UF fourth-year Parker Valby on the gold-medal podium after her SEC-record 5,000-meter performance in the conference championship meet at Percy Beard Track on May. 11.
For Valby, World-Class is the New Normal
Thursday, May 23, 2024 | Women's Track and Field, Chris Harry
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By: Chris Harry, Senior Writer
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – When Parker Valby first met her new Florida cross country coach last year, she shed some light on what he might be in for.
"There is nothing normal about me," Valby told Will Palmer.
As far as understatements go, it was a doozy. Valby could have been speaking about her quirky personality, bouts of stubbornness and social media diffidence. She just as well might have been referencing her tenacity, unconventional training methods and sky-high potential.
Whatever the case, Palmer was all in. He had tutored champions – both individuals and teams – at previous stops, most recently at Alabama, where he'd watched Valby win the 2022 Southeastern Conference cross-country crown and place second at the NCAA championships. Palmer knew he had something special in Valby, but also knew that together the two could have so much more.
Something generational, perhaps.
"You have to have a willingness to grow, improve, evolve and become a student of the sport and raise your running IQ, as we call it," Palmer said. "Some kids are excited about and love that process. Some don't."
By now, it's no secret which way Valby leaned. Three months after that initial meeting, Valby, then a redshirt sophomore, won the 5,000 meters at the 2023 NCAA Championships by nine seconds. Five months after that she was Florida's first NCAA cross country champion. In March of this year, Valby won the 3,000 at the SEC and the 3,000 and 5,000 at the NCAA indoor championships, respectively, and on May 11 blistered the field at SEC outdoors by besting her own meet-record time by a whopping 18 seconds (15:07.86) on her home Percy Beard Track.
Parker Valby wins SEC GOLD in the Women's 5000m with a time of 15:07.86‼️ Parker is PHENOMENAL 🤯
— Gators Track and Field & Cross Country (@GatorsTF) May 12, 2024
Now comes the 2024 NCAA Outdoor slate, which starts this week. Valby is slated to run the 10,000 (Thursday) and 5,000 (Saturday) at the East Preliminaries at Lexington, Kentucky, with the modest goal of qualifying for the NCAA championships at Eugene, Oregon, set for June 5-8. She will be the runaway NCAA favorite in the 5k. As for the 10k? Valby has run the race just one time in her career. That was April 15 when she went to California for the Bryan Clay Invitational to give the race a go. How'd she fare?
Valby's time of 30:40.43 shattered the 14-year-old collegiate mark by 31 seconds and was the fifth-fastest 10,000 time in the world in 2024.
And for those who might be thinking ahead, yes, this is an Olympic year.
"I'm focused on the NCAA season right now," Valby said.
International competition – be it the 2024 Games in Paris or 2028 in Los Angeles (and the world championship meets in between) – is definitely on her radar. And should be. Will Palmer
"You could write down any goal that any distance runner in the world could dream of accomplishing, and she's capable of it," Palmer said. "There's nothing she couldn't do."
Not bad for a lacrosse player from Connecticut, huh?
That's what Valby was when her family moved to the Tampa Bay area before her freshman year of high school. She was looking for something to preoccupy her time, to keep her in shape for lacrosse, and decided to go out for the East Lake High cross-country team in Tarpon Springs.
Valby's first competitive race, a 5k, came Nov. 11, 2017, in Lakeland. She ran a 22:24.90. She finished 49th.
Spoiler: She got better.
"At the end of the season, she'd qualified for state, and was like, 'Oh, that was fun, but I'm going to focus on lacrosse.' It hurt 'cause you could see that she was not just talented but had a chance to really be special," recalled East Lake track coach Britt Taylor. "She can be a bit of a brat, now. Really stubborn. I tried to talk her out of it, but her mind was made up. I had to call her parents and convince them to talk her into coming out for track." Parker Valby (left) with parents Tiffany and Kyle
and with East Lake High coach Britt Taylor (right)
Track coincided with lacrosse season, but Valby agreed to continue running. In time, the two-sport schedule was too much. Her parents asked her to pick one and their daughter went with Taylor, who ran track at North Carolina. By then, the two had forged a bond rooted in trust.
