Kimber Mattox is More than a Comeback Story, She’s a Walking Miracle.

by Chase Parnell — November 12, 2019

This Friday, Kimber Mattox of Bend, Oregon will be representing the United States of America at the World Mountain Running Championships in Villa La Angostura, Argentina. If you’re not familiar with Kimber, don’t feel bad, she hasn’t been “on the radar” since Barak Obama was in office.

In 2015, Kimber had an incredible string of successes: she made the final round at the USATF National Championships in the steeplechase, rubbing shoulders with the three women that revolutionized the event, Emma Coburn, Colleen Quigley, and Courtney Frerichs. That same year, Kimber finished 3rd at the USA Mountain Running National Championships, then she blew everyone’s expectations out of the water by finishing as the top American at the World Championships in Wales. To cap off her 2015 season, she flew to Hawaii and won the Xterra Trail Run Half Marathon World Championships. She was a world champion, sponsors were flocking, the running world went gaga for her, and then … everything began to fall apart.

Enter Injury: More than a Setback

A strange pain in her foot, which quickly spread to her hip, began to bother Kimber and it simply would not go away. At her level, athletes are constantly dealing with a whole variety of maladies at any given time. She’d work through it, she told herself. She could push through anything, she always had. And she had the tools to do it. Kimber, by trade, is a professor of nutrition and biology, previously at the University of Oregon and currently at Central Oregon Community College in Bend, Oregon. She spent years studying exercise science and physiology so she understood the impact of running on the human body. But this foot and hip pain was ominously resilient, and it was beginning to manifest itself in different ways.

She tried everything. But like the proverbial hamster’s wheel, she was getting nowhere. In fact, the pain was only getting worse. Ultimately, the injury led to severe nerve pain, which caused crippling discomfort in her arm and even her head. But her back was the worst. The pain was devastating. It got so bad that she could hardly walk, let alone run.

“I saw ALL the doctors and PTs,” she said. She went to the best of the best trying to figure out what was happening, she spent over $10,000 of her own money on healthcare expenses and travel to see specialists in Portland and as far away as Phoenix. It was all in vain though, everyone was stumped by this pain that morphed and moved throughout her body. Without answers, Kimber was in a state of constant fear that it would never improve.

She recalls times where she’d drag herself to work and barely survive a long lecture on her feet. She has vivid memories of returning to her office, locking her door, lying under her desk and crying her eyes out because the pain was just too much to bear.

Kimber could wallpaper her entire office with the x-ray and body scan images from her doctor visits. At one point or another, they imaged literally every part of her body to try to find the chink in her armor.

Finally, one of the doctors found a labral tear in her hip, which is a tear in the ring of cartilage that lines the outside rim of the socket of the hip joint.

At last, this had to be it!

Surgery was scheduled. This could literally solve everything! They operated, and for a few weeks, the progress was promising. Kimber optimistically tested it out, but relief evading her still. The pain was there and actually more aggravated than ever.

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The Person Behind the Stride

To give some context, this nightmare could not be happening to a sweeter person. Kimber is the type that genuinely lights up when she sees you. She’s a soft spoken, extremely kind, and very intelligent woman. She’s inquisitive and makes you feel like your life is worthy of the center of the conversation. She’s unassuming in her mannerisms, only if you study her very closely, will you catch glimpses of the competitor under the surface.

Kimber is a humble soul. If you visit her Instagram page, her bio says, “Kimber Mattox.” That’s it. There are no glittery emojis or lists of accolades, no claims to greatness or pithy remarks. She’s Kimber Mattox.

In entering a conversation with her, you learn quickly just how well connected she is with the elite running scene. During her post-collegiate years in Eugene, she was coached by Olympian Ian Dobson and she knows all the Oregon greats like Jordan Hasay, Alexi Pappas, Matt Centrowitz, and Jessica Hull. And it’s easy to forget when speaking with her that she actually belongs in that circle. Coming off her 2015 season, it appeared she was only a few developmental steps away from achieving similar running success.

Kimber says that due to the injury and her exit from competition, she had to come to terms with the fact that, “Some people will love me less.” The old cliche that you find out who your real friends are unfortunately held true. She’d have to build a new identity and people would either love her for it or not.

