Anne Kugler

After some down time and a few injuries Anne Kugler has laced up her racing shoes and is ready to run the Trials.

March 19, 2008
Media: Anne Kugler

Anne Kugler, who was the 2005 New York Road Runners Female Runner Of The Year, ran 2:44:57 for fourth place at the Philadelphia Marathon on November 18 and qualified for the U.S. Women's Olympic Marathon Trials in Boston in April. Kugler, 39, attended Brown University. Her marathon best was a 2:43:14 in New York City in 2005. She runs for Shoe4Africa and is coached by Toby Tanser. Her 2005 victories in New York included the Grete's Gallop half-marathon in 1:15:54 and the Poland Springs Kickoff 5-Mile in 27:31, and she was 12th at the Tufts 10K For Women, a USA Championships in Boston, in 34:19. Kugler has raced sparingly in 2007, but was second in the Rye Derby (Westchester County NY) 5-mile in 28:31 and the Spring Lake (NJ) five-mile in 28:45; she'd won at Spring Lake in 27:56 in 2006. This October 7, she was sixth in the B.A.A. Half Marathon in Boston in 1:21:06, running it as "just practice pacing to see where I was at with my training and to see if I would be able to see a full marathon out."

You had a very extended period in which you were doing some running, but not being competitive at all. Did that begin right after college?
Anne Kugler:
That's right. I guess when I was a junior in college, I got stress fractures in my shins and said "I'm going to give it a rest for now." I kept on running just because I enjoyed running but I wasn't competing at all until I was about 30 and then went back to it. I just had heard about (New York) Road Runners, and I guess during all that time off I didn't even realize that you could do races or be involved in running or anything like that. I was not in that world at all.

To some extent, geography is destiny. I had taken a long break from running, but then ended up living a half a block from Central Park, where it becomes easy to run and where there are lights and you can run from early morning to late at night. At about the time you resumed running, had you just moved to the New York?
I was living out in Brooklyn at the time and there weren't such great places to run at the time. Somehow, I heard someone talking about doing a Road Runners race and I did some research about it and then before the first floor of Road Runners (their building) was renovated, I would come in from Brooklyn and leave all my stuff there and go running in the park. I seemed to get totally absorbed in it and enjoyed it and then went there all the time.

Have you moved to Manhattan now?
I have, and I live near the park and I can't imagine living anywhere else in the city anymore, just because the park is so much part my running world.

You went to Brown University? How good of a runner were you there?
Pretty mediocre, I'd say. I didn't have a particularly stellar cross country career there. After running and being pretty successful at a high school level, when I got to college, it never quite translated. When I got to Brown, I got interested in a whole bunch of different things, and so my commitment to running got mixed in with a lot of other stuff - including having fun and socializing and all those other things that happen during college.

Where did you go to high school?
At the Groton School in Massachusetts (a private prep school). It's an amazing place to run just because there are beautiful trails and it's right out in the country. I look back on it now and think about it as an idyllic place to do cross country. It always seemed like it was a really fun thing to do there, too, because there was this sort of disinterested coach who would just let us go off and we'd say "OK, we'll be back in a couple of hours" and we'd just disappear into the landscape for awhile in what is normally a very supervised and structured kind of environment (school).

Have you just done two marathons, New York City in 2005 and now Philadelphia?
No, The first one I did was the Cape Cod Marathon (3:09:23 in 2000). I did New York twice; I did it in 2003 and then in 2005.

But was New York City in 2005 the first one you were well-trained for?
Yeah. After I ran the 2003 New York City Marathon, I'd had some injuries and problems in my training getting ready for that. It was after that that I first started working with Toby (Tanser). Mostly, I thought it would be a good idea to get some coaching because I had had all these funny injuries come up and I was looking for a way to train more consistently. Working with Toby definitely took my running to a different level. Toby's workouts are hard and basically have pushed me to the edge many times. It depends on the day, but it's a combination of long intervals and tempo runs and hills, just exactly what you would need to get in excellent shape for whatever race you're going to do. It would be ideal if you didn't have any other responsibilities and weren't having to conduct a whole other regular life in New York City.

So the workouts can be very concentrated?
Very concentrated. It's always been a struggle for me to figure out how to do with that amount of training and get enough rest and stay off my feet to let my legs recover afterward.

