Emily Sisson is beaming. In a tank top and visor, from the front seat of her car. She’s graciously made time to video-call on her phone in between her morning run and a body work appointment in Phoenix, Arizona.

Such is the life of America’s fastest woman marathoner ever as she gears up to compete at the Paris Olympics on August 11.

This race is a long time coming for the 32-year-old who’s been a distance runner standout since setting a 5,000-meter high school national record of 15:48.91. After an astonishing opener at the 2019 London Marathon in 2:23:08, the second fastest debut for an American woman, her high school dream of becoming an Olympic marathoner felt within grasp. Three spots were up for grabs at the 2020 Olympic Trials in Atlanta, Georgia. And Sisson had the third fastest seed time by nearly a minute and a half over fourth.

She dropped out of the race at mile 21.

The COVID-19 pandemic shut the world two weeks later, giving Sisson more than enough time to reflect on what went wrong.

“That race is probably the one I learned the most about the marathon from,” she says. “The biggest takeaway for me going into this Olympic Trials was it’s really important to be prepared for the elements and be prepared for the competition. Don’t get caught up in all the hype and forget that it’s just another marathon.”

She got a chance to put that lesson into practice 483 days later—just in a different event. That June, Sisson ran away from the field in the 10,000 meters at the U.S. Olympic Trials for track and field, winning the race and earning her spot on Team USA afterall. She ran another fearless race inside that empty stadium in Tokyo to finish 10th.

Sisson lined up at the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials marathon in Orlando two and a half years later as the clear favorite. Once again, things went wrong nearly from the start. But this time, Sisson was ready.

She felt a side stitch come on at mile 8. It was deja vu from the 2023 Chicago Marathon just four months earlier, where a side stitch came on at mile 18. She hung on to finish seventh and as the top American in 2:22:09.

“I can’t believe this is happening again,” Sisson thought. “I have like 18 miles to go. How am I going to get through it this time?”

That’s when she saw her husband, Shane Quinn, a former All-American runner with Sisson at Providence College who’s now a mental health counselor.

“He just was like, ‘Breathe in. Breathe.’ And so I just focused on really breathing and relaxing,” Sisson says. “I felt like I was meditating most of that race because I was just constantly relaxing.”

The spasms and clenching stopped, and Sisson hung tough to finish a commanding second sandwiched between Fiona O’Keeffe and Dakotah Lindwurm to make that Olympic team.

While Sisson’s personal best of 2:18:29 from the 2022 Chicago Marathon is an American record, that’s a hefty six and a half minutes slower than Tigst Assefa’s world record of 2:11:53, set last year in Berlin. The Ethiopian will toe the line in Paris along with the likes of Kenyan power trio Peres Jepchirchir, Hellen Obiri, and Sharon Lokedi, as well as and Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands, who’s attempting the iconic, perhaps slightly deranged, 5,000 meters, 10,000 meters, and marathon triple. She earned bronze in both events on the track this week.

But Sisson will have the beacon of promise that Molly Seidel laid out before the Americans in Tokyo. Seidel hung tough in the hot, humid, and resultantly slow race to earn bronze in 2:27:46.

Packed with not only heat and humidity, but also some soul-crushing hills, Paris promises perhaps the hardest Olympic marathon in history. Can Sisson use that to her advantage?

As an unfazed Sisson seems to get in some extra heat training inside her car, we caught up with her to discover how she turns setbacks into opportunities for growth, why she prefers training at her homebase of Providence, Rhode Island, under the eye of her longtime coach Ray Treacy over the high-altitude running mecca of Flagstaff, Arizona, and how she’s developed an unflappable quiet confidence over her career.

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She learns from setbacks

“I will say that’s one of the silver linings to my biggest setbacks—they are the best learning opportunities. I think going into this Olympic trials, it was really important to be prepared for the elements and be prepared for the competition, but not get so caught up in all the hype and forget that it’s just another marathon. I don’t want to leave my marathon in my training. And I think that’s something I might have done going into Atlanta. It’s an Olympic year. It’s easy to get excited and maybe overcook yourself a bit because it’s such a rare and amazing opportunity to vie for a spot on the Olympic team and get to represent the U.S. So I just tried to keep that in mind and try to just focus on stacking bricks and just trying to get fit and not get carried away.”

She prefers sea level

“I think my body just seems to prefer doing my marathon training at sea level. I do benefit a lot from altitude. I’ve done the hemoglobin mass testing, and I do get a benefit. I can feel it and we can see it. But I also can get really, really tired and run down up there. So I like going up before my marathon builds and I come down. Maybe it’s because in my marathon builds, I actually do quite a bit of training faster than marathon pace. My intensity is just a bit too high for doing higher mileage and higher intensity at altitude. When I’m at sea level, I sleep like 10 hours a night. So I just don’t think there’s enough hours in the day to train at altitude when I’m marathon training. I really do believe in listening to your body and my body likes doing my coach’s training down at sea level.”

She races in the New Balance FuelCell SuperComp Pacer v2—but that doesn’t mean you should

“It really comes down to personal preference. I’ve done shoe testing with New Balance in their sports research lab, and I think the whole FuelCell line is great. The Energy Arc technology provides a good combination of comfort and performance. I’ve seen benefits in how my legs feel and how fast I recover. At the end of the day, I believe you should go with what feels best, and I feel really good in the shoes I race in.”

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She’s earned a quiet confidence

“The week before the Olympic Trials, I saw on Instagram people sharing, ‘This is how I did my heat training.’ And they were wearing all these suits and everything. And I was like, ‘Oh, I didn’t do that.’ But, I don’t know what it is. Maybe I’m just getting older. You figure out what works with you a bit better.

I don’t think we did anything crazy, but we did prepare for the heat. Phoenix was actually that hot when we were training here in January. So I would just sleep in and run later in the day. But it was never really like doing anything super crazy and then we got to Florida. There were days it was warm and humid, and then there were days it wasn’t. And I just put on like an extra layer, like something like a windbreaker, something where there’d be space between your skin and the material so that you could get a little bit of sweat going.

I tried to practice drinking a little bit more water if I needed that during the race. I got used to that sitting in my stomach. I debated doing a sweat test at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. And we just decided that would be overthinking it and doing too much. I wore a visor and sunglasses and I thought that helped me stay relaxed. And then towards the end of the race, I just poured water on me. And I was like, yeah, the weather  actually felt pretty good.

And I think you get this quiet confidence in what you do and the team you surround yourself with. Like having faith in them, that they know what they’re doing too.”

She’s the eye of the storm

“I did feel pressure when I got to the [U.S. Olympic Trials marathon] hotel. I think I use a lot of different mental tricks for handling pressure and I really do switch it up depending on whatever resonates with me at the time. One thing is thinking I’m the eye of the storm. I can acknowledge everything that’s going on around me, but I can be this calm center and it doesn’t have to touch me. It doesn’t have to affect me. I can acknowledge it’s there and it’s good for the sport.”

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