Animals taught her how to nurture what you love. There wasn’t a lot going on in the small town where Leah Falland grew up but Croswell, Michigan did have plenty of animals and open land. Raised on a dairy farm, Leah would enter the 4-H Fair with her sheep. (4-H stands for Head, Heart, Hands, and Health, which is basically a pipeline for young people to become farmers.) Leah and her five siblings would stay at the fair for a week to show off their animals, win awards, and then auction the animals off. Looking back, this experience as a kid helped her understand her roots. Maybe it’s a punk statement to go from being a farmer’s daughter to a world-class distance runner for On Running, but Leah hasn’t forgotten where she came from. 

Today, she’s let go of animal fair competition, but Leah integrates lessons from her family farm into the way she lives. She tends to the things she loves in order for them to grow. Despite her expanding list of accomplishments (two NCAA titles, a 3,000-meter steeplechase time of 9:16…), two gut-punching performances stand out to me looking at her athletic career. In 2016, Leah made it to her first Olympic Trials in Eugene. She’d been running on an injury all season and still made it to the steeplechase final. That day she ruptured her plantar fascia during the race and ultimately placed 14th. Somehow she framed this heartbreak as an opportunity to turn towards something else she loves. She got a puppy. (She’s cuddling on the couch with her golden retriever Harper today while we’re FaceTiming.) Still, Leah knew it would take a lot of resilience to get to the next season. 

Five years later, Leah returned to the Trials and was in a position to make it to the Tokyo Olympics with two laps to go. In a group of three, 20 meters ahead of the next woman in the field, Leah nicked her toe jumping over a barrier on the penultimate lap. She fell to the ground, watching Emma Coburn and Courtney Frerich peel away from her. Val Constien caught up and made a break in the final 150, earning the final coveted Olympic team spot. Leah was in fourth with 100 meters to go and she placed ninth. It’s as though she fully embodied the heartbreak of not making the team and her body shut down. With unmistakable grace in her post-race interview, she said, “I’m sorry guys. I’m just really, really sad… I know I could do it. I know I can do it. It’s brutal.” Leah’s Olympic Trials races leave us with a queasy feeling but mother nature doesn’t pick favorites. Maybe it taught her raw conditions are part of the life cycle. “I wasn’t afraid at all. I believe in myself wholeheartedly,” she said. “As cheesy as it sounds, I know I have the heart of an Olympian. Even if it doesn’t go that way.” Nurturing something before you can see its fruition is in her blood. And while there was no guarantee of an Olympic spot happening, she was able to hold this misfortune with courage. That’s what makes Leah Falland a complete fucking legend. 

Now 29 years old, Leah’s already wrestled with a lot of weeds. And it’s led her to plant seeds in fertile places: she commits to professional running despite injury and defeat, healthily manages later-in-life ADHD, anxiety and depression diagnoses, and navigates the first years of marriage. She understands the hard truth about the business of doing something you love (running), falling short on Olympic-sized dreams (twice), and the long road it (usually) takes to accepting yourself. She’s closed the distance between the confident role model she needed in high school and the quirky, community-driven, animal-loving free-spirit self she’s always known. Living with her husband of two years, Louis Falland, she lives a simple lifestyle outside of Boulder, training for summer track races. She holds two conflicting truths simultaneously. 

Leah didn’t have to look very far to start running. Her father George O’Connor ran in high school and was really good at it, and continued his love for running into adulthood. He wanted to test his fitness in a 5K road race. As the father of six loud, energetic and busy kids, he and his wife needed to find a babysitter willing to watch them. No one was game. So they brought their kids along for the weekend races and threw Leah and her siblings in the mile fun run. Leah went all-out to try and beat her older brothers and sister and they’d all eat ice cream after. They were her closest friends and competitors growing up. Everybody pushed each other. Four of the six O’Connor kids ran at Division-I universities. “My parents nurtured a competitive spirit in the family,” she says. While they eventually all split and moved to different cities to find their own path, Leah and her siblings recognize that they had each other as their first running teammates, a time they cherish. 