See, Kimber has been an athlete her entire life. Growing up, when you saw Kimber, she likely had her hair up, dressed in one type of workout gear or another, and she probably had a layer of recently earned sweat caked on her cheeks.

She won the 4A state championship in cross country as a sophomore at Bend High School, then shockingly decided to redirect her entire focus to soccer, which ended up taking her to the collegiate level, playing for Willamette University. While at Willamette she was encouraged to have another go at running, and just like that, she went on to set the school records in the 1,500 meters and the 3,000 meter steeplechase, which she still holds to this day. Talent much?

Kimber has a knack for hopping around to different disciplines and achieving success at the highest levels. Case in point: in 2014, Kimber participated in the Warrior Dash World Championships, an obstacle course race, and took home the title and a check for $30,000.

All that to say, when you bumped into Kimber (and you pulled it out of her), she could always draw confidence and self-worth from her accomplishments in sport. So when all that was taken from her, what was she to do?

When All Else Fails

In the summer of 2017, Kimber was desperate, so she turned to what a lot of people turn to during a crisis. No, not some destructive vice. She turned to her faith. Specifically though, she credits the actual text of the Bible. She’d been raised Christian, but something about this period of brokenness made the experience when interacting with the Bible different. This was the first time the Bible actually worked for her. “It was the only thing that brought me any comfort,” she said. Plain and simple.

With the help of this newly found emotional salve, she said she finally accepted the cards she was dealt. “I decided I was finally done being sad about it,” she said.

As it typically happens, it was around this time that she was introduced to who she called, “my angel PT.” She beamed at the very thought of this woman, who would go on to guide her towards recovery. Spoiler alert, to this day, there isn’t a clear diagnosis for what happened to Kimber’s body, and similarly, there wasn’t a clear moment in time where they figured out how to treat it. It’s almost as if her body just threw a temper tantrum for no apparent reason and it needed a couple years to fully express itself. Yet still, Kimber credits the love and help of her angel physical therapist, who walked with her step by step. This PT was able to formulate a plan to work with the often changing and indecipherable needs of Kimber’s body and help bring her back to health.

After months of diligent work, in the summer of 2018, Kimber was back to walking pain free. She was even able to get out on fairly strenuous hikes, which she did mostly with the friends that stuck by her after what was now two years of continuous injury. While hiking mountains was fabulous for her spirits, her back still wasn’t good enough to run, not good enough to open up a real stride.

Determined to make the most of what she was able, Kimber began to go out on solo missions to all the local hills: Smith Rock, Mount Bachelor, Tumalo Mountain, Black Butte. She said she started to hike hard. If the grade was steep enough, she could really get a workout! During these outings, she’d swallow up the climbs and quickly became a very strong hiker. She relished the sweat and cardiovascular discomfort that harkened her back to 2015. In parallel, she intensified her strength and weight training.

But whenever she tried to transition the hiking into a run, she hurt. It didn’t feel right and the setbacks continued to roll in.

“That’s when I went to the Bethel Church healing rooms” she said.

If you follow the sport closely, this is the very same church that widely known professional runners, Ryan and Sara Hall, attended when they lived in Redding, California. Bethel is known, even within Christianity in general, for its extreme spiritual practices. But Kimber had nothing to lose and she was willing to try anything. This practice of seeking out healing is commonplace within the global Catholic Church and its sacred pilgrimage sites of Lourdes, Fatima, and Medjugorje. Bethel Church is essentially the American Protestant version. So why not try?

Kimber said she went down to Redding and did indeed have a distinct spiritual experience, yet it didn’t take place while she was in the healing rooms themselves. It occurred during what the church calls “worship”, where the congregants sing to their God during a traditional church service. She said she was standing, listening and singing to the music being played, when she felt hands on her back. Then she felt the hands slowly turning her … untwisting her spine.

“I felt like it was God’s hands healing me,” she said. Coming from a person who had been to hell and back, you could hear the resolve in her voice. Ryan Hall, in fact, reported a miraculous experience of his own at Bethel Church in an interview with the New York Times.

