When Jenny Simpson assumed the lead around mile eight of Sunday’s New York City Marathon, in many ways, it was a familiar sight. 

Over the course of her 14-year-long professional career Simpson won the Fifth Avenue Mile a whopping eight times, including every installment of the race between 2013 and 2019. No runner has ever been more dominant on the city’s asphalt. Hell, there may not have ever been another athlete as reliably great when competing within the five boroughs. In a just world, she would have had the chance to direct the Reggie Miller “choke” gesture toward Spike Lee, standing outside of the Guggenheim looking indignant, while blazing past him en route to any of her signature Fifth Ave wins.

But back to that brief moment in Brooklyn on Sunday. Plenty about that image was unfamiliar, too.

This wasn’t a mile race. And this wasn’t Peak Jenny Simpson. It was the historically great miler performing a 26.2-mile swan song. Her bid for the lead wasn’t a serious push for contention – it was a final chance to experience the roar of the New York City crowd and hear the slapping of competitors’ feet on the ground behind her. And then it was over. She downshifted and the real race resumed around, then in front of her.

Simpson held on to run 2:31:54, good for 18th place, and then formally retired from the sport of competitive running. Up next for Simpson? She’s basically going to become the sport’s Guy Fieri, only instead of rollin’ out, lookin’ for America’s greatest diners, drive-ins, and dives, she and her husband Jason will spend 2025 touring the country in their Winnabego, making stops in all 50 states, and exploring the various local running communities and training grounds they have to offer.

While that sounds objectively awesome and like something probably 90% of our readers would do in a heartbeat given the time and resources, we risk losing sight of Jenny Simpson as the elite competitor she was if we too wholeheartedly embrace her as the traveling runner-storyteller she’s set to become.

You wouldn’t have to work particularly hard to make the case that Simpson is the greatest American female miler of all time. Only Bernard Lagat and his body of work can stake a more obvious claim to top American miler ever. And while Simpson never set a world record – let alone several– like Mary Decker did, their medal counts aren’t too dissimilar, and Simpson’s prime racing years came during a far more globally competitive era than Decker’s (plus, Simpson has never been associated with doping allegations).

Simpson was the first collegiate woman to crack the four-minute barrier for the 1500m and still holds the NCAA record to this day. Her 3:59.90 – and its resilience – is all the more impressive when you remember that it predates super shoes by 10+ years.

A small knock against her collegiate career – aside from her memorable implosion at the 2009 NCAA cross country championships, which came on the heels of a 5th (ultimately upgraded to 4th) place showing at Worlds in the steeple – is that she never won a 1500m or mile title. But given Jenny then-Barringer’s focus on the steeplechase (and three national titles over that distance), it’s understandable.

Similarly, we’ll gloss over her pre-miler era on the pro circuit. (Accomplishments there include: the aforementioned 4th place Worlds steeple showing, an 8th place finish at the Olympics in the steeple as a collegian, a since-broken American record, and a handful of U.S. titles.)

In the 2010s, Simpson’s meal ticket was championship 1500m races. She won the 2014 Diamond League final, plus four other Diamond League 1500m races. And despite wrapping up her career with a relatively modest – again, pre-super shoe – lifetime PB of 3:57.22, she claimed Olympic bronze in 2016 (finishing behind only Faith Kipyegon and Genzebe Dibaba, and ahead of names like Sifan Hassan and Laura Muir). She took second at Worlds twice: in 2013 she lost only to Abeba Aregawi and beat the likes of Kipyegon, Dibaba, and Helen Obiri; and in 2017 she lost only to Kipyegon and beat Caster Semenya, Muir, and Hassan.

But if you had to distill Simpson’s career down to a singular accomplishment, it was winning the 2011 1500m World title. It was a textbook championship-style affair, with lots of pace changes, jostling, tangling of legs that sent a couple athletes – notably Obiri – to the track, and an absolute master class close over the final 150m from Simpson to secure gold. Track fans of a certain age (let’s say 30+) remember Nick Willis’s commitment to riding the rail, Matt Centrowitz’s smooth navigation of a pack, and Mo Farah’s control over the final 400m, but Simpson’s signature was her uncanny ability to perfectly measure effort in all kinds of races to maximize her own chances of a medal.