I have little to nothing to say about the divorce. It’s too personal for me to get into and I think it’s bad taste to gossip about it on an online message board. A divorce is usually tough for everyone involved.
However, as a central Virginian, I must say, emphatically, that this NYT story falls flat. A huge part of what made Keira D’Amato’s story cool was that she lived and trained in Richmond, Virginia. My beloved Richmond is a neat running town but it is no Provo or Park City or Boulder or Flagstaff. Richmond is not even the best place to train in Virginia. But we loved that Keira was doing big things as a resident of the river city and seemingly having a blast. She was unquestionably a hometown hero.
And then somewhere along the line, I think Keira lost the thread she was spinning her story with and jumped onto a new one, a thread of a completely different color on the loom of life so to speak. I saw the magic of Keira’s story as not needing to have everything optimized for performance (ex moving to altitude and training with a Nike group under Ed Eyestone), and yet, she was having so much fun being the regular mom with a superpower that she felt like she could compete with anybody. She was a foil to the neurotic running-is-my-life people who have a way of polluting this sport like it’s the 1960s Cuyahoga. Keira somehow made suburban motherhood feel like counterculture…she was rad.
I get it, there’s only one life and you’ve gotta go for sh*t if you want it. I guess I’m just wondering if I had this all gummed up in my head thematically.