TheAscent wrote:
Probably because she did The Ascent at Broken Arrow about 6-7 weeks ago. You can't do dumb stuff like that, expect it not to screw you up, and then come out and try to run fast on the track.
A 1/2 hour uphill race is just about the easiest race to recover from. I have no idea why you are getting such a high upvote ratio. At many mountain running weekends, many people race a vertical K before doing a longer race a day or two later at the same event successfully.
People pointing out her trail/mountain racing and YouTubing as the reason for being cooked are off the mark. She did well last year doing all that plus running World Cross as well. Anna Gibson, Lauren Gregory did well doing both in previous years too (though they skipped track this year. . . but both do better in mountains than track, unlike Allie). If you are fit, you can race both mountains and track and feel good and perform reasonably well. At worse if you are trying to do both, things might not be optimized 100% for track or mountains, but that doesn't account for the body not feeling up to her usual standards in almost all races this year.
The most obvious reason for running poorly is that she was injured and then overcooked her training trying to cram in fitness to be able to race. Progressing fitness doesn't work well that way, you need to train at the right efforts and let the fitness come. She had a video a couple weeks ago saying that she had overcooked things and was in "functional overreach" that she was hoping to recover from in time for USAs. Well she didn't.
I don't blame her for skipping the final. Nothing makes an athlete less motivated to race than coming in overcooked in training. She must have already felt that in the prelim, which just overcooked her more. It's like Remco DNFing at the Tour de France. He was right to pull the plug. There's no point if your body is betraying you.. It was time to recover, otherwise you put yourself into an even bigger hole. She needs to recover physically for a few weeks to reset and have her body back to feeling good before deciding what to do the rest of the year.
The biggest blame has to go to the coaching and injury. The injury was bad luck it seems, not related to eating disorders, and didn't really take her out all that long, but it happened at a bad time.