That’s our girl...................................

junior year, she says she was training just 25-30M per week, “so nothing crazy.” She bumped that up to “maybe 50” as a senior only to tear her ACL playing basketball. Surgery followed, and she came back for the last few meets of her final season running for the Warriors, winning the State 3200 title some 5 months after surgery.

Looking back, she says, “I was good in high school but it became clear that there were a lot of better people when I went to college, so it was kind of a shock.”

The continued rebuild of her knee forced her into a gradual transition into collegiate training: “I was still slowly coming back, but obviously you’re in a whole new world when you’re racing against people who are way better than you, a hundred people deep in college. It was gradual, and so that was part of why by my junior year it seemed like I made a big jump. I had been training for a long time to get better. I just hadn’t performed that way yet.”

She placed 4th in NCAA cross country that year (‘18), and came back in the spring to win the NCAA Indoor 5000. A runner-up finish in XC followed the next fall, and then the pandemic ended her collegiate career in anticlimactic fashion.

The move to Colorado to work with Ritzenhein made eminent sense, especially as Wisconsin announced it would not be the next fall, and then the pandemic ended her collegiate career in anticlimactic fashion.

In hindsight, Monson says, there were positives to transitioning to the pros while much of the sport was in lockdown. “During the pandemic there weren’t that many races to do, and so it was a time for us to really make training jumps. Sometimes people in their first year of pro get thrown into races and are kind of in over their head. I feel like I had an extra 6 months to basically just train. There were some