Tuohy back in familiar territory
North Carolina State standout has rebounded from knee surgery as a high school senior to become NCAA title favorite
Don’t get Katelyn Tuohy wrong.
She is proud of winning an unprecedented three consecutive Nike Cross Nationals cross country titles during her prep career at North Rockland High School in Thiells, New York.
She takes great pride in being selected by Track & Field News as its Women’s Prep Athlete of the Year in 2018 after setting national high school outdoor records in the girls’ mile and 3,200 meters during her sophomore year.
And she is aware that the national high school indoor records she set in the girls’ 2,000, 3,000, and 5,000 meters still stand.
However, the North Carolina State University sophomore would much rather talk about the present than the past as she and her teammates look to win the program’s seventh consecutive women’s team title in the Atlantic Coast Conference Cross Country Championships at Panorama Farms in Earlysville, Virginia, tomorrow morning (Oct. 28).
The men’s 8,000-meter race will start at 10:40 a.m., Eastern Time, followed by the women’s 6,000-meter race at 11:30.
The meet will be the third race of the season for Tuohy – pronounced Tewey – but the 20-year-old runner has established herself as the favorite for the women’s individual title in the NCAA Championships in Stillwater, Oklahoma, on Nov. 19 after rolling to victories over many of the top collegiate competitors in the nation in her first two meets.
“I think now that she’s running at this level collegiately, she has a desire for things to be more focused on what she’s doing collegiately than what she did in high school,” said Laurie Henes, the women’s cross country and track and field coach at North Carolina State. “Her focus is more on let me train hard and race well, rather than on what she overcame to get to where she is.”
Slowed by injuries in the last 18 months of high school before undergoing surgery on her left knee in June of her senior year, Tuohy has further silenced the naysayers with her dominance over highly regarded title contenders so far this season.
Some commentators tried to write her off after she graduated from high school, concluding she would never again be the runner she had been as a sophomore. That she was washed up at the ripe old age of 18. But she has quietly stepped up over the past year to prove her doubters wrong.
First, she placed 15th in the NCAA Cross Country Championships last November to help North Carolina State win its first team title in that meet. Next she finished second in both the 3,000 and 5,000 in the NCAA Indoor Track and Field Championships in March. Finally, she won the 5,000 in the outdoor title meet in June.
Furthermore, she lowered her personal bests to yearly collegiate-leading times of 4 minutes, 6.84 seconds in the 1,500 and 15:14.61 in the 5,000 during the season. Those times were more than 7 and 22 seconds faster, respectively, than she ran in those events in high school.
“It was pretty important,” Tuohy said of her 5,000-meter victory in the NCAA meet. “A goal of mine going into college was definitely to win an individual title. We had already won the team title in [cross country], which was something I had on my radar as a long-term goal in college.”
Her victory came a year after she had watched on television as then-NC State teammate Elly Henes won the 5,000 to cap her collegiate career. Tuohy said it was “cool to be following in her footsteps.”
Elly Henes, who ran a superb 14:52.87 in the 5,000 this year during her first season as a professional, is the daughter of Tuohy’s coach, Laurie, who also won an NCAA title in the 5,000 in 1991 when she was a Wolfpack junior.
Laurie Henes — one of the big reasons why Tuohy came to NC State — was a nationally ranked competitor in the 5,000 and 10,000 during a professional career that lasted through the 2000 season.
“I was really comfortable with having Coach Henes as the head coach,” she said. “She had many different perspectives on the running world, especially for young female distance runners. And then the girls on the team. We really clicked on my visit here and I knew I was going to be happy if I came here.”
Henes-nee Gomez, the top-ranked prep runner in the nation in the girls’ mile and two mile as a senior at Boardman High in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1988, knew Tuohy was loaded with talent as she was recruiting her, but she was also impressed with her aggressive racing style.
“She’s just a fearless racer,” Henes said. “The team aspect, running for her school, those kinds of things were always very important to her, even at the amazingly high level she was at. We’re pretty team oriented here, so her views toward the importance of a team were big draws for us.”
North Carolina State, paced by Elly Henes’ 10th-place performance, had finished fifth in the 2019 NCAA Cross Country Championships, but the addition of Tuohy helped the Wolfpack place second to BYU in the 2020 championships that were run in March of 2021 after being postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Tuohy was not particularly happy with her 24th-place finish in that meet when it occurred, as the time gap between her and teammates Hannah Steelman in fifth place and Kelsey Chmiel in ninth was larger than she had hoped it would be. But she has since come to realize that she raced “a lot better than what my fitness level was at the time.”
