Former NCAA All-American swimmer Felicia Pasadyn has taken her talents to both medical school and running. Pasadyn most recently won her first ever 10K race on a track, all while studying for medical school board exams on a treadmill as she trains.
Pasadyn won the 10K race at The TEN in a 32:04.17, finishing well ahead of 2nd place finisher Callie Hughes who was 2nd in a 32:27.39. The TEN is a World Athletics Continental Tour Silver level meet, the 3rd-highest level of international track meets behind the Diamond League and Gold tier.
After her win, Pasadyn said in an interview with FloTrack, “I feel on top of the world because I honestly didn’t know what to expect, and I believed in myself, but I didn’t know I could pull that out. And so I’m just feeling very excited. Most of my running is done on the treadmill while I’m studying for medical school board questions, so I wasn’t sure how my body would handle lactic acid.”
Pasadyn spent three years at Harvard as an undergraduate student, swimming for the team in 2019-2020 as well as during the 2021-2022 season. At the 2022 NCAA Championships, she was awarded the 2022 Women’s NCAA Division I Elite 90 Award. This was in her senior year as she carried a 4.0 GPA and graduated from Harvard with a degree in Integrative Biology.
She then transferred to Ohio State to pursue a Master’s Degree in Bioethics. She swam for the Buckeyes in the 2022-2023 season, and won the Big Ten title in the 400 IM in February 2023 with a 4:03.62. She went on to finish 13th in the event at the 2023 NCAA Championships.
After completing her Master’s Degree at Ohio State, Pasadyn began medical school at NYU in fall 2023 and is set to graduate this spring. She has turned to running and is a professional runner for Saucony. She has already qualified for the 2028 Olympic Marathon Trials after earning the qualifying time at the New York City marathon.
Didn’t SwimSwam do a podcast with her when she was at Harvard?
Yep!
https://swimswam.com/felicia-pasadyn-graduates-harvard-in-3-years-will-swim-grad-year-at-ohio-state/
Being good at swimming and running is a rarity.
How awesome to have many talents!
She said “bye Felicia” to her competitors.
Very impressive. If she improves a bit more they’ll start putting her in the A races, like the one won by Shelby Houlihan at The Ten. Felicia is probably good enough to be there already. Her times have been defeating the lowest finishers on the A flight, both here and in events like the 5th Avenue Mile last fall.
There were only 5 out of 17 in that A race that were faster and the 5th place runner was only about 2 seconds faster.
wait how is she already graduating
She also graduated from Harvard in 3 years. This woman is on 🔥
Looks like NYU offers an accelerated 3 year MD program
And it’s free.
Wow, surely USA Triathlon are looking at this very closely. Run and swim at this level and I would anticipate Felicia could be an extremely competitive triathlete. 👏👏👏 Very impressive.
Rare for a swimmer (even an elite swimmer) be so good at running. This is impressive!
Traditional swimmers have always been good runners.
traditional swimmers were obligated to run in the off-season and mostly hated it and have sore knees is more accurate….
source: I’m an old swimmer that hates running and has sore knees when running.
Not in my experience. I am not talking about just being a “good” runner. I am talking about being an elite runner. That is rare.
If you look at the body types of most elite swimmers and most elite runners, they are pretty different.
Rare indeed. I recall Jeff Kostoff (500/1650 American records) ran on the Stanford cross country team at the NCAA D1meet.
If you follow her on socials, she does an insane amount of stairmaster to train — major props to her!