Update 7/18/2022: On July 18, Keira D'Amato finished eighth in the World Athletics Championships marathon with a time of 2:23:34. Ethiopia’s Gotytom Gebreslase broke the championship record to win the race with a time of 2:18:11. D'Amato's fellow Team USA teammates Sara Hall and Emma Bates finished fifth and seventh, respectively.
Originally published 7/16/2022 with headline: Meet Keira D’Amato, the 37-Year-Old Realtor Who Wants to Bring Home a Marathon Medal for Team USA
Over the Fourth of July weekend, Keira D’Amato got a once in a lifetime phone call. Team USA’s top marathoner, Molly Seidel, had to drop out of the upcoming World Athletics Championships due to injury, and D’Amato was being summoned as an alternate to represent her country on the sport’s biggest stage for the first time.
But there was a catch: The 26.2-mile race was just two weeks away.
“To be able to compete wearing a Team USA jersey has been a dream of mine my entire life,” D’Amato tells SELF. “Then reality started hitting. I would have to say yes to a marathon in two weeks, which feels a little crazy. Let’s just say it was a whirlwind of emotions.”
D’Amato accepted on the spot. But she hadn’t been planning on racing another marathon until the fall, so she was nowhere near her normal training buildup for a 26.2-mile race—let alone one that will take place on July 18.
For those unfamiliar, non-professional marathon training plans generally last anywhere from 12 to 18 weeks. Those running the New York City Marathon in November, for instance, may just be starting their plans. Training for a marathon builds mileage over time, and then, typically a few weeks before the actual race, runners taper—reducing their mileage to save energy and strength for a final push on race day.
Even for the pros like D’Amato, training works in a similar fashion. Two weeks out during typical marathon prep, D’Amato would be just starting to taper her mileage in anticipation of the race. This time, however, she managed to add a single 22-mile training run as the crux of her “prep.” And that was only possible after some serious logistic juggling, which involved rearranging her family’s travel schedule to skip a planned appearance at the Peachtree Road Race in Atlanta on July 4 and canceling plans to be at a family reunion in order to get to Eugene, Oregon, for the World Athletics Championships marathon on July 18.
“It seems crazy, but I’m so excited at the same time,” she says. “I’m beyond proud to represent the country the way I know how. It’s wild, and I’m here for it.”
While D’Amato is lining up in Eugene last-minute as an alternate, she’s more than qualified to represent Team USA in the grueling sport. Over the last two years, D’Amato cemented herself as one of the greatest marathoners in US history: In January, the 37-year-old broke the American record when she won the Houston Marathon with a time of 2:19:12, just a few months after earning a fourth-place finish in Chicago Marathon. With such accomplishments, D’Amato could have been an initial selection for Worlds, but due to a last-minute change in qualifying policy from USA Track and Field, she instead became an alternate. And though her headline-making finishes seem recent, D’Amato is no stranger from the sport—she became the most decorated runner in American University’s history in college before taking a break for nearly a decade and then returning to the racing world a few years ago.
All of this makes D’Amato’s debut far from typical. But that’s actually quite fitting, since her running career hasn’t exactly followed the usual path either.
For one, she signed her first professional running contract with Nike at the age of 36—an age that’s pretty much unheard of in elite sport. D’Amato also has a day job—and will soon have two. She works as a realtor at her mother’s real estate brokerage in Fairfax, Virginia, and will open a run specialty shop in nearby Midlothian with her husband shortly. Add two kids to the mix—Tommy is 8 and Quin is 5—and it’s organized chaos. But D’Amato says she wouldn’t have her second chapter of running any other way.
A “Round Two” for Running
D’Amato’s a marathon star now—and she was a running standout in her teens and early 20s—but in between, there were several years when she wasn’t running competitively at all.
After graduating in 2006 from American University, where she was a four-time All-American and 11-time Patriot League champion, D’Amato (née Carlstrom) briefly joined a pro training group in Washington, D.C. But when a chronic ankle injury required surgery that her insurance wouldn’t cover, she figured that might be all her legs had to give. She retired from the sport, married, had two kids, and got a job.
Less than a decade later, though, she felt the itch to run again, and her running revival started in 2016. Her runs began casually at first, with a desire to get her endurance back following the birth of her children. Then in 2017, she and her husband, Anthony D’Amato, signed up for the Shamrock Marathon. D’Amato finished quicker than she had planned in just 3:14—but still 12 minutes behind Anthony. (“It was the last time I ever beat her in a race,” he told Runner’s World later.)