The fact was Tuohy had only been back training for about four months at that point as it had taken her about five months to rehab from her knee surgery the previous June.
Tuohy prefers not to discuss specifics about the surgery, but Henes was glad she underwent the procedure when she did.
“We were definitely in favor of that because we want her to have a long career,” she said. “And the sooner she got that done, the sooner she could start working her way back.”
Tuohy ran her first track race when she was 12 years old. Her older brother Patrick, who is a member of the cross country and track teams at Fordham University, got her interested in running and it quickly supplanted soccer – she was a striker – as her favorite sport because she liked the “opportunity to challenge myself, to push past my limits and see how far I could push myself.”
She had a lot of success at the youth level and entered high school with personal bests of 4:24.36 in the 1,500 and 10:00.09 – run indoors – in the 3,000.
After lowering those marks to 4:18.51 – the fastest girls’ time in the nation – and 9:30.28 during the outdoor track season as a freshman, she really took off during her sophomore year.
First, she capped her cross-country season by setting a course record of 16:44.7 in winning the Nike Cross Nationals in Portland, Oregon, with a 40-second margin of victory over runner-up Chmiel, who is now a teammate but was then a junior at Saratoga Springs High in New York.
Then Tuohy set national high school records of 5:57.76 in the 2,000 meters and 15:37.12 in the 5,000 during the indoor track and field season. That was followed by the outdoor season in which she ran national prep records of 4:33.87 in the mile and 9:47.88 in the 3,200 meters.
The mile mark bested the record of 4:35.24 that Polly Plumer had set for University High in Irvine, California, in 1982, and the 3,200 time lowered the national best of 9:48.59 that Kim Mortensen had run while at Thousand Oaks High in California in 1996.
Sports Illustrated wrote in a July 2018 story about Tuohy that “she seems politely bewildered that anyone else cares what she is doing.”
The article noted she had become popular enough to receive a direct message in Instagram from a young man offering to fly her to Arizona so she could be his date for a high school prom.
In a quote indicative of her royalty status in high school track and cross country circles, Kyle Murphy, one of her coaches at North Rockland, said: “I feel a responsibility to the sport. Talents like this don’t come along all the time, and I really want to make sure I get it right – for her sake, her parents’ sake and for running’s sake.”
Much of Tuohy’s junior year was a continuation of her stellar sophomore campaign as she won her second consecutive title in the Nike Cross Nationals with a time of 16:37.8 that lopped nearly seven seconds off her course record from the previous year and gave her a 17-second margin of victory over second-place Chmiel. Then came an indoor season in which she set a national record of 9:01.81 in the 3,000.
However, she did not have a great outdoor season – by her lofty standards. Nonetheless, her season bests of 4:25.21 in the 1,500 and 9:53.30 in the 3,200 ranked 10th and third, respectively, on the yearly national performer lists.
She managed to win her third Nike Cross Nationals title in December of her senior year, but her winning time of 17:18.4 – run on a cool and rainy day – was substantially slower than what she had run over the same 5,000-meter course the previous two years. In addition, her margin of victory was a scant seven tenths of a second over second-place Taylor Ewert of Beavercreek High (Ohio), with Sydney Thorvaldson of Rawlins High (Wyoming) another three-tenths of a second back.
Tuohy ranked second on the yearly indoor lists in the 1,500 and 3,000, but her bests of 4:20.81 and 9:32.88 paled in comparison to some of her previous performances.
The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. led to the cancellation of the outdoor high school track and field season in 2020, but Tuohy’s knee issues were severe enough that she would not have run had there been a season.
Under normal circumstances, the rehabilitation from her knee surgery would have caused her to redshirt the 2020 cross country season, but the four-month postponement of the NCAA Championships allowed her to compete in that meet.
She lowered her personal best in the 1,500 to 4:12.55 during the 2021 outdoor track season and also ran 15:47.38 in the 5,000. But she did not advance to the NCAA Championships in the longer race as she finished 33rd overall in 16:45.05 in the East Preliminary Round meet.
“It just wasn’t my day,” she said. “I was pretty sick that trip. A couple of us were.”
Tuohy took a longer-than usual break at the end of cross-country season last November as she had been bothered by a sore heel, but her time off became longer than planned as she came down with COVID, as well as the flu.
