After she was run over by a car, Westfield's Lauren Bailey ran to college glory
Runners are always coming back from something.
From illness. From injury. From a bad race or a bad season.
What about coming back from getting run over by a car? There is no template for that.
Lauren Bailey wasn’t a driver whose car was hit by another vehicle, or a runner struck while jogging along a roadway. She was walking across Hanna Avenue on the University of Indianapolis campus.
“I was literally run over by a car,” she said.
On the afternoon of April 7, 2021, she felt the tires roll over the right side of her legs. She was thankful, she said, not to be pinned underneath.
Astonishingly, she came away with no broken bones or spinal injuries. Skin on her legs was so badly scraped that the road rash looked like wounds from a bear attack.
After being transported to an emergency room, she was released in a few days. She left Franciscan Health hospital on crutches and in pain.
Seven weeks later, she was an All-American. Not a national champion, as she had been before, but a champion nevertheless.
“It was a fairy-tale ending,” she said. “I think it was more special than the national championship, just to know you can come back from something so hard and so drastic all of a sudden.”
Because of the collision, she advocated for improved safety measures at the crosswalk. Yellow signs and flashing warning lights have been added.
In the aftermath, Bailey said she drew on her Christian faith and support of friends, teammates, coaches. She is still coming back. She is just 23.
There is no ending. Not when you love running as she does.
“It helped me discover my personality a little bit more,” she said. “It’s a very quirky sport. But I love it for that reason. It teaches you to be patient within the challenges that it brings.
“If you put in the work, then the results will take care of itself in the end. I was willing to put in the work.”
She is still running, still working. Scars remain. And they are not all physical.
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As a kid, Bailey tried everything: basketball, soccer, gymnastics. She liked hoops but was short for that sport. She is 5-2. Soccer was more her style, but not because she scored goals.
“I just wanted to run around the whole time. So I didn’t really care about the game,” Bailey said.
She looked up to brother Matt, a distance runner for Westfield High School and later Wabash College. She would be a runner, too — and a good one, albeit not fast enough to attract a college scholarship.
Bailey once ran a 5:18.66 mile in high school, and she was on Westfield foursomes placing fourth and sixth in the 3,200-meter relay at state track meets. In cross-country, she was No. 2 runner for the Shamrocks’ 10th-place team at state, finishing 86th.
If she wanted to be a college runner, and she did, it would be as a walk-on. That’s how she ended up at UIndy.
She thought she was a middle-distance specialist. That was reinforced when, as a freshman, she lowered her mile time to 5:07.81 and was third in the Great Lakes Valley Conference indoor meet.
UIndy coach Brad Robinson thought otherwise. He entered Bailey in a 5,000-meter race to open the outdoor track season at St. Louis. She finished ninth, but in a time of 17:33.16, or 15 seconds off the school record.
It was an “epiphany race,” she said.
“I remember being done and being like, ‘Wow. That was really fun.’ It just kind of clicked from there. Ever since then, I’ve been dropping time.”
In November 2018, she led the Greyhounds to their first GLVC cross-country title in 26 years. In the 2019 calendar year, she won three GLVC titles and finished ninth in NCAA Division II in cross-country. For someone with such a modest high school resume, it was a revelation.
Robinson discovered Bailey could grind out the miles in training and manifest fitness into racing.
“Her ability to lock in and hold is unparalleled to almost any other athlete I’ve seen,” the coach said. “That is really her strength, which is more conducive to life on the roads.”
The pandemic wiped out the 2020 indoor and outdoor nationals but did not inhibit Bailey.
She won GLVC in cross-country the following fall, then a national title in the indoor 5,000 meters in March 2021. Her time, 16:03.98, was less than three seconds off the Division II record and would have placed 10th in Division I.
Then life changed.
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Bailey remembers almost everything about the collision, except how she landed.
There are two sections to the UIndy crosswalk, and she passed the first. It was more crowded than usual, she said.
“The first lane stopped. But the car in the second lane kept going,” she said. “I just remember thinking, ‘Surely, they’re going to stop.’ Then it was like that split-second, ‘Oh my God, they’re not going to stop.’ The car went over the top of my body.”
Bystanders rushed to her side and called 911. The driver stopped, Bailey said, and was more distraught than the stricken runner.
“I was just like trying to keep it together, process what just happened. She was very apologetic,” Bailey said. “And I was just like, ‘Hey, it’s OK. I just need a little space to breathe, figure out what was going on. I was very confused. But it was an accident. Could happen to anybody.”
Moments before, she had been in the UIndy track and field office. The phone rang, and Bailey was on the line.
“She was very nonchalant, super calm. ‘Hey, I got hit by a car,’“ Robinson said.
He, too, was astounded Bailey wasn’t more badly hurt. Robinson and track coach Scott Fangman were soon at the crosswalk and followed the ambulance to the hospital. They waited in the lobby with Bailey’s parents, Joe and Barb, who got the call reporting the accident as they sat down to dinner.
Lauren was released in a few days, unsure of when, or if, she would run as she once did.
