INDIANAPOLIS – One of America’s top athletes spends downtime walking around Broad Ripple, stopping at Monon Coffee or for tacos, sitting at outdoor patios with her 3-year-old Foxhound. She once dreamed of becoming a concert violinist or working for the State Department. She works part-time for an IT company ... but that’s not her real job.
She is a pro runner, sponsored by Asics and earning thousands of dollars in prize money. Unlike Caitlin Clark, few in Indianapolis knew who she was before she arrived here.
Emma Grace Hurley, 28, is taking on the best in the world. She has never run a marathon. Yet she is perhaps on track to represent Team USA in the marathon at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
If you are looking for an analogous athlete, maybe Kurt Warner. All the quarterback did was go from stocking grocery shelves to Super Bowl MVP in five years.
“I’m excited about the next few years,” Hurley said. “Because we’ve really been planning for them for a long time.”
Part of that plan includes Saturday’s Delta Dental 5K, which is USA Track & Field’s 5,000-meter road national championship. The race precedes the 50th IU Health 500 Festival Mini-Marathon.
Hurley is coming off two breakthrough races:
>> An 8-kilometer American record, set March 22 at Chicago, where she broke a 21-year-old mark held by Deena Kastor, an Olympic marathon medalist. Kastor, a running icon, was at the finish line to congratulate Hurley.
>> A USATF national 10-mile title April 12 at Washington, D.C.
Hurley is coached by Andrew Begley, a former Indiana state champion and husband of Olympic runner Amy Yoder Begley.
Hurley trains mostly by herself but occasionally is joined by those such as Westfield’s Lauren Bailey, an NCAA Division II champion at University of Indianapolis.
“I truly think she can make the (Olympic) team in 2028,” Bailey said. “She’s going to fly.”
Yes, it has been years in the making. Yet it all happened so fast for Hurley, who had such an unsatisfying college track career that she effectively quit.
Emma Grace Hurley's long road to running
When Hurley was playing intramural basketball in fourth grade, the phys-ed teacher told Hurley’s mother she should try track. So the girl ran the 400 meters in middle school.
Hurley did not consider herself a runner. Her grandfather owned a St. Louis violin shop and she was serious about violin. That required relentless practice.
“I remember looking outside and thinking, 'I wish I was outside right now,’“ she said.
If neither runner nor violinist, she was a setter in volleyball, also an indoor activity. Except she is 5-foot-1, awfully short for volleyball.
As a freshman at Fellowship Christian High School in Roswell, Ga., she was asked to run cross-country for a couple of meets ... and discovered she loved it. She was a runner, after all. Unlike other team sports, she felt in control of outcomes.
“I’m so glad I didn’t find it until later,” she said. “It allowed my body to grow in a way I was really healthy when I started running. I never overdid it in high school.”
On as few as 15 miles of week, Hurley thrived.
She did not win three state titles in Georgia just because it was in the 1A private-school division. She was Georgia’s 2014 Gatorade player of the year in cross-country, and twice she qualified for the Foot Locker national championships.
As a senior, she ran 1,600 meters in 4:46.00 and a two-mile in 10:22.58, fast enough to rank among the nation’s top 25. An Eritrean-born girl named Weini Kelati was No. 1 in the latter. Remember the name.
For college, Hurley chose Furman, a small university (enrollment: 2,500) that has done big things in running under the husband-and-wife team of coaches Robert and Rita Gary.
The worst parts of Hurley’s college experience were injuries that interrupted training, and the pandemic that eliminated the 2020 outdoor track season.
“It was always almost there,” she said, “and then something would happen.”
She won one Southern Conference championship, and her best finish in NCAA cross-country was 51st. Hurley never made it to an NCAA track championship.
Rita Gary acknowledged she made coaching mistakes along the way, but said Hurley’s talent and work ethic were unquestioned. Indeed, Hurley ran a 10:06 steeplechase at age 20, underscoring how “gritty” she was, the Furman coach said.
“She was never afraid to dream big. I love that about her," Rita Gary said. “I think her work ethic has caught up to her dreams. She has been so much more intentional in the decisions that she made. It just sounds like the stars have finally aligned.”
After that 2020 spring season was canceled, Hurley thought she was done with running. She was employed by an IT staff firm. For 16 months, she ran perhaps once a week, if at all.
Except she wasn’t finished. She was starting.
'I thought he was really silly'
Hurley’s mother sensed it wasn’t over. While watching track’s Olympic Trials on TV in June 2021, she told her daughter, “You’re telling me you can’t do that?”
The gateway back to running was coaching. In August 2021, Hurley began running with the girls she was coaching at Marist School in Atlanta. Marist’s head coach, Matt McMurray, agreed with Hurley’s mother. No way should Hurley quit. She was steered toward Atlanta Track Club Elite.
There was no guarantee Hurley would be accepted by the pro running club. However, Andrew Begley reasoned that as good a program as Furman featured, it might not have been right for her. He knew how fast she had run as a teen on low mileage. Success in this sport – high school to college to pro – is rarely linear.
“I knew within three or four weeks that Emma Grace could be really, really good,” Begley said. “Something just didn’t add up from what I saw in college and what I saw there.”
Hurley’s sole goal was to better her 5K best, which was 15:57. Then she would be “at peace with it,” she said.
She reached her goal in April 2022, clocking 15:49. She did not stop. She continued racing, and she continued listening to Begley, who resisted any temptation to increase a runner’s mileage at the expense of speed. He spoke to Hurley not about 2024, but about 2028 and 2032.
