Sophomore distance runner Adèle Martin ran four seasons in eleven months. After two weeks off, she’s ready to come back for her sophomore season.
Martin concluded her freshman campaign at the World U20 Championships in Eugene, Ore., where she competed for France in the 3,000-meter steeplechase. Martin has showed out for the Quakers as well in the event, clocking the second-fastest time in program history in the event at the Larry Ellis Invitational with a 10:17.26 finish.
The steeplechase isn’t the Parisian’s only specialty. Martin is a versatile threat, shifting specialties every season. She ran 21:38.9 over six kilometers on the grass at the Princeton Fall Classic to earn a spot on the Ivy League Heptagonal Cross Country Championships lineup. She transitioned to mid-distance during the indoor season, focusing on the 1,000-meter run, running the fifth-fastest time in program history for second team All-Ivy honors in March.
“Adele’s versatility is one of her greatest strengths as an athlete,” women’s cross country coach Matt Gosselin wrote. “Her best events are the 1500 and 3k steeple, but she has an amazing ability to drop down to the 800 and 1000…She may not like to hear it, but she will also have the ability to run a very good 5k this outdoor season. It is that combination of strength and speed that makes her a very dangerous athlete in championship style racing.”
Although it seems like running is a natural proclivity for the rising sophomore, three years ago, Martin didn’t believe she was fast enough to run in the NCAA, much less compete on the French national team.
A Paris native and Vienna transplant, Martin began running casually in elementary school by playing tag and other running games with her friends during recesses and breaks. Her natural speed was evident from the beginning of her running career, and she decided to join a club to explore track and field.
The club was small, so there wasn’t room to specialize, and Martin was thrown right into distance running. Even though her friends moved onto other passions and stopped competing after a year, Martin was hooked.
Despite her talent, Martin viewed running as more of a hobby when she competed at the club level in Vienna. Even when Martin was introduced to the idea of running at the collegiate level after a 2023 trip to the United States, she didn’t think it was a realistic endeavor.
“We visited a bunch of campuses, but not thinking I would go there, just for fun,” Martin said. “And I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s incredible, like all these facilities. It must be so cool to run for a university in the US.’ But I didn’t think at the time I was good enough to actually do so.”
That would change in 2024, when Martin crossed the seven-minute barrier in the 2,000-meter steeplechase for the first time in her career to claim gold at the Austrian U18 Steeplechase Championships in 6:54.66.
“My dad was randomly looking at the times you had to run to qualify for France [for the European U18 Championships], and then he was like, ‘Wait, you ran that time?’” Martin said.
Chains of emails ensued as Martin vied for a chance to compete for a spot on France’s national team. While Martin’s coach wanted her to represent Austria in the upcoming European U18 Championships, Martin wasn’t ready to give up her heritage, keeping her French citizenship.
When the French Athletics Federation finally responded, Martin had to switch loyalties, leaving her longtime coach in Vienna for the Paris Université Club Athlétisme. Although she was an unknown entering the Pre France individuels (copy – this is the actual meet title and capitalization utilized) qualifying meet, Martin walked away with one of two steeplechase spots on the French national team with a then-personal record 6:45.17.
After an eighth-place finish in the 2,000-meter steeplechase at the 2024 European U18 Championships, Martin began feeling confident in her abilities on the world stage. But as she was entering her senior year of high school, an even more daunting question loomed: Would she study veterinary medicine at her dream school in France or take a risk and go to the United States?
“I was like, ‘I’m going to say no to the school I always thought I would go to,’” Martin said of the decision. “And at the same time I was like, ‘it’s a huge opportunity to go to the US.’”
Martin grew used to spending long stretches of time training alone in Europe, so training with teammates who were at similar – or higher – levels of fitness was an adjustment, but she embraced the change.
“I really felt like I had a group of friends like really fast, and I didn’t really feel like I was lost and didn’t know who to talk to,” Martin said. “Obviously, school was different, too. But for just training, it was like that wasn’t hard because I was coming into a team and I had people to train with all the time.”
“That was a really big change for me, but in a positive way,” Martin added.
