Kate Hall USATF Outdoor Championships – Running With Type 1 Diabetes – Runner’s World

You’ll want to be ready if you find yourself on the receiving end of a Kate Hall medicine ball toss.

I wasn’t. During a midday early May workout, Hall recruited me to catch her throws and roll the ball back to her. I moved to the middle of the infield at Fitzpatrick Stadium in Portland, Maine. From just inside the track, Hall sprang forward and heaved the 8-pound ball. Next thing I knew, the ball landed just in front of me, bounced, and crashed into my chest. It left a red mark on my sternum that lingered for a week.

I should have known better. Hall, age 22, is the national high school record-holder in the long jump, a two-time NCAA champion in the event, and this year’s national indoor titlist. Her long jump PR of 6.83 meters is best appreciated by unspooling a tape measure 22 feet, 5 inches and imagining how much of that distance you could cover after a 40-meter run-up. Hall is also an accomplished sprinter, with a 100-meter best of 11.30 and a runner-up finish at 60 meters in February’s indoor nationals.

The medicine ball tosses came at the end of a workout focusing on sprint starts; on some, she bolted from the blocks with such force that her grandfather, standing on the back of the blocks, was knocked off balance. So of course I should have braced myself when this exemplar of power sent a flying object my way.

Greta Rybus

Greta Rybus

Hall is exceptional even among her peers. After the 2018 outdoor season, she decided not to return to the University of Georgia for what would have been her senior year. She moved back to her native Maine to resume working with Chris Pribish, an athletic trainer who guided her high school career but who has otherwise never coached a world-class track athlete, and who spends much of his day working with elderly rehab clients.

Hall and Pribish hope that their highly individualized approach can put someone training solo, unsponsored, in Maine’s less-than-ideal climate, on this year’s world championships team. And they hope next year to show that Hall, who has type 1 diabetes, can be the first person with the disease known to become a U.S. track and field Olympian.

Growing up, Hall was used to being the quickest kid in school. That doesn’t necessarily mean much in Casco, Maine, which had a population of 3,742 when Hall became a teenager. But it meant something to a natural competitor, so one day in 2007, when the 10-year-old Hall was beaten by another girl at a soccer practice race, she wanted answers. Hall’s father learned the other girl had done a summer track program. He urged her to try track club the following summer.

“I was hesitant to do something new,” Hall says. “I was all set with soccer and basketball. My dad said, ‘Just go and try one practice. If you hate it, you don’t have to come back.’” Hall sampled all of the events, excelled in the sprints and long jump, and told her father she wanted to return. By seventh grade she was competing for state titles. She stopped playing basketball in eighth grade because it interfered with indoor track, and abandoned soccer the following fall to avoid knee injuries.

Hall was obviously a natural, but that doesn’t mean she came to track unprepared. She has a jumper/sprinter’s version of Kenyan kids running to school. “When I was young, every time I went through a door, I would jump up and hit the doorpost,” she says. “I was probably doing hundreds of jumps a day. I sort of started to train myself to develop that springiness.”

In 2012, as a high school freshman, Hall set the goal of qualifying for the 2016 Olympic trials, even though her best long jump at the time was more than three feet shy of the eventual standard of 21 feet, 11 inches. In the final jump of her prep career, at the 2015 New Balance Nationals, Hall soared as she never had before. Her mark of 22 feet, 5 inches broke a 39-year-old national high school record, held by Kate McMillan, who in open competition went on to win silver at the 1976 Olympics. It was a massive improvement in personal terms—she had set her previous outdoor PR of 20 feet, 11 inches just the previous week—and an automatic qualifier for the 2016 trials.

That one jump also marked a great distance between the 18-year-old Hall and her 10-year-old self. It was at age 10 that Hall became uncharacteristically weepy, and started losing weight despite eating and drinking more than usual. A local doctor told her she was having growth spurts. As Hall’s symptoms continued to worsen, her parents turned to Dr. Google, which led to doing an at-home test of her urine’s sugar level. A trip to the hospital later that day resulted in a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes and celiac disease. “As soon as I was diagnosed and got insulin, I gained a ton of weight and was back to normal,” she says.

