I knew that, like my fitness, my grades wouldn’t magically improve on their own. It was going to take hard work. I visited my professors outside of class nearly every day to review the questions I got wrong on a test or how I could improve an essay. And slowly, over time, I learned how to be an Ivy League student. I learned how to focus during long lectures and how to write an analytical essay. I feel grateful that I had the intellectual capacity to teach myself these things, but I certainly would have failed out of Dartmouth without an incredible amount of hard work. The same principle held true with my running: My athletic talent was there, but it needed to be molded by hard work.
Those first few semesters in college were a long trudge toward getting my fitness back. In time, six-mile runs became ten-mile runs, and six hours of sleep became nine. I stopped failing tests, so garlic-knot pizzas phased out of my regular routine. I stopped going to bars to drown my sorrows after tough races, both because I now had younger teammates looking up to my example and because I learned that one night of heavy drinking would set me back about two weeks’ worth of training. Since I valued my time and was becoming more serious about my running, I became much pickier about when I chose to drink. My improv group, The Dog Day Players, had late-night shows a few times a week at various frat and sorority houses, and I learned to hang out with non-running friends after the shows without drinking. Did you know if you just carry around a cup, even if it’s only filled with water, nobody will ask why you aren’t drinking? I came to really enjoy having a well-rounded college experience on my own terms.
I also learned more about nutrition. In my dad’s house, food was just food. He never used words like healthy or unhealthy, just like he never used words like pretty or ugly, which I appreciate deeply. I didn’t have harmful complexes about food, for which I am very grateful, but I also didn’t have basic knowledge of how to fuel properly.
Food can be a sensitive subject for female distance runners, harkening back to the pressure that most girls face to stay thin even as their bodies are desperately trying to develop and mature. At Dartmouth, some girls on my team made a practice of limiting their portions by only eating from the palm-sized side-dish bowls in our cafeteria, never actual plates. When I became captain, I instituted a rule that you had to eat proper portions off a real plate. At UO, there was a teammate who ate all her meals with chopsticks, one grain of brown rice at a time. Every team at every school has cases like this (my friend at Brown reported that her coach had a “no booze, no boys, no bagels” policy), and I don’t know exactly what the right answer is for athletes who struggle with weight. It’s true that for each person, there is an optimal “race weight range”—but I believe that for female runners especially, coaches and athletes should take more factors than just weight into account. Longevity and durability should be part of the conversation as well. And it should be a conversation; we should not be silent about food.
In the meantime, while I was not fit enough to contribute to the team in a competitive sense, I contributed in other ways. When the traveling squad went to New York City for the Ivy League Cross Country Championships, I found my own transportation to the race and went in costume to cheer them on. My costume was a full snakeskin bodysuit and I cheered at the top of a big hill alongside a boy from Brown dressed as the Burger King, mask and all. In this way, even when I was not fit enough to score a team point, I could still find ways to matter by staying engaged, leaning in, and contributing any way I knew how. It built my self-worth and gave me a purpose every day while my body caught up. It takes integrity, determination, humility, and, most of all, a sense of humor to be the team mascot when just a few years earlier I would have easily beaten any of these girls. I kept showing up and I’m proud of how I handled myself during those few years. Yes, years. It wasn’t until the winter of my junior year that I contributed my first team point.
In my senior year, I competed in an NCAA Track and Field Championship for the first time. By then, the preternaturally talented prepubescent Alexi who placed high in state championship meets as a tween was long gone. The new Alexi was made from endless work, discipline, patience, and pain (and lots of sleep). Stepping up to the start line for the first leg of the distance medley relay at the 2012 NCAA Indoor Championships felt like something I had fought for and earned. I even got matching tattoos with my relay teammates because we were so proud. We had set a lofty goal, worked hard, and made it happen.
When I became a professional runner, my first coach paired me with Sally Kipyego, an Olympic silver medalist, as a training partner. For that entire season, I would either shit my pants, throw up, or otherwise have to stop at some point during every single workout. We had two workouts per week and I never finished one all the way through, and that was by design. I was in a program where I was meant to keep up with my training partner until my body gave out, and then the workout was done for me. I ran twice a day almost every day, more than a hundred miles total a week, plus we lifted weights and had drill sessions at least two to three times per week. It was an unprecedented level of athletic commitment and exertion.
I am grateful that I had the opportunity to safely and naturally grow a body durable enough to withstand that level of effort. I’m certain that if I had never gone through puberty and menstruated normally, my body would have broken down after just a few workouts in the professional world.
I’m also grateful that I had the natural talent somewhere inside me to develop into a world-class runner, as President Obama said. I appreciate that someone else might have worked just as hard as me without achieving the same results. But if talent gave me a powerful engine, then hard work is my fuel. An engine is useless without the fuel.
I don’t know if being a good athlete comes down to being born gifted or working hard. We can’t know; it is always some combination of the two. I would also contend that a third factor, health, is an equally important ingredient for athletic success. I hope that in the future, new generations of female runners will come of age in an environment that sets them up for long-term durability. Because no matter how powerful the engine and how potent the fuel, the whole thing is useless if it burns out too soon.
Braveys, the biggest takeaway is this: We can’t control the engine we’re given. But how we treat our engine is entirely up to us. It will take us to the moon if we let it.
chasing a dream is like building a sandcastle.
every grain of sand is important, even if you can’t see them all.
MY PAL, PAIN
To qualify for the Olympics, it is important to become a master of pain. At the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, I ran the 10,000 meters—twenty-five laps, the longest race on the track. It’s a grueling combination of endurance running and speed. It’s a test of pain tolerance and mental toughness as much as of athletic ability.
Throughout nearly the past decade of serious running, I’ve come to trust that I can exert myself to my absolute physical limit, and I will (most likely) not die. Deep down, I knew the difference between athletic pain, which is good pain, and other kinds of pain, bad pain. Whatever pain I felt while I was wearing running shoes could never be as bad as the things I had seen my mom do. Bad pain was scary; good pain just hurt.