By David Monti, @d9monti
(c) 2025 Race Results Weekly, all rights reserved
TOKYO (12-Sep) — Jessica McClain ran her first marathon in 2022 with minimal preparation and shoes she bought at Dick’s Sporting Goods the night before. McClain, 33, who will represent the United States here on Sunday in the marathon at the 20th World Athletics Championships, built a playlist on her iPhone to last two hours and 40 minutes and listened to it the entire race. She went on to win that race, the Mesa Marathon, in Arizona in 2:33:34.
“I did everything wrong,” she told Race Results Weekly in an interview here today. “I went to Dick’s Sporting Goods and bought a pair of shoes the night before because the Brooks shoes I ordered didn’t get there in time because of the post-COVID supply chain stuff. I was like at Dick’s at 8:00 p.m. Like, I need shoes to race in. I had no idea what I was doing.”
But McClain, who competed for Stanford University during her NCAA career, found that road running in general, and marathon running in particular, made her happy. That was something that had been missing from her solid, yet often injury-plagued, track career. McClain fell in love with the open and inclusive format of road racing and all of its uncertainties and quirks.
“There’s just so much that can go wrong in the roads which is why I love it,” McClain said. “You’re thinking about things constantly and making decisions in the moment: tangents, and potholes, and there’s wind. There are just so many fun curve balls on the road, and that’s why I love it.”
Putting the fun back in running is one of the main reasons that McClain made it here to Tokyo where she will be competing in her first major championships. She tried to make it as a pro track runner with the Brooks Beasts in Seattle, but left the Beasts at the end of 2018 to train on her own. She moved to Phoenix and put up solid results at several road races, including a second place at the Abbott Dash 5-K in New York City which hosted the USATF 5-kilometer road running championships. That day she finished second to Olympic and world championships medalist Shannon Rowbury by one second.
“That’s a race where I should have looked at that as, wow, a big springboard or launch pad,” McClain recounted. “That should have been, like, my second rebirth of doing this again.” She added: “I think that race… showed me how much I loved the roads.”
The Mesa race was McClain’s re-entry to competitive running after the pandemic shutdown and an extended training break after marrying her husband Connor McClain. She felt a new spark to compete and trained herself for Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth in 2023 where she finished fourth in 2:29:25. That performance qualified her for the 2024 USA Olympic Team Trials Women’s Marathon in Orlando, Florida, a race where she produced a world-class performance despite her unconventional build-up.
“Just me and my friends, who were also marathoners, just kind of making up training as we went,” McClain said with a hearty laugh. “It was a hot day, and that was something that definitely played in my favor. So that made me pretty confident going in.”
Running in the early morning in Phoenix turned McClain into an unusually good heat runner. She played her cards almost perfectly in Orlando. She was only in 13th place at halfway (1:12:38), but moved up to fourth by the finish. She missed an Olympic team berth by one place and just 15 seconds; that’s just 0.58 seconds per mile.
“I know how to run in the heat so I knew to be patient,” McClain told Race Results Weekly that day. “Pretty much every marathon I’ve run that’s what I can base my experience on. A lot of people have come back to me each time. I know I’m a good second half of the race runner so I just tried to stay within myself.”
But McClain got even closer to the Olympics than those 15 seconds. Trials champion Fiona O’Keeffe was nursing a sore hip in the weeks leading up to the Olympic Games, and McClain was brought to Paris as the team alternate just in case O’Keeffe could not race. O’Keeffe did ultimately start, but dropped out in the first 5-K segment of the race. McClain’s turn on a big stage would have to wait for at least another year; her spirit was not broken.
“I think Paris was a big learning opportunity,” said McClain, who still works a job and only runs once a day. “I think I just learned to just be grateful that, you know, the opportunity presented itself in whatever way it looked like. It also showed me, for me to look back on my career, kind of like, think back on what made it successful.”
McClain made the USA team for these championships after finishing eighth at the TCS New York City Marathon last fall (2:27:19), then nailing the best run of her life at the Boston Marathon last April where she clocked a personal best 2:22:43. She finished seventh and was the top American. That gave her enough World Athletics ranking points to gain selection for the USA team along with Erika Kemp and Susanna Sullivan, who both qualified by time. The Boston race was McClain’s first under the coaching of David Roche, an ultra-marathoner who set the course record for the Leadville 100 Mile last month.
“Making a team now in my eyes as a 33 year-old at the older end of the spectrum, I am so grateful and excited to be here,” McClain said. “I ended up getting here because I let go a little bit. I think I was just holding it so tight all of these years, defining my entire career by making a team. And when I kind of relinquished that a little bit and embraced the World (Marathon) Majors scene and just realized there are so many amazing opportunities, it just kind of alleviated the pressure I put on myself. Now that I’m here, you’ve just kind of have to go for broke.”
Indeed, McClain sees the hot and humid conditions as giving her a relative advantage (Phoenix experienced 113 consecutive days of 100-degree Fahrenheit/38-degree Celsius temperatures this year). She also did four training sessions in a humidity chamber at Arizona State University which she said would help her even more here in hot and humid Tokyo (it may also rain). She is hoping for a high finish.
“I’m assuming that it won’t go out too, too crazy,” she said. “But, I’m kind of up for whatever. If it goes, it goes. She continued: “I feel pretty good. I want to keep the top ten in focus for the first half, and I’m here to get top-five, top-three. If I blow up in pursuit of that, that’s what it is. I’m here to show up and show out, so I’m just really excited to see how it goes.”
PHOTO: Jessica McClain finishing the 2025 Boston Marathon (photo by Jane Monti for Race Results Weekly)
PHOTO: Jessica McClain in advance of the 2024 TCS New York City Marathon (photo by Jane Monti for Race Results Weekly)
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