Reflecting on Pass Christian native Cory McGee’s run to Tokyo
For a distance runner like Pass Christian native Cory McGee, putting in 70 to 80 miles per week certainly isn’t out of the ordinary.
But imagine all of those miles over the course of a lifetime coming down to just four minutes on the track, well four minutes and 67 hundredths of a second to be exact.
During last night’s Olympic trials in Eugene, Oregon, the pride of Pass Christian ran the 1500-meter race of her life, in need of a top three finish to punch her first-ever ticket to the Olympics.
Right on cue, McGee took home second place for her first taste of Olympic glory at the age of 29.
McGee hadn’t made a US team since 2013, but she never stopped running and now she’s still running all the way to the 2020 Tokyo Games, something she’s been destined for since she was a kid. Chris Doxey, Cory McGee’s former select soccer coach, said, “Yeah, it’s funny cause when I coached her back when she was nine – I coached her for two or three years – right before she went to Greece and discovered really that she was a runner, she lived – we practiced at Espy Avenue at the soccer fields way back when – when it was one of the only soccer fields, and she used to run to practice, which was about a mile, mile and a half. So, she would run to practice, practice for an hour and a half, and then run home. Her parents would follow her in the car, so it was kind of then we kind of knew that something had changed in her life, and then when she went to Greece and came back, it was just something kind of clicked. She came back, played maybe a year of soccer, and then cut the soccer out cause obviously, she had discovered her passion and her true calling for life.”
The Olympics start July 23rd, but Cory’s events don’t start until August.
