I started running in high school because one of my soccer teammates won a race. She had joined the winter track team to stay in shape for soccer and wouldn’t you know it, she was one of the fastest on the team. I knew I was faster than her though. If she could win a race, maybe I could too (not that I’m competitive). The rest is history. In my nearly 20 year running career, I’ve participated in countless races including 20 marathons and in one particularly ambitious year, I ran one marathon each month. Running has become an indispensable part of who I am.  

When I look back at my time as a high school and college athlete though, I realize that my relationship with exercise and food wasn’t always healthy. Food was something to be earned, something to be burned off. I was limiting intake of certain foods or food groups was a misguided attempt to improve performance and achieve a certain body type. I often wonder why/how I developed such a disordered, unhealthy relationship with food. I realize that part of it was real or imagined external pressure to look a certain way, but part of it was that I just didn’t know better. When I was a teenager, no one taught me about nutrition. No one taught me how to properly fuel my body. Frankly, I didn’t know what I was doing. As the years passed and my training load increased, I came to realize through a combination of education and experience that food is fuel for the body. I learned how to optimize my nutrition to help me reach my goals and am running faster and farther in my 30’s than ever before.

This pattern of disordered eating that plagued my adolescent years is a common theme among young athletes. The issue is compounded by peer and societal pressure to look a certain way and sometimes by, frankly, bad nutrition advice in the media. Young athletes who don’t know anything about nutrition become adults who don’t know anything about nutrition. It’s time to break that cycle.

There was a gap in nutrition education when I was competing in high school and college sports and that gap still exists. It is my goal to fill that gap. In 2018, I quit my corporate marketing job and went back to school to earn my Master’s of Science in Nutrition Education from American University. This program, along with years of experience and personal trial and error, has equipped me to develop programs and methods of helping individuals create sustainable, lasting health behavior habits.