Taylor's training methods – less mileage than most prep distance runners – proved prescient, especially for his standout. Though her times plateaued some as a sophomore and weren't great early during junior year, a breakthrough eventually occurred.
"We went through an emotional time and had some serious conversations. She can be hardheaded, but Parker was never disrespectful, would look you in the eye and then go out and run through a door if you asked her to," Taylor said. "We had a plan and I told her to trust the process."
Valby won the Class 4A state cross-country championship in record time in the fall of 2019 and the 3,200 at the state track meet in the spring of '19. The sudden impact she made on the distance scene – with her nationally ranked times – was big news in the Gen Z running community.
Soon, Valby was all over social media, including video of her rather different (somewhat awkward, at the time) running style.
"She wasn't the most efficient runner," Taylor said. "It's hard to describe. She had this flappy motion with her arms."
Breaking news: Teenagers can be mean; especially jealous wannabes on message boards. Valby was personally hurt by the third-party ridicule, but not as much as she was hurt by COVID, which wiped out her senior season of prep competition. Collegiate scouts, though, had seen enough, including Palmer, who was at the 2019 state championship performance representing Alabama. The Crimson Tide couldn't get in the recruiting mix. It was Florida, North Carolina and Oregon who got official visits.
The Gators, with Chris Solinsky coaching distance runners at the time, got the signed letter-of-intent.
As a UF freshman, Valby's best cross-country finish was 72nd. She ran just once in her rookie track season and, admittedly, felt like she was falling out of love with running. Solinsky, though, was both encouraging and persuasive. Valby's sophomore cross country year ended with a respectable 27th-place finish at NCAAs and her indoor track season brought a breakout win in the 3,000 at a big meet at Kentucky.
She also broke her foot in the race. Seriously.
To rehab from the injury, Solinsky put his rising star through a variety of cross-training methods: swimming, aqua-jogging, ARC training (a type of elliptical), Alt-G, (a zero-gravity treadmill) and even rowing. All of it put Valby's cardio system to the test.
"This might be stupid, but I didn't know what cross-training was," said Valby, who has eschewed what some might consider regular distance road work for cross-training tactics (she runs about 40 miles per week, while most at world-class level run 50-60). "My coach told me to go aqua jog and I said, 'I'm not going in the water and jogging. That's silly.' Then I figured out that it works. And then when I got to do weight-bearing off the crutches I discovered the ARC trainer. The rest is history."
History in the literal sense, with some significant milestones likely looming on her orange-and-blue horizon.
Parker Valby's only career race before a home crowd at Percy Beard track was (like most of her race) a smashing and record-setting success.
Valby's utter dominance in the sport has placed her on the cusp of being mentioned in the same conversation with the likes of Tracy Caulkins (swimming), Lisa Raymond (tennis), Abby Wambach (soccer) and Bridget Sloan (gymnastics), UF women who became among the greatest collegians of all time at their respective crafts.
"The average person doesn't understand what she's doing," UF head coach Mike Holloway said. "Parker, as a freshman, struggled out there. As a sophomore she was better. As a junior she was better. As a senior, she's phenomenal."
Check out social media these days. The petty never-weres are still out there – "She didn't run fast enough! She only ran one race!" – but no one is mocking Valby's now-gorgeous, graceful and majestic gait that allowed her to lap nearly two dozen competitors at the SEC meet two weekends ago – with hundreds of Gators in the bleachers – in the only race on Valby's home track in her career.
And she was merely coasting that night; running just fast enough to win comfortably.
"It felt like practice, just being out there and running in circles," she said afterward. "It was awesome with the home crowd and all my coaches being here."
The above championship pose from Parker Valby have become file photos.
Now she'll take her show, her last as a Gator, on the road with more championships, more records, more attention and more opportunity awaiting down the line.
More notoriety, too.
"She doesn't like getting in front of people. She's kind of a shy kid at the end of the day," Palmer said. "She's had to learn how to interact with people on a regular basis, but I think it's been hard for her because she's been under a microscope in college and has a pretty big following."
