Keira D’Amato had already zipped through eight miles on the quiet streets of Provo, Utah, by the time she arrived at Brigham Young University’s track on a recent weekday morning. The sun was rising over the Wasatch Mountains, which was foreboding in a way. The temperature would soon climb into the 90s, and Ms. D’Amato’s workout was about to get a whole lot tougher.
She was genuinely thrilled.
“You came for a good day!” she told a couple of guests as she sipped from a water bottle.
Ms. D’Amato, who will turn 41 in October, is something of a phenomenon. After an injury-marred stint as a professional runner following college, she left the sport behind in 2008, when she was only 23. And even when she laced up her sneakers about eight years later as a self-described “hobby jogger,” she had no illusions about her future. She just wanted to have fun.
But then something wild happened: She became one of the best marathoners in the world.
She was working as a realtor and raising two children in Richmond, Va., when, at age 37, she won the 2022 Houston Marathon in 2 hours 19 minutes 12 seconds, breaking the American record for the women’s marathon by 24 seconds. She went on to set a national record for the women’s half marathon in 2023.
Ms. D’Amato details her unconventional path in “Don’t Call It a Comeback: What Happened When I Stopped Chasing PRs, and Started Chasing Happiness,” a memoir that she co-wrote with the journalist Evelyn Spence that will be released on Tuesday. In many ways, she seems more determined than ever.
Last year, she moved with her family to Park City, Utah, so that she could join a high-performance team coached by Ed Eyestone, a former Olympic marathoner. Ms. D’Amato sold two houses earlier this year — “I can’t help myself,” she said — but has since taken a sabbatical from real estate so that she can see where running leads her. The sport has already taken her farther than she could have imagined.
“I want to explore everything in running,” she said, “and just see what it’s all about.”
After her eight-mile run, Ms. D’Amato joined several teammates at the Brigham Young track for the real work of the morning: a series of mile repeats, with a bit of recovery time between each. Mr. Eyestone calls them “fatigue miles.” After Ms. D’Amato cruised the first one in less than five minutes, her coach asked her a question.
“You feeling that eight-miler?” Mr. Eyestone asked.
Ms. D’Amato nodded.
“That’s the whole point,” Mr. Eyestone said. “We get tired, and then we run fast.”
Finding Joy
Nine years ago, Ms. D’Amato was six weeks postpartum with her second child and more than 50 pounds overweight when she set a modest goal of trying to jog for 3 minutes. She made it 90 seconds, then cried.
Rather than give up, Ms. D’Amato began to lean on her daily jogs as breaks from the demands of marriage and motherhood. She was doing something for herself. She entered a local 5K race and was thrilled when she finished in just over 25 minutes.
At the time, the idea of becoming anything more than a recreational runner was not a part of the plan. But she kept running and improving (slowly, then rapidly), and after she finished fourth at the Richmond Marathon in 2017, it dawned on her that perhaps she was capable of more.
The route to setting national records was not a straight line. Ms. D’Amato coped with injuries and setbacks. But she had pledged to herself that running would remain “joyful,” and setting small goals made a big difference. So did incentives: She ended each long run with a root beer float.
Now, at an age when many athletes are past retirement, Ms. D’Amato has a Nike sponsorship and, she hopes, much more racing ahead of her, starting with the Copenhagen Half Marathon next Sunday and the Valencia Marathon in Spain in December. She also continues to recalibrate her goals. She wants, for example, to reclaim her American records, which now belong to other runners.
“Who knows if I’m capable of it,” she said last month.
Mr. Eyestone, 64, recalled confronting his own athletic mortality when he was in his late 30s. He was still a competitive runner, but he found that he was beginning to lose his drive. All those years of hard training had taken a physical toll, and he wanted to get into coaching.
For Ms. D’Amato, the calculus is different. Because she went a long stretch of her adult life without running, perhaps she was able to sidestep some of the sport’s more corrosive effects. As Mr. Eyestone put it: “It’s not the age, it’s the mileage.”
