HAPPY PLACE
Return to Oklahoma launched Herron to ultrarunning greatness
L ess than a week after having a bawling, blubbering meltdown at the airport, Camille Herron quit her job and fired her agent. She’d never felt better. Late last year, the Oklahoma native and world-class ultramarathoner moved to Michigan for what she thought was a dream opportunity. A medical research job that fit her perfectly. A chance to train on challenging trails.
But after a couple months, she was miserable. “Life wasn’t meant to be this hard,” Herron told her husband during her airport meltdown. “We did not come up here to have all this stress.
“I just need to go back to Oklahoma and get back in my happy environment.”
That’s exactly what she did — and the results have been nothing short of spectacular.
Earlier this month, Herron became only the third American, male or female, to win the world’s premier ultrarace, the Comrades Marathon in South Africa. This weekend, she is going after the title at the Western States 100 in California. Win both races, and she will be only the second woman ever to do so.
That’s as big a deal as it sounds.
“This is like winning the Super Bowl and the World Cup in the same year,” Herron said.
“I won the World Cup, now I have to win the Super Bowl.”
Herron is convinced that none of this would have been possible had she not moved back to Oklahoma.
In 2015, she was the breakout star on the world’s distance running scene. She won U.S. championships at 100K and 50 miles, then added world championships at 50K and 100K. She was just beginning to run those distances, having transitioned from marathons to even longer races, but she absolutely crushed the competition.
Last year, she turned her attention to trail running and continued to enjoy success.
Then, things got even better — the University of Michigan offered her a dream job.
Herron had worked as a research assistant at the OU Health Sciences Center, and she loved everything about being in the lab. The twists and turns. The troubleshooting.
But when she read the job description for the gig at Michigan, she felt like it had been written for her. How could she not go? Her husband, Conor Holt, who had been the distance running coach at Oklahoma City University, got a job at a college about two hours away from Herron. It wasn’t ideal, living in separate towns, but they figured they could manage for a while. They’d make it work until Holt got something closer to Herron.
Herron was working and training, then driving to see Holt and their dogs on the weekend.
She stomached the arrangement for six weeks.
“I’d come home in the evening to an empty apartment,” she said.
No husband? No dogs? No go.
Herron came to grips with that the day she flew back to Michigan from a trail race in Washington. She’d hurt her hamstring right before, and the race did not go well.
Holt met her at the airport, and when she realized that she was going to have to stay in Ann Arbor and that he was going to have to leave at some point, she lost it.
She knew then what had to be done.
When her agent wasn’t supportive of her decision to move back to Oklahoma, it was the last of many straws; she fired him.
Herron and Holt moved back to Oklahoma City, a transition made easier by the fact they had not yet sold their house.
More confirmation that they were doing the right thing came when Herron called her former boss at the OU Health Sciences Center; she not only hired Herron back but also gave her more flexible hours so that she could train.
“Flash forward eight months,” Herron said, “and life is good.”
The move back hasn’t been perfect.
Herron suffered a partially torn MCL in March, and even though she downplayed it, the former basketball player in her freaked out when she heard she had a tear in a knee ligament. She took two weeks off, and being only a few months away from Comrades, she worried that it might hurt her training.
But when she started running again, she realized her fitness hadn’t fallen off. She was confident she could stay with the other elites at Comrades.
Instead, she blew them away.
Herron was so far ahead in the nearly 56-mile race that she avoided disaster when she mistook a timing mat for the finish line. It was about 200 meters from the actual finish, and when someone there gave her a rose and a golden relay baton, she thought she had reached the end.
She didn’t know that Comrades had a tradition of the winner crossing the finish line with a rose and baton in hand.
With all the noise around the course, it took a bit for Herron to realize she wasn’t quite at the finish line.
She still won by more than 4 minutes.
After running for nearly six and a half hours, it took Herron a while to wrap her head around what she’d accomplished. Winning a race she’d had a goal of winning for years. Becoming the first American to win Comrades in 20 years. She’d lived a dream. Even now, she marvels at it.
“And the fact I’m from Oklahoma?” she said. “I’m a woman from Oklahoma.”
She laughed long and loud.
“This doesn’t happen.”
Camille Herron doesn’t believe she is excelling despite being from Oklahoma. If the past year taught her anything it’s that she’s winning because of that.