Keira D'Amato is Chasing Happiness

The American marathon record holder once aimed for success at the expense of joy. Now she's focusing on fun-and running faster than ever.

- By Evelyn Spence

It's an early spring Saturday afternoon in Midlothian, Virginia, and in a backyard buzzing with activity-kids on a zipline, flying baseballs, careening scooters-a race is afoot. The challenger: a freckled 7-year-old boy, wearing the head-to-toe maroon of Virginia Tech. Accepting that challenge: a mom in black running tights, long blond hair pulled into a loose bun, smile incandescent. At the boy's call, they scrabble down the wooden stairs of the back porch, dodge family members, and sprint up the driveway. There's a few seconds of silence as the pair disappears around the front of the house, and then the boy rounds the corner again, yelling, I beat Aunt Kiki running! I beat Aunt Kiki running! The loser pretends to breathe hard, hands on knees, then protests teasingly, Hey, I wasn't running the tangents! But Keira D'Amato doesn't seem too disappointed. After all, just three months prior, at age 37, she set a new American record for the marathon in Houston, besting a time that had stood since 2006.

D'Amato's success has been riveting to watch, in part because it seemed to come out of nowhere. She had only resumed running competitively in 2017 following a seven-year hiatus. In the interim, she adopted the life of a typical suburbanite: career, marriage, kids. And then, around the time most people are starting to reminisce about their glory days, D'Amato started living them. Really living them. She found more success in five short years than most elite runners do in an uninterrupted lifetime of training.