As a result, she was not in top shape for the NCAA Indoor Championships. Yet, running with an underdog mentality, she finished second to Courtney Wayment of BYU in the women’s 5,000 meters in a personal best of 15:30.63 on the first day of the meet and was runner-up to Taylor Roe of Oklahoma State in the 3,000 in a time of 8:59.20 on the second day.
“That was pretty fun because I felt like I had no pressure on me,” she said of her approach. “It allowed me to go into the meet a little more relaxed.”
Henes said the runner-up finishes were a breakthrough for Tuohy because they showed she could compete with the best collegiate runners as she finished 46 hundredths of a second behind Wayment in the 5,000 and .25 seconds behind Roe in the 3,000.
“She was in it for the win in both those races and that got her confidence back to the level where she believed she could run with anyone in the country,” Henes said. “The indoor nationals were really a turning point for her.”
Tuohy said her performances served as a springboard to the outdoor track season that saw her win the 1,500 in the ACC Championships before winning the 5,000 in the NCAA meet.
Although Tuohy placed a disappointing 13th in 16:08.80 in the 5,000 in the USA Track & Field Outdoor Championships after the first 3,000 meters of the race were run at a sluggish pace that projected to a final time of 16:53, Henes said that experience should benefit her in the future.
“She’s a very good learner,” Henes said of Tuohy, a business major. “In situations like that, she will learn things that she could do differently the next time she is in that situation. If she learns something she could do better next time, she rarely will make the same mistake twice. Not everyone who just blew everyone away in high school is good at learning how to race in a different manner. But she’s been fantastic at it.”
Henes said Tuohy’s work ethic is another one of her strengths.
“I know a lot of people work hard, but she does all the little things that you need to do to be at this level,” she said. “She is very, very dedicated to reaching her potential in the sport and taking care of all the little things that can help you get there.”
Tuohy can be guarded in talking about her running past. In addition to not giving details about her knee surgery, she declined to identify which schools had been on her short list when she committed to North Carolina State. But Henes described her as someone who is “definitely a lot of fun and outgoing” when she is around people she trusts.
She added that Tuohy is a “hard worker and she enjoys making other people around her enjoy it as well.”
The hard work, which currently entails running 70 miles a week, has been very evident in both of Tuohy’s victories this season.
She won the Joe Piane Notre Dame Invitational in South Bend, Indiana, on Sept. 30 when she broke away from NCAA 10,000-meter champion Mercy Chelangat of Alabama and Kenya in the final kilometer of the five-kilometer race to record a 15:50.0 to 16:02.1 victory.
She followed that with a win in the Nuttycombe Invitational in Madison, Wisconsin, on Oct. 14 when she clocked 19:44.3 over the 6,000-meter course to finish a little more than five seconds ahead of runner-up and teammate Chmiel.
Tuohy was front and center in the lead pack from the beginning of the race before she began to force the pace with about 1.6 kilometers remaining. She had a three-second lead over her closest pursuers when she crested an uphill portion of the course a quarter-mile later.
Her advantage had doubled over second-place Chmiel with 500 meters left in the race, and although her teammate briefly reduced her deficit to about four seconds with a 300 to go, Tuohy pulled away over the final straightaway that finished up a long uphill grade.
Appearing to be running well within herself, Tuohy turned around after crossing the finish line and gave Chmiel a hug after she had finished before the two of them slapped hands.
“I wanted to make a move maybe around the hills with a little more than a K to go,” Tuohy said, “and then just work on slowly picking it up until the last straightaway.”
North Carolina State, the top-ranked team in the nation, won both of those meets, although the Wolfpack needed to win on a tiebreaker to defeat No. 2 New Mexico in the Nuttycombe meet after each squad totaled 80 points.
Henes is still in the process of determining North Carolina State’s top seven runners for the NCAA Championships. But in the meantime, Tuohy said she and her teammates are being very “meticulous with our preparation, like working on packing up in practice, and bringing that pack mentality with us when we run in races. . . Pretty much trying to get the team as fit and confident as possible for championship season.”
Tuohy refers to her teammates as her best friends, and credits them with helping her rediscover the joys of running hard.
“I fell in love with the sport again by being able to do this with my teammates,” she said. “It’s hard to explain how special it is to do something bigger than yourself. And we all collectively work so hard together and want to achieve these goals together. It’s just super special and that’s definitely my favorite thing about running.”