‘Like cutting the head off a hydra’: how Mary Cain exposed Nike’s disgraced coaching team

The track prodigy made it to world championships at 17 and joined Nike’s Oregon Project. At 29, Cain is detailing the hellish years under coach Alberto Salazar in her new memoir

“As someone who has lost touch with reality, I like to hold a firm grasp on it now,” Mary Cain says while we walk through a palm-tree spotted campus in California.

She’s telling me why she insisted she write her own memoir, This is Not About Running, without ceding the narrative to a ghostwriter, as happens with many athletes. “My story is so complicated … there are so many bad actors that I think it forces the reader to embrace nuance, and I don’t think you see that very often.”