Read: 2026-05-24
Recommend: 8/10
I did not expect to learn so much about ASICS shoes. I also enjoyed learning more about Sara and Ryan Hall as a couple. I especially liked reading about Sara’s mental preparation for hard workouts. Faith is a major theme throughout the book. I also picked up a few training ideas, such as using the stairmill and spin bike for cross-training.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
“You don’t have to prove anything out here today,” Ryan says from his bike that’s coasting next to me. “Let’s just get a solid one in. You’ve already done the work. Don’t smash it.” On the inside I allow myself another smile. Smashing it is exactly what I want to do. It’s certainly more due to Ryan’s loyalty than my coachability that he’s made it this long training me. I feel a tick of excitement that this final hard workout, a sixteen-mile tempo run at marathon race effort, will be the confidence boost I need in absence of any buildup races. Unlike a race where my every movement will be judged by a spectating stadium, there is nothing to lose out here. I can let it rip fearlessly.
Focus, I scold myself. The pain has been creeping up slowly. I’m twelve miles in, with four miles to go, but now my breathing is growing more irregular; my legs are burning and getting heavier. My brain is sending signals to slow down, a message I have been overriding for decades. I exhale slowly to calm my respiration. Run this like it’s the last mile. We long-distance runners are good at lying to ourselves, pulling out whatever mental tricks we can to get through. Another mile ticks by—5:33. What are you going to do in London when it gets tough? Prove it.
In the late 1990s, the internet was new to me, and it opened a Pandora’s box of insecurities and anxieties. Up until this point, I had never felt vulnerable out there competing—a young girl in minimal clothing in front of a stadium of spectators judging her every move and appearance. Now my eyes were opened to what an easy target I was. As I read line after line of comments that night, some part of me internalized the idea that by failing in running, I could lose what every fifteen-year-old girl craves more than anything—love and belonging.
ASICS stands for “anima sana in corpore sano,” a Latin phrase meaning “sound mind in a sound body.” True to Japanese culture, the company was known for its fierce loyalty to their athletes and a focus on quality craftsmanship rather than flashy marketing. That was a good fit for me because I preferred to just quietly work on my craft without distractions, and if my track record of inconsistent performances continued, I would need the brand’s loyalty.
Nothing to lose and everything to gain as I competed with just myself—unlike racing. So much of how I had approached the sport had changed since my school years, but these moments in practice would bring me back to my first love, center me, reassure me I was moving closer to my goals, no matter what the race results sheet said.
As I lay there, one of the women whispered in my ear, “God just wants you to know, he delights so much in watching you run. It doesn’t matter how fast, or what place you finish, he just so delights in you.” Tears dripped down my cheeks. I had never known love like that. I grew up with a God that you had to earn love from by obedience—which is really just another form of performance. My parents had loved me well and unconditionally, but they had also put a strong emphasis on “doing your best,” sometimes chiding me for giving less than all-out effort in small races when I wanted to just cruise, and I could sense their distress at times when I failed. The thought of a loving father, watching me struggling in last place at Nationals with a smile on his face, as proud as if I were running a world record, was revolutionary to me. I could see running more clearly as it was always meant to be— a gift from Him, not a burden. When I finally got up, I felt healing in my spirit, but I was curious about my Achilles. I headed out for a run to test it out, and for the first time in months, I felt no pain.
We had intentionally chosen the trailer over a house, which we could have afforded, because I had always lived by Gandhi’s quote “Live simply so others may simply live.” I was frugal—I saw every purchase as money that could potentially go to someone who was starving to death. My wardrobe was largely clothes I’d had since high school, and I was a magician at repurposing leftovers into new dishes to avoid waste. Ryan, on the other hand, had grown up with seven people living tightly on one teacher’s salary, and now enjoyed finally being able to spend his hard-earned funds a little more freely.
I also started redefining success on my own terms. It was no longer about meeting others’ expectations—or even my own. It was about being faithful with the gift God had given me, using it to my best ability with integrity and excellence, and loving others as fully as I could along the way.
