IF YOU WERE SURPRISED to see Nia Akins win her third USATF Outdoor 800 title on Randalls Island, you’re not alone. Akins herself wasn’t sure what to expect when she drove up from Philadelphia for the meet. The Penn grad was involved in a hit-and-run car accident at the beginning of the year and suffered a concussion which forced her to miss more than a month of training. “That was the longest that I’ve been sedentary since I started the sport,” she says. She relied heavily on her faith to get her through the period and her coach, Derrick Thompson, and training partners like Ajee’ Wilson helped keep her spirits up through recovery.
The San Diego native had moved back to Philadelphia, where she went to college, 2 years ago after bowing out in the Olympic semifinals in Paris and coming off a challenging stint with the Brooks Beasts.
(Akins, who is now sponsored by HOKA, has chosen not to elaborate on what led to the end of her relationship with the Seattle-based training group. During her time there she swept the indoor and outdoor national titles in ’23, finished 6th at the ’23 Worlds and made her first Olympic team.)
When it was time to return to training this spring, she was forced to keep an open mind. “Coming back from [the accident] my expectations were just wiped,” admits the 28-year-old Akins, who felt less pressure since there isn’t a global championship to target this season. “It’s an off year so it’s a little bit easier to have something like that happen.”
On the comeback trail, she shied away from high-profile competition, sticking mainly to the Philadelphia area and the Northeast. Her times didn’t attract much attention, but she won 800s at four straight small meets plus lowering her 400 PR to 53.33 in her final tuneup for USATF, all of which helped restore confidence. Still, the season best of 2:00.79 she ran on June 7 at the Adrian Martinez Classic in Concord, Massachusetts, was more than 3 seconds slower than the 1:57.36 PR she had run to win the ’24 OT.
“It was very slow getting back into it. I was running 2:01, 2-flat for most of the season, in low-key races,” she says. “I just didn’t know what was possible coming up here. It was more of a fight for me, but way less pressure.”
That lack of pressure, combined with flying under the radar in a field that included 11 women who had already run sub-2:00 this year, kept expectations low. Not that Akins was just going through the motions. “This was an opportunity for me to run faster and I think that’s all I needed to believe today,” she explains.
The final played out as she’d expected. “I was looking to stay on the rail for most of the race and then when a gap opened up to just go for it and see what happens,” she said of the “terrifying” decision to make her big move with 100m to go, passing defending champion Roisin Wills, Addy Wiley and Meghan Hunter before breaking the tape in 1:59.25.
“It’s not super fun in the moment, but looking back it’s really cool to be in a kick battle with so many women who can kick.”