Kimber returned to Bend encouraged but she said it wasn’t like she was immediately one hundred percent better. But at her very next PT appointment, after running the normal diagnostics on Kimber’s body, out of the blue, her PT said she was going to create a “return to running plan.”

Gulp.

At first, running still didn’t feel healthy. Every outing was a struggle. But something had indeed changed. Before, it was two steps forward, three steps back. Now, the progress was slow but the major setbacks didn’t come.

In April of 2019, she did a fartlek, her first legit workout in almost three years. She started to reach out to the Bend locals, tentatively asking if people wanted to join her in workouts. By summer, she began to feel like fitness was building. She got out most days but without any form of plan or agenda. She was running purely for the joy of it.

As the summer progressed into fall and she wasn’t waking up from this beautiful dream of uninterrupted running, the people in her life inevitably started to inquire about what she was thinking on the competition front. Would there be a comeback?

Kimber had been asking herself the same question. The sleeping bear, who’d been in hibernation for three long years, was finally beginning to stir. But she didn’t want to run in just any old race. She set her sights on the one that made her heart race, the one that would allow her to capitalize on all those long solo power hiking sessions she’d done. Her return to racing would be at the U.S. Mountain Running Championships in Waterville, New Hampshire.

The 2019 US Mountain Running Championships

If you go find Kimber on Strava, a social community for endurance athletes where you log your daily training, she has only one entry. It’s from September 21, 2019, which she nonchalantly entitled, “South Sister”. The outing was a solo ascent up South Sister, a peak near Bend, Oregon that rises over 10,000 feet into the sky. It’s the most accessible and runnable of the Three Sisters and the one that mountain runners frequently time trial. She said she was going to use that run to see if she was “fit enough” to race the following weekend in New Hampshire. Well, turns out she was because she crushed the record up South Sister by 8 minutes. Hundreds of women have logged their time on that route, and in one big push, Kimber found herself atop the pile. That run sealed the deal, she was fit enough to race. Call it diligent rehabilitation or divine intervention, “that was when I declared myself fully healed,” she said.

So there goes Kimber, off of a structureless training program and no tune up races, she goes out to New Hampshire and toes the line against some of America’s best mountain runners. After a tough battle, emerging superstar, Grayson Murphy of Saucony, pulled away from the field for the win. Kasie Enman of Salomon, perennial badass and 6-time World team qualifier, finished second. Then there was Kimber, finishing strongly in third place and securing her ticket to the World Championships in Argentina.

The World Championships

Kimber is currently in Argentina and joined by over 450 other runners from 42 different countries. Her race is this Friday, November 15th, at 7:15am PST. She’ll line up against the World’s best and let it rip. Heading into the big dance, she said she doesn’t really have any hardline expectations or goals. She’s been running 65-75 miles per week with 1-2 intense sessions, but admits she should probably have a coach. With the newly found health and craziness of life as a professor, she hasn’t been as performance-minded as she could be. She’s a little nervous about the team element too because she wants to represent her country well and do her best for the team. The American women’s team has had huge success at the Mountain Running World Championships in the past with a team win as recent as 2017, so there’s some pressure to maintain their winning tradition.

But in listening to Kimber speak, you get the sense that in general, this is all gravy for her. She hasn’t been overly concerned with her training because she’s playing with house money so to say. When you get to the point where you don’t think you are going to be able to run without pain again, let alone race, your perspective tends to change.

Kimber says her injury will definitely prove to be that inflection point in life. Did X happen before or after the injury? Those tears she shed curled up on her office floor, or the moments of hurt when people seemed to lose interest in her just because she wasn’t competing; those cuts run deep but she’s come out the other end a stronger and more emotionally balanced woman. Her identity has broadened.

But would she change it? Does she still dwell on what could have been had she rolled her 2015 success into 2016 and beyond? It doesn’t sound like it. Through her trials, she was forced to learn the hard way that she’s more than just a a fast runner, she’s not just an athlete. Would she like to win the World Mountain Running Championships on Friday? Of course, but she doesn’t need to in order to feel whole.

As her Instagram says, she’s “Kimber Mattox”, just Kimber.

And that’s enough.

Live race updates can be found at the WMRCA Facebook Page.

Follow Kimber on Instagram and Facebook.

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