After breakout season, Arkansas junior Britton Wilson keeps pushing limits
Rising star builds strength through endurance: 'I embrace the pain and keep going'
It can be hard to convince a fierce competitor and major talent like Britton Wilson of the University of Arkansas, but competing in fewer meets during the year can help a rising collegiate track and field star produce top performances in the biggest competitions at the end of the season.
That was Chris Johnson’s thought process when the associate head coach at Arkansas sat down with Wilson after the end of the 2022 season to lay out her training and racing schedule for 2023.
“With a special talent, you’ve got to make sure you give them what they need,” Johnson explained. “I wanted to make sure that she performs well in collegiate meets but still has something left for [competing against] the professionals.”
As Johnson prepared his pitch, Wilson was coming off a breakout season in which the transfer from Tennessee became the first athlete in history to win the 400 meters and the 400 hurdles in the Southeastern Conference Championships in the same year, finished fifth in the women’s 400 hurdles in the World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Oregon, and ran the third leg on the U.S. team that won the 1,600 relay in the final track event of that meet.
Yet Wilson had run close to four dozen races by the time her 49.39-second leg broke open a close 1,600 relay and gave U.S. anchor runner Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone a comfortable lead that she would expand greatly with a 47.91 anchor carry.
What would happen, Johnson wondered, if Wilson was able to dramatically reduce her race load while devoting more time to training?
“We want to give her the best opportunity possible to make the USA team that will compete in the [World Championships]. So we’re not only taking care of business at the collegiate level, but giving her the best opportunity to prepare so she can do the same at Worlds.”
It’s hard to find fault with Johnson’s program so far. Wilson has run 12 fewer races — 15 versus 27 — at this point in the year than she did last season, and she will enter the SEC meet at LSU’s Bernie Moore Stadium on Thursday with the fastest outdoor times in the world this year in both the women’s 400 (49.51 seconds) and 400 hurdles (53.23).
Wilson is scheduled to run in a qualifying heat of the 400 hurdles at about 7:25 p.m., Central Daylight Time, on Thursday, followed by a heat of the 400 at about 6:50 p.m. on Friday.
The final of the women’s 400 is scheduled for 6:15 p.m. on Saturday, with the 400 hurdles scheduled for 7:15. Wilson is one of the athletes in Arkansas’ 1,600 relay pool, but whether she runs in the final of that race at 8:45 could be determined by where the Razorbacks sit in the team standings at that time.
Last year’s SEC meet was Wilson’s coming-out party, so to speak, as she set then-personal bests of 50.05 in the 400 and 53.75 in the 400 hurdles before running a scintillating 48.60 anchor leg — the fastest in collegiate history — in the 1,600 relay for an Arkansas squad that finished third in 3:22.55, then the fourth-fastest time in collegiate history.
“It felt like a breakthrough moment for me,” Wilson said about her SEC triple. “I didn’t really realize until I pushed myself that I could accomplish something like that.”
Wilson, who is working toward an undergraduate degree in Sociology at Arkansas, has already had two dynamite doubles this year.
The first came on the final day of the NCAA Indoor Championships at the Albuquerque Convention Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico on March 11. First, she won the 400 in an American and collegiate record of 49.48 seconds. Then, she came back about an hour later to run a 49.19 anchor leg on an Arkansas 1,600 relay team that posted the fastest indoor time ever in the event with a victorious 3:21.75 victory that clinched the team title for the Razorbacks.
The second superb double came in the Tom Jones Memorial meet at the University of Florida. It was there that Wilson won the 400 hurdles in a yearly world-leading time of 53.23 seconds on Friday, April 14, before coming back the next day to record another yearly world-leading mark — and collegiate record — of 49.51 in the 400 to move to seventh on the all-time U.S. outdoor performer list in the event.
“It was a phenomenal performance,” Johnson said of Wilson’s double in the NCAA indoor meet as he spoke by telephone a week before her heroics in the Tom Jones Memorial. “You know your kids can do certain things. But we’ve never seen anything like that on the collegiate level. So it was a great surprise. Did I think she was capable of doing it? Absolutely. But was it shocking and surprising? Absolutely.
“It was phenomenal. But I just don’t think she’s tapped out. I think there is still some more there.”
Johnson, who will become the head women’s cross country and track and field coach at Arkansas on July 1, is hesitant to say how much faster he thinks Wilson can run. But he will talk at length when asked about her strengths, as well as areas where she can improve.
He will tell you that she is supremely talented and has a terrific combination of strength, aerobic capacity, and speed.
When told that one of Wilson’s former youth coaches has previously said that endurance is her super power, Johnson concedes that “she works really well.” But he quickly adds that “she’s also fast. She can sprint.”
Wilson would probably agree with her former youth coach about her endurance, as she regards her ability to push herself as one of her greatest assets.