She was placed in the care of athletic trainer Brian Gerlach, whose patience and encouragement helped healing. There was no grand plan. How could there be?
Treatment wasn’t week-by-week, but day-by-day. Bailey’s legs were bruised and swollen. Whiplash had resulted in a concussion.
Progress was slow but steady. The runner exercised in a pool, swimming for up to an hour, and ran on an anti-gravity treadmill. Bailey credited the athletic trainer.
Gerlach said it was all her. Her spirit. Her grit.
“If I said running through a brick wall would help you,” Gerlach said, “she would run through a brick wall.”
If anything, the athletic trainer had to restrain her. Bailey conceded she might have resumed running too soon. But all she wants to do is run around, remember?
As she was improving, she targeted the GLVC track meet. She wasn't ready.
Instead, she ran in a mid-May meet at Joliet, Ill., where misty, windy conditions were undesirable for fast times. Still, she finished second in the 10,000 meters. Her time of 33:53.16 was 35 seconds slower than in a time trial the previous fall, but it was another UIndy record.
Two weeks later, she was eighth in the 10,000 in the Division II nationals at Allendale, Mich. Top eight are All-Americans.
Gerlach wasn’t there but watched the livestream. He was incredulous. So was Robinson . . . sort of.
“She’s the most resilient runner, from a pain standpoint, that I’ve ever coached,” the UIndy coach said.
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Bailey pointed to one scar she said will never heal. The mark is barely noticeable, but she is self-conscious about it. If she bumps the corner of a table with her hip, pain flares.
Eventually, she grew tired of others asking how she was feeling. She was just over it.
“I really think I should have gone to therapy a little bit more to handle the mental trauma of it all,” she said. “I just wanted to move on. My body felt fine.”
She relocated to where she wouldn’t have to think about it all the time: Notre Dame.
Bailey was elite enough to transfer to a major program. However, Notre Dame coach Matt Sparks noticed troubling signs. For six to eight weeks, Sparks said, Bailey was hesitant about training, racing, everything.
Sparks, a former Noblesville and Indiana University runner, is not altogether unfamiliar with trauma. Molly Seidel, the Olympic marathon bronze medalist, has credited the coach with counseling her through some of it. Sparks wanted to help Bailey, but . . .
“That kind of challenge is not in the coaching manual,” he said.
Again, Bailey began reclaiming confidence. It culminated in two more epiphany races.
Eight days before last year’s NCAA Championships in cross-country, Notre Dame was ranked 25th nationally. Largely because of Bailey, the Fighting Irish climbed to fifth for their highest finish in 17 years.
She was Notre Dame’s No. 3 runner, in 62nd, or 24 places higher than she ever ran in a state meet. She characterized the race as “surreal.”
Two weeks later at Boston, she ran a track 5,000 in a personal best of 15:45.30, nearly fast enough to have made indoor NCAAs.
Finally, accumulation of all she had endured began to manifest itself.
Last December, Bailey returned to the UIndy campus for a visit. As she prepared to leave, she was going to drive through the fateful crosswalk to prove to herself she could. She couldn’t.
She took a different route north to Westfield, weeping all the way. She said the experience affected her over the holidays.
“I just felt defeated,” she said.
In January, after one run on a treadmill, she felt pain in her lower back. A chiropractor determined her pelvis had rotated out of place, and she had amended her stride to compensate. Bailey spent the entire track season attempting to feel right and to feel fit.
She qualified for the NCAA East Regional — an achievement itself — before dropping out of the 10,000 meters on the 20th of 25 laps at Bloomington. It was hot, humid, and . . .
“I blacked out,” she said.
She did not finish the race. College running was finished. It was an unsatisfying chapter in a story to be continued.
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With her gait back in balance, Bailey is doing likewise in life.
She seeks employment in health care or health education. She has interviewed with IU’s Simon Cancer Center. She attends Traders Point Christian Church’s Carmel campus and has volunteered in the food pantry at Noblesville’s Grace Church.
And she has become a volunteer cross-country coach at Butler, keeping her in the sport and with training partners.
“She’s very relatable to our team, and to our women in particular,” Butler coach Matt Roe said.
Bailey thought she would redirect running to the roads but said she is not done with the track. She has not run a full track season since 2019, and speed accrued there inevitably would help her qualify for the 2024 Olympic marathon trials. A 1-hour, 12-minute half-marathon would do it.
She quit seeing a therapist and conceded that was a mistake. Just watching the end to the movie “Mean Girls,” in which queen bee Regina George is hit by a bus, triggered trauma. She has not returned to UIndy’s campus. She said it is OK to not feel ready.
Not worried about moving on. She is moving. Running is therapy.
“There’s something very deep inside of why you want to do it. For me, I just love running,” Bailey said. “It’s one of the best sports. It’s so raw. You’re pushing yourself beyond limits very day.”
Contact David Woods at dwoods1411@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidWoods007.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Ex-UIndy, Notre Dame runner Lauren Bailey run over by car, has no quit
