Nixa's Courtney Frerichs always wanted to be an Olympian. Now she has a shot at the gold.
When Courtney Frerichs was a young athlete in southwest Missouri, she was focused on a single dream.
She spent much of her free time taking gymnastics classes at several facilities across the Ozarks, and when her schoolwork included putting together the “About Me” crafts projects, one answer always was the same.
“When you put ‘If I could do anything …,’ every time I would write, ‘Go to the Olympics,” Frerichs said. It’s always been something that I’ve wanted to do.”
Some 15 years later, the dream has been achieved. Not on the balance beam or the uneven bars of the gymnastics competition, but on the track.
She punched her ticket for the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, by finishing second in the 3,000-meter steeplechase at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials earlier this month in Eugene, Oregon.
“It still doesn’t feel quite real,” Frerichs said. “It’s been such a dream of mine for so long, and the idea that I’ve actually done it, I still can’t believe it.”
Frerichs, who won the NCAA championship in the event in June while running for New Mexico, turned in a personal-best time of 9 minutes, 20.92 seconds in the finals of the Olympic trials. The top three finishers at the trials automatically make the U.S. Olympic team.
It kicked off a whirlwind week for the 2011 Nixa High grad.
While wading through congratulatory texts and phone calls, she went through the fitting process at Nike headquarters with other U.S. Olympians. She enjoyed a shopping spree at the Nike Company Store, toured parts of Portland, Oregon, with her fiancé Griffin Humphreys, and finished the moving-out process from her year in Albuquerque.
With a wedding date set for New Year’s Eve, she’s turning over some of the planning process as she gets ready to realize her Olympic dream.
That’s where her mother, Kathy Frerichs, her sister Lindsey Frerichs and best friend Erin Townsend come in.
“They have been wonderful in helping me get things done,” she said. “Hopefully after the Olympics, I’ll be able to focus on the wedding a little more.”
Her agent helped Frerichs settle all the travel details for her entourage — finding them a place to stay, arranging for flights to Rio and lining up tickets to watch her compete.
Frerichs said her parents, Scott and Kathy Frerichs, will be going, along with Lindsey Frerichs, Townsend, Humphreys and his parents.
A concern for many Olympic athletes going to Brazil is the Zika virus, which is transmitted via infected mosquitoes found in the region. There is no vaccine or medicine for Zika, which can cause muscle pain, headaches, fever, rash, joint pain and red eyes. Those symptoms can last several days, up to a week in length.
“I’m confident that they wouldn’t be sending us if it was going to be a huge hazard to our health,” Frerichs said. “I know they’re doing everything they can to keep us healthy.”
CDC: Olympics unlikely to spread Zika worldwide
From gymnastics to steeplechase
Frerichs was a cross country and distance specialist at Nixa High, where she still holds school records for a 5-kilometer race and the triple jump, and was part of the school record-setting 3,200-meter relay team.
That continued when she moved on to Missouri-Kansas City. She ran cross country and some distance events in track, and that’s where coach Keith Butler turned her on to the steeplechase.
Her background as a gymnast and soccer player immediately caught Butler’s eye.
“Her freshman year after cross country, we sat down and I said you have the huge athletic background in gymnastics that requires you to be flexible and coordinated and have spatial awareness,” Butler said in an interview with the Tracktown USA website. “Let’s see what you can do with it.
“She took to it like a duck in water. She picked it up real quick.”
Steeplechase is a 3,000-meter race on the track, with 28 “barriers” the runners have to jump over, and seven water jumps, where the runners jump over a barrier and through a large water pit.
“It’s essentially cross country on a track,” Frerichs said. “Coach Butler found out about my gymnastics background, and realized because of gymnastics, and soccer as well, the experience I had there, helped me to build muscle that a lot of distance runners don’t have.
“The combination of the flexibility and the strength from gymnastics really came in handy for steeplechase.”
It turned out to be a natural fit.
Frerichs compiled the top three steeplechase times in school history as a freshman at UMKC, then finished sixth at the NCAA meet in the event as a sophomore. That’s when she won the event at the Summit League meet, in a conference-record performance.
After sitting out the outdoor season as a junior, she was the NCAA runner-up as a senior, in another personal-best time.
