A torn hamstring cost Gabby Thomas the opportunity to compete at last year’s USA Outdoor Track & Field Championships. It’s a common injury with a relatively short recovery time – six weeks. 

“I’ve torn my hamstring before,” the Florence native said. “Every sprinter has had a torn hamstring, but it was the timing of it.”

Two weeks before the championships meant she couldn’t run there or at the World Championships. She returned in time to race the 2022 Diamond League Final in Zurich.

“But it’s not the World Championships. I missed the bulk of the season,” Thomas said. “I didn’t get to compete on that major stage, I didn’t get to go and perform against every other athlete when they were also peaking.”

It shook her. The injury came out of nowhere. Thomas was running as well as she ever had, which is saying something for a two-time Olympic medalist and NCAA Champion.

“That was really devastating emotionally and mentally. It made me question what we were doing because I didn’t see it coming and the season was going so well,” Thomas said. “You really had to take a step back and go ‘where did we go wrong? What happened?’”

She and her coach, Olympic bronze medalist Tonja Buford-Bailey learned and adjusted. Thomas thinks deeply about her body through the lens of her academic background, which features a neurobiology degree from Harvard and a master’s degree in epidemiology from the University of Texas. It takes her body longer to adapt to fast sprinting than other athletes. If she trains at a fast sprinting pace one day, Thomas needs to take her recovery days before she can do it again.

“My body takes longer to recover to make those connections and get back to do it again. Trying to cram a bunch of sprinting in a short amount of time is not going to work for me like it works for other people,” Thomas said. “With that being said when I do get it and I am sprinting, I sprint really fast. It’s just the way my engine works.”

She and Buford-Bailey have worked together for almost three full seasons now and developed the kind of collaborative relationship that breeds success. Buford-Bailey understands what works for Thomas, and Thomas understands how her coach functions and why she writes certain workouts.

“We pushed a little bit, we leaned a little bit and we’re planning to come out with this third season together on top again,” Thomas said.

She’s aiming for a 200-meter dash gold medal at the 2023 USATF Outdoor Championships this weekend at Heyward Field in Oregon. That would qualify her for the World Athletics Championships in Budapest, Hungary in late August.

“My goal is to get gold in the 200 here at champs and gold at the World Championships,” Thomas said.

She has run the third-fastest 200 in the world this season, breaking the tape in 22.05 seconds at the Diamond League meet in Paris on June 9. That’s the fastest time by an American this year and her quickest since the 2022 Diamond League opener in Doha, Qatar, where she set a meet record (21.98).

“Even to be healthy and fit and sharp is such a blessing and I’m really happy,” she said. “Leading up to these championships everything has been as perfect as it could be. Last year we were pushing things really hard, which was exciting because I was running really fast really early, but I got injured. This year we took our time a bit more to make sure we’re peaking at the right time. The U.S. championships are arguably more competitive than World Championships.”

Americans hold six of the top 10 200 marks in the world this year. Sha’Carri Richardson (22.07), Latasha Smith (22.09), Abby Steiner (22.19), Tamari Davis (22.3) and Mckenzie Long (22.31) should all push Thomas for berths at the World Championships. The top three athletes will qualify for both the World Athletics Championships and the 2023 Pan American Games (Santiago, Chile).

The 200 heats will begin at 8:09 p.m. Saturday followed by Sunday’s semifinals (8:45 p.m.) and final (10:10 p.m.) broadcast on CNBC and Peacock.

Thomas considered adding either a 100 or 400 in Oregon, as well. She won a silver medal as part of the 4x100 relay team in Tokyo and has the fifth-fastest 400 time in the world in 2023 (49.66). But the U.S. championships are crammed into a single weekend unlike the Olympic Trials, which feature a week between events.

“In one singular weekend, it would have been really difficult to double,” Thomas said. “The best thing I can do is focus on that single race and not risk any type of injury, not risk anything else.”

Coming back from last season’s hamstring injury challenged Thomas. Even once her hamstring healed she needed to return to her normal gait and feel like herself while she ran.

“Coming back from that injury was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, performance wise, mental wise, physical wise. Get back into training and feeling like myself and mentally feeling confidence, that was hard,” Thomas said. “Overcoming that this season was the hardest thing I’ve had to do in track.”

It gave her a broader perspective about what competing in the U.S. championships and potentially World Championship means even in a non-Olympic year. Thomas fired hard out of the gate following her Olympic appearance and success.

“It’s kind of weird. This is how I think if it, after the Olympics in 2021 it was such a high. Then it was such an extreme low but performance-wise I felt like I was coming off with so much momentum,” Thomas said. “That was the danger of that season I was so, I hate to say the word cocky, but I felt so good about what I was doing. I was going so hard, so fast.”

Maybe too hard, but she learned that lesson. Thomas and Buford-Bailey have used this season to slowly ramp up toward the Olympics in Paris next summer.

“The World Championships are such a big deal, and it’s my dream to actually have a World Championships medal because I still don’t have one. It feels like prep for the Olympics next year,” Thomas said. “Now we need to get back into performing on a huge stage. We have to work toward a medal, you have to make sure your name’s in the mix. That’s how I’m looking at it, that way when we are in the Olympic year I don’t feel that.”

Kyle Grabowski can be reached at kgrabowski@gazettenet.com. Follow him on Twitter @kylegrbwsk.]]>