Every four summers, the Olympic Games captivate the world of television consumers yearning to witness athletic miracles through their eager corneas.
From those who follow the games from the ignition of the Olympic flame to its extinguishment, to those who casually stumble upon an event on the work TV by happenstance, there’s something for everyone in the Summer Olympics, particularly in track and field.
Pole vault and high jump present the instant gratification of airborne athletes defying gravity. The throwing events display superhuman strength and the edge-of-your-seat anticipation of the final mark. And the running events are non-stop excitement, whether it’s the torching speed of the 100-meter sprinters to the majestic endurance of the distance runners.
But buried within the athletics portion of the Summer Olympics is an event sparked by a charm that can only be understood and appreciated by watching its oft-described “quirky” style of competition — race walking.
It’s fitting that the only college in Washington state to feature an unconventional sport like race walking as part of its track and field program is considered by many to be one of the most unconventional higher-education institutions in the nation.
The Evergreen State College, an NAIA public liberal arts college in Olympia, is home to one of the few race-walking programs in the Pacific Northwest, as race walking is not recognized by the NCAA as a sanctioned event. To compete in it collegiately, a race walker will have to be admitted to an NAIA school or a community college.
Evergreen, epitomized by its delicately charming mascot Speedy the Geoduck, doesn’t have an extensive history of race walkers, but its current group is responsible for rewriting not just the school’s record books but those of the sport itself.
The headliner is recent Evergreen graduate Izabelle Trefts, a native of Milford, Maine, who transferred across the nation to Evergreen from Columbia College in South Carolina. She competed collegiately after a record-setting high school career at Old Town High School that saw her break the Maine record and win three state titles in the 1,600-meter race walk. Trefts secured an NAIA national championship in the indoor 3,000-meter race walk while at Columbia College in 2023, and she notched back-to-back indoor national titles in 2025 and 2026 in the same event while donning the Evergreen uniform.
In her final indoor collegiate race walk at the 2026 NAIA Indoor Track and Field Championships, Trefts set the national collegiate record in the 3,000-meter race walk at 13 minutes and 11.95 seconds. She’s now pursuing a professional career in race walking.
Madison Palek, a native of Cleveland, Ohio, who will be a senior at Evergreen in 2026-27, is less than a year into her race-walking journey but has found immediate success. She placed third in the 5,000-meter race walk at the 2026 NAIA Outdoor Track and Field Championships in May, but not before she took fourth in the indoor championships in March.
Trefts and Palek are the first two female race walkers in Evergreen history and only the third and fourth ever at the school. The first was Larry Smith, who walked a 5K in 30:26.20 in 1985 and stood as the school record holder until River Scheuerell shattered the record in 2024 with a time of 24:31.93. Trefts has since claimed this record at 23:01.80.
Evergreen’s race walkers are coached by head coach Joel Pearson and assistant Katie Burnett. Not only does Burnett coach the Geoducks, but she is still actively a professional race walker, a titan of the sport soon preparing for her fifth Olympic Trials. Burnett holds the world 50K record in race walking and currently owns eight American records. She has qualified for world championship teams three times and for U.S. teams 18 times, including with Trefts at the 2026 Caixa World Athletics Race Walking Team Championships in Brazil in April.
But to understand what makes elite race walkers like Burnett, Trefts and Palek tick, one must understand the sport and its complexities.
If you think it’s easier than running, think again.
A brief walk through the history and rules of race walking
Since the early 20th century, race walking has been an unsung staple of the Olympics. It made its official debut in the 1904 Games in St. Louis but was part of the “All-Around Championship,” now known as the decathlon. Men’s race walking has been a standalone event since the 1908 Games in London, where British walker George Larner took the first ever gold medal in the men’s 10-mile and in the 3,500 meters. A women’s race-walking category was added over eight decades later in the 1992 Barcelona Games, with China’s Chen Yueling winning the first gold in the 10-kilometer race.
Race walking, once called pedestrianism before its Olympic fame, developed in the mid-19th century in the Victorian era when noblemen wagered on foot races in Britain and Ireland. Pedestrianism often drew quite the crowd and was even featured at fairs before it became an Olympic event.
While YouTube and Reddit comments may mock the atypical foot race, race walking is a difficult discipline defined by its strict rules and judging. Competitors must have one foot in contact with the ground at all times, that is as well as the imperfect human eye of race judges can see. If there is no visible contact with the ground, race walkers can attract penalties and even be disqualified.
The other rule is that, outlined by Olympics journalist Ubaid Parkar, “the athlete’s knee of their advanced leg must not bend and the leg must straighten as the body passes over it.” Bending knees can also result in penalties and potential disqualification.
