An ultramarathon mindset for finding adventure
Only one more gym class! That was all Katie Spotz needed to graduate from high school. The problem was that she didn’t care all that much about sports. She played sports, but wasn’t very good at them. So she was trying to find a way to avoid having to take this final gym class. She even thought about getting a note from a doctor to get out of the class.
She finally chose a class called “Walking and Running.” But she became bored because she was walking in circles around a track. So she decided to try to run a mile. She didn’t think she could, but she tried. To her surprise, she did it. She says that this first mile was the hardest because she had never run that far before and her mindset convinced her it was all but impossible.
She made another important mindset shift. She asked the question, “If I can run a mile when I thought it was impossible, what else can I do?” She started running farther and before long, she was enjoying life as a runner. For Katie the great thing about running is that it never stops being fun. There are always challenges and opportunities to do more.
Her first marathon was the Columbus Marathon. After that she knew she wanted to do something else, but she didn’t know anything about endurance. She always told herself she wanted to do an Ironman so since she already knew how to run she looked on the internet for different challenges. She had a feeling she wanted to try to get better at cycling. She found a group doing a 3300 mile bike ride across the United States. It was a fundraiser for the American Lung Association. Her grandmother had just passed away from lung disease so she knew there was no better way to do something in her memory and in her honor.
She was the youngest rider in the group. Most were a decade older than her. She and 40 other cyclists were doing 85 miles a day. They became their own clan, slept in tents in random fields and spent the day cycling and ate lots of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
A few years later she was planning to do the Race Across America, a bicycle race from Oceanside, CA, to Anapolis, MD. She was planning to enter the team competition and try to set the world record for a 2 person team. She crashed her bike on her final training ride a few days before the race. She thougth it was a pulled muscle, but she had fractured her pelvis. The doctors told her she wouldn’t be able to walk for 4 months.
She and her friend didn’t want to give up on doing it together and started looking for alternatives and got a hand bike. Katie says it was really frustrating because you’re working twice as hard to go half as fast. She was still excited to do it, but it was definitely hard not being able to do what she had spent 8 months training her body to do.
Katie was in Australia for a semester as an exchange student, and she started talking about endurance challenges with her friends. She heard about a woman who rowed across the Atlantic with her 55-year-old mother. She thought that rowing across the Atlantic sounded like the ultimate challenge. The planning took two years. And when she said goodbye to her parents, they all had tears in their eyes because they didn’t know how the adventure would end or if this might be the last time they’d see each other. Katie said that she felt that if she didn’t row across the Atlantic she would spend the rest of her life regretting her missed opportunity.
She will probably go back to run a few Ironman’s and triathlons again. She also wants to run a race again in Ohio which is her home state.
Her adventures also serve as a way for her to raise funds for an organization called H2O for Life. This organization works to bring water and sanitation to areas of the world that don’t have access to good water. They have projects all over the world: South Africa and Central America. They even have projects in the Navajo Nation here in the United States as well as Kentucky and West Virginia. There is a link to Katie’s donation page at the bottom of this page.
Bridge Questions:
Her must-have fuel: some watermelon or banana.
The weirdest thing she’s seen while running: Once at a race she was having hallucinations, and then she saw her uncle who lived in Ohio and thought it was another hallucination and he had actually traveled to see her.
His philosophy of life: You must have the courage to try things, and even if you fail you are closer to success.
Connect with Katie:
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