The night before my last marathon, my boss sent me an email. It ended with: "Using only your heart, mind, and soul, you are responsible for seeing how fast you can get your body to travel 26.2. No excuses. No other people. Just you."
I cried when I read it. Not because it was motivational, but because it named exactly why running matters to me. Running is the one place where there is no luck, no shortcuts, and no one else to blame. The result is yours alone.
I was never supposed to be a runner. A podiatrist once told me my arches/build weren't built for it. My ex said to give up on running the Boston marathon if I didn't get it on my third try. My knees and hereditary arthritis constantly tell me the same thing. And yet, I kept showing up. 2 a.m. runs before flights, 20-mile long runs in ninety-degree heat, countless toenails lost.
I qualified for Boston on my first try but it wasn't enough to officially get in. I tried again, pushed hard. Too hard. I got injured, put a band aid on it via steroid shots, and hobbled through a race I knew didn't reflect the nearly 980 miles I'd logged that summer. Instead of quitting, I found a "redemption" marathon sixteen weeks out. Six weeks to heal, ten to train. That race, I didn't just finish. I set a personal best and placed third overall female. It's still one of my proudest and favorite moments.
Running taught me that progress is measurable and personal. You set a time, a distance, a pace then see if you can meet it. If you fail, the failure is yours. If you succeed, the success is too. It's not just about talent. It's about months of thankless, quiet, grueling consistency.
This sense of control is not something I grew up with. My childhood was defined by the opposite: poverty, instability, fear of losing my family to deportation, addiction in my household. I couldn't control any of it. I felt ashamed that it all made me feel "behind" in life. Running was the first place I found proof that what I put in could change what I got out. Mile by mile, it gave me back a sense of agency.
I've faced the same doubts at work. On my first big IP case, the client gave us a model. My coworker with two econ degrees was handed the analysis. I wasn't. Being shut out at the time felt like confirmation of the fear I'd carried since joining without an econ degree—I wasn't smart or "good enough."
Fast forward to my most recent IP case. No client model this time. No obvious inputs. Just a mess of documents and a pressing deadline. I built a dynamic patient model from scratch and ultimately calculated $62 million in lost profits for our client. The resilience I've learned from running and my personal life translates directly. Show up, keep going, push through doubt until the work holds.
Running has also changed how I think about ceilings. Early in training, I thought running a seven-minute mile for a marathon was impossible. Now I've done it. That shift matters. It taught me that ceilings exist until you break them, and then they don't. The same goes for life: QuestBridge, grad school, leadership roles—I once thought all of them were beyond me. Running has helped me prove otherwise.
I care about running beyond reason. Each time I think I'm too broken—by family, injury, or doubt—I turn to running. It's given me the discipline to believe in possibility. It showed me that effort compounds, that setbacks aren't permanent, and that legacies are built a mile at a time. I don't know yet what company or project will define my career, but I do know how I'll approach it: with the same heart, mind, and soul I've put into every race. No excuses. No other people. Just me.