With the help of a doctor, I discovered I had systemic inflammation and high levels of histamine. By improving my nutrition, supplementing with the natural antioxidant glutathione, and keeping my environment free of mold, I was able to get off all the allergy and asthma medications I had been on since I was young.
As I began to share running with the girls, I started seeing how it allowed me to model many of the character traits I wished to instill in them. They saw me set goals, as well as demonstrate the discipline, relentless attention to detail, and delayed gratification that were necessary for that goal. They saw me succeed, but more importantly, they saw me fail, and pick myself back up and choose to hope and believe again. I tried as much as possible to invite them into the journey and describe my thought processes. I encouraged them that doing hard and uncomfortable things was fun. “Berchi,” I would remind them, the Amharic word meaning “be strong” that I had learned from the other runners in Haji’s group. I wanted my kids to maintain that same mental strength I saw in the people of Ethiopia—being okay with discomfort—and to not become as coddled as children often are in the comforts of America.
This injury is going to lead to your breakthrough, I felt God telling me amid my discouragement. At first I plugged away on the spin bike, my go-to whenever I was hurt. I’d cycle through repeats of thirty seconds on, thirty seconds off, to correlate with the choruses and verses of techno songs, and kept a large stash of my favorite candies to consume during the “offs” as both fuel and reward for the monotony. But one day as I dragged myself back into the gym, the towering stairmill caught my eye. I decided to give it a try. I only managed to last fifteen minutes before my quads flooded with lactic acid and I collapsed onto the handles. This could be good—really good, I thought. I started implementing it into my training, and sure enough, it ended up being one of the factors that led to the big breakthrough I had in the Berlin Marathon in the fall of 2019, when I took more than four minutes off my personal best.
Longing surges within me as I watch my body powerfully lunging forward toward the finish line, in the greatest race of my career thus far. This is who you are, I remind myself, fighting back tears.
Amid my gloom and worry, something told me I wasn’t done yet. The only way out was through.
Another benefit of running under Ryan’s tutelage was learning from the mistakes he’d identified in his career, like someone reflecting on their “death bed regrets” at the end of life. One major regret was becoming too lean, an outcome rooted in his self-comparison with East African competitors who often had that physique genetically. As a female athlete, you are, to some extent, fighting biology, which wants you to preserve abundant body fat to aid fertility. But in a sport that leverages a power-to-weight ratio, leanness is undoubtedly a factor. However, becoming too lean can cause a loss of power and lead to injuries, and after seeing Ryan run his worst marathons at his lightest, I opted to not deprive myself. I rarely weighed myself; instead I ate intuitively by listening to my body and never letting myself go hungry. I didn’t try to taper down to an ambiguous race weight right before the goal event, but let my body find a homeostasis that was sustainable, and stayed pretty close to that year-round. I leaned more into the power side of the equation and focused on getting stronger, not lighter. If I wanted to have longevity in the sport, I had to fuel myself sustainably rather than live on the razor’s edge.
A mom is like a thermostat, always reading the room and taking inventory of everyone’s mood. It’s a never-ending mental load that you never get to switch off. I didn’t have time or energy to major in the minors. I let the house be messy; I never volunteered as classroom mom; but I made sure we sat around the dinner table every night and I looked the girls in the eyes and listened to them share their hearts.
I shook my head to snap myself out of that thinking and consciously shifted my mind into gratitude. How lucky I was to get a chance to race during this time of no racing. How fit I was— I had never been more physically ready. I drew my attention to how strong my stride felt, how amazing the shoes felt. I put more force into my steps just to feel them bounce back.
I thought of how long I’d wrestled with the question Is running selfish? and the self-condemnation I felt for not living a life of more tangible service to others. I remembered God’s words, that I could do more to help others through my running than with my own two hands. I had never been more certain I was doing what I was meant to do.
