Listen to a podcast interview with Jordan Hasay by Rachel Sturtz. (Please note: This four-minute podcast will take approximately 20-25 seconds to load.)

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It's dead quiet at the University of Oregon, save for the two crows squawking in stereo from the east and west grandstands at Hayward Field. In the setting sun, Jordan Hasay, a 21-year-old Oregon senior, strides through 200m intervals, opening up her speed after winter break as her shadow stretches longer than her legs. The historic, roofed grandstands here look more horse track than track and field, but these bleachers have seen the kind of action that made Man O' Wars out of mere mortals, names spoken with a breathlessness that attends any legendary icon: Steve Prefontaine, Mary Decker Slaney, Bob Kennedy. From the same bleachers, a crowd found its breath to chant "Come to Or-e-gon" to a 16-year-old Hasay as she knelt before the clock showing a new American record in the high school 1500m at the 2008 Olympic trials, a white-blond ponytail as long as her list of accolades. Two-time Foot Locker cross country nationals winner. Seven-time Junior Olympics champion. Thirteen age-group records. Nine high school class records.

Hasay knows effort, but it's tucked beneath her reliably calm and happy demeanor. It's the innate California surfer girl in her. But to the people in the green stands who watched a sprite of a girl flit past grown women with brands sewn on their chests and contracts fueling their livelihood, it was hard to believe she had to try at all.

Remember the first time you lost a big race or dropped the baton? There were tears and anger and conciliatory hugs and, if you were lucky, a trip to get ice cream. It was a distilled life lesson wrapped in a particularly not-fun moment of defeat.

Hasay never went through that.

Not until college, anyway. That's when she got her education. If she wanted more than the high school "phenom" label -- a fleeting title at best, a derisive one at worst -- she had to learn to lose, forget about records and wins, and train herself to be a competitor, a word not in her wheelhouse.

When she reprised her role on the rubber lanes of Hayward for the 2012 Olympic trials as a junior at the University of Oregon last summer, she barely made it out of the gates, failing to advance from the semifinals. What was once easy had suddenly become hard. Lessons have a way of growing ugly with time, and if you're a late bloomer to disappointment, it's a whopper when it finally hits you.

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Hasay's first lesson came on a dirt oval track during the mile as a 9-year-old. She went out at the gun, as Hasay is wont to do, and held her pace to the end. As she ran, she calmly watched another girl speed up and pass her just before the finish line. Dumbfounded, Hasay asked her coach afterward, "You can sprint at the end?" Armed with this newfound knowledge, Hasay beat the girl the next week. And the week after.

The second lesson came at Hayward Field. At first glance, it made her cry. Hasay looked out at the packed stands of the 2004 USATF National Junior Olympic Track and Field Championships, a giant crowd she'd never seen in her hometown of Arroyo Grande, Calif. -- not at her swim meets or volleyball games or around the dirt track where she mostly practiced relay hand-offs in elementary school. Tears in her eyes, the seventh-grade Catholic schoolgirl turned back from the packet pick-up and told her parents she did not want to run in front of all these people. It was the second time her parents had had to comfort Hasay since she began running. The first came when she was 9 years old and overheard an eighth-grade mean girl moan about the fourth-grader who was going to beat all of them in the mile. That led to tears, too. Talent and a tender heart is a hard balance for a young girl.

Luckily, seventh-graders don't dwell on much, and Hasay toed the line at her first Junior Olympics hoping to stick with some of the older, more experienced girls. Instead, she ran the fastest times in meet history with a 4:34.02 in the 1500m and a 9:48.77 in the 3,000m, crossing the line alone in both races. Back home, her running club coach sat her down to tell her she was good at running and suggested she stop skipping practice to swim. So she did. She gave up team sports to forge this new territory alone, keeping pace with the boys on the team or learning to suffer through intervals on her own. Her biggest competition was her own records. At the beginning, however, she found a short-term training partner in her mom.

"Once I quit the other sports and began training, my mom would let me join her for 4 miles of her 6-mile loop," says Hasay. "Eventually, I got up to 6. You see, racing was never my favorite part of the sport, this was. I got up early every day and ran that loop."

Now when she goes home, she has to run it three times. Hasay ratcheted up her mileage over break and is holding steady at 85 miles per week -- a new high to match a new possible goal of the 5,000m and 10,000m at NCAA outdoors this summer. The 10,000m is new territory for Hasay and she's enjoying it.