With larger-than-life energy, Leah could have turned into anything. And high school Leah, a more-malleable version of her current self, was still impressionable. She felt a sincere interest in a bunch of different things. “I think every high school girl is a little bit insecure,” she says. “I was definitely insecure. But I was looking for things to be passionate about that I was good at.” She played basketball and volleyball at Croswell-Lexington High School, a school in the thumb of Michigan, before turning herself into a runner. In the classroom, she struggled to focus. She got a bunch of detentions. She had good grades but was chatty and stubborn. With undiagnosed ADHD as a shadow on her mind, she constantly felt just a bit different. “I think running was the thing that sent me in the right direction. It took me, this little ball of clay, and introduced me to the best people I could have ever met. It put me in a position where I could get my school paid for, and not become a dingbat,” she says. Running became the conduit to channel all her zany energy into one place. She transformed into a leader, becoming the team captain for cross country and track and field, a four-year letterwinner and state champion in the 800 and 1600 over her final two high school seasons. Running was where she found strength and community, which continued into college and with OAC. 

“Every young woman needs something where you're working together with people and you have accountability. I felt really confident and really good about myself when I was on the track. That wasn't always the case off the track,” she says. Running didn’t add more clay to Leah’s so-called ball but rather shaped her by removing a lot of distractions and noise. 

Like any hero’s journey tale, Leah faced adversity—namely during her freshman year of college. She had a tough transition to living away from home for the first time. Leah says her coach, Walt Drenth, guided her through this phase. “He saw me early on, and saw me. I really struggled,” she says. She redshirted her freshman track seasons and turned her attention to the classroom, landing in the journalism program and found that to be fun. She’s still passionate about writing. After freshman year, she found her momentum on the track and became a multiple-time Big Ten and NCAA champion for Michigan State. In college, Leah also found her best friends for life. The NCAA can be like the lottery: overwhelmingly positive and nurturing, or riled with disappointment and harshness. Having good people around you, Leah says, makes all the difference. 

On Marigold Avenue in East Lansing, Leah and all her teammates lived in two houses, across the street from each other. A perfect distance to the track, Leah and her teammates biked and walked to practice. They’d come home from class and have dinner together and host movie nights. If she wanted to see her best friend Julia, she’d walk across the lawn, coffee mug in hand, and knock on their window. She didn’t have to text or call. Everything she needed was right in front of her. It’s kind of like growing up with six siblings: She was attached at the hip to her college teammates. “We were constantly catching up with each other about boys and stress,” she says. “I didn't know at the moment how special that was, but I was having, like, one consistent party with my best friends for years.” 

They’d never gone out to the bars though. Leah says, “We were really good girls… so good.” In 2014, the Michigan women won their first-ever cross country national championship. Four runners finished in the top 21. Leah came in third for the team and placed 17th overall. That seemed like something worth going out to celebrate. When they returned to East Lansing from Terre Haute, they went to Rick’s, a bar on campus. “Don't go to Rick's if you can help it. But we went to Rick's,” she says laughing. And they had a great time, enjoying the night because the moment called for it. She has fond memories of college, pretty much just enjoying herself. “It was a little community. You're in a bubble a little bit, but it was a really fun bubble,” she says. 

The thing with bubbles is they pop easily. In 2015, Leah graduated and for the first time experienced the shock that accompanies a string of unexpected injuries. “You don’t know how difficult it is until you go through it,” she says. “It's impossible to empathize until you experience it. You can be compassionate toward people who dealt with injury and I did. But I think I was ignorant to a lot of the difficulties of the sport in college. Maybe that’s all I could handle at that point,” she says.  

Leah’s love story with her husband began at the source of her most obvious heartbreak. In 2018, on the cusp of quitting the sport and dealing with a ruptured plantar fascia, she met Louis in physical therapy in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “When he said hello, I heard his freaking accent—the Australian accent.” She thought he was cute but also knew he was going to be her teammate, and they were both dating other people at the time, so she friend-zoned him pretty quickly. But they got along really well. They even formed a little Lizzie McGuire, Gordo, and Miranda squad— Leah, Louis and Emily Oren, who was also a founding member of the OAC team. They’d all hang out, all the time, as friends. “I thought he was adorable,” she said. But they were respectful of their partners and it wasn’t until Leah ended a relationship that “drew out way too long” that Louis ended his shortly after. 