One day I had an epiphany when I was listening to a short audiobook by Rob Bell about parenting, called Launching Rockets. He said that the number one goal of parenting is enjoying your kids. That they can feel it, and when they do, it does something to them. It hit me at that moment that I was focusing a lot of my energy on helping my girls. Hana and Mia were still behind in school, and I tirelessly advocated for them to get the support they needed in and outside the classroom while also helping them myself and teaching a seemingly endless list of life skills. I also wanted my girls to have a healthy lifestyle and environment, which sometimes felt like swimming upstream in the U.S. and required a lot of intentionality. But I didn’t actually enjoy most of that stuff. It was quite the opposite. I started to intentionally do things with my daughters that were legitimately fun for me as well (i.e., not endless rounds of Chutes and Ladders). We planned exotic meals to cook together, as well as a trip to Iceland after the World Championships. We watched more movies. Like any zealous first-time mom, I had been stingy with screen time. It was like the lack of sugar in their diet early in their lives—I could tell how much better their attention spans were from growing up without devices. But now I saw it differently—watching movies was something we all enjoyed together, and with my never-ending fatigue from training and adulting, there were few things I wanted to do more.
For so long I had approached the sport by looking for the line of what was too much by crossing it—and then scaling back. “Only those who risk going too far can find out how far one can go,” T. S. Eliot once wrote, and I wholeheartedly agreed. Plus excess had always been my vice. As a coach, Ryan gave me a long leash, and when he tried to hold me back, I wasn’t usually great at listening. When I inevitably went too far, I would recall a quote from Mark Wetmore, the legendary coach at the University of Colorado: “Don’t be greedy” when it comes to training. But it wouldn’t be long before I’d be over the setback, and in my zeal, I’d start searching for that line again.
Around this time I picked up the book Mamba Mentality by basketball legend Kobe Bryant, who played in the NBA for twenty years—the same length of my pro career. In the introduction, his coach Phil Jackson mentions what it took to keep playing later in his career: “I was watching Kobe go through extreme routines to get himself ready to play games.” Extreme routines—I could relate. The list of exercises I had to do before I went out for a run kept increasing: Loosening my ankles with reps of weights strapped to my feet. Stretching my neck with a traction unit, slung over a doorway and cinched around my head. Working my hip rotators on a spinning disc called the Standing Firm. A variety of hanging movements from a pull-up bar to get movement in my ribs. I didn’t have an NBA staff like Kobe joining me at training camp, but I was grateful that even on a smaller budget I had world-class support.
My first mile was 5:18; the next was 5:20. My confidence soared with each successful mile, and I ended up averaging 5:22—one of the fastest times I’d completed that workout in, under any conditions. As I trotted through the cooldown, I started dreaming not just of making the Olympic team, but of winning the Trials. I was not one to brag about my workouts on social media or even post them to Strava. I tried the best I could to avoid self-promotion. “If you eat from the praises of man, you will die by their criticisms,” Bethel pastor Bill Johnson always said. But I couldn’t help but post a screenshot of that tempo, just in case the haters, or my competitors, thought I had mentally given up because of the battle over the start time.
That night, as we sat in a raft underneath a starry Florida sky, I had the overwhelming feeling that all along, running had actually been the path that led me to my husband, my daughters, the friendships forged over countless miles—they were the real prize. The pursuit, the believing, the overcoming only to be knocked down again—it was all about the relationships and those who supported me. What a beautiful thing to be able to chase a dream for two decades and to have so many people believe in it with me. Experiencing that love is greater than any result or accolade I could have achieved in the sport.
I’ve felt a shift in the last year in how I view my family, my career, and my faith. It will always be hard to turn off the part of me who is never satisfied—who relentlessly pursues my craft, who worries I’m not doing enough as a mom, or who remains discontent with my experience of the divine. The part of me that will always be bothered by not being able to do more to help people struggling to survive here in Ethiopia, and elsewhere. But I also feel a contentment growing within me, with the connection I have with Ryan and the kids, and with God. I’m starting to accept that there is only so much I can do, and at the end of the day, to “cease striving and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). I hope to live more in that tension of pursuing what’s possible, but finding rest in faith and gratitude for what’s already happened.