by Bruce Kirschner
Ellen Hart remains one of Colorado’s greatest runners and is currently a world championship masters triathlete. She was born in 1958 in New York City and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico as the second of eight siblings. She attended the Albuquerque Academy, where she excelled in a variety of sports and graduated second in her class. Hart went to Harvard University for her undergraduate work, where she played several varsity sports and served as co-captain of the Ivy League championship soccer team. By her senior year she had turned her attention to running and made the 1980 10,000 meter U.S. Olympic team. Due to the U.S. boycott, she was unable to participate in the Games held in Moscow. Hart later competed in the inaugural 1984 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials, finishing 11th, and graduated from the University of Colorado School of Law.
Hart was a two-time winner of the Bolder Boulder 10K professional race, in 1981 (34:54) and 1983 (34:46). She has served on the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports and served as a member of the U.S. Olympic Committee. She has struggled with anorexia and bulimia for a good part of her life and co-founded the Eating Disorders Foundation in Denver. A 1996 made-for-TV movie, Dying to be Perfect: The Ellen Hart Peña Story, was based on her life. Hart has three children with her first husband, former Denver mayor Federico Peña: Nelia, Cristina and Ryan. In 2010 she married Rob Woodruff.
She has been a competitive triathlete for the last 13 years, winning 18 age group world championships, including the 2010, 2014, and 2015 Ironman World Championships in Kona, Hawaii. In 2010 Hart was USA Triathlon Master Athlete of the Year and in 2015 she was Grand Master Athlete of the Year.
Hart’s latest athletic endeavor is attempting to master the biathlon, a competitive winter sport that combines rifle shooting and cross country skiing into one race event. At the end of this interview she headed off to the Boulder Rifle Club, a local shooting range, for target practice.
Tell us what you have been up to more recently, both as a competitive athlete and in your professional life?
As a serious competitive athlete, for most of the previous decade I trained with a very clear focus. I wanted to be the very best triathlete in my age group in the world. Over the course of that time I won 18 world championships. That took a lot of time. I didn’t want to show up at a race and say, “Let’s see what happens.” I wanted to be really well prepared.
More recently I’ve been trying to recover from a torn tendon in my ankle, and a deteriorating bone in my foot. It’s the most debilitating injury I’ve ever had, and underwent surgery for it last November. So lately I’ve been learning to deal with what it means to not be a runner anymore. Running has been my best friend since I was 8 years old. It’s always been there. But I’m not closing the door yet. I could still come back.
I took up a new sport with hopefully less impact on the foot, the really cool sport of biathlon. I didn’t know how to cross country ski and didn’t know how to shoot a gun when I started. I’m obviously not going to have the same skill as people who have cross country skied their whole lives. But I’m going to do the best I can and have some fun at something new.
In my professional life I have been a Court Appointed Special Advocate since early 2018 for the Boulder County court system, where I work with children who have experienced abuse and neglect. My role is to visit with the children and their parents, foster parents, social service providers, and educators on a regular basis. I also attend court hearings and make recommendations to the court for placement of the children. This position has taken a lot of my time and energy, but it has captured my heart in a much different way than anything I have done previously in my life, including athletics.
Tell us about how you got your start in running.
I had asthma as a kid, was always indoors as a result, and couldn’t run outside. Then my family moved to New Mexico from Massachusetts in 1966 when I was in third grade. I went to a public school in Albuquerque and we had Physical Education class. My asthma had gotten better and then disappeared. I remember that feeling, “It’s almost time for PE!,” which meant we got to run all around the playground. I just loved it – how it felt to move, to run, and to be fast. My PE teacher asked me to be in track meets and then I joined the track team in middle school. In high school I ended up playing a lot of team sports, such as basketball, field hockey, and softball with my younger sister, and it was the most fun I ever had. I thought my running days were behind me. In college I focused on soccer, which I really loved. I wiggled my way back to running because I was going to school in Boston, home of the Boston Marathon. I watched it my freshman year and got goose bumps on my arms because I thought, “This is absolutely amazing.” By my junior year I said to myself, “I really want to do this.” I ran a 3:06 in my first Boston Marathon. But no one said to me, “That’s a really great time, you have potential.” Then the next year I ran track. My first real road race was the Freihofer 10K in Albany, New York during my senior year spring break and I ran 33:40 for third place in a really competitive field. Later I was the first woman from Harvard to ever score [5th place] at the collegiate national championships. Then I was invited to the 1980 Olympic 10,000 meter trials in Eugene and came in third. Even though we didn’t get to go to the Olympics [due to the U.S. boycott], it was such a thrill to run at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon with the stands filled with yelling and screaming track fans. Around 1982 I switched from an amateur to a professional runner.
