Featured Guest
Apr 2, 20229 min
The Stride Report had a chance to chat with NC State's Hannah Steelman, one of the top distance runners in the NCAA. Steelman is a seven-time All-American across all three seasons of competition, competed at the 2021 Olympic Trials last summer and owns personal bests of 9:05 (3k), 15:30 (5k) and 9:43 (3k steeplechase).
Thank you to Hannah for taking the time to chat with us and answer a few of our questions!
Wow, what a time. Crazy that it’s been 2 years since then!
It definitely was a lot to deal with at once. I felt like everything was coming at me so fast. First, we’re at Indoor Nationals and it gets canceled. Then, that same day, we find out that the outdoors is also canceled. Then I’m on a flight back to Spartanburg, South Carolina and the next day I’m packing to go home for an extended spring break (which, you know, turned into months).
During the first couple of weeks at home, the 2020 Olympic trials were postponed and that’s when it really hit me that I had run my last race for Wofford (I had already made my decision to transfer at this point). I remember having a pretty emotional phone call with my former coach, Coach Bomar, because my time with him and at Wofford ended so abruptly.
Then, I entered the transfer portal and it was only a few days later that I announced I was transferring to NC State. There’s a lot involved in the transfer process beyond choosing a school, like getting credits transferred over, figuring out a housing situation, filling out lots of (lengthy) forms, etc.
Meanwhile, I was running, doing online school, and had a lot of people reaching out to me about the transfer news. I was literally constantly on the phone/Zoom calls for several days.
So yeah, it was a lot, but obviously I’m very happy to be where I am now.
I don’t know if it was pressure, but I was definitely nervous coming in. I knew I was going to be surrounded by other high-level women and things were going to turn up a notch from Wofford.
I also knew that we had a star-studded freshman class coming in at the time and that, plus the news of me transferring, put us in the national team title conversation. But still, I think what I felt personally was less pressure, a little bit of nerves, and more excitement. I wanted to be a part of something like that, which is partly why I transferred in the first place.
In sum, it was a good year.
It took some time for me to adjust to the training and team dynamic during that first fall. At Wofford, I was doing most of my training solo, so I had to get my ass kicked a little bit for me to realize that I was not competing with just myself anymore.
I came back from winter break in 2021 feeling super motivated and fit, and I think that showed in my indoor performances and at cross country nationals in March (lol). Outdoor was good, too, for the most part. I set PRs across the board and I was having a lot of fun in practice and competing. I dealt with some weird health incidents throughout the year, including a really bad reaction to a bee sting to the eye the week of NCAA’s, but there were a lot of highs compared to lows on the year.
Obviously, not making the steeple final at NCAA’s was a huge disappointment and a hard one to shake off, but to cap off my season at the Olympic Trials was an incredible experience.
As far as breakthroughs go, I feel like my first major one came at 2019 outdoor track nationals in Austin, Texas while at Wofford. I got 3rd in the steeple and 8th in the 5k about 75 minutes apart. I truly competed that day, rather than just settling for an All-American position and holding it as I had done in the past, and it did a lot for my confidence moving forward.
The 5th place finish at XC Nationals in Stillwater also felt like a breakthrough. I really wanted to do what I could for the team, so even when it started to hurt, I dug deep and continued to run hard. And one more performance that felt like a breakthrough was my 15:30 5k last year. It was a big PR and in that race, I made a move for the win and committed to it which I was proud of.
As cliché as it sounds, it was a dream come true. All year we talked about it, honestly ever since the runner-up finish in March. We were confident. We knew we had all of the pieces, we trusted one another and our coaches, and all we had to do was what we did in practice every day, nothing different.
That’s what Coach Henes told us on the starting line and something she preached all season.
One of my favorite moments from that day was when I crossed the line, turned around and saw Sam Bush cross the line after me and then heard Kelsey Chmiel say, “That’s five!” To realize that we had actually won it all was an indescribable feeling, but it was amazing.
I had been dealing with some pain in my achilles since late September which came on pretty sudden and we still don’t really know why. We were able to manage it so that I could line up at XC Nationals, which was the goal and I am very grateful for that.
But in training throughout the season, there were a lot of ups and downs and I wasn’t able to train at the capacity that I would have liked. Coming off of cross country, I was riding the high of Nationals and my achilles was feeling pretty good, so I got greedy and thought I could compete one more time at the Boston indoor opener before taking a break.