“I thought he was really silly until about a year ago,” Hurley said. “Then I started seeing it.”
She had fewer expectations and less pressure than she felt at Furman. In 2023, she became genuinely elite.
In March, she was second in the national championship 15K at Jacksonville, Fla., behind Emily Sisson, the American record-holder in the marathon. In the national 10K, at Northport, N.Y., Hurley was on the podium again in third place behind Kelati and U.S. cross-country champion Ednah Kurgat.
Just as her renewed career was on the rise, however, Hurley faced another crossroads. The Begleys were moving from Atlanta to Indianapolis, where Amy was taking a job as USATF director of long-distance programs. Hurley had to choose: stay home with a new coach or relocate.
Why Emma Grace Hurley is in Indianapolis
Indianapolis has not been a stumbling block, but a launching pad. Hurley settled into her Hoosier home by January 2024 and continued to soar.
It helped that her agent, Ray Flynn, secured a sponsorship deal with Asics. Those can be worth up to $100,000 a year, plus bonuses. As Begley did, Flynn identified Hurley early. The agent’s clients include the entire podium from the 2024 Olympic men’s 1,500 meters: Cole Hocker, Josh Kerr, Yared Nuguse.
In cross-country, Hurley was second in the USA Championships (behind Kelati) and 34th in the World Championships at Belgrade, Serbia. So she finished higher in the world than she ever did in the NCAA.
After finishing second in 2023, she won the 2024 USATF running circuit title, worth $30,000.
In a last-minute decision, she entered that November’s CNO Financial Group Indianapolis Monumental Half-Marathon – and proceeded to set a course record of 1 hour, 8 minutes, 26 seconds. She won by nearly two minutes.
In 2025, Hurley was no less prolific, finishing second in national races at distances of a half-marathon and 10 miles. She was also second (behind Kelati) in the prestigious Falmouth (Mass.) 7-mile road race.
The one thing she declines to do is race on a track. Doesn’t like it, she said. Begley thinks he knows why.
“She does math in her head all the time when she’s running,” the coach said. “When you do math after every 400, that’s too much thinking to run fast.”
Hurley’s resilience was never tested as much as it was a few weeks ago.
In the USA half-marathon championship March 1 at Atlanta, she and two other women separated from the pack with a mile to go. The lead vehicle guided them off course, and when the error was discovered, they had run an extra kilometer.
Hurley finished 12th, and she was going to be no worse than third. It was an egregious mistake because the top four qualify for the world half-marathon Sept. 20 at Copenhagen, Denmark. The runners’ appeal was denied.
“The first few days after that, it was hard to even sleep. I don’t think I slept for like a week, just because it was very stressful,” Hurley said.
Ultimately, World Athletics agreed to let the United States enter seven in the world half-marathon, rather than four. She will get her chance on the world stage again.
She has shown she belongs.
In Hurley’s most recent race, she was third in the Cherry Blossom 10-miler, five seconds behind winner Asayech Ayichew, an Ethiopian who was fourth in January’s world cross-country race. Hurley beat Kelati to become U.S. champion, finishing third. Kelati was eighth in the 10,000 at the 2024 Olympics and has twice broken the American record for a half-marathon.
'The No. 1 thing she says at practice is ‘oops’'
Hurley is what David Epstein, author of the book “The Sports Gene,” would call a high responder. High responders make large gains from training, compared to others.
Hurley’s coach must, if anything, restrain her. The runner is so analytical, Begley said, that he encourages part-time employment so she doesn’t always think about running. They clash sometimes in their collaboration.
On repetitions designed for a certain pace, Begley said, “The No. 1 thing she says at practice is ‘oops.’“ That means she runs faster than the target of a 4:40 mile, for instance. Usually, it happens once or twice. But in one recent workout, “She said ‘oops’ on eight of them,” Begley said.
Begley also coached another unheralded Atlanta TC runner, Allie Wilson, who also relocated to Broad Ripple. Wilson ended up making the 2024 U.S. Olympic team in the 800 meters.
Begley credits Scott Hudson, an athletic trainer who formerly worked for USATF, for Hurley’s rapid rise.
“Emma Grace is demonstrating that having the right coach and the right team behind you is more important than where you live,” Begley said.
Life in Broad Ripple has been idyllic, and simple.
Hurley is steps away from the Monon Trail, where at least once a day someone she doesn’t know says “hi” to the once-anonymous runner. If she is not running, she is resting. Or walking her dog, Ava. Or dining with runners who belong to the Working Man’s Track Club.
“She is such a good role model for myself and so many athletes,” Bailey said. “I see her work really hard, but I also see her take her easy days easy. That’s such a good reminder.”
Saturday’s 5K through downtown Indianapolis will precede Hurley’s planned marathon debut next fall. She does not want to make the 2028 U.S. Olympic Trials her first marathon. Eventually, she will be a marathoner.
“And that’s all she will do,” Begley said.
Since Kastor won bronze at age 31 in 2004, the 15 Olympic marathon medalists have ranged from 26 to 38, with an average age of about 30.
Hurley would be 30 at Los Angeles 2028 and 34 at Brisbane 2032. Peak years are ahead.
“This is a sport, if you keep coming back to it and coming to find the best version of yourself,” Gary said, “you’ll find her.”
With more ‘oops’ moments, Hurley could find herself where no one ever could have imagined – on a global podium.
Contact David Woods at dwoods1411@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Emma Grace Hurley is one of the nation's top distance runners, Olympic marathon hopeful