Being diabetic adds challenges that Hall’s competitors never need worry about. If her blood sugars go too high, the pH level in her muscles can change enough to cause cramping. “She had meets in high school where she took one or two jumps and her blood sugars were over 350 [mg/dl], and she’d be done for the day,” Pribish says. Training was frequently interrupted if Hall’s blood sugars had been too high or too low recently.

Greta Rybus

There have also been equipment malfunctions. The insulin pump she used to wear was a pager-like device attached to her hip, with a tube that connected to a needle. “Whenever I tried to compete, the whole thing would rip off,” Hall says. She now wears an Omnipod, a 1.5-inch x 2-inch pump that she attaches to her triceps for three days at a time. A discreet glucose monitor she clips to her waistband sends blood sugar readings to her phone. (Before I knew about the set-up, I assumed Hall was checking Instagram when she immediately went to her phone between sprints.)

Between technological advances and greater knowledge about managing her nutrition, Hall is now rarely out of commission because of diabetes. Track meets remain challenging, because the excitement of competition can spike her blood sugar levels. Hall tries to stay calm more than get psyched up for meets.

Hall uses her platform to speak regularly to other diabetics. “The message I’m trying to give is that type 1 diabetes doesn’t have to stop you from doing anything you want to do,” she says. “It doesn’t have to control you. You can control it.”

Greta Rybus

Indeed, Hall ascribes some of her success to diabetes. “My work ethic stems from being diagnosed when I was 10,” she says. “I’ve had to manage and control this disease from a very young age, and I wanted to do it all on my own.” The initial misdiagnosis contributed to Hall’s sense of self-sufficiency and her skepticism toward authority figures who don’t take her perspective into account. As a teen, Hall was home-schooled. While representing Lake Region High School, she was coached by Pribish and trained on her own, using the school’s track practices as a time to stretch and socialize.

Pribish’s and Hall’s origin story isn’t quite that of Alberto Salazar spotting a young Galen Rupp running laps at soccer practice, but it has the same element of chance. Hall pulled a hamstring sprinting at her seventh grade state meet. She went for physical therapy at a clinic in Windham, the nearest facility to her home. Pribish, now the owner of Momentum Performance and Wellness, in South Portland, was on hand during Hall’s last day of therapy. “I told her dad, ‘She’s not ready to go back to sprinting,’” Pribish says. “I told him the hamstring would tear again if she didn’t do some things differently.”

Halls says of their meeting, “He seemed extremely knowledgeable. He knew a lot about track and other sports and how the body works and moves.” The Halls asked Pribish if he did personal training. They’ve been working together in some capacity for the ensuing nine years.

Hall’s development stalled after high school. As a freshman at Iowa State University, her best outdoor long jump was almost a foot short of her PR. “I had more freedom in high school to pursue my goals,” Hall says.

Greta Rybus

Greta Rybus

Pribish says that promises made about him staying involved in Hall’s training weren’t honored. “The training was completely different,” Hall says. Near-daily heavy weight lifting made Hall gain 10 pounds in her upper body. “I got to where I was doing my own thing to correct what they were doing, but then I was doing too much, because my body was already tired. I got heavier and slower and realized Iowa State wasn’t going to work for me.” The only real highlight of the year was fulfilling the goal she had set in ninth grade of competing at the 2016 Olympic Trials, where she placed 10th.

Transferring to the University of Georgia for her sophomore year initially felt like an improvement. Hall enjoyed making friends with her teammates and having people to work out with. She set her still-standing 100-meter PR in May 2017. The following month, she won the outdoor NCAA title in her best jump since high school.

But some of the frustrations of the previous year returned. “I started to become aware that the NCAA is a huge business,” Hall says. “It’s not necessarily about what’s best for the athletes, it’s about scoring points.”

