Naive and scared no more, UMKC’s Courtney Frerichs poised to medal at Tokyo Olympics

Standing beneath the Olympic Stadium in Rio de Janeiro five years ago, Courtney Frerichs, the first UMKC graduate ever to compete in the Olympics, still was cooling down as she sought to process what had just happened.

A mere five years removed from Nixa (Missouri) High, where she never quite qualified for a Missouri state track meet, and competing in a precarious event she had heard of maybe once before arriving in Kansas City, she had just finished 11th in the world in the 3000-meter steeplechase.

Even having been jostled in the middle of the pack along the way, she was filled with what she called “a sense of peace” about a race that came just months after she seized the American collegiate record in the event (9 minutes 24.41 seconds) as a grad student at New Mexico.

But something else was bubbling inside her, too, after the breakthrough experience in Brazil that she considered a bonus delivered four years ahead of her anticipated trajectory toward the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

“I felt like I left Rio so grateful, feeling like my dream had come true,” she said in a phone interview last week from Hawaii, where she was training for her Olympic competition that begins with prelims on Saturday at 7:40 p.m. Kansas City time. “But I also was just filled with all of these things I wanted to work on. Because I knew I wanted more out of myself at that stage.”

It didn’t take her long to convert that perspective, and the measures that went into actualizing it, into eye-opening results for the 28-year-old phenom who trains with Bowerman Track Club in Oregon.

(During the pandemic, she hasn’t been back to Nixa as much as she’d like. But she remains a celebrity and source of community pride, and if you’ve ever spoken with her you’d know why. And nicely aligning with her wholesome persona, she also is in a partnership with the nearby Hiland Dairy, which she said has supported her since her days serving ice cream at the Ozark Empire Fair ... and helps supply her ongoing reliance on milk as fuel for her training).

Only a year after Rio, she earned a silver medal in the World Championships in London. The result was an absolute thrill, she said.

“But the bigger thing that day was I took a risk,” she said. “I went out at in a pace I’d never touched before in a race and decided to just go for something. And that’s where those breakthroughs come, by putting yourself in a position you’ve never been in before.”

Then, while finishing second in a race in Monaco in 2018, she claimed the American record that she still holds … in a time (9:00.85) that World Athletics noted would have been good enough to win every world championship of the last decade.

So much went into that leap forward.

But, really, maybe nothing mattered more than sheer attitude as she absorbed longer-term lessons from Rio.

“I think one of the biggest takeaways from Rio was just how scared I was on the international stage,” she said. “And I could tell, I just knew, if I wanted to really see what I was capable of I was going to need to not put everyone on a pedestal any more. And stand on that line knowing that I belonged there and I earned my spot.”

Speaking of earning her spot, this spot in Tokyo had challenges of its own even as she has come into her own.

For one thing, there was that brutal fall she took and recovered from in the U.S. Olympic trials preliminary round of the event, laden with the perils of 28 30-inch-high fixed barriers and seven 12-foot water jumps.

Or as she put it on Twitter punctuated by a crying laugh emoji:

“Well, last night’s prelim was a little more stressful than anticipated, but got the job done & qualified for the final! And most important walked away unscathed. Thankful for those years of gymnastics & soccer teaching me how to fall.”

But like all prospective Olympians, not to mention the rest of us, she also grappled with how to reconcile the uncertainty of the pandemic — which jeopardized if these Olympics could be conducted at all and ultimately left them postponed a year.

When we spoke by phone last year, Frerichs said she had been thinking about Tokyo “basically every day” since that race in Rio even as she and her husband, Griffin Humphreys of Columbia, Missouri, had made decisions based on that time frame.

She had shed tears over the mystery of what was ahead as she pondered the “very real expiration date” of the prime of an elite athlete.

Then there was this simple analogy with its own complicated ramifications: “It’s kind of like we got to the bell lap of this Olympic cycle (only to be told), ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, just kidding — you have another mile.’ ”

So she simply “rode the wave of grief,” she said last week, for a while. Then she worked to let go of what she couldn’t control and concentrate on being grateful for what she could, including the crucial camaraderie of teammates experiencing the same issues.

Along the way, she realized this was a chance to focus on what she came to consider “exciting things” such as sheer speedwork — which is why she was able to set a personal record in the 5K with a time of 14.50

Through those circumstances and beyond, Frerichs said she also has prospered by working with a mental coach over these last few years.

“You can have all the physical aspects (thriving),” said Frerichs, who had a near-perfect GPA as a chemistry major at UMKC and has spoken of practicing medicine later in life. “But if you’re not working on the mental side as well, I think you’re leaving stuff on the table.”

Having been at the table before should help in Tokyo, of course, though she also is going into this embracing a “resilience mindset that it’s going to be a lot different than what we’re used to.”

But she’s a lot different than she was five years ago, too. Looking back, she said, she didn’t realize how naive she was then.

Now she’s more well-rounded and mature in many ways, she’ll tell you. And she knows she belongs ... not just at the starting line but perhaps even on the podium.