Athing Mu: ‘Mentally I wasn’t present. I didn’t enjoy what was happening to me’

“Grace, gratitude, appreciation,” says Athing Mu of her approach to running, which is also her approach to life for good reason. We talk about learning and growing, about setbacks and what they can teach you, about expectations and when to let them go. About how to find joy in the process of this most brutally unambiguous of sports, where you win or lose based on fractions of a second.

“Things are going to happen,” she says with a wisdom beyond her 22 years, via video link from Los Angeles, where she lives and trains. “Suppose I run for another ten years. So many things will happen in those years. It won’t all go smoothly. The problems we have are lessons we learn.”

So let’s talk about the issues for a moment.

Go back twelve months and Mu was untouchable. She had made the 800 meters, one of the sport’s signature events, her personal fiefdom. She had won Olympic gold in Tokyo, added another in the 4x400m relay and won the world championships the following year. She had not been beaten in more than three years. She was young, marketable and hailed by CNN as “the future of athletics in America.” And she was unhappy.

Things came to a head at the 2023 World Championships in Budapest, where she was the runaway favorite to defend her title and extend her unbeaten run. How did she feel inside? “Definitely, I wasn’t really happy to be there,” she says now. “The season that preceded it – not in terms of training, but mentally – I just wasn’t really there. I just wasn’t there. I didn’t like being there. I didn’t really enjoy what was happening to me.”

What actually happened was the paralysis of expectation. Just winning had created a spiraling pressure that increased with each race, a vortex of attention and judgment that essentially pulled her out of her comfort zone and forced her to go through the motions. “You can be the rabbit, or you can be the fox,” one of her first coaches at the Trenton Track Club in New Jersey once told her. In her total dominance, Mu ironically felt more hunted than ever.

By the time she arrived in Budapest, she said, she treated it as “just another meet, instead of the actual world championships.” In the final, she was chased in the home leg by Mary Moraa from Kenya and Keely Hodgkinson from Great Britain. Bronze. Mu stopped a few feet after the line, grim, with her hands on her head. It was as if she finally realized that she had nothing left to give.

That remains Mu’s last championship race. A hamstring injury has kept her off the track this year, so her heat at the U.S. Olympic Trials in the early hours of Saturday morning will be her first race in nine months. With the Olympic Games in Paris just a month away, her absence has naturally fueled all kinds of fears, insecurities and wild theories. But she feels good. And most of all, she has largely given up caring about things she has no control over.

How does she combine racing sharpness with freshness? How does she determine how much racing is too much or too little? “I think we’re still working on that,” she admits. “This year we took a step back and decided to prioritize the Olympic team first, and prioritize the bigger competitions. So of course racing is great. But now we are just preparing for the Games.” That’s when she remembers herself. “Not the Games, the trialsshe adds, as if this were more than a formality.

What has definitely changed is her view of the sport. During those long months away from the track, Mu tried to rediscover the spark of inspiration that drew her there in the first place. “When I started running at the age of six,” she explains, “it was just something I did did. It wasn’t about pursuing ‘this person’, or reaching ‘this level’. It was something that was hardwired into me, and so it became the norm.

“The first two years [after turning professional]I don’t think I was that focused on winning. It was all just a new experience for me. And luckily I hadn’t really had a difficult moment. But of course that’s what happens as you get older. And I just didn’t know how it would affect me. Just… growing up. I experienced things that I didn’t expect to experience.”

After the world championships last year, she took a complete break and embraced the other parts of her life. She spent time with her family. She has logged off social media. She took long walks and read the Bible. She modeled and did commercial work. She speaks here on behalf of Team Coca-Cola, one of the Olympic sponsors. And along the way, she says, she learned “to see things in a different way, to take the moments and just appreciate them, and walk in gratitude.”

It’s not that she doesn’t want to win. An athlete who is so driven and destined will always want to win. But Mu is no longer willing to let winning define him. “I just want to appreciate the environment,” she says. “I don’t want to have the feeling of last year. It’s my second Olympics and I have the honor of hopefully going to an Olympics where it’s completely normal. There is no Covid, there are fans in the stands, there is an incredible field of 800m runners who are shaping this event for the whole sport.”

One of them, lest we forget, is Hodgkinson, an athlete whose fate seems intertwined with Mu’s since they both burst from the junior ranks around the time of the pandemic. Silver behind Mu in Tokyo 2021 and Eugene 2022. Silver behind Moraa in Budapest. The brand new European champion and this year the fastest woman in the world. And of course Mu watched.

“I’ve seen things on the tracks and on my social media,” she says. “She’s fantastic. I don’t think we’re really rivals. We’re just two really good athletes in the 800, super young, and with that fire between us, we’re going to go out and compete. But I feel like at the moment that you start thinking about rivals, things fall apart.

Ultimately it comes down to grace, gratitude and appreciation. Accept things as they will be. Towards the end of last season, after her post-world break, Mu ran in the Prefontaine Classic in Oregon. Even before the gun went off, she felt a different energy. “It was different from how I felt all season,” she says. “A kind of lightness, no expectation. I felt free. I felt like running and competing. I didn’t think about what the outcome would be. I just want this race to feel great. And whatever happens, happens.”

Of course, you could argue that an Olympic Games brings a very different kind of pressure. But Mu knows it is possible to run the biggest races with the greatest freedom, because this is what led her to greatness in the first place. And she wants to live in that place again. “Let’s compete,” she says. ‘Let’s not leave anything there. And when your legs get tired, just pump your arms.”