This binding formula for successful race walking results in what appears to some to be a silly version of a walk, where athletes use heavy movement of the arms and shoulders, swiveling of the hips, and awkward-looking strides of the legs.
While Burnett calls race walking “like a low-impact run,” it can be difficult for those who came from a running background to adjust to the peculiarities of race walking in the infancy stage. Walkers’ shins take the pounding at first, as they must land on their heel and then roll through the toe, putting plenty of stress on their shins. But the sport offers plenty of health benefits and has been a constant at the Olympics for well over a century.
The 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles will feature a half-marathon (13.1 miles) race walk in both the men’s and women’s categories. Burnett, Trefts and Palek are all hopeful that they can one day bear the esteemed title of Olympian race walker, and they all credit Evergreen for helping steer them toward that goal.
Katie Burnett: The record setter
By day, Burnett, 37, is the assistant director of recreation in Evergreen’s athletic department while serving as the Geoducks assistant track and field and cross country coach.
But behind the curtain of her full-time gig, Burnett’s journey is geared toward someday updating the first two words of her LinkedIn biography.
“Olympic Hopeful.”
“It’s my ultimate goal. It’s the one goal I haven’t made,” Burnett said. “That would be the ultimate way I’d want to end my career. I’m really hoping I can do it. It’s gonna be very hard, but I’m gonna give it a shot.”
It’s not a long shot for someone with Burnett’s ability and work ethic. But she didn’t always have that drive to be great in race walking.
Burnett, a Bellevue native who moved all over the country in her youth, played a handful of sports growing up, including cross country, softball, badminton, swimming, soccer, and track and field. One of her first passions, however, was football. She even took part in a football camp at the University of Washington, but her mother put the kibosh on that short-lived venture.
Burnett was a fourth-place state finisher in the high jump at Desert Ridge High School in Mesa, Arizona, and she also took eighth in the shot put. She started her collegiate career at the University of Arizona throwing javelin before transferring to William Penn University, a private NAIA university located in Oskaloosa, Iowa, once a hub for black coal mining.
Burnett was first exposed to race walking at the age of 13 while competing in a summer track club called Cascade Striders Track and Field Club in Bellevue. A teammate competed in race walking, and Burnett was already collecting the track and field “infinity stones” at an early age by trying every event she could, so she gave it a shot.
After all, she admitted it was pretty easy to qualify for nationals in race walking within the USATF Junior Olympics program. Across all events, she was a seven-time USATF Junior Olympics national qualifier, with three All-American honors, but national race-walking competitions were a wake-up call
“You’d go to the local association meet, go to the regional meet, and then you can qualify for the national meet based on your placement. Nobody else did it, so it was really easy for me to go from association to regional to national, and then I got my butt kicked every year,” Burnett said. “I was like, ‘I should take this more seriously.’”
Eventually, Burnett improved every summer in her race-walking meets. Her father, who often jogged with her, joked that he couldn’t fathom how she was improving because he never saw her train in race walking over the summer. After her short stint at the University of Arizona, Burnett picked up race walking again at William Penn.
Burnett was mentored from a distance by two-time Olympic race walker Tim Seaman, who saw her potential in the sport and pushed her to elevate her training. At William Penn, she was a seven-time NAIA All-American who qualified for nine national championship events, including three in javelin, two in the 5,000-meter race walk and four in the 3,000-meter race walk. Burnett set the school records in both walk events and the javelin, and she was later inducted into the William Penn Athletic Hall of Fame.
In her athletic career, Burnett is a self-admitted sucker for “the struggle.” Running cross country in the Arizona heat was torture, not to mention race walking in the Iowa winters. But endurance is in her blood, no matter what concoction Mother Nature throws at her.
“I loved the work of making myself better,” she said. “Working through Iowa weather was terrible, so you kind of have to love the struggle a little bit. Overcoming the struggle is what I’ve enjoyed the most. I’ve always been able to do things for a long time, so the endurance aspect of race walking made sense once I started training with it. I like having that technical focus combined with just being able to do something for a long time.”
The same year she graduated magna cum laude from William Penn, Burnett won her first national championship in the 50-kilometer race walk at the 2011 USA Outdoor Track and Field Championships in Eugene, Oregon. In 2012, she qualified for her first Olympic Trials but was disqualified during the race. She redeemed herself by winning her second national outdoor title the following year, this time in the 30-kilometer race. Burnett set the American records in the 40-kilometer and 50-kilometer races in 2017 while winning a national title at the USATF 50K Race Walk Championships in Santee, California.
Her proudest achievement came in 2017 in London at the World Championships, and with just four weeks of notice and training, she broke her own American record in the 50K by about six minutes.