What were your reasons for choosing the Philadelphia Marathon to get your Olympic Trials qualifier? Were you just not ready earlier in the year?
I wasn't ready earlier. In fact, I was planning to do the half-marathon there (in Philadelphia, the same day) up until about three weeks beforehand. Because my training had been off and on over the summer and I had to get a lot of physical therapy, I wasn't sure that I was ready to do a full marathon. But in those couple of months leading up to it, I had some really good long runs that felt good and I decided to go ahead and do the full marathon - but with the idea that at the 18th mile, if I wasn't on pace, I would drop out and try again in January with another marathon, trying to get a qualifying time. So I really went into it (Philadelphia) not knowing whether I was in shape enough to do that kind of marathon. But it all felt good while I was doing it, and as I hit my little pace markers, it just came like "OK it's happening. Go do it."

Were you afraid that you didn't have enough distance base behind you?
The one thing I had done was all my long runs, so I knew that endurance-wise, it was not going to be a problem for me. But I hadn't really done any speedwork or intervals or a lot of the structured training that I had done in 2005.

Ten women in Philadelphia ran below the Trials standard of 2:47, though the winner, Kristin Price, already had a qualifier. Was there a general agreement among the women that "we're all trying to run in the 2:40s here"?
Yeah, I think so. It was a little bit odd because the half-marathon and the marathon are on the same course and you start together. Until the half-marathon was done, it was a little bit unclear which race all of the women were running. But there were definitely people around. There was even a little bit of talk before the race started about who was trying to get qualifiers. So there was a nice feeling about it, that everybody was working toward the same goal instead of just trying to crush one another (laughs). There were also a few men running around me at the same pace, and that is also helpful. It's such a hard call, with the New York City Marathon, to figure out what start to do if you're in that 2:40 ballpark as a woman. You can either be up with the elites (in the separate earlier elite women's start) and be potentially by yourself the whole way or be back with everyone else and have some men around you, which seems very useful for me. In 2005, I did the regular (mass) start.

You're a vegetarian, aren't you?
AK: I guess I became a vegetarian when I was about 16. There have been different times when I've eaten some fish, but for the most part, I've been so happy to do plant-based foods for the most time. Of course I'll do fruit and vegetables, but I eat a lot of lentils and soy beans and tofu and tempeh. I love cooking. Pretty much anything that can go in the pot. I love trying different recipes. I like making Indian food and I like making Mexican food. There's a huge variety of things to eat. I guess one of the really exciting things about living in New York right now is that although the whole sort of greenmarket system has been around for a long time, it seems like in the last two years it's really expanded and we have so much access to locally grown food. The ideas about having food being linked to community and the people living around here are coming to be.

Were your reasons for becoming a vegetarian health-related or ethical ones?
Just ethics. I read Diet For A Small Planet and some other books on factory farming and how meat and dairy products were produced for our grocery stores, and that was a big turnoff and continues to be.

What do you do professionally?
I work at place called Fountain House, which is a psychiatric rehabilitation program for people with serious mental illness. I have been working with some folks on developing a wellness program there, because a lot of people who have mental illness have a lot of intermingled medical problems. A lot of the medications and even some lifestyle things that come up with mental illness make people really prone to having diabetes and obesity and hypertension and high cholesterol. Although Fountain House for years has helped try to get people back in the mainstream and working and going to school, a huge percentage of the population that we work with are having these different health-related problems. So we're trying to address that as well as the psychiatric end of things.

That is pretty taxing in terms of energy and hours, and you're on your feet a lot. You were talking about how resting is more of an issue for you.
Yeah. Right before Boston (the Marathon Trials), I'll take some time off from work so I can be off my feet and can get some more rest. But it's a really wonderful program and I feel very, very lucky to have lots of years of working there with people.

You were the New York Road Runners Athlete of the Year in 2005. Had you missed some time with injuries since then?
Yeah. It's happened so many times that it's a cycle phenomenon, where my training will build up and I'll get in good shape and have a few races and just can't keep it together. I'm very prone to getting stress fractures because I have low, low bone density. I've gotten a few of them and they just take a long time to heal. That's been a struggle. I feel like I've developed this sort of Zen relationship to my running, of nonattachment, because I just feel like every time I get it in my head that "I'm just going to run a million miles and spend all day training and do 10,000 sit-ups and all these push-ups and go for it," an injury will come up and I'll have to go back into the mode of assessing what is happening and saying "well, when this injury is over, I'll just keep trying." But it's quite humbling. It's just accepting that it's part of the process.

You're 39. In your late 30s, you're still getting better.
It's such a joy. I'm so pleased about it. It's just fun at this point. Although I put my heart into it and try my hardest and it's a lot of time and effort and things like that, it sure feels like playing. It's all good. It's not like I'm trying to have a whole career as a runner at this point, so I don't have a lot of the pressure that other people who are trying to support themselves with their running have. It's great.