Heptathlete Heather Miller-Koch is used to doing it all in track and life

RIO DE JANEIRO – It probably shouldn't come as a surprise that Heather Miller-Koch has excelled in the heptathlon. She proved long ago that she's a gifted multitasker, giving her the right foundation for track and field's seven-sport test.

Miller-Koch, a Wisconsin native, played basketball and ran track at St. Cloud State. She juggled a career as an operating-room nurse with her heptathlon training for five years, including two in St. Paul. Her focus didn't narrow until last fall, when she and her husband — Ryan Koch, who also is her coach — moved to Chula Vista, Calif., so Miller-Koch could make an all-out push for the Rio Olympics.

They have devoted the past year to pursuing the Olympic ideal, trying to make Miller-Koch run faster, jump higher and throw farther. All that work prepared her for July's Olympic trials, when Miller-Koch topped the field in the heptathlon's 800-meter run — her least favorite event — to lock up a second-place finish and her first Olympic berth.

"I was confident I could run a solid race and secure a spot," said Miller-Koch, 29, who begins the two-day Olympic heptathlon Friday at Rio's Olympic Stadium. "I didn't really care if I got second, first or third. I just wanted to make the team. Coming down the home stretch, it was an amazing feeling."

Miller-Koch came to the heptathlon late in life, but she has steadily improved through eight years of competing in the event. At Columbus High School in Wisconsin, she received some Division I offers for track but wanted to play basketball in college.

She landed at St. Cloud State and did both for three years. At age 21, Miller-Koch tried the heptathlon and her coaches saw promise, enough that she decided to stop playing basketball and specialize in her new event.

Miller-Koch won the Division II pentathlon championship in 2010 and left St. Cloud State as a 10-time All-America and 15-time champion in the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference. She also picked up a partner: Ryan Koch, a Huskies decathlete and a wide receiver on the football team. After she graduated in 2010, they moved to New York City, where Miller-Koch worked as an operating-room nurse and hooked up with the Central Park Track Club.

Every day, Miller-Koch woke up at 6 a.m., taking a bus and two trains to the New York Armory to do track workouts. She worked from noon to 8 p.m., then went to the gym for more training. In 2012, a ninth-place finish at the Olympic trials earned her a spot on the team for the Thorpe Cup, a decathlon and heptathlon event between the U.S. and Germany.

"My goals started small, but they changed as I got better," Miller-Koch said. "Making that Thorpe Cup team, it was so amazing to wear a USA jersey. I wanted to keep going and see how far I could get."

Miller-Koch and her husband wanted to return to the Midwest and moved to Mendota Heights in 2013. Heather worked at United Hospital and was a volunteer assistant track coach at Concordia (St. Paul), where Ryan was an assistant coach for the men's track team.

With the Rio Olympics approaching, she began scaling back her work hours to train more. Miller-Koch finished second in the heptathlon at the Pan American Games last summer, which convinced her to take a one-year leave of absence from her nursing job and move with Ryan to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista.

Mike Coonen, who was a track teammate of Miller-Koch for one year at St. Cloud State, said her personality is well-suited to her event.

"She has a quiet persistence about her," Coonen said. "You rarely see her get overly excited or down on herself. That even keel is really important in the heptathlon, because with seven events, you have to bounce back very quickly if one of them doesn't go well."

Now that she's made an Olympic team, Miller-Koch is eager to see where she goes next.

"Right out of college, I hoped to make a U.S. team," she said. "I didn't think I'd hit my potential, since I'd only been doing heptathlon for a limited time. Each year, I've gotten better. And the goal is to just keep getting better."