The race sparked her competitive drive: Eight months later, she shaved 27 minutes off her marathon time to run 2:47 at the 2017 Richmond Marathon in Virginia, just two minutes shy of qualifying for the 2020 Olympic Trials. So D’Amato started training a little more purposefully. She began working with her former pro coach, Scott Raczko, who guided her to a 2:44 at the 2018 Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota.
“I qualified for the Olympic Trials for the first time ever, and that’s what really lit the fire,” she says now.
But D’Amato’s improvement curve was just beginning. She cut a full 10 minutes from her time at the Berlin Marathon the following year, clocking 2:34, and though her name wasn’t on most people’s radar heading into the Olympic Marathon Trials, she entered that race with the ambitious goal to place top three and make the Olympic team. D’Amato ended up finishing 15th overall in what she describes as a tough day, but she still posted her best marathon time to date in that race, over 30 seconds off her Berlin time. Perhaps more importantly, her self-belief continued to fuel her forward, propelling her to an American record and World Championships berth for Team USA two short years later.
A New Perspective on the Roads
D’Amato credits a healthy balance of running, career, and family for giving her a different perspective than she had as a younger athlete.
“I think in my ‘first round,’ I felt so much pressure. I was really nervous to race, and I felt like I had so much to lose that it was almost crippling,” she says. “This time, coming in as a parent with no one expecting anything of me has been really freeing. That’s been kind of beautiful—to be free, in that sense.”
In her early 20s, D’Amato says that running was all-encompassing. Now after workouts, she shifts into mom mode or work mode. She jokes that her kids and clients don’t care whether she nailed it or bonked that day. It’s given her some necessary perspective to a sport that can understandably feel like it’s the be-all and end-all.
“Everyone has bad days,” D’Amato says. “I have a lot of bad days. I try to treat workouts like races and I take them really, really seriously. But sometimes you don’t feel it or the weather’s not good, and you just gotta learn and move on. And that’s been easier for me with kids and with the job because I have to shift into another mindset as soon as I leave the track.”
As D’Amato’s star has risen, it’s taken the full support of her family to make everything work. Her husband, she says, sacrifices his workout time so she could get hers in. And flexibility is key all around to keep everything running smoothly.
One thing that is rigid? What D’Amato calls the “golden hours” that she spends with her children: mornings before school and evenings before bedtime. She prioritizes that time above training and work.
“I really protect that time,” she says. “I look at that as ‘don’t mess with me during that time unless it’s a special circumstance.’ I don’t make a habit of eating into that time.”
After that top priority, real estate or running filters in next depending on the day, she says. “It takes a village, and I ask for a lot of help with my family and support system.”
A Push to the Future
Expectations are high going into the World Championships, both for D’Amato and Team USA in general. On the start line, D’Amato will join fellow Team USA runners Emma Bates and Sara Hall—who finished second and third, respectively, in the 2021 Chicago Marathon—and they’re hoping to keep Team USA’s marathon momentum going. At the Tokyo Olympic Games last summer, Molly Seidel captured the bronze medal, becoming only the third-ever American woman to medal in the Olympic marathon.
“Molly absolutely leveled up American distance running. I think it showed other people what’s possible,” D’Amato says. “Going into this World Championship, I think all three of us thought, If Molly can do that, maybe I can do that.”
The makeup of Team USA acknowledges another subtle but growing trend across the sport: Women can run their best marathons well into their 30s and after becoming moms. At 39, Hall also balances her training with raising four young children, and Eugene will be her first time representing the US at Worlds too.
It takes a little more work, Hall says—for instance, strength training and rehab work take on utmost importance to racing healthy—but it’s definitely possible to run better (and faster!) as you get older.
“All [you hear] growing up—and I’m sure Sara [Hall] heard this too—is, you peak in your 20s, and then it’s downhill,” D’Amato says. “I’m glad that [we] didn’t listen to naysayers who didn’t believe that people could compete in their late 30s.”
The World Championships marathon on Monday will represent at least one career peak, but D’Amato doesn’t see a finish line yet.
“I’m not slowing down. I’m getting older, but I’m still getting faster,” she says. “I’ve been on this journey to see how fast I can run, and the goals are probably going to change, maybe the distances will change, but I still feel like I have a lot of things to learn and a lot of growth.”
Does that mean a shot at Team USA for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris?
“I’m going for it, man. Definitely going for it.”
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