When she talks about running, it's hard for Hasay not to smile. It's a near-constant feature when you get into the semantics of running. Her love for the sport isn't about glory (although it can be) and it's not about winning (though it is sometimes). She loves it in the way she loves other people. The measured, thoughtful way she talks about training and racing is the same way she listens to others, and "How are you?" is never rhetorical. She gives all of herself. Ask anyone who has known Hasay for five minutes and they'll talk about her drive, her passion, her studiousness in the sport.

"The difference between Jordan and the other girls is that she enjoys every single day she's out there," says teammate Allie Woodward. "She puts in extra time stretching and rolling with not a bit of regret. She works hard without the bitterness."

She'll have to work hard for her final season of track. "We're assuming I'm going to be good at the 10,000," says Hasay, raising her eyebrows. Hasay rarely uses "I" when talking about goals or success; she prefers "we," a pronoun that includes her coaches and family. It's a fairly safe assumption that Hasay could be a force in the 10,000m, considering she has earned 17 All America awards at the 1500m and 3,000m, two indoor national titles, four Pac-12 crowns and two school records (3,000m, DMR). But you can sense a chink in Hasay's normally sanguine armor.

"Mentally, we're not worried about 10,000. We're worried about the 5,000," says Hasay, as she folds a leg underneath her and leans against the back of a couch in the Bowerman Building lobby, settling in. "Especially after last year."

When a top-three finisher in the last three NCAA cross country championships decides it's time to graduate from her 1500m specialty in track and bring out the big guns in the 5,000m, the move reads like a foregone conclusion. Except when, for whatever reason, the talent doesn't transfer. It doesn't come easy like it does in cross country, and the final 400m of each race rears its head and gets into hers.

It's not as if Hasay went unbeaten in college. In fact, one of the aspects she liked best about the University of Oregon was that even as a star recruit, she wasn't the team standout. That title belonged to Ducks like Nicole Blood, Alex Kosinski, heptathlete Brianne Theisen. Hasay ran with people who were faster than she was. She ran with a team. For the first time, the way she performed counted for more than just personal glory.

"As a freshman, she came in wide-eyed," says Maurica Powell, head cross country coach at the University of Oregon. "She hoped to come in and not have immediate success. She got her wish. She still got third in the 1500m at NCAA indoors and went to World Juniors, but she didn't feel like she was expected to win all of the time." That expectation happened after Hasay's sophomore year when she won the 2011 NCAA indoor 1500m and 3,000m titles.

"The bar got set high after that," says Powell. "She began to struggle with the idea of win or bust."

It was a mindset that her coach at Mission College Prep High School, Armando Siqueiros, tried to prepare her for ahead of time.

"She liked to take off like a rabbit and just hammer," says Siqueiros, who was only in his second year of coaching when he took on the then-14-year-old ingenue. "I wanted to put her in a race she couldn't win and see how she responded. At a certain point, your competitor will no longer be intimidated, and it's only a matter of time before they pace off you and outkick you in the end."

After the double titles as a sophomore, Hasay began to measure herself on winning, on records, on splits. Raw decision-making took a back seat. The hard lesson Hasay learned during her first mile race in fourth grade -- sprint if the other girl sprints -- was to respond. Without thinking. Now Hasay was working against it.

At the beginning of last outdoor track season, her junior year, the plan was for Hasay to run the 5,000m at the Olympic trials. Midway through her season, it wasn't working. She was chasing times and they weren't coming to her. Neither was the "A" standard. For whatever reason, Hasay couldn't make the transition work. Hasay and her coaches decided that her focus would stay on collegiate races, abandoning a focus on the trials. Her priority was performing for the Ducks, and when the trials rolled around, well, she'd give whatever her legs had left. Late in the season, Hasay had some success in the 1500m and split her training between it and the 5,000m going toward the NCAA outdoors. The nail went in the coffin. Despite knowing her shot at the Olympics was minuscule, and her legs were wasted from the dichotomy of training for the 1500m and 5,000m and the brutality of a collegiate outdoor season, Hasay lined up at the trials in the 1500m and against all odds, hoped to surprise herself.

"I never realized the significance of the 2008 trials until I competed in the trials last summer," admits Hasay. "When I was 16, I was so focused on school that my goals were, 'I want to win the high school state meet, and if I make it into the trials, that's cool.' Last year, I approached the trials with the mindset of a professional runner, as someone who thinks in terms of Olympic cycles. This was the year. Everyone was running fast." Hasay wasn't. And to someone with the mindset of a professional runner for the first time, the blow was extra hard.

