When Did I Become an Athlete?

By Guest Blogger Susie Salmon

I am not an athlete.

I’ve known this for years. When we chose teams for P.E. sports, I was always the last kid selected (often to the tune of audible groans from my default teammates). I did play softball, but I spent more time in deep right field daydreaming and weaving dandelions into my mitt than I did running the bases or shagging fly balls. In dance, I was the kid who couldn’t touch my toes and hid in the back line at recitals.

I come by my non-athlete status honestly. My mom wasn’t an athlete either; the nuns at her grammar school prohibited her from playing basketball after she tripped and tore her knee open one too many times. 

As I moved into high school and college, I only exercised out of fear; both of my parents struggled with weight issues, and my own battle began as soon as I hit puberty. When she wasn’t slipping me dollar bills, my sweet little Sicilian great-grandmother alternately urged me to eat more and warned me not to “get too fat.” The highest praise I could earn from my grandfather was that I had lost weight since he had seen me last. A well-meaning friend called me “pleasantly plump” and triggered a three-week soup fast.

Over the years, I tried various activities for short periods.  A bit of Stairmaster here and there. A year of step aerobics. I was drawn to distance early, though; I enjoyed epic, long walks in Los Angeles when I was in undergrad, San Francisco when I was in law school, and Manhattan when I worked there for a few months. When I moved to Tucson, I bought an elliptical and mounted a small TV/DVR on the opposite wall. I sweated through seasons of The Good Wife, Breaking Bad, How I Met Your Mother, and countless other shows that I only allowed myself to watch if I was on the elliptical.

Through all these exercise experiments, it never really occurred to me to run. Of course not: running was for athletes. I am not an athlete.

When my elliptical broke in the winter of 2012 and I couldn’t get the repair dude to return my calls, I had no idea how much my life would change. Over the holiday break, I started jogging on the beach with my dog, Phoebe. When I returned to Tucson, I continued running sporadically, a few miles here and there in my neighborhood or on the river path. A year or so earlier, I had become friends with Marti Ackermann through a book club; I knew that she ran, and, when SAR organized a community run after the Boston Marathon bombing, I asked if she would run with me. I ran / walked six miles that day.

Suddenly, I decided to do this running thing for real. To this day, I cannot tell you why or how. I can tell you that I started signing up for races like mad. The Cinco de Mayo 10K, which I ran / walked. The Meet Me Downtown 5K. Then I went really nuts: I signed up for my first half-marathon, the City to the Sea race in my hometown of San Luis Obispo.  In my first year as a runner, I ran eight half-marathons.

The following summer, Marti told me she had started doing track workouts with a running group. That sounded like a nightmare to me. A group of strangers? Athletes? Running track, which sounded ominously like one of those things I failed at over and over in junior high? All those athletes would see immediately that I wasn’t one of them.

But somehow I talked myself into messaging Shokofeh and getting added to the group. And somehow I even got out of bed, into my car, and out there on the track at 5am on a sweltering August morning for a one-mile time trial. The next thing I knew, I was getting up at 3:30am four or five days a week to run with TRP. I found myself chatting with total strangers and actually enjoying it. I was even leading group runs. And I found motivations beyond fear: friendship, strength, and even fun.

It was nothing like junior high, after all. Everyone was friendly and supportive, including (perhaps especially) the people whose recovery pace was my all-out pace. No one ever rolled eyes when I announced my pace at the beginning of a run. When faster runners passed me, they offered words of encouragement, not mockery. Sometimes they’d even run with me to help me meet a goal pace in a tempo mile or to finish an especially long run before sunrise.

 I lotteried into the NYC marathon, trained through the crushing heat of the Tucson summer, and finished thirty seconds faster than my goal time. I ran each of my training twenty-milers with a different TRP member.

 The biggest step in my journey, though, was signing up for coaching services with TRP Peak Performance Coaching. I had run almost twenty half-marathons, one full marathon, and countless 10K, 5K, and other races. But coaches? Coaches are for athletes.

Working with Keith this past year, following that training plan to the best of my ability each week and chatting periodically with my coaches about race strategy and goals, I realized something kind of earthshattering. I may have started running at 42. I may still be slower than I want to be. And I may not look like a runner; I still dream of reaching what the Internet tells me is my optimal “running weight.”

But, thanks to TRP, I know that I am an athlete.