Article by Oana Duşmănescu – Published Friday, 01 May 2026, 10:05 / Updated Friday, 01 May 2026 10:05
Mary Cain was just 17 years old at the 2013 World Championships, becoming the youngest American athlete ever sent to such a competition. Then she was co-opted into Nike's Oregon project. Now, at 29, the former runner recounts, in her memoir, the nightmare years she lived under the guidance of coach Alberto Salazar.
Cain was dead set on writing her own memoir, a book titled “This Is Not About Running,” not wanting to collaborate with a “ghostwriter,” as happens with many athletes. “My story is so complicated … there are so many negative characters, and that forces the reader to accept the nuances, which is not very common,” said the author, who in 2014 was the world junior 3,000m champion.
As a teenager, Cain set four junior national records, and at 17 he competed at the World Senior Championships in the 1,500 meters, finishing 10th. But instead of going to college to compete in the NCAA, she was contacted by Alberto Salazar, a renowned coach from the Nike Oregon Project, who convinced her to give up college athletics and turn professional under his guidance.
The Guardian writes that four years of nightmare followed for Cain, during which, she says, Salazar became a huge emotional abuser. Cain portrayed a trainer obsessed with her weight who isolated her from her parents, sent her to an unlicensed sports “psychologist” and ignored her clear signs of suicidal ideation, eating disorders and self-harm. Salazar denied all allegations, and the 2023 lawsuit ended with damages paid to the athlete in 2023 by him and Nike.
Alberto Salazar
While the media wondered what happened to Cain as her times got weaker and weaker, the young woman says she was lucky to escape the whole experience alive.
Cain is now a second-year medical student and hits the Stanford faculty gym when she has time between classes. However, she confesses that she is not obsessed with school, even though she has high grades in exams, but prefers to spend her time balanced between studying and friends.
Mary Cain has been bullied and abused since she played track and field in high school
“I think it's really important to learn from what I've been through and make sure I never get caught up in the idea that this is it,” she said.
In “This Is Not About Running,” Cain vividly describes her years as a teenage phenom forced into an extremely unhealthy mindset in the present tense. Her story begins with a high school coach, her classmates at the time and their parents who bullied her for her talent. When Salazar called her, offering to train her from the age of 16, Mary Cain gladly accepted.
In Project Nike, Cain describes a team of people who seemed fully aware of Salazar's tactics, but concealed them.
She recounts scenes in which a so-called sports psychologist ordered her to be tougher when the girl revealed that she was self-harming. Salazar's boss and vice president of marketing at the time told her that he would help her cut her hair to lose more weight, but he wouldn't allow it because it wouldn't look good, and she needed a different bra because she had large breasts.
The woman measuring her body fat percentage was asking Cain to submerge herself in the water for at least 30 seconds four times because Salazar wanted the most accurate reading possible, thus ignoring the pleas of the girl who was panicking underwater.
Mary Cain says that in addition to abuse from coaches, she also endured indifference from other athletes who ignored her depression and suicidal tendencies
Her teammates, Cain writes, were equally unempathetic, ignoring her suicidal thoughts and depressive episodes.
Cain left the Nike Oregon Project in 2016, regularly self-harming and suffering from a severe eating disorder, but spent the next three years thinking, “I hope Alberto still loves me… I'm a loser. I'm bad. I'm fat.”
The road from that point to now has been a long one of healing mind and body. In the early years after leaving Nike, he continued to run, but was always injured. “I was still in a state of deep depression and I didn't know what was happening to my body,” says the former athlete.
Stress fractures, common in athletes with eating disorders and malnutrition during overtraining (a condition known as Relative Energy Deficit in Sports, or RED-S), were part of the problem. But there was another condition, more mysterious.
Cain was experiencing numbness in his right leg from the knee down, which would worsen if he ran too much and would eventually occur even after walking short distances. The story she had been saddled with by the press and coaches was a popular one among young athletes: her career could end at any moment due to injury, puberty or physical exhaustion.
“I think that hurt me more during the years when I was going through this chaotic physical problem where I couldn't feel my leg,” she confesses. “I was desperate for that prophecy not to come true”
In 2019, the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) released a 270-page report on Salazar, which earned him a four-year suspension from athletics for doping rule violations.
Cain read the entire report in one sitting and finally understood that Salazar had not been honest with her about certain drugs she had seen him administer to other athletes, such as higher-than-allowed L-carnitine infusions. The report also accused him of testosterone trafficking and attempted falsification of doping test results. That got her thinking about the thyroid medication and diuretics that, she says, Salazar often insisted the athlete take.
Her coach, whom she had tried desperately to please as a teenager, was not at all who she thought. A few weeks later, while texting Greek athlete Alexi Pappas, she sent him the contact details of a New York Times journalist. He invited Cain to the newsroom, where they filmed a video in which the athlete recounted her experiences with Salazar.
The Nike Oregon Project was disbanded shortly thereafter. In 2021, Salazar received a lifetime ban for sexual and emotional abuse.
After leg surgery, Mary Cain prefers to live her student life, playing sports for fun
Cain points out that Salazar's suspension does not solve the problem of athlete abuse in athletics. In fact, she says, it's like “cutting off the head of a hydra” — there are far more abusive coaches, and athletes need to expose them, not cover them up.
Shortly after the revelations were published, the numbness in Mary Cain's leg worsened so much that she did not run again for two years. He played soccer, did pilates and attended a physical rehabilitation therapy program.
In the fall of 2022, Cain decided to study medicine – since childhood he admired Marie Curie and dreamed of becoming a doctor. She felt the sports story was over for her, but if she was going to be a doctor, she wanted to know if she could walk and stand for long periods of time.
Mary's mother finally asked his father, an anesthetist by trade, to examine her. He noticed that one of the legs seemed more swollen than the other and assumed that the problem might be vascular in nature. Her mother Googled the symptoms and found a possible cause: popliteal artery compression syndrome (PAES).
The problem — a muscle in the back of the calf that grows too fast and can block blood flow to the rest of the leg — is rare but can be caused by overtraining in young athletes. Cain went to two doctors, but the first MRIs gave a false negative – because this investigation does not detect vascular problems.
Another doctor, Jason Lee, who works with the Golden State Warriors basketball team, confirmed that this was the diagnosis and operated on her. The way Lee treated her changed her perception of how a doctor could and should be. She was amazed not only that Lee believed her, but also his kindness and willingness to treat her so quickly, even though she was an athlete who hadn't competed in years.
That summer, he prepared to move to Palo Alto to begin medical school. While he hasn't completely ruled out a return to competition, Cain is focusing on another physical goal for now: reconnecting with his own body.
This involves a lot of physical therapy exercises and the exercise of not straining during runs. She seeks this kind of balance in all aspects of her life. He does not consider medical school, where he lives on campus and interacts with a small group of peers, a second chance after the painful years of high school.
“A lot of people have asked me if I regret anything… I was abused. I can't regret it. The people who did it should regret what they did,” Cain says. Instead, she is extremely grateful for her medical colleagues. “After the experience I went through, I was thinking, 'Am I a deeply unsympathetic person? Am I being abused because I'm the problem?'”
Now, she says, having friends who really know her has been a big step toward healing. Cognitive therapy also helped her a lot.
The idea to write the book in the present tense took shape during some therapy sessions, which helped her reinterpret those years. “I had developed a strong hatred of myself. That's why I was self-harming, that's why I was suicidal, that's why I had eating disorders. In essence, I was hating myself… because of other people's actions,” the former athlete also said.
