She felt a slight twinge in her left shin, but thought little of it. 

Nothing out of the ordinary for a seasoned collegiate distance runner.

An hour later, though, Izzy Thornton-Bott couldn’t stand up. 

She began to worry it might be more than a twinge. 

After a win in the 6,000-meter at the Dellinger Invitational, her track career at Oregon was off to a fast start. The injury — which came just days after — would force Thornton-Bott to spend four months away from the track.   

“News as devastating as that, I would be lying if I said it was all fine,” Thornton-Bott said. “I’d come [to Oregon] to be a part of the team. And I started making good friendships with the team, and then suddenly, I’m out. I’m stuck in the pool for eight weeks.”

While it was tough at times, Thornton-Bott’s track career had been stunted before. Therefore, when she learned that she had sustained a stress fracture in her left shin, she was far from daunted. 

Instead of wallowing, that four-month recovery process helped remind her there’s more to life than running track.

Throughout those four months, she cheered her fellow teammates on from the sidelines. She committed herself to grow internally. She dedicated herself to her love for photography and reading. 

Thornton-Bott came to the University of Oregon from Australia to compete for one of the most prestigious track teams in the nation and gain exposure so she could compete in the 2024 Olympics.

Following the stress fracture, those goals were merely put on pause.

It wasn’t all that dissimilar from the journey she embarked on to save her track career before even coming to Oregon. A journey that makes any of her other challenges seem minuscule in comparison.

In August 2019, Thornton-Bott traveled from Australia to Ontario, Canada for a six-month exchange program at the University of Waterloo.

She arrived with no plans of joining its track program. At first, she trained individually. She put an emphasis on relaxation, her studies and the enjoyment of her social life.

Thornton-Bott surrounded herself with non-athletes, jumping at any chance to travel or explore new hobbies such as photography and knitting.

For the first time in her life, track was not the most important thing.

“I could do things that are just fun for the sake of doing them for fun,” Thornton-Bott said. “I could actually have more to me than ‘Izzy, the athlete.’ I could be ‘Izzy, the friend.’”

Shortly after, Thornton-Bott learned she was eligible to try out for the team and earned her spot completing a time trial.

At Waterloo, she was named the Ontario University Athletics Rookie of the Year after a fifth-place finish in the 8,000-meters race at the OUA Championship.

When the six-month exchange program ended in December, she returned home to Australia to prepare for the next step in her budding track career.

Then, life happened.

Thornton-Bott’s liver completely shut down.

She was diagnosed with an acute granular fever — a.k.a. mononucleosis.

Prior to the diagnosis, she was at the peak of her powers. To return to that point, an arduous road lay ahead.

“I think the hardest thing as an athlete is when you get ill or when you get injured; it’s not the fact that you’ve hurt a part of your body,” Thornton-Bott said. “It’s the fact that it’s preventing you from running. It’s working against you.”

Thornton-Bott tried to come back multiple times, but her body was not ready to push the limits. She lost an immense amount of weight; she endured recurring leg injuries, and she went from one of the fastest girls on her team to struggling to keep up with her youngest teammates.

The simplest of drills became almost impossible. Some days, she struggled to get out of bed and go to workouts.

She was reduced to solely training on the exercise bike.

“I remember being on the bike, and it was maybe the third time going back,” Thornton-Bott said. “I went ‘Ah. Fuck this.’ and got off.”

Calling it quits on her track career was never an option. She decided to take a full season off to regain her health and strength, instead of trying to train through the illness.

Thornton-Bott’s choice to put her athletics on the backburner ultimately helped prolong her future.

Before taking that hiatus, she had reached out to Oregon distance coach Helen Lehman-Winters and had shown interest in the University of Oregon as the place to pursue her goals of competing at the collegiate level. After beating the illness, she began the process of joining the Ducks’ program.

“Izzy expressed a really strong interest in coming to America, not just to go to any school, but to come to Oregon,” coach Lehman-Winters said. “A lot of athletes want that interest to be one-way; they want all the attention. Izzy was truly interested in going through the process to get here. She was committed to coming here all along.”

Her track career was moving in the right direction once again. 

She won her first collegiate race and she began to build friendships with her fellow Oregon track teammates. 

A week later, Thornton-Bott and her teammates were on a leisurely run at Eugene’s Mount Pisgah when the first signs of the stress fracture began to pop up. With the Nuttycombe Invitational in Madison, Wisconsin, right around the corner, she decided to cut her run short out of caution.

She returned to the mountain’s car park to sit and rest. As her teammates came down to the mountain to check on her, Thornton-Bott tried to get up and greet them.

Suddenly, her leg gave out.

Right as she was finding her footing again, it was swept out from under her. Her track career was derailed, once again.

“I knew that if I could get through how ill I was and still be kind enough to myself, then I can get through just about anything,” Thornton-Bott said. “That mentality definitely helped out a lot when it came to the fracture.”

Her injuries and illness weren’t exactly blessings in disguise. However, her instinct to stay true to the future of her track career while it was on pause prepared her for any obstacles that may present themselves down the line.