A 31-year-old mother of three and real estate agent runs her way into world championships
‘I couldn’t ignore the feeling of wanting to compete’
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Rick Maese.
She’ll line up at the track and field world championships as the most surprising — and likely most inspiring — runner in the field. But not long ago, during the toughest of times, Sara Vaughn wrestled with the enormity of it all. She wasn’t sure how to keep going. There was a three-month stretch in 2015, in fact, when she didn’t run at all.
It took some time. The six months after her daughter Cassidy was born, Vaughn said, she was in the worst shape of her life. She would get ready for a run, and then fall asleep on the couch.
Of the 47 runners competing in the women’s 1,500 meters at worlds, which begin Friday in London, only one is older than the 31-year-old Vaughn. But none faces quite the same challenges and daily juggling act. The others have shoe contracts and sponsors and build their lives around training. Vaughn is a mother of three with a full-time job. She’s always put family first and wasn’t sure she’d ever get to compete at this level.
“I was like, ‘I don’t know if I could work and be a mom to my older two kids and take care of this infant and run. It seemed overwhelming,” she said.
“But I couldn’t ignore the feeling of wanting to compete still.”
She became pregnant with her oldest, Ciara, who’s now 10, when she was a sophomore in college. She and now-husband Brent Vaughn were on athletic scholarships at the University of Colorado. At the time, she didn’t know what a child would mean to her running career. Coaches were supportive, but administrators in the school’s athletic department had no experience with expectant mothers.
That was more than a decade ago. Vaughn did graduate, but her running career hardly unfolded as she’d hoped, interrupted for stretches each time their family grew. The young couple had Calia in 2010 and Cassidy in 2015, and Vaughn never really came close to qualifying for an Olympics or a world championships.
Despite her busy, complicated schedule, Vaughn now feels like she’s in the best shape of her life and is running her fastest times at an age when other elite runners are either switching to longer distances or other passions.
The Vaughns don’t have a set routine most weeks. With school out, summer can be trickier to manage. Vaughn typically is up early, feeding kids and packing lunches. Her main workout is in the morning and the local gym provides childcare for her youngest. She has a dedicated two-hour block after that in which she focuses on work. Vaughn is a real estate agent in the Boulder area, and this is her busy season.
“I always tell people, if you try to do everything at the same time, you’ll fail at everything,” she said. “Even if it switches every hour, whatever you’re doing in that moment, be present and focus on that. It’s hard. It takes conscious effort. But when I leave the house and I’m at track, I turn off my phone and tell myself my kids are fine and it’s time to be a professional athlete for 90 minutes. When my workout is done, it’s time to call clients back. And when I walk in the door at home, there’s no choice but to be fully present for my family.”
By time the kids all return from school or childcare, Vaughn is a full-time mom, shuttling them to gymnastics or swimming and cooking dinner. Later in the evening, she might show houses to clients before putting the kids to bed and then donning a headlamp to squeeze in a second run after 9 p.m.
“Fortunately, the mountain lions don’t really bother people,” her husband joked.
She knows that a running career might have been easier without family — less financial stress, fewer scheduling hurdles. “But I don’t know that I function well that way any way,” she said.
In fact, as her family has grown and as the juggling act has become more complicated, Vaughn thinks that her running has actually benefited.
“I don’t think I do well when it’s only track all the time. I think I self-destruct when I analyze everything,” she said. “When you sit around and think about track all day between running and that’s all you do — I don’t function that way. I think being busy outside the sport helps me.”
After giving birth to her youngest in August 2015, she struggled to find the time and energy to run. But when the calendar turned and the Rio Olympics grew closer, Vaughn finally forced herself to train in earnest.
She didn’t have time to get in optimal shape and was the 27th-ranked woman out of 30 to qualify for the U.S. Olympic trials. Cassidy was 10 months old and Vaughn had stopped nursing just two weeks before the race. Still, she posted a seventh-place finish, not good enough for a ticket to Rio but her best finish at nationals.
This year the entire family bought into a new approach, building their schedule more than ever around Vaughn’s needs.
“I don’t condone bribing your kids but that last month leading into trials, I told the kids, ‘If mommy does well, I’ll take you to London,’” she said with a laugh. “I would say it every day but not really expect to have to buy all these tickets to London.”
As Vaughn ramped up her training, her confidence grew, and so did her expectations. She’s run personal bests in the 800 and 1,500, and she hit the world standard — 4:07.50 — two weeks before nationals by posting a time of 4:06.64. All she needed when she got to Sacramento in June was a top-three finish to earn a spot on the U.S. team at the world championships.
Entering the final lap, Vaughn was still in the middle of the pack but began gaining ground. With about 25 meters to go, she finally pulled even with Lauren Johnson, who made the U.S. world championship team two years ago, and found another gear to pull ahead. Vaughn was the third woman across the line, finishing in 4:07.85, just 0.28 seconds ahead of Johnson.
When she finally found her husband to celebrate, they fell into a silent embrace. Brent had screamed himself hoarse and Vaughn was simply speechless.
“People may think they know what went into it,” Brent says, “but no one outside her and I can really appreciate how special that was.”
Regardless of how she finishes at worlds, Vaughn said she feels momentum in this Olympic cycle and has Tokyo in her sights. In the meantime, she and her husband are launching a scholarship at their alma mater that will help young mothers stay in school and keep working toward a degree.
It’s a basic tenet of distance running — keep putting one foot in front of the other — and Vaughn knows better than most how hard it can be, even if it takes years to realize the rewards.
“I’ve had a few of those heavy periods of contemplation: Is all this stuff I’m sacrificing to train like a professional athlete, is it worth it? Maybe I should call it quits?” she said. “But I’ve never been able to do that. I always knew I had to keep going.”
