Allie McLaughlin has climbed back to the top--in more ways than one--right back to where she belongs.

McLaughlin, a Colorado Springs native, is no stranger to making a impact in whatever her sport of choice happens to be at any given time. Small in stature but tremendously strong and with a huge engine, she excelled in multiple sports at Air Academy High School during her time there from 2005 to 2009 from on the hockey rink as part of her club hockey team, onto the lacrosse field, where she was part of a 5A state championship team, and ultimately, she found her way to running by her junior year, spurred along by the persuasion of some of her teachers and peers.

Hockey was still her first love at that time though, and she was reluctant to give it up in favor of a sport she wasn’t too sure about.

“The summer before my junior year, I ran the (Colorado Springs) State Games 5k,” McLaughlin recalled of her first experience running competitively, more or less on a whim. “It was my first race ever and halfway through, I thought, ‘I don’t really want to do this.’”

But the stars aligned, and heading into her junior year she didn’t make the cut for a coveted place on the Under 19 AAA club hockey team that she had been a part of for two years prior, and subsequently went out for cross country instead. Unbeknownst to her at the time, running would become the sport that she loved most, but would take more perseverance than she would have anticipated at the time.

“I was super bummed to not make the team, but at the same time, I was super ready to run.”

Her first year was a stellar success, despite ending on somewhat bittersweet note. McLaughlin led her team that year at the 5A State Championships as she placed 8^th, racing with a stress fracture in her shin.

“At the time, I didn’t really know any better, so I just went out and ran as hard as I could.”

Taking time off but still undeterred, she took to the track that spring while still competing in lacrosse. Since both are spring sports, she divided her time between the two, but mostly prioritized lacrosse.

“I was sort of casual about track,” she explained. “My track coaches, who I'm really thankful for, were just like, ‘we know you have lacrosse, but can you just kind of come and run a meet whenever?”

She wound up competing in four meets that year, one of which was the state championships, where she won the 5A girls two mile in a loaded field.

Her final year at Air Academy saw McLaughlin expend more of her effort into her running. This time around, it carried her to a 5A State Championship title, a 5th place finish at Foot Locker, and with her 4^th place at the USA Junior Cross Country Championships, she punched her ticket to Amman, Jordan to compete on the junior World Cross Country Championship team.

But she didn’t end up wearing the red, white and blue in Jordan as an unlucky adductor tear took her out for the remainder of the spring and extinguished any chance of competing on the track.

But McLaughlin had seen what kind of success she could have in running and had her mind made up to continue on in college. Recruited by both NCAA powerhouses University of Oregon and the University of Colorado, she very nearly found herself as a Duck before settling on CU to don the black and gold of the Buffs.

“I really loved Eugene,” McLaughlin explained. “At the time I wasn’t as attached to Colorado like I am now, so it was hard to choose. But CU seemed like something really special, and I really clicked with (CU coaches) Mark and Heather, and they’re the reason I ended up there.”

Leaving Colorado Springs for Boulder, McLaughlin spent her first year as a Buff training and competing alongside teammates and future Olympians Jenny Simpson, Emma Coburn, Shalaya Kipp and others.

“Running there was never complicated. We just showed up to practice, put in the work, and the fitness just came,” she remembered. “Being on that team was like a dream and I just didn’t have any worries or expectations. I was just fearless to be honest.”

That fearlessness paid off as she went down as the fastest freshman woman to be a part of CU’s illustrious program to live out the dream of Running With the Buffaloes. Leading the Buffs at the 2009 NCAA Cross Country Championships, she earned a fifth place individual finish, the highest freshman finish since Shalane Flanagan, and seemed poised to more than leave her mark as a Buff over her next four years.

But in spite of such a promising start, it was the first and last time that she would put on a CU jersey at a national championship. She went home over Christmas break after NCAA’s nursing a nagging foot injury that would curtail her indoor season and precede a gamut of injuries that would quash her ability to compete at the level that she had become accustomed to.

“I look back and I was pretty naïve and just ready to take on anything and the sky seemed like the limit. After that first season I got a glimpse of what could be possible, but things went downhill,” she explained.

