From heartache at the Olympic trials to a personal best days later. Kate Grace and the cruel world of track and field.

After Kate Grace failed to make the Olympic track team last month, she didn’t have time to feel bad for herself, or at least not right away. About 20 minutes after finishing a disappointing seventh in the women’s 800 meters at the Olympic Trials in Eugene, Ore., her coach told her that she had an opportunity to race an elite international field — in three days, in Oslo, Norway.

“In that moment, I was obviously not happy, and I had this desire to escape, so I was like, ‘Sure, why not, let’s do it,’ ” Grace told the New York Daily News of getting on a plane the next day.

The Olympic Trials are, in some ways, higher-stakes than the Olympics in American track. If you bomb at the Olympics, you’re an Olympian for life; if you fail at the trials, you have four years to stew about it — or a lifetime.

“For the past two years, I feel like I’ve been locked in on this,” Grace, who won the 800m at the trials in 2016 and made the Olympic final in Rio, said of last year’s Olympic postponement. “Then having a less-than-ideal performance really sucked. It almost just feels like an emptiness. … Things had been going so well in the last month or two that I really thought that something good was going to happen.”

She faded from third to seventh in the final 100 meters at the trials in a race delayed until nearly 10 p.m. because of extreme heat, running 1:59.17, well behind the 1:58.39 it took to make the team.

“Even if I wasn’t going to make the team, I thought I would be able to have a great performance,” said Grace, who trains in Boulder, Colo. “I knew that it was gonna be really hard to make the team, that maybe even my best performance wasn’t gonna do it. But it was gonna be a (personal best) situation, and to not have that was such a letdown, just all the air going out of your sails.”

“It’s more of a shock situation right after. It’s almost like I’m the one comforting other people, I’m telling my coach, my parents, that it’s OK. For me, it’s not until I get alone a day or so later, that I then feel any emotion,” she said.

But her post-trials travel meant that she had no time to think until she landed in Frankfurt, Germany, for a layover. That’s when she went into an airport bathroom and started crying. “That was the low point, for about five hours there. ‘Oh, s---, everything I’ve been working on for the past nine years is over. We’re done,’ ” she said. Grace is 32 and possibly near the tail end of her prime as a middle-distance runner. “There are thoughts that go through your mind. Is this all really worth it? Do I want to be running next year?”

And that wasn’t the only realization she had on her way to Europe. Grace said that she booked the travel so quickly after the race that she didn’t realize until getting to Norway, two days before the race, that virus protocols there were strict to the point that she couldn’t leave the hotel except to run. “By that evening, I was in a calm place and able to see what racing in Europe might mean,” she said.

Here’s what it meant: She set three personal bests in nine days, winning two Diamond League meets, a relatively rare achievement for an American distance runner. When the smoke cleared, she was the eighth-fastest 800 meter runner in U.S. history, and the seventh-fastest woman in the world this year.

At every Olympics, there is a group for whom missing out is particularly painful: Athletes with bad luck or bad timing or whatever who would have a legitimate shot at a medal, but are missing the Games entirely.

At first, this doesn’t seem to be Grace. The U.S. is sending an incredibly strong team to Tokyo in her event. Athing Mu, who is just 19, is the fastest woman in the world this year. Raevyn Rogers and Ajee Wilson, who finished second and third at the trials, were second and third in the world at the last global championships, in 2019. But Grace ran like she belonged in that category — just right after it counted most. In Oslo and again in Monaco, she beat the reigning world champion, Uganda’s Halimah Nakaayi. In Monaco, she ran 1:57.20, faster than Rogers’ personal best, which was set at the Trials. The U.S. just has more medal contenders than it can fit on one Olympic team, it appears.

Grace isn’t dwelling on it. “It’s a tough team to make,” she said. “I don’t find any value in rethinking what could have happened. I was just so happy to be able to show (myself), you’re a quality athlete and you can expect to perform well next year,” she said of the 2022 world championships. “You can make plans as an athlete and you don’t have to give up on all of this.”