Ms. D’Amato likened her experience to a scene from the movie “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” in which one of the characters tries to take miles off the odometer of his father’s Ferrari by running it in reverse — except in Ms. D’Amato’s case, the maneuver worked.
In hindsight, she said, the benefits of her hiatus were not merely physical. For many young pros, the sport is their livelihood, and that means that the pressure to perform can be enormous. When Ms. D’Amato returned to running, she already had a career that was separate from running. She also was married with two young children. She knew, in other words, that there were many ways to feel fulfilled that didn’t involve landing on the medal podium at marathons and road races.
“That’s why I felt like a wild card, because I wasn’t afraid to lose,” she said. “I could go into a race and I could totally go big and fail — or not fail — but it can be dangerous to race against someone who’s a little crazy like that, right? Other runners would look at me like, ‘What is she going to do?’”
Helping Others
After her track workout last month, Ms. D’Amato joined her teammates in Brigham Young’s weight room, where she made a beeline to “the best water fountain in the world,” as she described it. (“It’s so cold! It’s so good!”) She greeted Braden Goimarac, a strength and conditioning coach, by presenting him with a thimble-size dog figurine. (“He collects knickknacks.”) And then she plowed her shoulders into a weighted sled.
It quickly becomes clear to anyone meeting Ms. D’Amato that she exists on a caffeinated plane foreign to most people. Emily Venters, a 26-year-old teammate who is training for her first marathon, described Ms. D’Amato as part-mentor, part-motivational speaker.
“There have been some days when I’ve had tough workouts and I’ll cry and be like, ‘I don’t know if I can run the marathon!’” Ms. Venters said. “And she reminds me that I can do it, that I can do hard things, that this is what it’s supposed to feel like.”
Later, after stopping for an açaí bowl (“Aren’t they the best?”), Ms. D’Amato arrived for her weekly appointment with Jake Carluccio, a massage therapist who works with athletes. Mr. Carluccio asked her if there were specific areas that she wanted him to address.
“Oh, everywhere,” she said as she settled in for an hour of agony. “I do all this running, and then this breaks me.”
Mr. Carluccio dug his elbow into Ms. D’Amato’s glute.
“Oh, nooo,” she moaned. “Oh, mannn.”
It was the sort of pain that Ms. D’Amato knew was necessary. She often runs more than 100 miles a week, and she left Mr. Carluccio’s table feeling refreshed as she made the 45-mile drive home to Park City so that she could retrieve her children from their second day of school. Her son, Thomas, is 10, and her daughter, Quin, is 9. Their big takeaway on their mom’s memoir is that they are in it.
“I’m so famous!” Quin said.
When Ms. D’Amato and Ms. Spence began working together in 2022, neither knew how the book would end. At the time, Ms. D’Amato was harboring a dream scenario for the final chapter: a top-three finish at the 2024 U.S. Olympic marathon trials and an appearance in Paris as a member of Team USA.
It turned out to be a dream unrealized. At the trials, Ms. D’Amato began seeing stars at around Mile 16 and was forced to drop out as she succumbed to the early stages of heatstroke.
Ms. D’Amato populates the book with lessons learned from her own experiences — about being open to opportunities, celebrating small wins, embracing failure. Real life is full of loose ends, and that message was underscored for Ms. D’Amato when, a few months after she finished writing the book, her marriage ended.
“I don’t think anyone’s path is perfect or rosy,, and I don’t think I’m anything special,” she said. “But maybe I’ve figured out some special things that can help other people.”
It is especially rewarding, Ms. D’Amato said, when other women approach her at races to tell her that have recalibrated their own goals and dreams because of her example.
“I’ve reached heights that are higher than I ever thought I could reach,” she said, “so let’s just see how far I can keep going.”
Scott Cacciola writes features and profiles of people in the worlds of sports and entertainment for the Styles section of The Times.
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