Subtitle: Running Imitates Life (Imitates Running)
Introduction
Posted on April 6, 2026
By Olivia Baker
In many ways, running is a metaphor for life. The hills and
valleys on the marathon course mirror the ups and downs we walk through during
our lifetime. The slow grind of training day in and out parallels the
perseverance we exhibit on the long path of personal growth as we age. The
unexpected downpour, pothole in the road and shifting sands of the trails bring
the same unpredictability we experience in daily life. Whether you are a
marathoner, sprinter or fall somewhere in between, running still teaches many
of the same life lessons.
As Meb Keflezighi puts it, "Like the marathon, life can sometimes
be difficult, challenging and present obstacles, however if you believe in your
dreams and never ever give up, things will turn out for the best." Michael
Johnson puts it differently in saying,"Life is often compared to a marathon,
but I think it is more like being a sprinter; long stretches of hard work
punctuated by brief moments in which we are given the opportunity to perform at
our best." Though they come from vastly different backgrounds, both Johnson and
Keflezighi point toward the same lesson regarding the endurance needed to
succeed in both running and life.
If you've been in this book club long enough, you know that we
love to talk about the ways that running parallels life. Keira D'Amato would be
the first person to tell you that though she is a former American record-holder
in the marathon and multi-U.S. Champion, running is but a metaphor in this book
about life. This is why I chose Don't Call It a Comeback by Keira
D'Amato for the 26th installment of Runners Who Read. While the
stories are about running, this book is actually about being open to
opportunities, embracing failure and celebrating small wins amongst other life
lessons learned through sport. Substitute running for anything you are
personally passionate about and you have lessons that are applicable across all
fields of life. In this way, running imitates life (imitates running).
Discussion Questions:
- In what ways have you experienced the parallels between running and life?
- What are you most looking forward to learning about from this book?
Subtitle: Failure is a Paper Tiger
Chapters 1-3
Posted on April 20, 2026
By Olivia Baker
Keira D'Amato has been an incredibly gifted runner from the start
of her career. In her own words, "I was always an athlete. And I was always
fast." (pg#15). From lapping her teammates around the field in gym class in
elementary school and setting the school record in the mile, to winning six
Virginia state championship styles before she graduated high school, Keira has
always had that talent. In college, she would go on to rack up eleven Patriot
League Championships at American University and then become a four-time NCAA
All-American before her collegiate career was all said and done.
The logical next step was the professional ranks. However, things
didn't go as she had planned. The fun of racing was slowly replaced with
overwhelming anxiety now that running was her profession. Good results came
fewer and further between, and eventually injuries began to pile up. By early
2008, instead of preparing for the Olympic Trials that coming summer, she was
fighting off a bout of recurring stress fractures in her ankle. After a
multitude of doctors' visits and her health insurance denying coverage (twice)
for the expensive surgery she would need to prevent the fractures from
continuing, Keira began to come around to the idea that it was time to retire
from competitive racing. The prospect of leaving the sport came with a fear of
losing more than just a job, but friends and even her very sense of self-worth.
Nonetheless, the morning after making the decision to walk away, she felt…
relief and happiness.
She could sleep in without a workout hanging over her head, there
were no physical therapy appointments, and though her schedule was different,
she still had the support of her old friends from the training group and
opportunities to reconnect with some of her high school buddies too. She got a
job at Freddie Mac in 2009 and started making money and finally feeling like
she was adulting. Though it wasn't all smooth sailing—Keira definitely
took time to mourn the goals she never hit and the lifestyle she had once
enjoyed—she was determined not to let grief dictate her life. At the end of the
day, the fears that felt like they would be world-ending weren't nearly as bad
as she thought they would be. In fact, they were empowering.
"I experienced the ultimate failure, and it wasn't nearly as scary
as I thought. Weirdly, it brought me power and confidence," she writes (pg#33).
And that's the thing about failure. Most of the time it is a paper
tiger that is rarely as bad as we build it up to be in our worst case scenario
doom spirals. This isn't to suggest that failure isn't hard. If you've ever
cared deeply about reaching a goal and missed it, you know the sting of defeat.
It most certainly is hard and it's important to grieve the loss that may come
with it. However, when we realize that it isn't as bad as we imagined—that we
will wake up the next morning and the world has not ended—there is an
opportunity to learn and grow stronger. For Keira, this meant learning that she
could experience "the ultimate failure" and still build herself into something
amazing outside of running. Years later, it would also give her the freedom to
return to competitive running, but this time without fear of failure. So this
week, may we view failure through the proper lens, and when it comes (not if,
this is definitely a when), I hope that we will not be paralyzed by
fear, but grieve adequately and come back stronger.
Discussion Questions:
- In what way has a failure in
life set you up to come back stronger?
2. In chapter 1, Keira writes "If you're trying to climb Mount
Everest and look straight to the top, you'll quit before you ever get going.
So, don't look up. Stare directly in front of you—and take a single
step." Do you agree with this advice? Are you an "eyes on the prize" type of
person or are you focused on simply taking the next step?
Subtitle: Don't Forget to Have Fun
Chapters 4-6
Posted on April 20, 2026
By Olivia Baker
There is a long held stereotype in sports that the best athletes
are the ones with the greatest single-minded focus on their task to the
exclusion of everything else. They eat, sleep and breathe their sport from the
crack of dawn deep into the night. When no one has awakened for the day, they
are up and already grinding. While others are partying, they're in a dark room
studying their craft. In soccer, one might call this being married to the game.
In basketball, some would say "ball is life." In distance running, well, there
may not be a trope associated with it. But in a sport as solitary as running
can be, you can picture the elite marathon runner cranking out 120-130 lonely
miles each week and curating a precise schedule of fueling, rest and not much
else around that.
