Injuries overcome, Olympia High alumna Annie Dear set to run in Olympic trials

In late May 2011, Annie Dear went to the starting line for the NCAA Division III championship race in the women’s 10,000 meters as part of a deep crew of young Williams College runners.

Her teammate from the elite Massachusetts college Jennifer Gossels won. Dear didn’t finish, a nagging stretch reaction injury having turned into a full leg fracture mid-race. She wouldn’t seriously race again for years.

“The mistake I made in hindsight was I thought I could just cross-train. I was in amazing shape. I’d just set a bunch of (personal records),” the former Olympia High School standout recalls. “I thought I could not run for the last few weeks before nationals and still try to compete. It really worsened my injury quite a bit.”

There was no quick bounce back for Dear. It was more of a crawl back.

“I spent my last two years of college in an agonizing cycle of trying to come back,” she said. “I couldn’t sustain training without feeling like my injury was returning. I repeated that every three to six months for two years. It was very disappointing.”

But on Saturday in Atlanta, after years of fits and starts to rehabilitate her injury, including some time spent competing in triathlons, Dear will hit a high point in her running career: competing in the U.S. Olympic trials for the marathon.

Now 28 years old, Dear ran 2:41:52 during October’s Chicago Marathon to qualify for the trials.

Jesse Stevick was the boys track coach at Olympia High who worked with the girls team toward the end of Dear’s prep career and also knew Dear from his dad’s Barron Park Striders club team. He isn’t surprised she made such an impressive comeback.

“She has fun competing and training. She always had a spunky, light-hearted attitude,” he said. “She also has a lot of drive and stick-to-it-iveness that allows her to work her way through injuries.”

Her life as a runner started early. As a 7-year old kid she followed her brother, Ben, another former Bear star who recently won a half marathon, into first YMCA track, then the Striders.

Jesse’s dad, Drew Stevick, is primarily known as the founder of Barron Park, a team that, at one point or the other, has included many of the top athletes in Thurston County, regardless of their primary sport.

A former javelin thrower at Whitworth, Drew has a mission to expose kids to more than running, and Dear was no exception. She still has a share of the Barron Park record for high jump by a bantam (9-10 years old) girl.

“In his heart, Drew wants every child to be a decathlete, so I tried every event,” said Dear, who now lives in San Francisco, where she competes for the Hoka One One Aggies Running Club.

But even as a pre-teen she was drawn to distance running.

“I remember when I was 7 or 8, I was smart about pacing the 400 meters, which is obviously a sprinting event when you get older, but every time I would go up in age groups, I’d always want to try the longest race,” she said. “It was usually the event I wound up placing the best in. I was motivated by success.”

Dear continued to high jump through middle school, but in high school discovered training for both jumps and distances was counterproductive.

By her senior year at Olympia, Dear was good enough to finish third in the state 4A 1600 meters and fourth in 3200 meters.

She said she chose Williams for college because she feared getting lost in a Division I track program and because she craved the college’s strong academics, rural setting and history of successful runners. She ended her career with top 10 all-time marks there in the 5,000 meters (third in 16:49.2), 10,000 meters (fourth in 35:23.84) and 1500 meters (10th).

She moved to San Francisco in 2017, and began seriously pointing toward the 2020 Trials in early 2018. She lives a block from the city’s famed Golden Gate Park.

“It’s a phenomenal urban running resource. I can’t imagine a better park to train in,” she said.

With her husband, Patrick, and circle of friends also drawn to running, Dear has been able to balance her training with her work as an associate director of a non-profit, Social Finance.

“I’m better at getting enough sleep to sustain the level of training. I spend a lot of time running, a lot of time working, so I don’t have the social life a lot of people my age do. It’s just about calibrating the right lifestyle,” she said.

With the course in Atlanta hillier than most elite marathons, Dear isn’t focused on running a specific time. Seeded in the middle of the pack, she has a goal of finishing higher than her seed.

“I’m really excited, grateful to be making it to the starting line healthy and in the best shape of my life,” she said.

Dear joins other Olympia area women Karen Steen, Linda Huyck and Susan Havens in reaching the marathon trials over the years. And it’s notable that she is from Olympia, the city that hosted the very first women’s Olympic marathon trials 36 years ago. Joan Benoit won that race in 1984.

While making the 2020 trials was one goal for Dear, she said she’s still formulating future running goals.

“I don’t know what’s next, but there’s definitely more to come,” she said. “I like looking at the list of women who stayed competitive well into their late 30s or beyond. I feel there’s a ton of potential for me to keep getting faster.”