Senior Mia Brahe-Pedersen is soon to be Olympic bound. Within the last year, Brahe-Pedersen has set numerous records and become the first high school athlete to sign a Name Image Likeness (NIL) deal with Nike. In June, Brahe-Pedersen finished seventh in the 100m event at the USA championships, finishing with a time of 11.09s. For reference, Sha’Carri Richardson won the event with a time of 10.82, putting Brahe-Pedersen only 0.31s behind. One crucial difference between the two is Richardson is several years older than Brahe-Pedersen (23 years old vs. 17 years old), making her an especially young athlete to be at the top of the track world.

Brahe-Pedersen has been a Lake Oswego runner from the very start. She started track and field in middle school after her soccer coach noticed her especially fast sprint. Compared to other athletes who have been training for over a decade, Brahe-Pedersen has only been running for around five years. She quickly made her way up through the rankings in both the district and club capacity, and now has competed for Team USA at a competition in Cali, Columbia. Despite her national and international competitiveness, Brahe-Pedersen still trains locally in Lake Oswego. Her track coach, John Parks, also works as a Special Education aid at LOHS. Of course, as the year starts up Brahe-Pedersen maintains a rigorous training schedule. “For the past month it’s been pretty light and my practices have only been two hours a day five days a week, but now it’s really starting to ramp up because we have track sessions in addition to gym sessions. I’m training from 4 to 8:30 nearly every day,” said Brahe-Pedersen. Her four and a half hour training schedule is an important part of her consistently competing at a top level. “For me last year I am very proud because I had a very consistent season where I was staying within two tenths of a second.” For reference, the average person takes about 0.1-0.4s to blink.

One of Brahe-Pedersen’s goals this year in addition to going to the Olympic trials is to break the national high school 100m record. She is already one of the fastest high school sprinters ever and remains only 0.11s off the all-time record. Additionally, as one of the 20 fastest women in the world, she has an excellent shot at being one of the youngest sprinters at the Paris Olympic Championships.