She took advantage of NCAA rules that allowed her to be a graduate transfer and gain a fifth year of eligibility, taking her chemistry with a pre-med emphasis to New Mexico, where Butler had moved to continue his coaching career.
Frerichs helped the Lobos to the NCAA team title in cross country, then won the NCAA steeplechase championship, posting the best time in NCAA history by finishing in 9 minutes, 24.41 seconds. The time was a personal best by nearly five seconds and broke the NCAA record — which stood for 7 years — by more than a full second.
Frerichs has made coming from behind a habit.
In the trials, her final three laps were the fastest three of the eight-lap race, with her final lap split time the fastest lap turned in by anyone at any point in the race. She was in seventh place through the first half of the race, to fourth entering the final lap and finishing in second place.
In the NCAA meet, her final two laps were her fastest of the race, with her final lap the fastest split turned in by anyone at any point in the event.
“I think one time in her entire career was she outkicked,” Butler said in a feature story done by Fox4KC last year.
“She’s the type that embraces it and pushes even harder.”
It’s a long way from running in high school to becoming a world-class steeplechase athlete.
“We didn’t even know steeple existed,” Kathy Frerichs said. “It’s always been a dream, but it’s every little gymnast’s dream to make it to the Olympics.
“It’s very surreal.”
Courtney Frerichs has a moment where it all came together and all seemed possible, though.
It came in 2012, when she competed in the World Juniors.
She didn’t make the finals, but Butler sat down with her and told her something that has resonated ever since — so much so that she can recite the date by heart: July 19, 2012.
“He told me that I’ve earned the right to have an Olympic dream,” Frerichs said. “He said my main goal should be to get to the Olympic Trials in 2016, and I have four years to get to that point.”
Nearly four years to the day after that talk, Frerichs qualified for the Olympic team.
She did it with a performance at the trials that was the fourth-best in U.S. history in the event.
“I couldn’t picture a better ending to this four-year plan,” she said.
What's next after the Olympics?
After Rio, Frerichs will settle in Portland, where she will be based at Nike headquarters as a member of the Bowerman Track Club. She signed with Bowerman after the NCAA meet, and will train and run as a full-time job.
“I’ll be supported very well by Nike,” she said. “It’s a cool opportunity and I’m very excited about it.”
One of her training partners is Colleen Quigley, another Olympic qualifier in the steeplechase who is from St. Louis.
Her post-running career is up in the air. With her degree, a future career as a doctor may be in the cards.
“I haven’t removed it from my goals,” she said.
“I definitely plan to go back to school once running is done, but I just don’t know when that will be. I’m not going to put a cap on running.”
This is not the one shot Frerichs has to claim Olympic glory.
Running as a full-time job for Bowerman Track Club, Frerichs will start a four-year cycle after Rio, building up to the 2017 World Championships in London, and eventually the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo.
Emma Coburn, the Olympic Trials champion in the event, finished ninth in the London Games four years ago, in her Olympic debut.
Emma Coburn cruises to steeplechase crown at U.S. Olympic trials
Eyes on the prize
For now, Frerichs has Rio to focus on.
After closing the book on her Albuquerque days, she will join some U.S. teammates in Park City, Utah, for altitude training with other long-distance runners. Then comes a trip to Houston for Olympic team “processing” and a stint in Madison, Wisconsin, for more prep work.
The idea is that Madison is a perfect mirror for the weather and conditions in Rio at this time of year, giving the athletes an ideal run-up to the Games.
Her group is scheduled to arrive in Rio on Aug. 7, with the steeplechase first round on Aug. 13, with the finals on Aug. 15.
“Unfortunately, I’m going to miss the Opening Ceremonies,” Frerichs said. “I’m a little bummed, but I know that it’s the right decision … that’s the reason we’re going there, to represent the United States the best we can.”
If you look at comparative times, Frerichs figures to be in good shape in Rio.
The 9:20.92 she ran in the Olympic Trials was almost exactly four seconds better than the gold-medal performance from the 2012 London Games.
But she isn’t putting any pressure on herself.
“I’d really like to make the final, I think that’s my main goal for the meet,” Frerichs said. “It will be hard, but I think I’m capable of it. Then if I make the final, I really want to challenge myself.
"I want to take as much as I can from this experience, my first senior international experience, and learn from it."