The U.S. 100-meter Olympic hopeful who refused to stop running

Not long after blowing out her right knee spinning past a defender during a powder puff football game at her high school, heralded sprinter English Gardner began to grow impatient to run again.

She attempted to accelerate her rehabilitation timetable by retreating to her room a few times per week and repeating the same grueling exercises she had previously done with her physical therapist.

When doctors learned about her extra workouts, they warned she was in danger of overworking her three surgically repaired knee ligaments and reinjuring herself. Undaunted, Gardner continued to push herself, barricading her bedroom door with a chair to prevent her parents from busting in and demanding she stop.

“We tried to get her to relax and let the process play out, but she’s just not that type of person,” said Gardner’s father, Anthony. “You would not believe how hot and sweaty that room was when she was done. It was like a sauna in there.”

The tenacity Gardner displayed rehabbing a potentially career-threatening knee injury seven years ago hinted at her ability to overcome future obstacles.

She made believers out of the college coaches who stopped recruiting her when she got hurt. She bounced back from a bumpy coaching transition after turning pro and regained her previous swagger. And now the 24-year-old New Jersey native enters the U.S. Olympic Trials as a leading contender to win the 100 meters and a favorite to qualify for the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro by finishing in the top three.

Last summer, Gardner ran a personal-best 10.79 seconds at the USA Championships, the fastest wind-legal time any American has clocked since Carmelita Jeter’s 10.78 in 2012. On May 28, Gardner won the Prefontaine Classic in 10.81 seconds, the third-fastest 100 meters in the world this year, three hundredths of a second behind the Ivory Coast’s Murielle Ahouré and one hundredth behind fellow American Tori Bowie.

“I want to run 10.6,” Gardner said. “If you run 10.6, you get the title of being the fastest woman alive. That’s the title I want. When I ran [10.79], I shut it down the last 10 meters. So there’s more there. I just have to figure out how to get there.”

Gardner owes her jaw-dropping speed and passion for track and field to her father, a gifted sprinter, hurdler and triple jumper who admits he squandered his own talents.

Too into drugs, alcohol and partying to sufficiently focus on either his sport or his studies in college, Anthony expended minimal effort during practices and produced marginal results at meets. He crashed out of Delaware State after just one year without coming close to matching his best marks from high school.

“I was too busy thinking of when the next party was,” Anthony said. “I remember sitting in the coach’s office and he would tell me, ‘You’re one of the best talents I’ve ever seen but you’re probably one of those talents where I’ll say if this guy could have gotten himself together, he could have been great.’ It didn’t penetrate. It was as if I was blind. It wasn’t until I got older and more mature that I understood I wasted that part of my life.”

The first time that Anthony recognized his daughter’s sprinting prowess, she was 7 and he was trying to scold her for misbehaving. After stumbling up a flight of stairs futilely trying to chase her down, he told her that she had escaped punishment but she’d be starting track and field the next day.

When Anthony first brought English to a local track club, the coaches were hesitant to give her a late-season tryout. They doubted a little wisp of a girl in baggy shorts and clunky basketball shoes could outrun sprinters who had been training for months for the summer’s biggest meets.

Anthony’s persistence led to a compromise: a high-stakes race. If English defeated the team’s fastest girl in her age group, she would secure a roster spot. If English lost, she’d have to wait until the following year for another tryout.

Of course, English didn’t just win. She trounced her overmatched opponent.

For Anthony, the sight of his daughter zooming down the track was equal parts exhilarating and terrifying. He made a promise to himself that day to do everything in his power to make sure English and her siblings didn’t waste their natural ability the way he did.

“I put myself on the chopping block,” Anthony said. “I told them what I had done — drugs, alcohol, partying, fighting, all those things. Some parents want to keep those things quiet. I wanted them to know so they knew what not to do.

“I’d preach it over and over and over. You don’t want to follow the steps that I took. You want to be better than me. You want to be greater than me. You want to be smarter than me. English just got it. To this day when she tells the story, she says my dad could have been pretty good but he was a knucklehead. She’s absolutely right. But because of what I experienced, she didn’t go down that road.”

While Anthony’s words were surely persuasive, his actions no doubt had greater influence. He and his wife Monica often sacrificed to make sure their kids had clean clothes, full plates and somewhere safe to sleep at night.

Unpaid bills often piled up for the Gardners because their jobs were more rewarding spiritually than financially. Anthony initially worked as a traveling evangelist before teaming with Monica to open a Willingboro, N.J., church that sometimes drained more money than it produced.