After coming off the grass with a 59th-place finish at the Heptagonal Championships, Martin hit the ground running for her first collegiate indoor track season. Gosselin immediately made use of Martin’s versatility on the oval, having her run 3,000 meters, 1,000 meters, the mile, the 4x800-meter relay, and the 4x400-meter relay over the course of the indoor season, while utilizing an entirely different training program.
Instead of focusing on developing endurance through long trail runs and aerobic workouts, Gosselin pushed Martin out of her comfort zone with speed work and interval training. While any one workout might not jump out at you, Martin’s success during the indoor season was built on “her ability to string together weeks and months of good solid training,” according to Gosselin.
Just when she was settled into the pace of her new training regimen, it was time to switch focus on to Martin’s specialty – the steeplechase, an outdoor-exclusive event. While Martin was used to running the steeple at a high level, she had to adapt to a new challenge: a longer race.
At the junior level, runners typically compete in the 2,000-meter steeplechase, while at the collegiate and senior level, they instead compete in the 3,000-meter steeplechase.
“I feel like it was kind of hard after indoor [track] and coming into outdoor [track] because I went from running 1ks to 3k steeples, which is not the same at all, and it’s so much longer,” Martin said. “I still felt like I was kind of lacking the fitness, like the base fitness endurance to run the steeple that I think I had the year before, and because I did shorter races last year, I felt like I have more speed and less endurance, so it was kind of hard [running] the first few steeples.”
By the Larry Ellis Invitational, though, it was safe to say that Martin found her footing. She kept in contention with the top of the pack throughout the race, cleanly clearing each steeple. By the time she crossed the line, Martin improved her personal record by almost forty-five seconds with her 10:17.26 finish, notching the No. 2 all-time program mark and the World U20 qualifying standard.
Feeling like “death and super overjoyed at the same time,” Martin also solidified her spot at the NCAA East Regional, becoming one of two distance runners from Penn to qualify for the meet alongside 2026 College graduate Lily Murphy.
Martin was nervous going into the biggest meet of her career so far. At the beginning of the season, she thought making Regionals was an achievable goal, but the depth of the field wasn’t something she anticipated.
“I didn’t really know what to expect,” Martin said. “I was like, ‘it’s going to be super fast with super fast people,’ and I think that also made me feel a bit like a spectator of the race [rather] than actually racing.”
“I think the fact that the girls in the front were so fast made me not realize that I was actually kind of close to the girls next to me,” Martin added. She ultimately finished 46th in the region and 14th in her heat in 10:49.21.
Only a few days separated Martin’s collegiate outdoor season from her World U20 ambitions. She spent the summer training alone with her old club once again while competing at local meets in France, even showing out against seasoned pros from around the world at the Meeting National Est Lyonnais.
By the time August rolled around, Martin was back stateside for the World U20 Championships, excited but exhausted after competing for almost eleven months straight. She went into the race trying to feel “calm and confident,” keeping in contention with the field for the first two laps, but she couldn’t do away with the stress of a long season plaguing her mind.
After hitting the 800-meter mark, Martin claimed she wasn’t “really racing anymore,” feeling disconnected from her feet hitting the full-polyurethane track as the race became a mental fight to the finish.
Even though she didn’t make it to the finals as she had hoped, Martin walked away from World U20s with a sea of support from her fellow French national team members. She showed up for her countrymen and college teammates in the stands, cheering them on through her finals as she too celebrated a well-deserved rest.
But now that she’s back in Philadelphia, Martin is ready to attack the grass once again and help the Quakers fight for the title at Ivy Heps this fall. She’ll be back suited up in the Red and Blue in October for the Paul Short Run at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Penn., to make her sophomore season debut.
“She’s locked in on steeple and track in general,” fellow sophomore distance specialist Aoife Shovlin said. “She’s really, really good and she’s very into it, enthusiastic about it, and also super humble about it. She’s gone to Worlds and things, but you’d never catch her bragging about it or anything.”
“For her competitive goals this season, I really just want to see her be the best version of herself on and off the track,” Gosselin wrote. “If she keeps stringing together training like she is capable of, she will have a very good season.”
