Sometimes life is a sprint and a marathon.
Sometimes, you can be one of the fastest people in the world on the track, able to cover 200 meters in less than 22 seconds, without ever having been on the fast track. Without ever having been anointed the next big anything.
For Claremont’s Brittany Brown, it’s about living up to what she promised herself – well, herself and 28-time Olympic swimming medalist Michael Phelps.
“It’s so crazy how you reached every goal you put your mind to,” a 21-year-old Brown said eight years ago, speaking into a pink iPod Nano and recording one of her video diaries she still makes when inspiration strikes.
“So I’m gonna do that. Every goal I put my mind to, I’m gonna reach.”
And sometimes life comes at you fast. Like at the U.S. Olympic trials, when the runner in Lane 9 who’s been cast mostly as a background actor breaks through with the performance of her life so far, delivered in a smoking 21.09.
That’s TV at its realest: The also-ran who’s been dealing with invisible, dang-near debilitating hurdles off the stage comes in and punches her ticket for the Paris Games that will begin Friday, July 26, by clocking a faster time than all the race favorites except one.
Finishing in front of everyone but Gabby Thomas, the two-time Olympic medalist who edged Brown by .09. Ahead of Mckenzie Long, a compelling collegiate champion who took the third and final spot on the U.S. team in the event. Ahead of superstar Sha’carri Richardson, who was fourth.
Ahead of seemingly everyone on NBC’s bingo card that June 29 afternoon in Eugene, Ore., because after the race ran for 22 seconds, it took the broadcasters 80 more seconds to mention Brown’s name: “Brittany Brown is going to experience her first Olympic games.”
Eight years ago, Brittany Brown recorded this message after being inspired by Michael Phelps’ last Olympic race.
She has now qualified for her first Olympic Games.
#ParisOlympics @brittanyshamere @MichaelPhelps pic.twitter.com/nmsV4OHy9R
— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) July 2, 2024
ON YOUR MARKS, SET, GO!
Brown is a bubbly person, quick to flash a great big smile and her great, deep dimples. And she’s been an underdog from the beginning. So now that you’re getting acquainted, let’s start there.
Her first racing experience came at Vista del Valle Elementary in Claremont, where she was a skinny kid, asthmatic and uncoordinated but game to compete. She had her mind and lungs opened during a school-wide track meet there: “I remember running and just feeling like, ‘I’m able to breathe!’ Which is so weird. But I just remember feeling like, ‘I have a second wind.’”
But Brittany – who has a twin, Brandon, an older sister, Brandi, and a younger brother, Bryan – didn’t start thinking about running in college until late in high school, never mind the Olympics.
Inspired by Brandi, who’d earned a scholarship to play basketball at Youngstown State, Brittany thought her sport might pay for college too. But she wasn’t on schools’ radars until her senior year at Claremont High School, when she started training with Jon Gilmer, a private coach based then in Rancho Cucamonga.
“She’s been on the cusp,” Gilmer said of his former pupil nowadays.
And back then? “I don’t say this often, but when I see an athlete who has potential, I’ll tell them, ‘If you continue in this direction, you will be a world-class sprinter…’”
How could he tell? “We’re in there doing box jumps,” Gilmer said. “And she goes to the highest box and she jumps over the box! To the other side! Like, holy crap, did that just happen? How do you just go over a 45-inch box?
“But that’s Brittany, she’s always been uncoordinated.”
U.S. Olympic sprinter Brittany Brown started to get serious about track and field at Claremont High School, finished second in the CIF State Meet in the 100 and 200 as a senior. (Photo courtesy of Brittany Brown.)
And fast. Runner-up in the 100 and 200 meters at the state meet that year, and 100-meter winner at 2013 USATF National Junior Olympic Track and Field Championships. She got offers from San Diego State and Iowa and thought, what the heck, let’s give Iowa a try.
She became a Big Ten champ, an 11-time All-American, set school records in the 100 and 200 and started to think the track talent that took her to college in the Midwest could open more of the world to her: ‘‘Let me see if I can do this Olympic and pro thing.”
