Allie Kieffer is something of a household name among running fans these days, but her story starts long before her breakout performance of 5^th place in the 2017 NYC Marathon. It starts on Long Island where her sister introduced her to running and her mom, who took up hiking as a bit of a “mid-life crisis” would take Allie on long hikes that she now likens to endurance training. Allie recalls that there was no emphasis put on weight or appearance when she was growing up. But then she started to get good at running.

In high school, it was clear that Allie had talent as a runner and in her own words, it was the first thing she was ever really good at. She took it seriously. She would train before school in addition to practicing with her team and when she looks back on it, her fueling, something that she has come to be very outspoken about in recent years, wasn’t something she thought much about back then. She and her mom would share big Italian meals or dinners at the Outback and Allie would always eat more than her mom, but knew that she was running a lot, so she needed the fuel. At the time, she didn’t think much about how fueling affected performance…she just ate.

Allie’s running continued to improve as the years went on and as success came, unfortunately so did comments about her body. Things like “oh, you’re not super skinny, you must have really good cardio” became common. Allie shares that she was a healthy, average-sized high schooler but since the societal norm is to think that all successful runners must be as thin and lean as possible, she didn’t fit that picture. Not surprisingly, these types of comments started to get under her skin. Should she try to lose weight? Was she doing something wrong?

Fast forward to college. Allie received a scholarship to run at Wake Forest and was thrust into what came to reveal itself as a very toxic atmosphere. The coach, a successful runner in her own right, suffered from an eating disorder during her career and didn’t know how to teach her team proper fueling habits…she had never learned them herself. She commented often that Allie would run faster if she lost 5 pounds and it was an almost an unspoken motto of the team – “lose 5 pounds, run faster.” It didn’t take long for Allie to notice that when she was hitting up the dessert bar, her teammates were hitting up the salad bar. Eating disorders were common on the team and Allie shares that for many races, they struggled getting 10 healthy girls on the line because there were so many injuries. During her time at Wake Forest, Allie watched as so many of her teammates go through cycles of undereating, eating disorders and injury. Allie knew that starving herself wasn’t going to make her faster so instead of conforming to the team norm, she continued to fuel herself properly. In spite of this, Allie shares that she often felt guilty about her diet.  

After her senior year at Wake Forest, Allie went to ASU for grad school and still had some eligibility to use so joined the cross-country team there. Allie noticed an immediate difference – at ASU, no one ever talked about weight. No one obsessed about weight. In fact, since Allie had spent the months leading up to her time at ASU injured, she lost quite a bit of weight over her first season as she started running again. The medical personal that oversaw the team saw this weight loss and put her a watch list for eating disorder tendencies and she had to talk about it with her coach. Allie of course was not at risk for an eating disorder as her weight loss stemmed from amping up her mileage again after rehabbing her injury but the fact that she was now on a team where extreme weight loss sent up a red flag, not a congratulatory high five from the coach, was amazing to her. Allie had a fantastic cross-country season that year at ASU, and a decent track season. Things seemed to be going great…until she tried something new. She tried to lose weight.

While she didn’t begin severely restricting her intake, Allie found herself being more conscious of her food choices and wondered if she really needed to eat the things that society has labeled as “bad.” The result? A stress fracture at the end of her time at ASU. After leaving ASU, she moved to Boulder, got a professional coach, and started training as a professional runner. An old theme from her high school days popped back up – Allie didn’t “look” like a professional distance runner and quickly realized she was often the biggest girl on the start line. Thrust into this new environment, she continued to subscribe to the “lose 5 pounds, run faster” mindset that runs so rampant in women’s running. The result was a string of injuries that left Allie frustrated and disillusioned and made it so she couldn’t get to the most important start lines. She qualified for the Olympic Trials but didn’t even make it to the start because she was injured. She started to feel confident in daily life, but not in running and not on the start lines- at least the ones she made it to. The thing she’d loved since she was a young girl on Long Island was taking her confidence away and leaving her injured and broken. So, she quit.

Allie moved to NYC and got a job. Since she was new to the city, she didn’t have many friends and eventually started running again as a hobby. Soon that hobby transformed into more serious training and she secured a spot in the 2017 NYC Marathon and Nike’s Moonshot Project – a program designed to give amateur runners the coaching, nutrition, recovery series, etc. that they need to train like a professional runner would for the 2017 race. For the first time in a long time, Allie trained hard and fueled harder. The result? 5^th place overall on one the world’s largest stages.

After that, she didn’t look back. Earlier in her career she had spent too much time and effort thinking that if she lost 5 lbs she’d be faster. She spent so much time trying to shrink herself. At the end of the day, that only resulted in injury and heartbreak. Allie excelled at the highest level of the sport when she finally believed in herself and her ability, fueled her training and regained the confidence she had lost.

Her message to young athletes? Losing weight doesn’t work. It might be a shortcut to some faster times initially, but in the long term, it doesn’t work. Fueling yourself makes a difference. Instead of thinking that losing weight will make you faster, try thinking about how losing weight will make you slower – makes it a little less appealing.

Allie shared a story about a relationship she was in recently. The guy was treating her badly, so they broke up, but he lingered. And she allowed him to linger, waffling about what he wanted, drifting in and out of her life until one day she woke up and said, “NO MORE.” She decided that she DESERVES to be happy, to be loved, to find a guy who knows what he wants and will treasure her. She likens this awakening to how she now thinks about running and fueling her body. She DESERVES to be happy and confident. She deserves a life better than one consumed by calorie counting and body dissatisfaction.

She deserves better, and so do you.