Growing up, traditional sports never came naturally to me. I’m rather petite as a woman, and even when I started running in the seventh grade, I always considered myself to be an underdog. I never broke any records and consistently was never looked at as someone who had incredibly high athletic potential. I wasn’t heavily recruited for Division 1 athletics, and I barely even made the varsity team my freshman year in high school.
I found more solace as an endurance athlete and a long distance runner. The nature of the sport is a constant, quiet grind of working hard and continuously pushing yourself to find new ways to improve and get better. Some people are incredibly physically gifted and naturally find success relatively quickly, but the reality for most of us who pursue endurance events is that it doesn’t work out that way - myself included.
Perhaps my gift though is a determination and a refusal to quit. I am someone who never gives up in the face of many challenges and obstacles thrown my way. From the early days I started running, I dealt with a lot of injuries, and rather than throw in the towel, I tried to use every setback as a means in which I could diagnose and find a way to get to the root cause of the issue. Without that magical gift of natural talent, I have had to continually find ways to adjust, make improvements to my technique, and get increasingly comfortable being uncomfortable.
If it wasn’t for coming in close to last in my middle school district races, and struggling to even finish 11th on the team in my first varsity cross country race – finishing All-State for the first time my sophomore year of high school wouldn’t have meant as much.
If it wasn’t for many years of getting dropped on runs with my teammates in college and aggressively cross-training while battling back from injuries, I wouldn’t have been able to finally have a breakthrough season running 16:57 in the 5k and 35:09 in the 10k - barely missing out on NCAA east regionals and receiving the honor of being named an Academic All-American.
In my last year of college eight years ago, I badly hurt my right knee (or at least what I thought was simply a knee issue). When I went to a highly renowned doctor, I was told there was nothing that could be done for my knee. It wasn’t bad enough to operate on and that was that. My limp would always be what it was and the constant knee pain I was having wouldn’t improve. In what was to be the culmination of a decade plus of consistent running, my final year of college finished with me fighting until the end, running with a limp through the cross country, indoor, and outdoor track seasons.
Upon graduation, I knew that I wouldn’t and couldn’t give up. My DNA would not let me. I knew that this would not be the end to my story. There were so many days of tears being shed from constant pain, frustration with my body not being able to move properly, and wondering when I would stop feeling partially broken. But piece by piece, I started figuring things out with lots of help, patience, and amazing support from family and friends along the way.
Progress is never as linear as we hope it will be, but when you take those positive steps forward, you can’t help but be so, so grateful. From dealing with severe knee pain from 2017 through 2019, to dealing with a bit of a limp running at moderate speeds 2019 through 2022, to limping while running only at faster speeds of unbroken running 2023 and half of 2024 - I went on to finish 5th in the 2024 Spartan Ultra 50k World Championships in France (the top American overall) and finished 3rd in the Spartan Pan American Championships in Seattle a few months later.
The path forward might not always be clear, but I believe the future for me will only be brighter as I work towards some lofty goals in 2025.
I hope to podium this year at the Spartan Ultra World Championship and run an hour faster than I did in 2024. Additionally, I’ll be competing at the Spartan Trifecta World Championship, the US National Series, the Pan American Championships, and 20+ other races this year looking to be on the podium consistently and hopefully, win one race outright beating the entire men’s field as well.