“They sometimes went days without eating,” English said. “I remember my parents sharing a Snickers bar for dinner just to make sure they could feed us, just to make sure I had track spikes to be able to go to practice the next day. We were homeless twice, living out of hotels or other people’s homes, but I always had enough food, enough water and a place to lay my head.”

Things were especially difficult for the Gardners when doctors diagnosed Monica with stage 3 breast cancer nearly a decade ago and gave her less than a 50 percent chance of survival. Monica underwent radiation and chemotherapy and eventually beat the odds, but the stress raised Anthony’s blood pressure to the point that he experienced a mini-stroke and had to take precautions to guard against a more severe one.

Watching her parents overcome life-threatening health scares taught Gardner not to pity herself after her freak powder puff football injury. She never lost hope even after doctors warned she might never regain her former speed, and college coaches began revoking their scholarship offers.

For years, Gardner dreamed of running for national power LSU, the school that produced Olympians Lolo Jones and Muna Lee, among others. But when Gardner and her parents visited Baton Rouge before her senior year of high school, LSU coach Dennis Shaver offered only a partial scholarship that covered about a quarter of all costs.

LSU already featured a stable of elite sprinters including budding stars Kimberlyn Duncan and Semoy Hackett. Shaver did not believe it was wise to use a full scholarship on an area of strength, especially since Gardner was less than a year removed from tearing three ligaments in her knee and had yet to run competitively again.

“Sometimes you have to offer a scholarship where your need is,” Shaver said. “For us, based upon who all we already had coming back at LSU, we just weren’t willing to take as high a risk and offer a full scholarship.”

For Gardner, being spurned by her childhood favorite program provided instant motivation. She pledged to run faster than ever when she returned to the track and vowed to make Shaver regret his decision every time she faced an LSU sprinter in college.

“Anytime someone from LSU got on the track with her, we knew she was going to run a crazy time that day,’ ” her father said. “She went hunting. She was like, ‘I’m going to get them.’ ”

The school that eventually landed Gardner was Oregon, which at the time was better known for producing renowned distance runners than sprinters. Gardner agreed to attend a program on the other side of the country because Ducks coach Robert Johnson was one of the few whose interest never wavered despite her injury.

“We sat and talked to her at her house for a lot of hours to get a sense of who she was and whether she was worth the risk,” Johnson said. “Her work ethic and her competitive nature were some of the things that stood out. She was willing to do whatever it took to make sure that injury didn’t hold her back.”

In three years in Eugene, Gardner proved that Oregon was no longer just a haven for distance runners. She set school records in the 100 and 200 meters, won the NCAA outdoor championship in the 100 meters twice and captured the NCAA indoor title in the 60 meters once.

Hailed as America’s next great female sprinter after a fourth-place finish at the 2013 World Championships as a 21-year-old, Gardner instead regressed during her debut season as a professional. Two torn hamstrings hindered Gardner’s progress, as did her reluctance to embrace the changes new coach John Smith sought to make to her training methods and running form.

Smith pushed her to run more 400 and 800 meters in practice early in the year in order to increase her stamina and improve her finish in her signature races. Gardner balked at the revamped approach because it was producing times slower than some of her best races from high school, let alone college.

“She had never been in that place before,” her father said. “John Smith kept telling her, ‘Humility, humility, humility.’ She told me, ‘Dad, if he says that word one more time, I’m going to choke him.’ ”

When Gardner’s second season under Smith began as poorly as her first one ended, her father feared she might demand a new coach. Gardner instead called a lunch meeting with Smith, apologized for her stubbornness and pledged to do a better job trusting his methods.

The success that has followed for Gardner makes that decision appear wise. She began her turnaround by running a speedy 10.84 seconds at the 2015 Prefontaine Classic. Then came her personal-best 10.79 seconds in the USA Championships semifinals a month later. A medal at the world championships last summer wasn’t out of the question, but Gardner strained a hamstring two weeks before leaving for Beijing.

This summer, Gardner is healthy again and eager to make the U.S. Olympic team. Should she accomplish that goal, she has even loftier aspirations for Rio – from reaching the medal podium, to ending Jamaica’s run of dominance in the 100 meters, to claiming the title of world’s fastest woman.

“If I get a medal, I’ll probably pass out somewhere,” Gardner said. “And if I get gold? I’ll lose my mind. It will be like when a jockey wins his first [Kentucky] Derby and he pops the cork and sprays champagne over everyone. I want to be the first athlete to do that on the podium because that’s how crazy the moment would be for me.”

Achieving that goal won’t be easy, but don’t count Gardner out. Fueled by her family’s unwavering support and her own indefatigable will, Gardner has long shown a penchant for exceeding expectations.