What was the highlight of your competitive running career?
There were actually a lot of highlights. It was the coolest thing ever to get to do the thing I liked best and to try to achieve excellence, find my limits, and be the first at the finish line.
One highlight was the Nagoya [Japan] 20 Kilometer road race [now the Nagoya Women’s Marathon], my first international race, in February 1983. It was quite an international field, including Allison Roe, who was the world marathon record holder at the time. I won the race in a world record time (1:08:58). Getting to represent myself, my family, my team, and the United States in another country, while doing something I loved and getting paid for it, was just amazing.
But my favorite, favorite, favorite race was the first year I ran the Bolder Boulder, in 1981. I had heard about the race in advance – that it finished at a stadium and was fun. It was a tough field with Anne Audain and Jacqueline Gareau that year. But I was in the lead at 6 miles when I climbed up the ramp [at Folsom Field] and then down that ramp into the stadium. I was just absolutely awestruck. The stadium was at least half full of people. It was like an Olympic finish and the most exciting thing that I had ever experienced. I was so grateful to have won. I never wanted to leave Boulder.
What prompted you to transition from road racing to triathlons?
Injuries. When I was dating Rob, now my husband, he said “Why are you getting injured all the time?” He gave me a bike for my 47th birthday, which was so sweet. Then he said, “Maybe you won’t be injured as much and maybe we could do this together.” Sure enough, both of those things were true. But then I wanted to compete…it was just my hard wiring of always wanting to be competitive. So I started biking and swimming. In 2006 I decided to sign up for my first triathlon, the Boulder Peak Triathlon. I literally limped my way through it, but it was really fun. I qualified for nationals and did it the next year, finishing 5th, which got me a spot on the U.S. team for the World Championships in Hamburg and for the next World Championships in Vancouver in 2008. But my true love is still running, there’s just nothing that compares to it. Triathlons are great, but running is the best.
Who do you consider to be your greatest running and triathlon heroes?
I really don’t have any running heroes. My triathlon hero is Sister Madonna Buder, a Catholic nun in her late 80s. She’s amazing in terms of what she has done. Just her background, deciding in her 50s she’s going to do a triathlon. Not just any triathlon, but the Ironman Triathlon! I saw her on a TV broadcast of the Ironman and my mouth was agape. I was in total awe. Then later I got to meet her various times at different national and world championship events. I told her that there was something specific she said that inspired me. She was interviewed by Runner’s World magazine and their last question was something like, “Sister, what do you tell people when they are skeptical about you being a Catholic nun and going out and doing all these athletic things?” She responded, “I don’t have to apologize for the gifts that God has given me. I would only have to apologize for not using them.”
I found my participation in triathlon rather selfish because I spend a lot of time training. Every minute and hour I spent training I wasn’t doing something that could benefit other people in some more concrete way. As it turned out, my participation in triathlon sport gave me a platform to talk about other issues and hopefully make a difference in the lives of others, such as the difficulty of eating disorders and how important it is to get help. I’ve had confirmation of that. I was at a world championship and a woman came up to me and she said, “You don’t know me, but I know you. I was 75 pounds and hooked up to machines. But I knew about you and you were an athlete who [had the same affliction and] got healthy. You’ve been my inspiration.” I got tears in my eyes. I was so happy that I’d had the opportunity to give hope to someone else.
If you could re-live your running career, what (if anything) would you do differently?