Greta Rybus

Greta Rybus

Greta Rybus

Both schools, she says, ignored that having diabetes means she needs more recovery than most athletes between hard workouts, either on the track or in the gym. “If my blood sugars are really high, there’s all this stuff going on in my body to lower them,” Hall says. That process can hinder aspects of recovery such as lowering muscle tension and increasing glandular activity, which in turn can harm her sleep. “Diabetes affects pretty much everything,” she says.

Despite winning the 2018 indoor NCAA long jump title, Hall didn’t make the final at outdoor NCAAs. For the third of three years in college, she’d seen herself mostly get worse, not better as the schedule moved toward championship season. She often felt exhausted from inadequate recovery and out of touch with her body. “No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t jump like I used to,” Hall says. “I would visualize it, but when I was on the runway I physically couldn’t do it.” She was constantly on the verge of a serious injury. The emphasis on heavy lifting over bodily balance resulted in the hip and glute of her right leg, which is her takeoff leg for jumping, becoming noticeably larger than her left hip and glute.

Greta Rybus

Hall decided that staying in the college system would hurt her chances of making the 2020 Olympic team. “I didn’t want to be thrown into the professional world in an Olympic year,” she says. “I wanted a year to learn what it’s like and get experience with the pro schedule, traveling overseas, things like that. I knew I needed to go back to where I know is going to be best for me.” That meant leaving Georgia and the NCAA, and returning to Maine to work with Pribish. She’ll finish her degree in exercise science next spring through online courses with Eastern Oregon University.

The longest Hall has run at once is a mile during a school fitness test. She was more lumbering than lithe when I watched her jog about 300 meters as part of a sprint workout warm-up. “Her body doesn’t like jogging, doesn’t find it comfortable,” Pribish says. “I don’t think she has a slow-twitch muscle fiber in her body.”

Understanding jumper/sprinter training requires setting aside a distance runner’s volume-is-king mindset. Even what many of us think of as interval workouts don’t make sense in Hall’s disciplines. “Sprinting is all about 90 to 100 percent effort,” Pribish says. “The only way you’re going to get faster is teaching the muscles and nervous system how to go at this extremely fast pace. And then you need a very long recovery. It’s not about doing lots of repeats at 80 percent effort. That middle speed breaks you down more than it helps either of the things we’re looking for—maximum efforts or recovery.”

Greta Rybus

The core of a sprint workout I witnessed was four 25-meter, four 35-meter, and four 50-meter accelerations, with recoveries ranging from three to six minutes. (This was enough time between for girls from a Portland high school to ask Hall for a group photo.) Counting her warm-up jog and a few strideouts, Hall covered less than 800 meters during the two-hour workout.

“A very long recovery” also applies to days. Whereas elite distance runners might cover 10 to 20 miles on their “rest” days, Hall takes the term much more literally. The day after a hard gym or track workout, she’s likely to go to Pribish’s gym for an hour. She’ll do some foam rolling, a few basic mobility exercises, and then mostly lie on a massage table while Pribish does fascial-release and repositioning work on her. If Hall still feels tired or sore the next day, she’ll take another recovery day. What Hall has written about diabetes also describes her approach to training: “[T]aking things one day at a time, making changes to one thing at a time, and learning from my struggles and failures.”

Greta Rybus

Pribish, a former collegiate rugby player who is now 39, is perhaps the perfect coach for Hall. His sports medicine background imparted the idea that plans change as the person—whether a world-class athlete or a 65-year-old with a bad back—adapts to the previous work. At the same time at his gym you might see young ice and hockey players doing plyometrics near a hunched retiree pulling a weighted bag across the floor. “Rehab and performance are very similar,” he says. “They’re just at different intensities.”

Not coming from the typical track coaching ranks frees Pribish to ignore conventional wisdom. The willingness to always question and adapt meshes with how Hall thrives under individualized attention. Pribish loves to deconstruct athletic movements, then come up with interesting, challenging ways to improve those motions based on each person’s unique make-up and current capabilities. He cites Charlie Francis, coach of Ben Johnson, who was stripped of the 1988 Olympic 100-meter title for doping, as a key source on sprint mechanics, and old Russian literature for his knowledge of plyometrics. “There’s a lot to learn from both—minus the doping, of course,” Pribish quips.