“I got fourth place. I almost got a medal. It was a very exciting moment. It all just came together at the last minute,” she said.
Burnett qualified again for the Olympic Trials in 2016 and finished third but didn’t meet the time standard to make it to the Olympics. In the 2021 Olympic Trials, which were moved back due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Burnett had to watch the trials from the sideline in a boot after suffering from about a dozen stress fractures in her shin. She was on crutches for eight weeks and wasn’t able to put full weight on her leg for several months. After nine months of physical therapy and training, she made another U.S. team. Burnett went on to qualify for the 2024 Olympic Trials and will begin her training block for the 2028 Summer Olympics this fall, where she will increase her typical range of 40 to 60 miles of race walking per week to 70 to 100 miles per week.
Burnett’s coaching debut came in 2018 alongside Pearson at Mountlake Terrace High School in Snohomish County, less than a 30-kilometer race-walk distance north of Seattle. She took over as head coach in 2021 until she came to Evergreen in 2023. In her second year at Evergreen, Burnett helped recruit a transfer that would bring an unprecedented level of success to the program.
Izabelle Trefts: The champion
Trefts doesn’t remember a time in her life when she wasn’t race walking.
She remembers competitively race walking before she even ran competitively, starting her track and field career at the age of just 5 years old. Trefts had a drive to defeat her rivals when she was just 8 years old, and she’s been addicted to winning ever since.
“I remember going to state every year for our summer track program. I’ve always been super competitive,” Trefts said. “I remember some of my rivals from when I was little. I always wanted to win every year. I remember the first time I did win when I was 8, and then I won like every year after that.”
Her older sister Elizabeth, who is three years older than Izzy, inspired her to race walk, and their mother coached them at Old Town High School, where Izzy won three state championships in the 1,600-meter race walk. When she destroyed the Maine state record in the 1,600-meter race walk at 7:12.64 in 2021, which was good enough to beat the previous state record by seven seconds, she knew her talents could extend outside her small Penobscot County town of about 3,000 people.
“When I was in Maine and I got the state record, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. This is the proudest moment of my life.’ That’s when it really became real for me,” Trefts said. “I was like, ‘OK, I could do something in this.’”
Five years after graduating a year early from Old Town High School in 2021, Trefts is now an Evergreen grad with three NAIA national championships to her name, as well as the collegiate 3,000-meter race walk record set in April in Gainesville, Florida. She finished the 15-lap race with a time of 13:11.95, topping the previous record held by Heather Durrant by nearly four seconds.
“I was obviously chasing it. I was so close before. You always have that little doubt in your mind,” Trefts said. “When I started the race, everything just went how it was supposed to. I went through the mile exactly the time that I was supposed to go. After that, I was getting excited. It felt very unreal.”
Trefts, who also competed for the Evergreen cross country team, had never been to the Pacific Northwest before transferring from Columbia College in South Carolina. She left that school after the track program’s head coach was fired, and after researching NAIA schools nationwide, Trefts knew even before she hopped on a phone call with Burnett that Evergreen was right for her. Both parties admitted they were nervous for that call; Burnett wanted to add an accomplished athlete to the program, while Trefts desired to confirm that her intuitions about the program were correct.
“I knew in my brain that I was going to this school. This is where I’m going. If I’m not going here, then I’m not going anywhere else,” Trefts recalled thinking before her call with Burnett.
Trefts is a two-time USA indoor nationals qualifier and a two-time USA outdoor nationals qualifier. The adjustment from collegiate athletics to post-collegiate athletics has surprised her, but she still has support from people like Burnett, who has race walked alongside her as well as served as a coach and mentor.
“Training with Katie and seeing everything that she does and to be able to have someone that’s equal in talent, it’s fun because I’ve never had somebody that I was able to do that with,” Trefts said. “It is definitely hard to transition from college to post-college. You still have the support system, but it’s different. It’s more independent. I’m learning how to deal with that. The Olympics is the next goal for me.”
Madison Palek: The wide-eyed pupil
Palek is just eight months into her race-walking journey, but her times rival those of veterans of the game. In fact, she recently surpassed Burnett’s college-best time in the 5K, and her 3K time of 14:20.50 at the Jerome Classic in Canada on July 14 was a personal record by 53 seconds.
Palek’s exposure to race walking was a happy accident that was fairly unhappy at the time. After growing up swimming and Olympic weightlifting, she tried track and field for the first time as a senior at Camas High School just four years ago. Palek competed in the 800 meters, javelin and pole vault, and she “somehow” did enough to be recruited by Clark College, where she spent two years.
After transferring to Evergreen ahead of the 2025 indoor season, though, she fractured her foot, and she was unable to run in her distance events without sharp pain.