When Louis got the courage to ask Leah out for a drink, they had their first, longly anticipated, one-on-one date. They stayed at the bar for three hours, just talking, and then went their separate ways because as serious runners, they both needed to go to bed. After that, they kept hanging out alone and all of a sudden, they were dating. She met his dad when he came to the States and fell in love with his family. They dated for a year before their relationship really got tested. They went into quarantine together. “We were like, if this goes well, that's a really good sign. If it doesn't, well then we know. But we had the time of our lives actually,” she says. The pandemic obviously was a relatively terrible time. It was also Leah’s way of making the best from the circumstances, as she has a way of doing. “When I say it was the time of our lives, we made the best of what we could. I think it taught us that when we're together we can do anything. We could be in a cardboard box and we'd figure it out together,” she says. 

Professional runners lead very strange lives. In Colorado, she lives close to her teammates, and centers her days around training, eating and sleeping. As an On athlete, Leah doesn’t work the traditional 9-5. Professional running is a 24/7 lifestyle. It’s one that requires more of the calmness and discipline of a monk than the productivity and assertive-jargon of a corporate Girl Boss. Being with the OAC team reminds her of the days that she started to fall in love with running at an elite level in college. When the team goes to training camp for up to six weeks, she reconnects with the feeling of entangling her entire life with other people, the closeness she had with her siblings growing up, the proximity she felt to her Michigan State teammates. They’re adults now though. “We're happy to come back and go into our adult space,” she says. It’s different from the environment on Marigold Avenue, because she’s married and lives with her husband. She has to drive to see the OAC men who currently live together, Morgan, Olli, Geordie, and Carlos. She has to drive to see Carmela. She has to drive to see Alicia and Ben. Sage and Joe. All of it’s a drive, and that makes things different. “I can't just walk over to their house and knock on the window and be like, ‘What’s good,’ unless I drive there,” Leah says. 

There have been plenty of instances since joining the team where Leah has called on her teammates for help because she’s needed them. They’ve also needed her. When the weather is shit and running alone sounds like a prison sentence, they depend on each other. She says, “But sometimes it's just enough to know that people care, that they check in… It’s the little stuff,” she says. That’s what’s necessary for Leah’s longevity in the sport. Some people enjoy training as lone wolves. Leah hates it. “Running doesn't feel as meaningful if you have to do all the miles alone,” she says. OAC trains together, and they also hang out and have dinner together and do all sorts of fun things. They might go home to seperate houses and they’re definitely not attached at the hip, but the OAC is a community. 

Leah’s first cellphone was a pay-as-you-go phone from the Dollar Store. She didn’t have social media apps or unlimited texting. She had to buy cards to add minutes onto the phone. Every time she sent a text, it cost 15 cents. “I’m in my millennial brain, continuously trying to figure out how to hold true to what matters and also understand the benefits of social media,” she says. With 17K followers on Instagram and social media requirements built into her On contact, she’s sometimes online only out of obligation. Sharing the highs and lows on social media is part of the business. She tries to be as authentic as possible but can’t get away with posting grainy pictures of what she’s eating or triple chins anymore. Leah says she and Morgan McDonald share this sentiment. They wonder how to balance their actual personalities with social media snippets of life. “It can get a little disenchanting. Sometimes it doesn't feel like you're really communicating. It just kind of feels like you're flashing the best parts of your day and then moving on,” she says. 

Her relationship to social media is perpetually evolving. She’s figuring out better ways to relate to her Instagram followers. She has a lot of balls-of-clay watching her now. Leah hopes to use her position for good. She’s a role model to young girls and says she wants to be helpful rather than brandable. Leah shares thoughtful images and captions to show her quirky, larger-than-life personality (“HaVe YoU gUyS hEaRd oF tHiS COVID tHiNg?,” when she caught it in March). She breaks the fourth wall by talking about mental health and her own diagnosis of ADHD, injuries and illness, to let people know they’re not alone. While being a professional runner seems glamorous, she stays grounded. “That probably keeps me from being remarkable online, but I also try to honor my brain with it,” she says. An old soul to her core, she’d even like to go back to flip phones. “Remember when we had razors?” she asks. 