Greta Rybus

At 5 feet, 4 inches and 130 pounds, with broad shoulders and heavily muscled legs, Hall looks imposing in athletic gear. But she’s now neither as strong as she was in college nor particularly cut. “The normal world of strength and conditioning for sprinting relies on heavy, heavy loads of Olympic lifts,” Pribish says. “The risk of injury is through the roof, and they’re too heavy and slow to mimic what she does. Really fast people aren’t necessarily strong—it’s much more of a bouncy-ball effect. We want to train that bouncy ball to work better, not necessarily for the muscle to be able to lift something super heavy.”

In a one-hour gym workout I watched, Hall did no bench presses, crunches, deadlifts, full squats, or other conventional weight exercises. She started with a series of proprioceptive and neuromuscular exercises, such as swinging 10-pound dumbbells back and forth while standing with one knee bent at 90 degrees, or jumping rope on one foot and switching to the other foot when Pribish yelled “Switch!”

[Smash your goals with a Runner’s World Training Plan, designed for any speed and any distance.]

Greta Rybus

Greta Rybus

Then she did sets of what Pribish called “evil little exercises,” with each becoming more challenging than in the previous set: lunging while Pribish pulled on a belt from her side; jumping up and slamming a medicine ball to the ground on her descent; stepping on a raised wood box with 30 pounds across her shoulders, then doing two-footed jumps atop the box; and similar functional-strength movements. Between exercises Pribish explained the idea behind each.

The workout ended with Hall alternating quarter-squats and jumps on a force plate that measured her ground contact time. The squats got increasingly quicker and heavier (up to 310 pounds), and Pribish set increasingly short goal times for the jumps. Hall looked like she had springs in her shoes as produced ground reaction times as low as 133 milliseconds, almost half the 250 milliseconds that Pribish says is seen in good athletes in a range of sports. Then she and Pribish discussed the next day’s training, and Pribish said, “We’ll see how you feel in the morning.”

It must be noted that Hall’s long jump PR remains that high school national record. She and Pribish ascribe the four-year-old mark to her college training not being suitable for her body, including from the diabetes angle. “I don’t have any doubt I’ll be better than that soon,” Hall says.

Greta Rybus

The signs are certainly pointing in the right direction. Since mid June, she’s won the long jump at the Adidas Boost Boston Games, where a runway and pit were set up in Copley Square, near the Boston Marathon finish line, and at meets in Marseille, France and Lignano, Italy. Among those she defeated was Darya Klishina, second at the 2017 world championships. Her season’s best of 6.78 meters, which she’s hit twice, is less than 2 inches off her PR. It ties her for the fourth best qualifying mark for this weekend’s outdoor nationals, where the team for the world meet will select itself. Hall’s chances of going to Worlds are even greater because Brittney Reese, the defending world champ, gets automatic entry to the meet, so the United States can send a four-woman long jump squad.

For now, Hall is without a major sponsor. She lives inexpensively in Gray, half an hour northwest of Portland, hanging out with her boyfriend of six years, and getting by on prize money and coaching jumpers and sprinters at St. Joseph’s College in Standish. Most of her gear is from college. She tries to compete in apparel without large logos to avoid giving the impression she’s sponsored. Her one material indulgence is paying extra for a vanity license plate that reads “LJCHAMP.”

One of Hall’s goals for the year is to get a sponsor. She runs the 100 not only because training for it helps her long jump, but also because prowess in a marquee event makes her more desirable to sponsors. Still, she understands the reality of her situation. “A lot of shoe companies don’t like athletes going back to a high school coach,” she says. “They think a high school coach might not be as qualified or knowledgeable.

“I know why I’m going back to that coach,” she continues, “and that’s not anything I would change for a company. I know this is the best place for me.”

Contributing Writer Scott is a veteran running, fitness, and health journalist who has held senior editorial positions at Runner’s World and Running Times.