Kerry Gillespie's profile of Varsity Blues track and field athlete Gabriela Stafford was published in the Toronto Star on July 8, 2017.
Gabriela Stafford has improved her times every year since she started running seriously as a grade 10 student in Toronto.
She dropped more than a minute off her 1,500-metre time and ran in the Rio Olympics last summer, which was an entire four-year cycle ahead of expectations.
Seven years of constant improvement is an impressive trajectory for any athlete, but what Stafford didn’t realize until recently is that she wasn’t just running to get faster and to win medals, she was running away.
Or at least she was trying to run away from her grief, 1,500 metres at a time.
Stafford was 13 when her mother, Maria Luisa Gardner, died of leukemia.
“I thought if I could be a better runner, I’d be happier,” Stafford says. “It didn’t matter how fast I ran — I was never fast enough, no medal would make up for her loss.”
Stafford, now 21 and four years into a psychology degree at the University of Toronto, is competing this weekend at the Canadian track and field championships, looking to book a spot at the world championships in London next month. She qualified for Sunday’s 1,500 final with the fastest time.
Stafford grew up in a running family: Her father, Jamie Stafford, a U of T professor was a cross country runner for Canada; her mother was a teacher who coached grade 4 cross country, the introduction to school sports for many children. But it was never a sure thing that Stafford and her younger sister Lucia would lace up their shoes seriously. They were, in fact, deep into Irish dancing, their dad recalled.
“I used to say I was training them by stealth,” he says.
It certainly worked for Lucia, who was successful from her first race in grade 4 and now, at 18, holds numerous Canadian junior records. She raced in her first senior 1,500-metre championship race on Saturday, advancing to the final with her sister.
But no one called Gabriela a running prodigy.
She was a good runner in grade 10, good enough to get to the provincial school finals but not fast enough to get near the front. But she had something else that suggested her potential might be limitless.
“She always had a passion and a lot of heart and just guts,” says Terry Radchenko, a track coach at U of T who has coached Stafford since then. “She’s definitely someone who can push herself to places in a race that other people just can’t get.”
That ability to suffer in a race, coupled with years of hard training, account for why Stafford has run personal best times every year, including a 4:04.87 at a Diamond League race in Rome last month. She is closing in on the four-minute barrier that marks world class ability for women in the 1,500, a race about 100 metres short of a mile. Stafford is ranked 24th in the world but she’s one of the youngest women high on that list.
Though Stafford kept improving on the track every year, “you could see there was a pretty heavy weight on her,” Radchenko recalls.
Three years ago, on the heels of a big race disappointment, she finally came to realize what that was.
Things had been going so well — “every year was kind of like the most successful year of my life,” she says — until she came within a second of breaking the 3,000-metre Canadian junior record in her first year of university. She went to the world junior championships in 2014 confident that she would break the record but ended up running a second slower than her previous best.
“I had a taste of the runner that I could be, I could be a national record holder, and to not get that was devastating. I wanted to dedicate the race to my mom, I had this whole plan,” she said. “I was so upset afterwards. It was clear there something else going on, more than the just the running . . . so I went to therapy.”
She was two years into the process of developing “a better relationship with running” when she arrived in Edmonton a year ago for the Rio Olympic trials. She had to beat runners she had idolized for years to make the team and she had to do it the day after the anniversary of her mother’s death, July 7. That was an emotional roller coaster she wasn’t quite ready for.
“It’s tough when you’re at milestones in your life, so last year was really tough because it was my first senior nationals, it was my first time trying to make the Olympic team.”
She went in ranked fourth and came out a tearful Canadian champion on her way to Rio. But all the emotion caught up with her and she was disappointed not to advance out of the heats and into an Olympic semifinal.
“The trials were such an emotional experience. By the time Rio came around, I was so exhausted. This time I feel I’m approaching the trials in a more stable manner so I’ll be fresher by the time worlds comes along,” she said.
At a Canadian Athletes Now fundraiser in Toronto earlier this year, Stafford spoke about her journey from so-so high school runner to Olympian.
And she made it clear that now she knows why she runs.
“I run because it reminds me that no matter how weak I feel, I am always strong enough,” she said. “Your body says you can’t take another step but you do, you always do.”