The most important thing in navigating a turbulent relationship to social media is determining how she’s actually feeling, without distractions and notifications and feedback. She doesn’t have any self-consciousness that comes with being an influencer. She uses her intuition and monitors how she’s feeling first, which seems like the most sustainable approach. “I’m continuing to set that boundary with it. I understand that's not reality, it's part of reality, but it's not real,” she says. Real is how you feel with tangible people. She asks herself how her relationships are with her best friends, her husband, her family and even her dogs. “Is my house clean? Do I feel rested? Do I feel good? If all those things are checked off, then I feel like I'm in a good spot with it,” she says. Sometimes she’s so happy with her life as it is, she forgets about social media. Like a badly behaved puppy that needs to be put on a leash, she says, “I gotta make sure that it stays where it belongs, in my mind and emotionally.” Monitoring screen time is important to her, and she would rather have a full and happy life than hundreds of thousands of followers. “Maybe I’m a little bit of a hippie,” she adds.

In 2020, Leah married her boyfriend in her parent’s backyard. It unfolded quickly, then happened all at once. Louis was working at Gazelle in Grand Rapids, Michigan and his work visa was about to expire. She just got an offer to move to Colorado. He had to make a decision about whether he wanted to pursue another work visa in Colorado. (That would be super complicated to travel back to Australia during COVID). Louis’ lawyer told him, “If you’re going to get married to Leah, you should just do it. Have a party later.” He was already saving up for a ring. It was well known they were going to get married, and they had talked about engagement before. Louis had already spent a lot of time in Michigan with Leah’s siblings and parents, Leah had met his entire immediate family before the pandemic when they visited the US, but neither was thinking marriage would happen so suddenly, or untraditionally. 

They drove to Meijer’s Grocery Store. “I picked out this crappy little $7 placeholder ring,” she says. The ring that Louis had designed for Leah would still take a month to be made. She ordered a dress online that thankfully fit. Being cautious in the thick of COVID, they invited 10 of their closest family and friends to join them for the ceremony at her parent’s house, and everyone else had to stream in on Zoom. Their coach, Olympian Dathan Ritzenhein, drove three hours to be at the ceremony for 10 minutes. “It was hectic, but oh, it was bad COVID times. If somebody told me that was how I was gonna get married four years ago, I would've been really confused, but it was perfect,” she says. 

Leah has never been one to be concerned with societal conventions. For the wedding, her mom made lasagna and they had a bonfire. She doesn’t just make the best out of tragedy, but she recommends that anyone on the fence of getting married should just do it, or “whatever the heck they want for their wedding.” To put it simply, Leah does things that will make her happy. When things got stressful the week leading up to their marriage, she says they’d remind each other: “This is for us, it literally does not matter what anybody else is thinking at this point.” The ring is tarnished and gross, but she can’t fathom getting rid of it. “I’ll give it to my daughter someday,” she says. 

After recovering from COVID at the end of March, Leah’s focus is now on building fitness. She dealt with a long, annoying foot injury after she raced last summer and anticipates a healthier summer of racing. But she’s not racing ahead to get to the end of anything. She knows in her bones that in order to grow something, you have to be patient. You have to nurture it. Water it, give it space and sunlight, to let it unfold. “I can sense everyone's getting fitter. Some of the people on our team are just disgustingly fit. And I'm starting to get fit,” she says. She hopes to travel to Europe to run Diamond League races and maybe Worlds. She calms her ambitions down with the fact that summer is her favorite part of the year. It’s her birthday in August. “There's a lot to look forward to, a lot of travel, racing, being with my teammates and just better weather,” she says. 

Leah doesn’t talk about the weather to be impersonal or shallow. The natural world is an integral part of her. It’s impossible to know if this statement comes from the well-trained daughter of a farmer, or from the longing of a distance runner who’s logged too many gloomy miles. Regardless, she says with signature heartiness, “It's always good to make it out of the winter.”