It has been years since she was rookie pro or college champion. Even more years since she was high school phenom or 12-year-old prodigy.
Lynna Irby-Jackson has been representing the United States in track and field since — get this — 2015. That is 11 seasons on the world stage. That is as long as two other 26-year-olds, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and Tara Davis-Woodhall, who are celebrities in this sport.
“I think people are shocked at how young I am sometimes because I have been around so long,” Irby-Jackson said. “Always in the mix, aside from a couple of down years, I think I recently got called a ‘vet,’ and it shocked me.”
The Indianapolis sprinter was honored four years ago at her alma mater, Pike High School, after earning gold and bronze relay medals at the Tokyo Olympics. Now she has returned to Tokyo, seeking her first World Championship medals.
She is in the Team USA relay pool, meaning she will run in the 4×400-meter relay or mixed 4×400. Or both, as she did in 2021.
At the World Championships, heats and final of the mixed relay are Saturday, Sept. 13. Heats and final of the 4×400 — in which the American women might challenge the world record — are Sept. 20 and 21.
The 2025 season has been redemptive for Irby-Jackson, especially after missing out on the 2024 Olympics. She was seventh in the 400 meters at last year’s U.S. trials. Sixth, and she likely would have returned to the Olympics.
“It was hard, sitting on a couch, watching all my teammates in Paris,” she said. “But once again, I knew at the end of the season, I just needed to make a change to prepare for this year, and it’s paying off.”
She has belonged to two elite training groups, with coaches Lance Brauman in Florida and Tonja Buford-Bailey in Texas. She was clubmates with two of the biggest names in the sport, Noah Lyles and Gabby Thomas.
Irby-Jackson changed coaches again, relocating to Nashville, Tennessee, to run under Vanderbilt coach Althea Thomas, her college sprint coach at Georgia. In Irby-Jackson’s only outdoor college season, 2018, she won the NCAA 400 in 49.80 seconds — still her best time.
This has been her best season.
Besides finishing fourth in the USA Championships, she won her first individual senior medal, a bronze in the North American, Central American and Caribbean Championships. She has times of 49.82 and 49.87, plus three other races under 50.50. And she beat Femke Bol, a 25-year-old Dutch superstar who holds the world indoor record in the 400 meters.
“I think the best is yet to come,” Thomas said. “I think it’s great we’ve come this far so fast.”
Simply put, coach and athlete said, the training was amended to concentrate on Irby-Jackson’s strengths, speed and power, without disregarding weakness — her finish.
For instance, in a June 20 race at Paris, Irby-Jackson led through 300 meters over reigning Olympic champion Marileidy Paulino and 2025 world leader Salwa Eid Naser. But the former Pike sprinter finished fourth.
Otherwise, the coach said, she doesn’t want “to change who she is.” Irby-Jackson said her other coaches “were wonderful” but that she has chemistry with Thomas. The sprinter said she can think about something, not speaking, but that Thomas knows exactly what she is thinking.
“Any time I made a move, I was certain about it,” Irby-Jackson said. “But this time around, it was like, ‘I have to follow my gut, no matter what anyone else tells me, no matter what the influence is.’ I’m going to be comfortable here.
“Her and I have maintained a relationship through the years. So that was easy to pick up the phone and call her and say, ‘Would you take me back? Would you want to coach me again?’ She was like, ‘Absolutely, I can handle it.’”
The sprinter’s challenge has been to handle emotions. She has been candid about mental health issues she coped with as a youth and teenager.
She used to ask coaches if she really had to run. She sobbed uncontrollably.
Behind an invincible veneer — she was 60-for-60 in high school during the Indiana postseason, winning a record 12 state titles — was invisible insecurity.
“My nerves before a race would be so horrible,” she said. “Sometimes I would cry. At some point when I got to college, I felt like I’m a little bit too old to be crying and being so anxious before races.”
In a social media post before the 2021 Olympic Trials, she said therapy has taken “pounds of bricks off my chest and shoulders.”
She began meeting a sports psychologist at Georgia. The psychologist helped, she said, but she did not initially meet with another. A lingering hamstring injury left her with 2019 times nowhere close to those of a breakout 2018.
Then came 2020.
Pandemic. Social unrest. Olympics coming up, then postponed.
She bought a townhome. She and then-boyfriend Jalen Jackson, a former Alabama football player she met through Instagram, were “merging lives,” she said.
So much at once.
“I felt like I was cracking under the pressure,” she said.
Although there wasn’t much of a 2020 season, she did run the world’s fastest 400 meters that year, 50.50, at Monaco.
The therapist supplied tools to cope. She encouraged Irby-Jackson to identify things that trigger anxiety and consider stimulus/pause/response. If she is not ready to respond to a situation, she said, “I’m more open to saying, ‘Let me think about that.’”
She had always been the one doing the worrying. Instead of playing outdoors, a 10-year-old Lynna would stand at the door to watch over two younger brothers, her mother said.
“Lynna has always been a person that takes care of others,” Nakela Irby said. “And she’s always put everybody else first.”
The sprinter was married in 2023, and her husband has commuted between Texas and Tennessee.
In last month’s nationals at Eugene, Oregon, she was one place from top three, and only three run the 400 at Tokyo. She would have been third if McLaughlin-Levrone, a four-time Olympic gold medalist, had not chosen the flat 400 over the 400 hurdles.
Lynna-Irby conceded she was “in shock” afterward. She was second at 300 meters but finished 0.15 seconds behind third-place Aaliyah Butler, who ranks No. 4 in the world.
“I know I’ve got it in me. I know I’ve got that ‘dawg’ in me,” Irby-Jackson said. “But the goal was obviously top three. But then, we’re happy because I’m on the relay this year. So there’s a lot of happy and sad.”
The 400 meters is a race of speed endurance, and she has endured longer than most. Since Allyson Felix’s last national title in 2016, five different women have won the 400 at nationals, and a sixth, Alexis Holmes, won the silver medal at March’s World Indoor Championships.
The only one of the six to beat Irby-Jackson at Eugene was McLaughlin-Levrone.
To be so good for so long — and to be so dismissed — is something that vexes Michael Vinson, her coach at the Indiana Storm track club.
“People don’t count her out. It’s that people don’t consider her,” said Vinson, now girls track coach at North Central High School. “And every year, she’s in the final of the national championships.
“Every time, she’s put herself in position to have a real shot to make a team. She might not win them. But she’s always in position to make a team.”
That goes all the way back to, yes, 2015.
After her sophomore season at Pike, she ran in the under-18 World Youth Championships at Cali, Colombia. She won a silver medal in the 400 and gold in the mixed 4×400. Other gold medalists there were McLaughlin-Levrone in the 400 hurdles and Davis-Woodhall in the long jump, the same events they won at the Paris Olympics.
“It’s crazy to think that I’ve been knowing these girls for 10 years plus,” Irby-Jackson said. “But they’re amazing competitors, even better friends. We have private conversations, always encouraging each other.”
Irby-Jackson has reason to be encouraged.
She would be 29 by the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Felix won a bronze medal in the 400 at age 35 in 2021, and Pauline and Naser won gold and silver last year at 28 and 27, respectively.
The former Pike sprinter has told her coach she expects to win every race, every year. Perpetual dissatisfaction is also manifested by perpetual progress.
Thomas said Irby-Jackson has learned at every stop. That is why she continues to go.
“The top is just limitless,” Thomas said.
David Woods is a Mirror Indy freelance contributor. You can contact him at dwoods1411@gmail.com or follow him on X @DavidWoods007.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
