The Spotlight Finally Lands on Irene Riggs

Maybe it’s because Irene Riggs is from West Virginia, a state not regarded as a running powerhouse. Maybe it’s because the pandemic kept her local for most of her sophomore year, and she and her coach turned down many chances to race high-profile track meets during her junior year.

Or maybe it was because a car ran over her foot and kept her from running for a full month last September, which shortened her senior year cross-country season.

Whatever the reason, Riggs, a senior at Morgantown High School, has dodged most of the hype that has followed—and at times plagued—other high school runners, Katelyn Tuohy the most notable among them.

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Now the hype is here.

It’s well deserved. In November, Riggs won the Nike Southeast Regional 5K in 16:02, breaking by 20 seconds a record previously held by Tuohy. In December, she won Nike Cross Nationals in 16:40. In January, she won the USATF U20 cross-country championships, running 19:45 for 6K.

Riggs, who spoke to Runner’s World during interviews set up by Gatorade after she won the company’s national player of the year award for girls cross country, said the attention hasn’t been too intense.

“My parents have been good about encouraging me to stay away from social media,” she said. “It’s been manageable.”

Coming from a family of competitive swimmers puts Riggs in a solid position to handle whatever attention comes her way. Riggs’s twin sister, Caroline, is going to Yale to swim. Her mother, Renee Riggs, coaches the local club swim team, and her father, Vic Riggs, is the head coach of the women’s swim team at West Virginia University. Her family knew the drill when it comes to college recruiting and media.

Riggs is committed to run for Stanford next year, on a team full of other phenoms, such as 800-meter specialists Juliette Whittaker and Roisin Willis, both of whom broke 2:00 before setting foot on campus. They’ll share the limelight when Riggs joins them.

Dominant victories

The résumé that Riggs has built will make her one of Stanford’s top runners. But she came on gradually, before dominating her senior year.

As a junior, in December 2021, she finished 14th at the Eastbay (formerly Foot Locker, now Champs) cross-country championships, which put her on the national map.

Last June, she ran 9:50.72 for 2 miles at the Brooks PR Invitational, finishing second by 0.02 seconds behind Dalia Frias, with both breaking the previous outdoor high school record.

Then came the car fiasco last September.

Riggs put her backpack in the back seat of a friend’s car, and the driver mistakenly thought she was in the car already. She wasn’t. The driver started driving, and the rear tire rolled over Riggs’s foot.

Nothing was broken, miraculously, but the bones and tissue were severely bruised, Riggs said. She was in a boot for a month. After some time off completely, she started cross-training with swimming (she, too, was a competitive swimmer through eighth grade), elliptical, and on an Alter-G treadmill.

“When she got hurt, she was fit,” said Mike Ryan, her coach. “She was in great shape at that time. The cross-training just maintained her fitness. She came back with a little chip on her shoulder, because the goal all along was to go to nationals and try to win. She thought she might have lost that chance.”

When she returned to racing, not much of the high school season remained. But her fitness was intact. Riggs ran in her regional championship, then the West Virginia state meet, which she won by more than 2 minutes.

A month later was the Nike Cross Nationals Southeast Regional in Cary, North Carolina, which is when she really started gaining more national attention. At Nike Cross Nationals the following week, she was 14 seconds ahead of second place.

At the USATF U20 cross-country championships on January 21, Riggs again won decisively. The top six runners from that race compete at the world cross-country meet on February 18 in Bathurst, Australia.

How she does it

Riggs’s coach, Mike Ryan, has taken a steady approach with her. Although her talent was evident from the start, her mileage was about 25–30 miles per week as a freshman and she’s built up to about 40 miles per week now. “My max would be 45,” she said. “That’s a big week of training for me.” Her training load will likely be significantly higher when she gets to college, where 60-mile weeks are common for the top runners in the NCAA.

Her staple workouts are nothing fancy: hills and 800-meter repeats. West Virginia doesn’t have an indoor track season. Riggs does hills almost weekly during the winter, when other athletes are running on tight circles.

One workout, which they call “Nightmare on Elm Street,” is 30 minutes of continuous hills on a three-block stretch of Elm Street, which runs perpendicular to the high school. The first block is a gentle grade, the second block is more moderate, and the third block is steep, then the team jogs slowly back down to the start. Riggs likes to see if she can get one more rep in each time they do the workout.

For the 800s, Riggs does 8 reps, in about 2:26 (which is about 4:54 per mile pace or around her 2-mile race pace), with 3 minutes of walking and jogging recovery by the end of the cross-country season. Younger members of the team do much less than Riggs is doing, Ryan emphasizes.

That body of work helps calm her prerace jitters. “I used to get super nervous,” Riggs said. “Now I’m a little bit more relaxed, which has helped me. I taught myself that I needed to have more confidence in myself and reflect on my training. If I know that I went out and did solid workouts, it helps me get more confidence in my racing. I figure—if I did it then, I can do it now.”

Ryan sees his role as helping Riggs achieve the long-term goals she set for herself: to run at Stanford, to break 10 minutes for 2 miles, to win cross-country nationals. That often meant skipping some of the opportunities that came her way. At the Penn Relays, for instance, Riggs ran last year on a 4x800-meter relay with her teammates, rather than doing an individual event.

“She has talent, for sure, but when it came down to it, she had set those goals, was determined to do the work to achieve those goals, and I think I spent more time trying to put the brakes on,” Ryan said. “Most of coaching is [saying], ‘We don’t need to do it all today. Let’s plan long-term.’”