Kelly Catlin also began to limit her social interactions to “robotic social motions,” as Catlin herself put it in the January note to family and friends. Around third grade, Catlin established her lifelong code to live by and included some of it in the note, which was shared with The New York Times:

Fear not physical discomfort. Never love. Never engage in a relationship that could be defined as having a significant other. (In my case, a so-called “boyfriend.”) Never allow yourself to become close enough to another that their actions or inactions might cause you (any amount of) distress or pain. If kindness and gentleness are at all an option, they are the only option.

“We all knew that she didn’t like to express her emotions,” Christine Catlin said. “She never really told anyone how she ever felt, until the very end, that is.”

Cycling Calls

Colin and Christine Catlin were cycling for a local development team, NorthStar, when Kelly quit high school soccer and joined them, at Colin’s prodding. She loved long training rides and used cycling as a way to practice memorization, another passion.

She would remember dozens of license plates of cars passing her and would recite the number pi to hundreds of decimals, Colin Catlin said. She mapped out training routes in her head.

“She liked that cycling kept her mind focused, but I think she liked it most when she started winning everything,” said Colin, a data scientist. “Her mentality was, if you wanted to be an Olympian, all you had to do was train hard.”

And Kelly did make it seem easy. Within two years of starting to race, she was invited to the United States Olympic Training Center in Colorado, where coaches put cyclists through testing to see if they are national team material. Kelly was that, and more.

Her power output on the stationary bike was higher than every other recruit and higher than several athletes on the national track cycling team, said Neal Henderson, one of the coaches back then.