“I think a lot of people, when they get tired, they shut down,” she said. “I don’t do that. I embrace the pain and keep going.”
That willingness to accept the discomfort that comes with fatigue might be best illustrated by the fact that when Wilson entered the NCAA meet in March, she had previously run three 800-meter races, along with a 600 during the indoor season.
Most 400-meter sprinters or hurdlers want nothing to do with racing over a 600- or 800-meter distance. And the few that do compete in one of those events will often turn in performances that are not particularly noteworthy.
But Wilson opened her indoor campaign with a collegiate-record time of 1:25.16 in the 600 — while finishing second to training partner and Arkansas volunteer assistant coach Shamier Little — and she twice ran times of 2:02.13 in the 800, with her second clocking placing her second in the SEC Championships.
Wilson’s relationship with Little is interesting: they are rivals in the 400 hurdles, the event in which Little finished a place ahead of Wilson in the World Championships. Yet the 22-year-old Wilson says the 28-year-old Little is kind of like a big sister to her.
“She’s so much fun to be around,” she said. “She’s a very good role model. She’s positive. She’s funny. She’s upbeat. She brings an upbeat energy to every practice and training session.”
Lance Harter, who is in his 34th and final season as the women’s cross country and track and field coach at Arkansas, is a huge fan of Wilson. He loves her work ethic and says she is the consummate team player willing to do whatever is needed to help the Razorbacks. He adds that during workouts on the track, when the middle-and long-distance runners are engaged in multiple-lap intervals, Wilson consistently cheers them on when they come past her.
“She’s just one of those kids who has a very quiet perspective of her gift and she doesn’t flaunt it,” he said.
Harter said that Wilson’s willingness to run the 600 and 800 during the indoor season paid huge dividends in the NCAA championships because her level of endurance was so high that it allowed her to rise to a level she had never been before.
“She’s gotten so strong that she now has that ability to carry her speed longer,” he said.
Her performance in Albuquerque was something to behold.
After running a then-personal best of 50.69 to lead qualifying in the 400 on Friday, Wilson cut more than a second off that mark in the second of two finals on Saturday when she obliterated both the previous American and collegiate records of 50.15 that Talitha Diggs of the University of Florida had set in the SEC meet two weeks earlier.
Defending champion Diggs led the four-runner field through the first 200 meters in 23.17 seconds — to second-place Wilson’s 23.56 — but Wilson narrowed Digg’s advantage down the backstretch before passing her entering the final curve and never looking back. Wilson’s time of 49.48 was just .22 seconds off the world indoor record of 49.26 that Femke Bol of the Netherlands had set 20 days earlier and more than a second faster than runner-up Diggs’ 50.49.
“I just wanted to execute and be smart,” Wilson told John Anderson of ESPN+ in a post-race interview. “[Diggs] is a really strong runner and she likes to get out. Just having her in the race is really good competition and pushes me to be my best too.”
A little more than an hour later, Wilson teamed up with teammates Amber Anning, Joanne Reid, and Rosey Effiong in the 1,600 relay to record a world best of 3:21.75 while finishing nearly four seconds ahead of second-place Texas (3:25.67).
The Razorback quartet’s time was not considered a world record because a relay team must be comprised of athletes from the same country to count as a world record. Arkansas’ foursome included Americans Effiong and Wilson, Anning of Great Britain, and Reid of Jamaica.
While Wilson’s 49.19 anchor leg was the fastest split ever recorded indoors by a woman, it was also another reminder that the 5-foot-5 dynamo had made a good decision when she decided to transfer to Arkansas after a frustrating two years at Tennessee.
Wilson had signed with Tennessee — after also taking recruiting visits to Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, and Miami — following a decorated prep career at Mills Godwin High School in Henrico, Virginia, during which she ran 23.59 in the 200, 52.06 in the 400, 40.89 in the 300 hurdles, and 56.36 in the 400 hurdles as a senior in 2019.
The times in the 300 and 400 hurdles were the fastest prep times in the nation that year. The 400 clocking ranked fourth on the yearly performer list, just behind a 51.98 best by a junior from Trenton Central High in New Jersey named Athing Mu, who is now the defending Olympic and World champion in the 800.
Wilson was looking forward to continuing to progress at Tennessee, but things never jelled there.
She ran a solid 52.99 in the 400 as a freshman in February of 2020, but the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. led to the cancellation of the NCAA indoor championships in early March, as well as the entire outdoor season.
Although she had not run as well indoors as she had expected she would, Wilson decided to come back to Tennessee for a second year. But her performances on the track really went south as her best 400 indoors was 53.90 and her season bests of 24.21 in the 200 and 58.68 in the 400 hurdles outdoors were much slower than she had run as a high school senior.
