Running toward a new prize
Canada’s Marchant hopes surgery means end to years of pain
Portland. Vancouver. Minnesota. Michigan. Saskatoon.
Lanni Marchant’s quest for an answer to an injury that has plagued her for years reads like a medical scavenger hunt.
But Canada’s fastest female marathoner can finally see the grand prize: the chance to run without pain, and the possibility of another Olympic appearance.
The 34-year-old from London, Ont., had surgery on May 15 in Michigan to repair a torn labrum, bone spur, and nerve impingement in her left hip, an injury in hindsight she can trace back as far as five years.
“I had pretty immense hip pain, and I remember 2013, 2014 in training runs wincing, it hurt,” Marchant said.
“But it was just one of those things where I kept running on it, and I was able to keep running, and I was still running well that anyone looking at me would treat the things around it, like ‘Your glutes aren’t firing, your quads aren’t firing properly, you just have hip tightness.’
“I just shut everything off on that side because then through my build for Rio (2016 Olympics), my biggest issue was I couldn’t push off my left side as well, and I just felt like I was working harder to run the same times I’d run even a few months before. And I was as fit if not more fit, but I just couldn’t drive through that left side.”
Marchant was in Portland this past winter for an appearance with her sponsor Under Armour, and was demonstrating the company’s gait analysis system for reporters, when Michael Watts, a sport scientist with Under Armour, “looked at it a bit sideways. He noticed something funky.”
They decided to do more indepth gait analysis a few weeks later in Portland, and discov- ered Marchant’s left foot was merely slapping the ground. She wasn’t pushing off with any power.
From there, her medical road map took her Vancouver and twice to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Each stop brought her a little bit closer to an eventual diagnosis.
Each stop came with a stiff price tag. The two trips to the Mayo Clinic cost about $25,000 (U.S). The surgery cost $20,000. Because she hasn’t been a carded athlete since 2016, meaning she wasn’t receiving Sport Canada’s monthly stipend for top Olympic athletes, she wasn’t able to access any help with her medical bills.
A big breakthrough came dur- ing her second trip to the Mayo Clinic. Doctors did gait analysis with nerve conduction, and numbed the five-foot-one runner’s hip. They discovered when her hip was numbed her gait problems cleared up, “everything started firing properly.”
The hip surgery was the latest major event in a roller-coaster couple of years for Marchant. In 2013, she broke the 28-yearold Canadian record in the women’s marathon, running two hours, 28 minutes.
At the Rio Olympics, she became the first Canadian woman to run both the 10,000 (she finished 25th) and the marathon (24th). She was seventh in the New York Marathon three months later, recording the fastest time by a Canadian woman ever in the race.
Then the bottom fell out. Her father Roly died suddenly. She spent eight days in hospital with sepsis after surgery to remove a kidney stone. She tried to come back too quickly.
Marchant has been a practising trial lawyer in Chattanooga, Tenn., for several years, but has moved back to London for her comeback, and still works remotely for her law firm. She’s targeting either a marathon or half-marathon next spring for her competitive return.
Her running goal is twotiered. She’d love to race at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. But even more importantly, she’d just like to rediscover her love of running.
“I was running before anybody in the media, anybody in Canada knew who the heck I was, or what I was doing, it was something I always loved to do,” Marchant said.
“I wanted to fix my hip, and if it gets me to the Olympics, fantastic. But I also want to be able to go out for a run for an hour and enjoy it and be pain-free, and not have to do 18,000 tape jobs, and exercises and everything just to get out the door.
“I want to just put my shoes on and go out for a run like a normal human.”