Heartbreaking though it was to have her wings clipped, in a manner of speaking, battling though her remaining time as a collegiate runner unable to run didn’t come without its share of lessons, takeaways, and silver linings.

“It was definitely a long process of learning over the years of not competing that running wasn’t everything, it couldn't be everything, and that I had to find other things outside of running that I loved just as much if I was going to be able to be okay, and I learned never to take it for granted.”

Despite a college career that fell tremendously short of her expectations, McLaughlin wasn’t quite ready to hang them up.

“A lot of people would tell me that maybe I wasn’t meant to be a runner and that I should just move on, but I wanted to show them that maybe right now, no I can’t do these workouts or this training, but I still had a lot of goals and things I wanted to do, and I always felt so strong on the trails and especially going uphill.”

Perhaps much of that uphill-running strength had come from her years of training on the famous “Incline”, a one-mile uphill stretch of trail that reaches over a 50% vertical grade that begins in the tiny town of Manitou Springs, just outside of Colorado Springs, and climbs up the mountainside to end in the shadow of Pikes Peak. Having found many times in previous years that while she was at times unable to handle the pounding of running on flat land, she could get her heart rate just as high, and then some, climbing--and sometimes running--up the Incline, and that alternative to running would end up being a blessing in disguise that would come to fruition in an unexpected way a short time after her time at CU drew to a close in 2013. 

In July of 2014, McLaughlin took to the trails to compete at the USA Mountain Running Championships at Loon Mountain in New Hampshire. Mountain running championships alternate between “up” years, featuring mostly ascents, and “up/down” years, which combine long ascents with steep and technical descents. Needless to say, 2014’s “up” year was right up her alley, and McLaughlin set her eyes upon the the US Championships that year. She had, after all, just had her healthiest training stint since leaving CU a couple of years prior, and had just busted a few years' worth of rust at the Vail GoPro Games half marathon where she narrowly missed the win, getting out-kicked to get second by .09 seconds by multiple-time USA Mountain Running champion and Olympic Nordic Skiier Morgan Arritola of Sun Valley, Idaho. It was all the reassurance the McLaughlin needed to solidify her decision to take another crack at the sport she wasn't quite ready to walk away from.

Her mountain running campaign began much in the same way her college running career began: out of nowhere and with a bang. Outdistancing the whole field within the first mile, McLaughlin ran to a surprise win on Loon Mountain to become the US Mountain Running Champion, and got a second chance to represent the USA while she punched her ticket to represent the Team USA at the World Mountain Running Championships in Italy the following September.

“I had no idea what to expect going into USA’s,” she said. “Obviously I go to a race and I want to win, but that wasn’t as much on my mind. It was more like, this is a big race, I’m healthy, let’s go do it. I thought hey, if I can race 13 miles at the GoPro Games, then I can definitely race 5.”

Her performance on Loon Mountain was a double victory of sorts as it also catapulted her onto the USA team for the World Mountain Running Long Distance Championship in August. Having been held in prior years overseas rotating around various locations in Europe, this year the race made the move Pikes Peak, to be mixed in with the Pikes Peak Ascent, making it an even more special experience for McLaughlin, who spent years racing up the Incline at the base of America's Mountain.

“Running the Ascent had always been a goal, but I didn’t think that it would happen so soon. I figured I would wait a couple of years,” she said.

Lining up last August with many of the world’s best mountain runners mixed in among an enormous Pikes Peak Ascent field, McLaughlin was the first woman to the top of Pikes Peak and led Team USA in their 1-2-3 sweep. But, her season wasn’t over yet, and she put the finishing touches on a tremendous first mountain running campaign as she charged to a bronze at the World Mountain Running Championships in Cassette Di Masa, Italy a month later.

Having gotten a taste of what she’ll be able to accomplish in the mountain and trail running scene, McLaughlin, who prefers to take training and competing one day at a time and to enjoy “being in the moment,” as she puts it, has her eyes on some European races and certainly still has hopes to represent the USA again.

“Being able to get back on a higher level again and knowing that I can still compete is really refreshing and I feel more like myself than in a long time. This was definitely a year of redemption."