It was because of that injury that she discovered race walking.
“I’m grateful now that it happened, but for a while, it was so painful. I couldn’t do any endurance stuff other than using the elliptical or the Arc Trainer,” Palek said. “Coming back from that is scary because for a while, you don’t know why it happened. You don’t know if it’s gonna come back.”
In the 2025 outdoor season, she competed once in the 5K race walk without much prior training, and, by her definition, it was “really slow,” coming in at 36:18.65 at the Nancy & Norm Berney Classic at Corban University. But the next time she competed in the 5K race walk this past March, she cut over 10 minutes off of that time.
When she returned to Corban for the Nancy & Norm Berney Classic this past April for the first time since her dissatisfactory race-walk debut, Palek won the event with a new best time of 24:53.88. It ranks as the 17th-best NAIA 5K race walk of all time. She went on to win the conference title in that event and finish third at the NAIA Outdoor National Championships.
“I’m grateful that Joel and Katie made me try it again this year. I’m pretty proud of how well I’ve been improving so fast,” Palek said. “This whole year was really intimidating because we were at meets every single weekend. Going to national meets is such a cool experience. I definitely cherish it.”
Adjusting to the sport of race walking was intimidating at first for Palek, who watched two of the best in the nation in Trefts and Burnett up close often. At Clark College, she ran the 800 meters, 1,500 meters, 10,000 meters, 400-meter hurdles, 3,000-meter steeplechase, and 4x400-meter relay. But the race walk was a different beast.
Palek, also a cross country runner at Evergreen, quickly grew to love tagging along with Burnett and Trefts during their workouts and heavy training involved for the long-distance race walks. Now, Palek practices race walking on her own for about 30 miles per week while also going for a run two or three times per week, and it’s led to significant drops in her times in just eight months.
“They’re the ones pushing me and making it seem not as scary and that it’s totally doable. It’s nice to see it in action. It doesn’t feel as big and scary,” Palek said of Burnett and Trefts. “Competing as much as we do is super helpful. I feel like that brings me to the next level.”
Taking Evergreen and their race-walking skills to new heights
Trefts is off to the post-collegiate world of track and field with her Evergreen degree in hand, but Palek, Burnett and Pearson will be back to lead the Evergreen cross country and track and field programs in the 2026-27 athletic season with plenty of new eyes on the team.
While they acknowledged that the focus from the college hasn’t always been on athletics, Trefts and Palek said their success has sparked an increase in interest in Evergreen’s athletics from the student body and the Thurston County community. This past athletic season saw seven school records fall across the men’s and women’s track teams in the indoor campaign and six in the outdoor season.
“For me, it has been exciting to be able to put more light on athletics and to gain more support for the school,” Trefts said. “I feel like the more success I have, the more people are like, ‘Oh, look what’s happening.’”
Burnett thanked Evergreen for giving her the flexibility to coach while competing and training professionally. One can often find her training on the separated bike path on campus, although she wishes the college had a track. Having the fresh experience from competing all over the world, sometimes alongside her student athletes, is a huge plus for Burnett as a coach. By her count, she’s competed in about 17 countries.
“It helps me relate to them because I understand what they might be thinking or what they’re dealing with,” she said. “Sometimes I didn’t know how to help myself when I was feeling that way, so I do my best to help them and think about what got me through a lot of those things.”
Next up for Trefts and Burnett is the 2026 USATF Outdoor National Championships in New York City, where they will be competing in the half marathon race walk on Friday, July 24. Trefts, in particular, is hoping for a smooth outcome as she was disqualified from her first outdoor nationals last August in Eugene.
Together, in one forest-covered liberal arts college campus in Olympia, the three race-walking stars are breathing life into a sport that is mostly dormant in the Pacific Northwest and is often lampooned by those who have never tried it.
No American woman has ever reached the podium in an Olympic race-walking event, and only eight American women have represented the United States in Olympic race walking. Michelle Rohl’s 17th-place finish in 2000 is the best finish in the nation’s history at the Olympics.
Burnett, Trefts and Palek believe they can add to that brief Olympic history and inspire others to follow in their footsteps not just at The Evergreen State College but around the nation and the globe.
So when you watch Olympic race walking on the roads of Los Angeles two summers from now, don’t think just anyone can do it. These women can walk long distances faster than an average human could run them.
“It is not normal to a lot of people. It looks different. It’s easy to make fun of it,” Trefts said. “A lot of people just think you’re going out for a walk. Then I tell people how fast I go, and they get taken aback by it. They just think you’re going out there and not really doing anything.
“No, I’m actually going pretty fast.”
