Training for the New York City Marathon has helped Molly Seidel regain 'a sense of normalcy' after her breakout Olympic performance

• American Molly Seidel earned a bronze medal in her third-ever marathon at the Tokyo Olympics.
• The 27-year-old's life changed forever as a breakout star from the games.

Molly Seidel's life changed forever on August 7, 2021.

The Team USA distance runner shocked the world by winning a bronze medal at the Tokyo Olympics in the third marathon of her career. Seidel became the first American woman to reach the podium in the event since Deena Kastor finished third 17 years earlier in Athens.

Though the now-27-year-old was a superstar during her college days at the University of Notre Dame, the response to her four national championships in seven months paled in comparison to the reaction following her breakout Olympics performance.

"The few weeks right after Tokyo were just absolutely insane," Seidel told Insider. "Just going from someone just being on the team, running my first Olympics, to then all of a sudden, just this huge, absolute boom - it kind of exploded there for a bit."

"Truthfully, the couple of weeks after Tokyo were some of the hardest I've dealt with," she added.

In the weeks that followed her stunning marathon finish in Sapporo, Japan, Seidel's schedule filled up with write-ups from outlets like The New York Times and The Boston Globe, live interviews with "Today" and other morning shows, and even an opening pitch at Fenway Park for a Boston Red Sox game.

It was all "exciting," but by Seidel's own admission, the abrupt change of pace "was frankly pretty overwhelming."

"Everyone expects like, oh, you win an Olympic medal - especially very suddenly how I did it - and that your entire life is made and everything's great now," she added. "But I actually kinda mentally took a dive after it."

Seidel has Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), which was one of the factors that led her to seek a treatment program instead of a bid to the Olympics in 2016. Through lots of hard work, introspection, and years of intensive therapy, the long-distance virtuoso was able to reach an equilibrium and return to running.

And while collecting Olympic hardware five years later came with an incredible sense of accomplishment, the aftermath brought with it a break in the routines Seidel had established to help manage her mental health.

"To deal with my OCD, I set my life up into a series of routines to keep this sense of normalcy so that I'm not constantly being triggered because life is already hard enough when you do have those routines in place," Seidel said. "And suddenly, when all of that is shot to shit, you don't know how to process that quite as well."

"So I struggled quite a bit through the latter part of August and early September," she added.

Channeling her energy into prepping for this fall's New York City Marathon has helped her cope. Seidel returned to her home in Flagstaff, Arizona, and began reorienting her life around training for the 50th-anniversary rendition of the iconic race through the Big Apple's five boroughs.

After a few weeks of "my normal life: get up, train, be with my friends," she feels much better.

"Having New York to train for really helped kind of get that sense of normalcy back," Seidel said. "I really am just a big running nerd. I love training for marathons. I love just like getting into the grind of it."

Seidel will line up for her fourth-ever marathon at Staten Island's Fort Wadsworth Sunday, hoping to cross the finish line in Central Park ahead of some esteemed competitors. In New York, she'll run alongside 2020 Olympic gold medalist Peres Jepchirchir and 2012 Olympic silver medalist Sally Kipyego, among others.

It's a stacked field, to be sure. But Seidel insists she's prepared.

"Being able to get back to my safe spot here in Flagstaff of knowing what I'm doing, having my runs, having my training plan, having my support network here has been really instrumental for finally feeling like, okay, like I'm ready to go," Seidel said. "I'm mentally where I need to be to race a major marathon."