During her first stint as a professional runner straight out of
college, Keira D'Amato believed that she too needed to approach her sport with
this level of gravity and there was no better example than her former teammate,
Alan Webb. In her words "He was the epitome of serious—even monk-like at
times…I observed him up close, found incontrovertible proof and made my computation:
to succeed, I had to be driven and muted." (pg# 101). Though she was never
quite able to "rein in her sparkle" (pg#101), taking on this mentality became a
burden that sucked the joy out of running. Ultimately, it became one of the
reasons she left the sport so early the first time and a reason she feared
going all in after her return. By the time she had returned to running it was
no longer a profession, but a refuge from the chaos of raising two toddlers
while her husband was away on military deployment. If she took it more
seriously, would running once again become a place of stress instead of a place
of peace?
Not this time! As Keira made the decision to go all in again, she
made a list of things that made running fun and prioritized those things as a
part of her training. For her, this list included allowing for flexibility in
training. She had a weekly mileage and workouts to get in but when and where
during the week she completed each session was up to her. This allowed her to
accommodate the unpredictability of her life outside of running. The list also
included racing often. Marathon builds can be long and monotonous so breaking
it up with races at shorter distances and fitting them into her program as
workouts made the grind much more enjoyable. Finally, she found fun in
community. Whether that meant buying her husband a bike so that he could ride
alongside her during her longer runs, writing jokes into her workouts on Strava
just to have a laugh with fellow runners, or reaching out to runners in the
community via Facebook to see if they'd want to join her for a workout so she
didn't have to do it alone, Keira learned how to leverage this beautifully
diverse running community to share the burden of the grind.
As a result, she actually raced better. She didn't have to choose
between joy and intensity, and neither do we. Whether you are a first-time
runner or seasoned racer, running can feel like a grind. What Keira's story
teaches us is that it doesn't always have to be in order for us to achieve our
goals. Being successful doesn't always mean being serious. Being intense
doesn't mean you can't have joy. We can work hard AND have fun. And when we
prioritize fun as a part of the process of chasing our goals, the reward is
both the journey and the outcome.
Discussion Questions:
- What is on your list of things
that make running fun for you?
- In
chapter 6, Keira encourages us to give it all we've got in our performance
because we will either achieve our goal or learn something in the loss.
What valuable lessons have you learned from a recent performance in which
you missed out on reaching your goal?
Subtitle: "Good Enough" Days
Chapters 7-9
Posted on May 20th, 2026
By Olivia Baker
There's an old saying that everyone who has grown up in sports has probably heard at some point: "Practice makes perfect." This phrase is often told to us as children to encourage us to keep going in the face of delayed gratification when practice doesn't turn into instant results on the playing field. Now as an adult athlete, I've learned that this saying is far from the truth. Perfection is an unattainable goal and even pursuing it can be more harmful than helpful. In chapter 9 of Don't Call it a Comeback, Keira D'Amato breaks down why perfection is a dangerous pursuit and how most days being "good enough" will make you great.
Firstly, there are too many factors outside our control when lining up for any given race to expect perfection. As Keira puts it, "It took me most of my running career to realize that I was hardly ever going to have perfect preparation for the perfect race under perfect conditions." (pg#195) From illnesses and small injuries that can pop up during training, to a shoe coming untied in the middle of a race to terrible weather on any given racing or training day (just to name a few), it is highly unlikely that conditions will fall into line perfectly.
However, instead of dwelling on this reality, Keira encourages us to practice for it. "As for workouts? I treat them like races." (pg#195). This is not to suggest that she runs at race pace in every practice, but that she embraces the little day-to-day adversities as opportunities to practice being "good enough" when things aren't perfect. Missed a split? That's an opportunity to learn how to adjust mid-run. Dropped a bottle? Learn how to maintain composure and stay in the zone. Stringing together "good enough" days over time as opposed to dwelling on imperfect days builds resilience and can create great days on race day.
Secondly, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that often times chasing perfection is rooted in chasing happiness. "If I could just have a perfect race to reach that one goal that has been just out of reach or that one time I've been striving after for years then all this training would be worth it and I can be satisfied." That was an oddly specific internal monologue because it's the one I've said to myself at various points earlier in my career, but I'd bet that many of us have had similar thoughts with regard to our loftiest goals. However, chasing perfection often leads to a lack of fulfillment either way (this is known in psychology as the success trap). In the best-case scenario in which we do have that "perfect day," we move the goalposts to the next goal almost immediately, and looking back, we can almost always imagine things we could have done better. In most cases, that perfect day doesn't come and we are left with a level of dissatisfaction with the time we invested in the pursuit. In Keira's words, "It's easy to fall into the trap of believing that being successful will lead to being happy. In my experience, the opposite is true: when you're happy, then you find the most success." (pg#168).
When Keira ran the American record at the Houston Marathon in 2022, things definitely were not perfect. She didn't feel relaxed or comfortable early on in the race, she dropped a bottle while trying to grab it off the table, and turned into an unexpectedly strong headwind after rounding a corner at mile 10. Yet, she still managed to be good enough to reach her goal because instead of aiming for perfection, her practice actually created permanence and that is both a warning and an encouragement. On one hand, it is a caution to make sure we are practicing the right things. Good habits get reinforced with practice, but so do bad habits. On the other hand, we should be heartened that the habits we reinforce are fully within our control. Like Keira, we can choose to practice being consistently "good enough," seeking out gratitude, and embracing adversity. This week, maybe if we do just that, when our time to shine comes we can turn "good enough" into great.
Discussion Questions:
- What habits have you formed to stay consistent in pursuit of your goals?
- In chapter 8, Keira discusses turning a year of injury setbacks in 2021 into some of her best racing in 2022. What setback have you been able to turn into a comeback?