After the workout at the high-school track, I returned with Yuliya and Vitaly to their cramped but tidy $500-a-month, one-bedroom apartment in a blue-collar neighborhood close to a running trail. About a week before the German documentary aired in December 2014, anticipating its explosive impact, the couple and their infant son left Russia for Germany. They lived in Berlin for a year. At the beginning of 2015, Vitaly was offered a job in the United States, and the family moved. The job offer fell through, but the Stepanovs decided to stay in America. Seeking cheap rent and a place where Yuliya could train at altitude, they eventually landed in this sunny spot in the mountains. Now, as Vitaly awaited a work permit, the family was getting by on savings and some money a supporter sends them.

After a quick shower, Yulia started chopping potatoes and a pork loin for a sour-cream gravy stew. She explained that she was taking classes to improve her English skills and seemed relieved whenever her husband took over the burden of answering my questions. “Our stormy time together has passed,” Vitaly said. “Doping almost robbed us of our marriage, but over the last few years, fighting against doping has given it back.”

The loneliness of that fight seems to have created an extraordinarily close bond between the two of them. “Even now, no one really wants to hear from us,” Vitaly said. He gave a resigned smile. “I guess we threaten a lot of brands.” No brand has been more threatened by the Stepanovs than that of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which has invested deeply in sports. “Don’t underestimate the smears and abuses they have endured and the danger they live under,” says the German journalist Hajo Seppelt, who produced the documentary that turned the spotlight on the Stepanovs and who has been threatened and assailed in response to his own investigative reporting. “Together, Yuliya and Vitaly have been Public Enemy No. 1 in Russia.”

In Kursk, Yuliya’s mother has been harassed at the hospital where she is a nurse — How could you raise such a Judas? When Vitaly’s father turns on the TV in Chelyabinsk, a thousand miles east of Moscow in the Ural Mountains, he has seen his son and daughter-in-law vilified as traitors.

As the Stepanovs’ actions and their impacts become better known, however, the rest of the world may regard them in a far kinder light. Frank Shorter, the 1972 Olympic gold medalist in the marathon and the first chairman of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, acknowledges the Stepanovs’ “giant contribution” and says “they have given hope to honest athletes all around the world.”

“To stand up for what’s right and to expose a state-supported doping system in their own country — against all odds — it’s incredible,” Travis Tygart, the head of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, told me in an email. “Those who value clean sport are forever indebted. In their own way, they are both true Olympic heroes.”

Last Friday, the I.A.A.F. appeared to agree, ruling that “Yuliya Stepanova’s case should be considered favorably” by the I.O.C. for her “extraordinary contribution to the fight against doping.” Earlier this week, however, the I.O.C. seemed to kick the decision back to the I.A.A.F., leaving Yuliya’s hopes in limbo. Still, she and Vitaly claim to be at peace whether or not she gets to run at the Rio Games. “I don’t regret what I have done,” Yuliya told me. “And I am not angry at the Russian coaches and officials. I am only angry at myself, that I wanted to be part of that system, that I let myself get used for so long.”