Unfortunately, this race is what pushed my body past its limit. It was my first DNF ever which was probably the harder pill to swallow at the time than the injury itself. I couldn’t walk without crutches for a few days, and MRI results indicated that I needed at least 6 weeks of “aggressive rest”, which meant absolutely no running and minimal cross training. I had never required so much time off before, so I wasn’t sure how I was going to handle it.
For the first week, I was pissed off and sulked about it quite a bit, which I think was fair and necessary. In the following weeks, I committed to doing whatever I could to get back as fast as possible, smartly. I was eating well, getting a ton of sleep, doing my prescribed exercises and not overdoing it on the cross training (I loathe cross training, so this part was not hard for me, haha).
For cross training, I was mostly on the bike and on the Eliptigo, but I also swam a couple of times. After 6 weeks, I transitioned to doing some short runs on the AlterG every few days, splitting with my cross training. After a couple of weeks of this and steadily moving up in both time and body-weight percentage on the AlterG, I got to start running on the ground again.
This was a ~humbling~ experience, to say the least. The first few runs were nothing glamorous, 6x2 minutes on / 1 minute off, things of that nature.
At first, running on land felt so unnatural. But as I progressed, it came back fairly quickly and I built up to more running and less cross training and eventually, just running (yay).
During all of this, I was also in the weight room 2x per week working on overall body strength, but namely calf strength. Within a couple of weeks of building up volume on land, I was transitioning back into workouts. This was perhaps the hardest part of the whole recovery process, because I realized just how much work I had to do to get to where I wanted to be.
Thankfully, I had teammates around me who had gone through the comeback process before, reassuring me that it would all click eventually and that I just needed to stay the course and remain trustful.
And one day, it started to click and from there, I’ve been stacking the bricks one by one. The people around me truly made the journey so much more bearable. So quick shout out to my family, coaches, teammates, ATs and friends — love and appreciate y’all.
Yes, I am happy with that for a start. This race wasn’t so much about time for me as it was about getting on a start line again and remembering how it feels to race. I trust that with more time and work, the finishing speed will come.
Recently, I’ve been working on being more process-oriented rather than outcome-oriented as far as goals go, so I want to continue to find joy/celebrate the little victories in the return from injury, appreciate how far I’ve come since December and stay diligent in the day-to-day work.
Of course, I want to run fast and finish high at the big meets, which I believe will come with staying dialed-in to the process.
What drew me to the NC State program in the first place was the leadership and team culture. Coach Henes is very personable, for one. She’s big on communicating. She knows what each individual needs in order to be successful and understands that this looks different from person to person; it’s not a “one size fits all” type of program.
Coach Henes shows true care for us beyond our athletic capabilities, and encourages having a sense of balance in life.
As a team, we have so much fun together. We enjoy working hard with one another and we all want to get better every day. I think sharing a similar mindset and having common goals plays a huge role in our success. I think trust is also big: trusting your teammates, your coaches, and yourself.
Outside of practice, these ladies really are my best friends. I know I’ve formed life-long relationships thanks to the NC State program.
CAVA and Jubala Coffee.
Black on black.
Never met a Drake song I didn’t like.
Why is this one so hard??? Okay -- For YouTube, I like Emma Chamberlain, Kylie Ross and Harper’s Bazaar does cool series’ like Food Diaries and Get Ready With that I enjoy watching.
I don’t use Twitter much, so I’ll say PackXC and WolfpackTF.
For Instagram, I’ve always liked traderjoesfoodreviews. I trust those reviews with my soul.
And for Tiktok, my own obviously (hanofsteel)
Teleportation.
“Well-rounded”
The biggest piece of advice I can give is to not allow what you do to be who you are.
Whether it’s running (or another sport), school, your job, etc.…that’s what it is; it’s not your entire life. Or at least it shouldn’t be. This is something I was fortunate enough to learn relatively early on in my competitive running career, but my recent injury tested me in this way.
It was difficult, but instead of letting my entire world come crashing down, I devoted more time to my other passions in life: my faith, my relationships, coffee-drinking, tv-watching, cooking and baking, and so on.
At the end of the day, it’s just running. It’s something that I do and enjoy doing; it’s a part of who I am, but not who I am. Making something your entire identity creates this immense amount of unnecessary pressure and takes away the joy from something you should love doing.