PattiSue Plumer (part 2)
If you haven’t listened to part one, we recommend listening to it before part two.
PattiSue Plumer would eventually become one of the best distance runners in the entire world, but the future Olympian’s early years in track and field were overshadowed by the accomplishments of her younger sister Polly Anne, who set the national high-school record for the mile in 1982. Her time of 4:35.24 would stand for over 30 years, until Mary Cain broke it in 2013.
While Polly Anne grew up in California with their mother, PattiSue attended high school in Colorado while living with their father. Her best mile time in high school was just 5:10, but thanks to her sister’s athletic renown (“[Coach] Brooks [Johnson] will say the only reason he took me was because my sister”) and some encouragement from legendary distance coach Lance Harter (who then organized a high-school running camp in Colorado), PattiSue walked on to the team at Stanford, where she had earned a generous financial aid package.
By the end of her freshman year, she improved enough to qualify for the NCAA Outdoor Track & Field Championships in the 3K. In her end-of-season meeting with Coach Johnson, she said her goal for the upcoming season was to qualify for Nationals in three events: 5K, 3K, and 1500m, and make All-American in one.
“He said, ‘Well, if those are your only goals, then you might as well just quit the team now… We have a recruiting class coming in, every single person wants to win a national championship. So if you don't have aspirations to win a national championship, you don't have a place here.’”
“And I was like, ‘Well, I'm going to give it one year. And if at one year, I'm not at that level, then I'll quit.’”
Almost exactly a year to the date, she took second place at NCAAs in the 3K to a teammate, and then at USAs, broke the collegiate record in the 3K. She had earned her spot.
From there, she went on to win two NCAA titles on the track, including the outdoor 5,000-meter title during her senior year, and earn nine All-American honors.
After Stanford, she went on to win four U.S. national titles, make two Olympic teams and set the American record in the 5,000 meters in 1989, clocking 14:59.99 in Stockholm, Sweden. She won the 1990 Grand Prix Final (now known as the Diamond League) in the 5K, and was the No. 1 ranked runner in the world that year over 5,000 meters.
In an unusual move, she raced at an elite level while putting herself through law school and later, while practicing law.
Plumer has plenty of eye-opening stories and her journey is not without its hiccups. She was hit by a car in Japan, and overcame several serious bouts of pneumonia during pivotal points in her athletic career, including just before making her first Olympic team in 1988.
In the 1991 Prefontaine Classic mile, she fell at the finish line in a close battle with victor Suzy Favor Hamilton, and the resultant hip injury lingered for the rest of her career. She rallied to make the Olympic team in both the 5K and 1,500m for the 1992 Barcelona Games, but she never quite returned to her international prominence.
“It’s a different era,” she says now. “Even though I had that No. 1 world ranking, it was still just a female distance runner. Getting medical care, medical help… I always felt like I was not ever really taken seriously by the doctors I worked with at that time. I wasn’t a professional athlete like the Giants athletes they treated, or the 49ers that they treated, or whatever.”
She became pregnant with her first child following the 1992 Olympics, and she continued to compete through the 1996 Olympic Trials, after which she opted for a hip surgery that she had been putting off, and to try for her second child.
“[Life] went from being pretty predictable [as a professional track athlete], to being very unpredictable [as a mother],” she says. “I didn't have a [road] map, or, like a singular goal. I wasn't even sure what that should look like. It was a really weird space for me to be in as a mom and as a woman. I think I was already doing things that people hadn't really done before. And so there wasn't really someone for me to say, ‘hey, what do you think of this?’ Or, ‘how should I be doing this?’ It was a very new, unusual space to be in, and I'm not sure it's much better now. It's certainly not. There's certainly a few more role models. And I think also, being a female professional athlete is not considered weird, anymore, or an outlier, where I was definitely an outlier. At that point, there just weren't very many female professional athletes period in any sport. There was just a lot to navigate at that point in my life.”
PattiSue started coaching on the side during her professional running career, and went on to assistant coaching stints at her alma mater, Stanford, as well as the University of Texas for the past five years.
Note about the author: Johanna Gretschel is a freelance writer, editor and broadcaster in Austin, Texas. She is a regular contributor to Outside, Runner’s World, SELF, Women’s Running, ESPN and more.
