But last spring, in a quiet moment on a practice field just days before lining up for a 1500m, it all gave way.

A full tear of her right ACL. Damage to both menisci. The kind of injury that rewrites timelines—and, sometimes, careers.

Surgery was non-negotiable. The comeback? Entirely uncertain.

Frerichs is not a dramatic person, but even she can’t quite explain the disorientation of those first few weeks.

“It was so mindblowing how back to the basics I had to go,” Frerichs says. “I still remember on my first day of physical therapy, I was sitting on the table, and my physical therapist said. ‘Let’s try and do a straight leg lift. Try and raise your leg off the table.’ And I couldn’t do it. It was crazy. I always remember that moment when workouts aren’t going how I want to.”

Her surgeon, Dr. Matthew Provencher—who also operated on Val Constien just months before her own Olympic comeback—reconstructed the ligament using a graft from Frerichs’ patellar tendon and repaired the meniscus. For six weeks, Frerichs was on crutches, watching her once-powerful quad atrophy before her eyes.

With the meniscus needing extra time, she couldn’t even start cross-training until week five. Simple tasks became victories: learning to fire the quad again, bending the knee without fear, walking unassisted. It would be 15 weeks before she could run—and even then, it was five minutes at 50% body weight on the Alter-G treadmill.

“It was definitely the most amount of time I’ve had to take off ever and it’s certainly given me a whole new appreciation for being able to run.”

A Change

There was no pressure to rush back. After years spent bouncing between Portland and high-altitude camps, Frerichs craved some stability. She moved to Utah and took her time. Early rehab was guided by physical therapists, not coaches. For months, the question of who she would train with next remained open.

Frerichs was part of the mass exodus that left the Nike Bowerman Track Club in early 2024 after the team relocated from Portland to Eugene, Oregon in 2023. She had been under coach Jerry Schumacher’s tutelage for the first seven years of her professional career. Upon moving to Utah, she started working with Alistair and Amy Cragg (who also spent time with the Bowerman Track Club until PUMA tapped them to lead their professional team based out of North Carolina in 2021). Frerichs gave herself the room to not only heal but reassess.

By October, she was visiting Chicago during marathon weekend, speaking with her agent Tom Ratcliffe about the future. Soon after, she connected with Ed Eyestone—BYU head coach and the architect behind the Olympic breakthroughs of Conner Mantz, Clayton Young, and Olympic silver medalist steeplechaser Kenneth Rooks. The more they spoke, the more a plan began to form.

“I decided to go down the path of building a relationship with someone who didn’t know me as a person or an athlete before this injury and I feel very confident that was a really good move because there’s so much less room for comparison,” Frerichs says.

She wasn’t the only one. Keira D’Amato, the former American record holder in the half marathon and marathon, had also joined Eyestone’s group for her Chicago Marathon build last year. Eyestone’s reputation was well-established on the men’s side—but now, a cohort of elite women, including D’Amato, Makenna Myler, and Makena Morley have created their training stable.

“He does a really good job of overlapping us where it makes sense,” Frerichs says. “I haven’t had to do a workout entirely alone yet—and I was prepared to.”

Frerichs is willing to admit “there is curiosity” when it comes to the marathon. She believes that to be good at the steeplechase, you also need to be a good 5000m and 10,000m runner—the same type of athlete who tends to move up to the marathon. Frerichs also imagines that the ability to close out the final miles of a marathon would draw from her experience of the fatigue that comes with trying to take a barrier in the final kilometer of a steeplechase.

“My dream when I first started running pro was the idea of trying to run the marathon in 2028 because I thought it would be iconic to run the marathon in LA with the history there,” Frerichs says. “Women’s marathoning is so unbelievably strong, so that would be quite the feat to take on but there is a lot of curiosity that lies in what I could do in some of the longer distances. I feel excited about putting myself in a place where there could be the option to explore that.”

For the time being, the first goal is to get back on a track starting line. In late November, her comeback took a meaningful turn. Eyestone asked her to run a few miles at effort. No paces. No pressure. Just a read on where she was. She averaged 5:45 per mile.

A few weeks later, she ran her first mile repeat under 5:20.

“It felt so hard,” she laughs. “But it also felt so good. That was a huge win.”

Coming Back To An Even Deeper Steeplechase Event

Frerichs hasn’t touched a barrier since the surgery. She’ll wait until she’s closer to a year post-op to clear her first hurdle. In the meantime, she’s eyeing a few flat races in April to start her 2025 season. U.S. Championships are in late July. The World Championships in Tokyo aren’t until September.

When she watched last year’s Olympic Trials from the sidelines, Frerichs was awestruck. Val Constien ran 9:03.22 to win. It took 9:07 to make the team. Nine women ran personal bests. The U.S. all-time list was rewritten.

“It’s given me so much confidence and belief that I can come back because it is a really scary injury,” Frerichs says.

And neither Frerichs nor Coburn—the two titans of U.S. steeplechase history—were on the line last summer in Eugene.

“I think we’re just going to continue seeing the depth increase more and more,” Frerichs says. “That’s what was so, so cool about last year. The number of women, not only running under 9:20 but also running under 9:10 – I hope to see that kind of depth knocking on the door of 9:00. I think we can have multiple women under the 9-minute barrier. I think that’s what’s going to propel us forward. We have the athletes in the event. I know for a fact that Emma and I being able to push each other together is what pushed us to run so much faster than we ever dreamed possible.”

She remembers how she and Coburn once did that for each other, year after year. Now, she wants to be part of that wave again—not as a legacy name, but as a contender.

“As we’ve gotten further and further from the surgery, I have started to feel like something exciting could come in this next chapter.”

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