Athing Mu: ‘Mentally I wasn’t present. I didn’t enjoy what was happening to me’

‘Grace, gratitude, appreciation,” says Athing Mu of her approach to running, which by no small coincidence also happens to be her approach to life. We’re talking about learning and growth, about setbacks and what they can teach you, about expectations and when to let them go. About how to take joy from the process in this most brutally unequivocal of sports, where you win or you lose based on fractions of a second.

“Things are going to happen,” she says with a wisdom beyond her 22 years, via a video link from Los Angeles, where she lives and trains. “Say I run 10 more years. In those years, so many things will happen. It’s not going to be all smooth sailing. Problems that we have are lessons that we learn.”

So let’s talk about the problems for a bit.

Related: Keely Hodgkinson takes silver in narrowest of world 800m defeats to Mu

Go back 12 months and Mu was untouchable. She had turned the 800m, one of the sport’s signature events, into her personal fiefdom. She had won Olympic gold in Tokyo, added another in the 4x400m relay, won the world championships the following year. She hadn’t been beaten in more than three years. She was young, marketable, feted by CNN as “the future of athletics in America”. And she was unhappy.

Things came to a head at the 2023 world championships in Budapest, where she was the runaway favourite to defend her title and extend her unbeaten run. How was she feeling inside? “For sure, I wasn’t really happy to be there,” she says now. “The season leading up to it – not in terms of training, but mentally – I just wasn’t really there. I just wasn’t present. I didn’t appreciate being there. I didn’t really enjoy what was happening to me.”

What was happening, in effect, was the paralysis of expectation. The very act of winning had created a spiralling pressure that increased with every race, a vortex of attention and judgment that essentially dragged her out of her comfort zone, forced her to go through the motions.

“You can either be the rabbit, or you can be the fox,” one of her first coaches at the Trenton Track Club in New Jersey once told her. In her total dominance, Mu ironically felt more hunted than ever.

By the time she got to Budapest, she says, she was treating it as “just another meet, rather than the actual world championships”. In the final she was run down in the home straight by Mary Moraa of Kenya and Keely Hodgkinson of Great Britain. Bronze. Mu pulled up a few metres after the line, grimacing, hands on her head. It was if she had finally realised she had nothing left to give.

That remains Mu’s last championship race. A hamstring injury has kept her off the track this year, and so her heat at the US Olympic trials in the early hours of Saturday morning will be her first race in nine months. Of course with the Paris Olympics barely a month away, her absence has fed all kinds of fears, uncertainties and wild theories. But she feels good. And above all, she has largely given up on caring about things she cannot control.

How does she balance race sharpness with freshness? How does she decide how much racing is too much, or too little? “I think we’re still working that out,” she admits. “This year we took a step back, and decided prioritising making the Olympic team first, prioritising the bigger meets. So of course racing is great. But now we’re just gearing up for the Games.” At which point, she remembers herself. “Not the Games, the trials,” she adds, as if these were any more than a formality.

What has definitively changed is her outlook on the sport. During those long months away from the track, Mu tried to rediscover the spark of inspiration that drew her to it in the first place. “When I started running when I was six years old,” she explains, “it was just something I did. It wasn’t about pursuing ‘this person’, or getting to ‘this level’. It was something embedded in me, and so it became the norm.

“The first two years [after turning professional], I don’t think I was focused on winning so much. It was all just a new experience for me. And fortunately, I had not had a really hard moment. But of course as you grow up, that’s what happens. And I just did not know how it would affect me. Just … growing up. Living through things that I did not expect to live through.”

After the world championships last year, she took a total break and embraced the other parts of her life. She spent time with her family. She logged off social media. She went on long walks and read the Bible. She modelled and did commercial work. She is speaking here on behalf of Team Coca-Cola, one of the Olympic sponsors. And along the way, she says, she learned to “see things in a different way, to take the moments and just appreciate, and walk in gratitude”.

It’s not that she doesn’t want to win. An athlete this driven, this destined, will always want to win. But Mu is no longer prepared to let winning define her. “I just want to kind of appreciate the environment,” she says. “I don’t want to feel like last year. It’s my second Olympics, and I have the honour of hopefully going to an Olympic Games where it’s completely normal. There’s no Covid, there’s fans in the stands, there’s an incredible field of 800m runners that are shaping this event for the whole sport.”

One of whom, lest we forget, is Hodgkinson, an athlete whose fate seems to have been intertwined with Mu’s since they both burst out of the junior ranks around the time of the pandemic. Silver behind Mu at Tokyo 2021 and Eugene 2022. Silver behind Moraa in Budapest. The newly crowned European champion, and the fastest woman in the world this year. And of course Mu has been watching.

“I’ve seen things on track outlets and on my social media,” she says. “She is great. I don’t think we’re really rivals. We’re just two really good athletes in the 800, super young, and having that fire between us, we’re going to go out there and compete. But I feel like the moment you start thinking about rivals is where things kind of fall apart.”

It comes down – in the end – to grace, gratitude and appreciation. Accepting things as they will be. Towards the end of last season, after her post-worlds break, Mu ran in the Prefontaine Classic in Oregon. Even before the gun went, she could feel a different energy. “It was different to how I felt the whole season,” she says. “A kind of lightness, no expectation. I felt free. I felt eager to run and compete. It wasn’t me thinking about what the result was going to be. Just, like, I want this race to feel great. And whatever happens, happens.”

You might argue, of course, that an Olympic Games brings a whole different kind of pressure. But Mu knows it is possible to run the biggest races with the biggest freedom, because it was what led her to greatness in the first place. And she wants to live in that place again. “Let’s compete,” she says. “Let’s not leave anything out there. And if your legs get tired, just pump your arms.”