I would have had a running career without my eating disorder because that just took so much from me physically, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, and every other way. I remember showing up at the Olympic Trials and saying to myself, “I’m up there, I have a shot at this.” But I had wanted to have 6 months where I was free of this disease [anorexia and bulimia]. I had to continually set new deadlines for myself, “If I could just be okay for a month, well maybe a week, or even a day, I would be so much stronger, so much more confident.” When I was training without proper nutrition my workouts were not what they could have been. When racing, I did not have the confidence I should have had. That makes a difference at the Olympic Trials.
So if I could do it again, I would have made all of that not happen. When I had my eating disorder there was nobody talking about it, there was no Internet, you couldn’t find out anything about it, and there were no treatment centers, so it was a very lonely, isolated, and shameful kind of personal experience.
In terms of your lessons from personal experience and coaching practice, what should be the key components of the serious runner’s training program?
Consistency and recovery, although they are not the jazziest things to talk about.
By consistency, I mean knowing that you’re going to do five or six workouts a week and they go into your calendar and they are just as important as anything else, including reading a book, going shopping, meeting up with your boyfriend, or even your job. You have to make sacrifices because you can’t get to do everything in your life, there are just not enough hours in the day. Your long-term goals are also just as important as the short-term goals.
In terms of recovery, the older you get and the more stress that has accumulated in your body, the more recovery you need. It feels good to put in a really solid week of training, so then you say, “Let’s do another one!” After a few months of this, you can barely get your legs to swing over the side of the bed in the morning. Regarding sleep, I know that there are not always enough hours in the day, but so many good things happen to you when you sleep in terms of resting, rebuilding, recovering, and all those things.
What would you tell serious runners about running their best race, including proper mental frame and best racing strategies?
Let’s assume that you trained properly, did all the difficult building up work, had periods of recovery and a tapering, and now it’s race day. Race day is the best, because now you get to dance on the stage, express yourself in movement, and see what’s there. No one else does this for you. It doesn’t matter how privileged a life you’ve had or, on the other hand, how many disadvantages you’ve come through in your life. When it comes to race day, it’s really up to you. It’s inside of you to execute and to decide how you are going to run that race…with sportspersonship, without cheating, with joy, without complaining, and enjoying the camaraderie of your friends and competitors. So, instead of thinking to yourself, “This is going to be really painful and might be a terrible experience,” you realize that this is a day to celebrate being active, healthy, alive, and having the ability to train for something like this. So you pay your entry fee, show up, and have that day to enjoy life and the sport that you love. That’s my mental framework.
There are older runners who are less competitive, if at all. They just want to keep running long-term. Can you offer any advice to help them extend their running lives?
Run on softer surfaces. This includes the treadmill, if you can stand that. I also believe bodywork is important if you have the time and you can afford it. Foam rolling and massage is really good. There’s also acupuncture, dry needling, rolfing, and Feldenkrais – all of which I believe are valuable. It’s finding the specific things that work to make you feel better.
Cross training is also important. For example, swimming is obviously aerobic, works other muscle groups, and is non-weight bearing. It doesn’t even matter if you are any good at it. When I’m injured I do deep water running and the AlterG [anti-gravity treadmill]. I’m hoping cross country skiing will also be great. Even though I love warm weather, I can take advantage of Colorado and its beautiful mountain winters.
Has your attitude toward running and being a competitive athlete changed over the years?
I used to believe I had to go as hard as I possibly could all the time and have to get a personal record in every single event…to keep getting better and have a noticeable upward trajectory all the time. That’s just not realistic. On the other hand, you should never have any reason to quit running, or running/walking. It’s one of the most convenient, accessible forms of exercise to integrate into your life. You can get a really good workout in 20 minutes going out your front door with a pair of shoes and you don’t need all sorts of equipment. There’s just no reason to have to quit, short of disabling injury, just because you might be getting slower.
What was it like being an inductee of the Colorado Running Hall of Fame in 2008?
I think the Hall of Fame had started only a year or two before I was inducted. To move here, to be from Colorado now, to know that this was my home, that this was where I wanted to do my running, to have my life here and to be recognized for it was so gratifying, heartwarming, spectacular, so appreciated, so wonderful! I loved every minute of it. I can still remember that night – what I wore and the people that were there. When you’re a kid and you really want to be good at something someday and you don’t know if you ever will be, and then to have them say, “We really think you are,” is very special. It was an amazing honor, deeply appreciated.