She ventured out, unattached in 2019, without a shoe sponsorship. Spent her days training, bussing tables, working as a caregiver for patients with dementia and Alzheimers. Counting pennies so closely that on her first flight abroad, bound for a race in Switzerland, she had to ask the man in the seat next to her whether the in-flight meal was free before she could accept it.
She kept grinding, kept striding, has since moved from Iowa to Texas and then to Arkansas, where she now trains. She’s just signed with Nike, but got a deal with Adidas after racing to a silver medal in the 200 meters at the 2019 World Championships – a total blur, she’d write: “I remember nothing of it, only those moments after when I got to drape myself in the U.S. flag. I remember thinking, ‘Thank you, God. It’s over.’”
Brown started having a hard time outrunning her growing race anxiety, unable to step into the blocks unless she went through an involved, 10-step process. She had to watch a video that made her laugh, do a 10-minute guided meditation, breathing exercises, etc., and still she would cry before races.
Combine that with the severe menstrual pain she was experiencing because of then-undiagnosed endometriosis, a chronic disease that affects about 10% of reproductive age women and girls, and it’s a wonder Brown stayed on track.
Especially considering how many times she described her symptoms to doctors: pain, dizziness, fatigue. None of them thought to investigate further, she said; they just prescribed birth control, although one went so far as to suggest a hysterectomy.
“There were times I remember talking to her and her being like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this,’” said Brandi, who has been her little sister’s de facto assistant, her one-woman marketing team and social media manager, her biggest supporter in every way. “I told her, ‘Girl, you can do this. Stick at it, you got this.’”
TURNING THE CORNER
Finally, in March 2023, Brittany got a doctor who diagnosed what she was experiencing and helped her devise a holistic treatment plan that incorporates herbs, vitamins and iron supplements.
“I know, as an athlete, pain is an indicator that something is wrong,” said Brown, who is eager to add to the relatively scant discussion about endometriosis. “Your body is talking to you, listen to it. Because you start to have this self-minimization where it’s like, ‘I’m actually in a lot of pain, but since you guys are doctors, if you think this, I’m gonna think that too.’
“But we’re the experts on our bodies and there’s space for me to know my body and be aware of it, as well as the doctor. I definitely have told plenty of women who’ve reached out to me, ‘If this doctor doesn’t believe you, or if you feel like he’s minimizing you, leave.’”
Brown has also put in miles with a mental performance coach to ditch that race anxiety, reaching back to that skinny girl who found a gear she didn’t know she had on the Vista del Valle track. To that Claremont High standout who wasn’t burdened by so many external pressures.
“Her laughter back then was contagious,” said Kristin Crowell, who taught Brittany for four years in high school and watched her race as a distance coach on the Wolves’ staff.
Brown was serious about the sport, but she was never not having fun, said Crowell, who remembers her having a running joke about taking a slow-and-steady approach to her sprints.
Lately, Crowell said not a day goes by that she isn’t bragging to someone about Brown, who might not have exploded onto the world track scene like a supernova, but who’ll arrive in Paris at 29, stronger for having had to fight to forge her own lane outside of the traditional pathway. Ready, set.
Brandi thinks Brittany is a fitting representative of the Inland Empire, “because when I think about the I.E., I think about how everyone knows L.A. County and San Diego County, and it’s like, ‘Who comes out of the I.E.?’ Well, actually a lot of good things come out of the I.E. It’s just like we’re the middle child or something – which she is, also.”
That uncoordinated, asthmatic, devoted middle child who woke up on June 30 and recorded a message about reaching the goal she put her mind to eight years earlier – not on an iPod Nano this time, but on social media, for the whole world to see:
“My name is Brittany Shamere Brown
I never won a track state title
I didn’t go to a ‘big track school’
I never won a NCAA Title
Wasn’t signed right out of college to a shoe company
BUT
I JUST WOKE UP AN OLYMPIAN!!”
My name is Brittany Shamere Brown
I never won a track state title
I didn’t go to a “big track school”
I never won a NCAA Title
Wasn’t signed right out of college to a shoe company
BUT
I JUST WOKE UP AN OLYMPIAN!!
— Brittany Brown, OLY (@brittanyshamere) June 30, 2024