"There was a lot of emotional baggage with that race that affected my confidence," says Hasay, her smile fading. "I thought it would be cleared out by cross country season."

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The early part of the fall was a grind, says Powell, who'd worked with Hasay to completely overhaul her training. No more swimming. Longer mileage. Twice a week in the weight room doing squats and lifting free weights. Hasay's first race of her senior year at the Bill Dellinger Invitational was a complete disaster.

"We were adjusting to different training and Jordan should have expected to feel a little tired and flat," says Powell. "When she felt it, she sort of panicked and was overcome by the expectations of what was ahead of her. She melted down with a mile to go."

After some hard conversations, Powell decided to have Hasay approach training and racing differently. The gist: Running to win was out, tactics in. Ever the student to the process, Hasay was ready. She ran workouts like 1,000m intervals that focused on a relaxed pace during the first and last two intervals with a steady pace for the ones in between, to help her become more conscious of feeling the shift. Or running the last half of a 14-mile run at 6-minute pace to practice being uncomfortable after a slow start.

Hasay also made an appointment with a sports psychologist and has been working with him ever since.

"I've been learning how to control how I feel in races," says Hasay. "I developed some bad mental habits over the last few years when I'm not in the lead or going to win. I'm good at the start and in the middle of the race, but the final 400 is when I'm most negative. I'm learning to go back to my high school mentality, when I was tough and had fun in the race. He's helping me reinvent that."

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But so are her teammates. When a team's chemistry clicks, it's a beautiful thing. There's an instilled incentive to work harder, be more supportive and become better teammates when you like the people you run with every day. Their NCAA cross country title last November was the result of the cohesion. When Hasay was her most vulnerable after the Dellinger opener, she leaned on her teammates for the first time. Fifth-year Dartmouth transfer Alexi Pappas became one of her closest friends and most reliable training partners.

"One of my teammates told me that the funny thing about our bodies is that we can be out at a party at 2 a.m. when we should be asleep, but mentally, we're having so much fun, we keep dancing until 4 a.m.," says Pappas. "If we can amuse in the pain, enjoy it with a teammate, it's possible to reach another level of sport that some women or elite runners never experience."

Pappas was vocal about the times when a race was hurting, when a workout was hard -- struggles that Hasay had gotten used to keeping to herself. When things got tough, Pappas says she focused on Hasay's breathing instead of her own.

"I told her that the only way I was able to get better was to literally depend on teammates in the workouts, to think of them doing the workouts for me," says Pappas.

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The more Hasay opened up about the things that felt hard, the stronger she became. The more she was able to brush off losses, the more she was able to enjoy running.

When Hasay lost the individual title at NCAAs this fall by 1 second and second place by a hair -- forever forsaking her chance to become the first female Foot Locker champion to win an individual NCAA cross country title and break the Foot Locker Curse -- she cried, happily this time, because her team had won. At indoor nationals in March, where the Ducks were again team champions, Hasay's performances -- fourth in the 5,000, second in the 3,000 -- accounted for 13 points, which gave Oregon the win over Kansas. It turns out the key to becoming a better runner, a stronger runner, a more confident runner, had everything to do with her teammates.

"Jordan had a very businesslike approach to training in high school and for a long time, really," says Powell. "But this year, she adopted a new attitude, freeing herself of that expectation. She leaned on her teammates for the first time. Jordan's coming into her own. She's learning that to have a long and successful career in running, you've gotta find that fun stuff. And now that she has, I know she'll compete on the world stage for a long time."

Where that begins may well be local. Though Hasay can't start talks about sponsorships and clubs until after NCAAs, she likes living in Oregon and wouldn't mind staying there. The stress of whether or not she can run professionally has begun to wear off since she has received attention from a few pro coaches. That in itself has made her feel more relaxed about this last semester because what they see in her is not the next six months, but the next six years: her potential. Her excitement is already garnering results.

Hasay opened the 2013 indoor season with a new school record and PR of 8:57.46 in the 3,000m. And about 30 seconds after she finished, still catching her breath, she asked Powell if she could run the 4×400m relay.

"I told her to go put her shoes on and jog for 10 minutes," says Powell, laughing. "By the time she got back, I couldn't see a reason why not. Sure, it would be a good workout for her, but that's only 10 percent of why I let her do it. She took the baton at the anchor leg and I've never seen a smile so wide in my life."

Listen to a podcast interview with Jordan Hasay by Rachel Sturtz. (Please note: This four-minute podcast will take approximately 20-25 seconds to load.)