Having just secured a victory in the Mid-Atlantic Regional Championships in Philadelphia, Miller hopes to win a U.S. Amateur Championship this September. She also wants to achieve recognition as a top American triathlete over the next four years and to compete in the 2012 Olympics. It’s not exactly your average “to do” list, but even more impressive than the goals Miller has set for herself is the path she took to become a triathlete.
After graduating cum laude from the University of Maine in Orono in 2002 with a degree in business marketing & advertising, Miller landed a job with Arnold Worldwide in Boston, eventually becoming the manager of the Volkswagen account and helping to coin the slogan, “Drivers wanted.”
At the same time, she began running competitively in Boston, doing 5Ks, 10Ks and even half-marathons, but the idea of longer races had never appealed to her. Miller remembers asking her cousin, Molly Keehn, who was running marathons and competing in triathlons, why she would ever want to put her body through those sorts of grueling physical challenges. Keehn replied, “You’d be really good at triathlon, Mary,” but Miller — who’d never been a swimmer — was skeptical.
Then, in 2005, Keehn was in a car accident that prevented her from attending a race for which she’d already registered. The race was still a few weeks away, so Keehn transferred her registration into Miller’s name and then called her cousin to tell her what she’d done. “She said, ‘You’re doing this race, Mary,’” Miller recalls.
Miller was nervous at first, but she joined the local YMCA to “try to start swimming,” and signed up for some spin classes, too. When race day came she felt moderately prepared, and though she doggie-paddled at least a portion of the swim and cycled on a borrowed mountain bike, she managed to place second in her age group and eighth overall in a field of about 300 women. “By the time I got to the running portion of the race, I had a huge smile plastered across my face. It was an a-ha moment for me,” Miller says. “I realized that I could be really good at this.”
Encouraged, Miller competed in the Timberman Triathlon in New Hampshire that summer, winning her age group and placing 13th overall. After that race, she remembers looking at the people who had beaten her and thinking to herself, “I can do that. I can be better. What’s holding me back?” Shortly thereafter, during her three-year review, her boss asked her where she saw herself in five to 10 years, and Miller replied honestly: she wanted to be a professional athlete. Knowing that triathlon had recently become an Olympic sport and realizing that it had also become Miller’s passion, her boss asked her, “Why not go after it?” So she did.
Miller visited the Olympic Training Center in Boulder, CO, and after spending a week training with world champion triathlete Siri Lindley, she took the plunge. “Siri said, ‘If you give me the next eight years of your life, we can make you a world champion,’” Miller remembers, and she was sold. With no idea where she would live or how she would fund her training, Miller quit her job and moved west.
Now, two years into her training, Miller is ecstatic. Looking back, she realizes that she had lost her sense of herself working in the corporate world in Boston. “Since I’ve taken this huge risk,” Miller says, “I’ve learned that if you truly believe in something 100%, you can achieve anything you put your mind to.”
Though it’s been humbling to go from making $80K to making nothing (all of her funds, whether from part-time work, prize money, donations or sponsorships, go directly toward her racing and living expenses), her sense of herself, her level of fitness and her spirituality have all bloomed. She’s been writing about her journey, and her ultimate goal — to inspire others to believe in themselves and pursue their dreams — on her blog: gomary.blogspot.com. And while she’s managed to gather a few sponsors at this point, she’s still hoping that a Maine business will hear her story and jump in to help her meet her goals.
If you want a sneak peek at the future Olympian, Miller will be competing in the Zone Urban Epic Triathlon (www.urban-epic.com) Saturday right here in Portland. And if you can, you might want to get her autograph now, because in another four years, the crowds just may get too big.
— Belinda Ray