Some athletes use an injury as an excuse to take a break from their rigorous training schedule or even to sit on the couch binge watching Netflix until they’re fully healed, but not Maria Rickman, who was injured late last year. Described as “having a little fire inside of her” by Julianne Logan, the Edina High School junior and Varsity Track athlete is coming into the 2018 spring season strong after a lengthy recovery from a foot injury.

At the end of the 2017 track season, Rickman fractured her cuboid bone in her foot. “I couldn’t run for I think like six weeks so I just had to aqua jog for a while and then I had to run on an AlterG which is kinda like our anti-gravity treadmill and it was not fun,” Rickman said. To a runner, a foot is like a lung; you can’t run without it operating at its best. Surprisingly, Rickman feels that her injury won’t negatively impact her ability to perform this upcoming season. “I feel really good. I’m super excited to just be able to run and I’m like, I think I can like really improve,” Rickman said. Rickman gets strong results in all the events she competes in, both for track and cross country. One of her strongest events is the 4x800m relay, which she has won for the past two years at state. Training her hardest, she hopes to have a solid season this year with good base times and personal records in all events to appear appealing to college recruiters.

“She’s very very persistent…something really changed after she got injured and when she was coming back she had to like take a lot more steps to be able to get where she wanted to be and she was really really persistent through the whole thing and she became like in a way a more dedicated and stronger runner,” Julianne Logan, one of the Edina Girls Track & Field Team Captains, said about Rickman.

In running, just like any endurance sport, your fiercest opponent is your own mind, which can try to hold you back or tell you to give up before your body is physically exhausted. No matter what level you compete at, this mental game can be a tough one to play. “I think like in any runner, I think mentally it’s super challenging sometimes, I feel like you can be super motivated but at the same time, running is a super mental sport where anything can hold you back, especially during a race,” Rickman said.

Perhaps what makes Rickman such a unique athlete is her ability to push herself to her limits. “I really like the end, like the kicking at the end where you can just run your hardest, I don’t know, I feel like I can always like kick at the end even when I think I don’t have any strength left, I just find an extra gear,” Rickman said. Logan agreed. “She just like has this ability to push herself to the next level that I feel a lot of people can’t do.”