hill all the way through the finish line at TD Beach to Beacon 10K on August 3.

Just seven months after her last hip surgery, Infeld had the rush of racing again, a feeling that she missed.

The 2015 world bronze medalist covered the 10K course in 32:39 as the fourth overall finisher and top American in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, against a field that included half marathon world-record holder and race winner Joyciline Jepkosgei.

“I was happy to be fourth in a really good field,” Infeld, 29, told Runner’s World. “It was good to have positive momentum and just really hurt again. I was just texting Shalane [Flanagan] and I said, ‘I haven’t worked that hard in forever.’”

For Infeld, the performance was a reminder that she endured one of the most challenging periods in her career and managed to use it as a turning point where she finally learned to trust herself.

On New Year’s Eve 2018, the Bowerman Track Club standout went to the Steadman Clinic in Vail, Colorado, where she underwent hip surgery to repair a torn labrum, restructure her hip socket, and shave the head of her femur, which had bone spurs. It was a surgery needed after several years of pain in the area and elsewhere in her body. Ultimately, it was also the end of an exhaustive search for the primary source of the injury that plagued her.