Her struggles on the track led to feelings of depression, and she and her parents came to the conclusion she needed to start fresh at another program.
“I wasn’t running well,” Wilson said about her angst at that time. “My times were way slower than I had run in high school. I went from being one of the best people in the country in high school to someone in college who was running slower than I had in high school. It became a mental battle where I blamed myself for what was happening.”
While Wilson does not blame Tennessee for all of her struggles, she does say the program was just not a good fit for her.
Arkansas was one of the schools she regarded as a potential transfer destination, and she was even more convinced it was the right place for her when she made a visit to campus.
She said she could tell right away it was a “winning mentality school” and she was impressed with how focused the women track and field athletes were about training and competing. In addition, she liked the fact that Johnson had not sugar-coated things when she met with him.
“He told me it wasn’t going to be easy,” she recalled. “He said, ‘I’m going to push you.’ I knew I needed that.”
That does not mean things went perfectly from day one. It took time for Wilson and Johnson to get to know each other and to learn how to best communicate with one another. But they had developed enough trust in each other by the end of last season that when the possibility of signing a contract to run professionally came up, she ultimately agreed with his opinion that another year of “growth and maturity” at the collegiate level would be best for her.
She also is all-in on the train more, race less regimen he has in place for her. Although that wasn’t always the case.
“I don’t think she was necessarily against it,” Johnson said when he first proposed what he was thinking about with Wilson. “But I would have to say she was apprehensive. She was saying, ‘Am I doing enough?’. . . I told her to just be patient and good things will happen.”
Great things have occurred, although Johnson said there are still times when Wilson wants to do more than he thinks is prudent.
“She’s just one of those kids who loves to work out,” he said. “She wants to get out there at practice and cross all the Ts and dot all the Is. But sometimes I’ve got to hold her back. Sometimes we will get to a certain part of a workout and I will say, ‘You know what? We’re good. We don’t need to do anything else.’”
Wilson says she knows “there is a fine line between racing just enough and too much,” but she is a fierce competitor who loves to race.
There is off-the-track Britton and then there is on-the-track Britton, according to Harter.
The off-the-track version is an unassuming, nice, sweet, and caring individual. But he says “a raging competitiveness goes off” when it’s time for her to race.
LeYuani Wilson, Britton’s mom and a long-time second-grade teacher, is one of her daughter’s biggest fans.
Seeing her daughter produce performances such as her American record in the 400 in the NCAA indoor meet has been wonderful but “shocking,” LeYuani said, adding she is also very proud of her daughter’s humility and knows Britton’s demeanor might surprise those who only watch her race.
“It is that small little voice. . . that’s so sweet,” LeYuani said. “It’s almost like a little girl’s voice, you know? But that’s how she is with her family, with her friends, with strangers when she meets people who ask her if they can take a picture with her. She’s just a very sweet and a very kind-hearted person.”
When asked to describe herself, Wilson said she’s outgoing and kind. Someone who likes to make friends and “have good exchanges with people.”
The 400 hurdles is her favorite event, her baby, as Johnson likes to say.
“I like the fact that it is so technical,” Wilson said. “That you’re working through things in your mind while you’re racing. Like how many steps am I taking between hurdles and what leg will be my lead leg at each hurdle.”
While one could argue that Wilson’s performances in the 400 have outshone her performances in the 400 hurdles so far this year, Johnson said there is lots of room for improvement in the latter event.
“She just needs to be a little more sound going into and coming off a hurdle,” he said. “Being able to switch [her lead leg] and to be comfortable and learning to trust that more. It’s really just a rhythm thing and timing thing that we’ve got to work out.”
Her affinity for the 400 hurdles, and the fact that she was ranked fourth in the world in the event by Track & Field News last year, might lead some to assume that will be her focus when the USA Track and Field Outdoor Championships are held in Eugene, Oregon from July 6-9. But Johnson said nothing has been decided at this point, and there’s no one saying she can’t also run the 400.
While running both the 400 and 400 hurdles is technically doable at the USATF meet, running well in both events would be an extremely tall order, as an athlete such as Wilson would be required to run in six one-lap races during a period of a little more than 72 hours.
The third day of the four-day meet, which will determine the U.S. team for the World Championships in Budapest, Hungary from August 19-27, would be particularly challenging. The final of the women’s 400 is scheduled to be run at 6:19 p.m., Pacific time, that day, with the semifinals of the 400 hurdles scheduled to start at 6:34.
Based on Wilson’s performances this year, Johnson is frequently asked how much faster does he think she can run by the end of the season? Not surprisingly, he refrains from naming specific marks as he does not want to put added pressure on her.
“I have some times in mind that I think she can achieve, but I don’t want her chasing times,” he said. “Let’s chase execution and the times will take care of themselves.”