- Angela Naeth
Part 1 The Weight and the First Spark
I still remember the first time I really ran in fourth grade. It was called the Milk Run. We were let out and told to run around the perimeter of the schoolyard, and at the end we’d get chocolate milk. It was March, the grounds still had frost to them, winter still showing its hold to the area. I grew up in a rural area in Northern British Columbia - Prince George, a workers town of millwork, and forestry. Chilled in shorts, I went out on a mad dash as fast as I could. I was the only one who did, and found myself completely alone, running around the field, determined and free, feeling the wind and my body move like they were made for each other. By the time I got to the finish, some students were still being told to start.
It was spiritual for me before I even had that word; a feeling of being completely free in my own body. I didn’t think about anything, didn’t have to try, didn’t have to measure. I just ran. That first spark has stayed with me my whole life: that sense that when I run, I meet the truest version of myself.
Growing up, I pressured myself a lot. I was a perfectionist, and it wasn’t something anyone else demanded. It came from inside. School came easily; I never really had to try. But the expectations I held for myself were high, and maybe I thought that was what made me worthy of praise, or of belonging.
Nietzsche would later describe how we humans sometimes take pride in carrying the heaviest load, how the spirit first becomes the camel, kneeling down to be burdened. I didn’t know that then, but I lived it. I was the camel, taking on everything: responsibility, approval, high standards -thinking that strength meant carrying it all without complaint.
I question this at times, why did I do this? Was it because I was the middle child of three? I could say perhaps that partly played a role, but I can’t explain it other than I just lived it. I don’t remember my childhood any other way. I wanted high standards.
Nietzsche wrote about the transformation of the spirit in three stages: first the camel, who kneels to accept every burden; then the lion, who learns to say no to all the “Thou Shalts” that confine it; and finally the child, who creates and plays freely again. Those ideas resonated deeply with me, not as philosophy, but as lived experience. I’ve carried all three of those spirits at different times, sometimes all at once, often cycling through them without even realizing it.
Running was both my escape and my proving ground. I loved it deeply, but I also used it to measure myself, to see how far I could go, how much I could take. But even there, I measured myself against standards: times, splits, expectations when I started running competitively and in races with others my age. I can’t explain it, but it was a different pressure -it was instinctive, but also demanding. I could lose myself in it completely and still come away asking if I’d done enough.
Track and field came into my life in sixth grade. It felt like a calling from the start: the structure, the discipline, the clear connection between effort and growth. I loved how running gave me that sense of purpose. But it was also where I first learned how easily joy and pressure can become tangled.
By the time I was in junior high, I had already set high standards for myself. I was an A-student (top of my class) and because of this, I got away with a lot. I’d skip classes sometimes even mid-lesson, claiming I had a project to do as class president, and the teachers believed I was just busy and didn't question me. The truth was, I was already learning how to balance appearances with the internal pressure to perform.
Around fourteen, I got injured for the first time: a stress fracture in my tibia. At the time, I thought running in race flats for two hours was a great way to get fit. It was a lesson in consequences, but I didn’t see it that way yet. That injury introduced me to control in a new form: food. I started to see food as something I could master when everything else felt uncertain. Puberty, perfectionism, pressure -it was all colliding.
I worked as a lifeguard and swim instructor, twenty hours a week through high school. I liked earning my own money and going by my own rhythm, even when it didn’t make sense to anyone else. I grew up in a clean, orderly house, and part of me rebelled just to create some chaos, maybe to feel alive in a world everywhere that seemed to prize order.
I started challenging authority more in those years, like most teenagers do. But for me, it wasn’t about breaking rules; it was about resisting conformity. I hated being told I had to do something. It drained all my creativity and life vigor. That quiet defiance was probably the beginning of what Nietzsche called the lion: the spirit that learns to say no.
What has always held me hostage, though, isn’t rebellion. It’s the fear of not being enough -not in others’ eyes, but in my own. I’ve always felt that tension between wanting to find peace and wanting to see what’s possible. It’s not that I fear failure; it’s that I sometimes forget to listen to the part of me that knows laughter and lightness. The child, the final transformation Nietzsche wrote about, has often felt distant, but I think I’ve been searching for her all along.
By the time I got to college, that search had turned into a struggle. My eating disorder deepened. It wasn’t about vanity (perhaps a little -my body was changing!), but it was very much about control. About trying to shape a world that felt overwhelming into something I could master. It grew quietly alongside my achievements, hiding under praise. I was excelling and eroding at the same time.
The breaking point came in college. I received a full-ride scholarship into a Division 1 NCAA school in the USA. I was competing in track and running on fumes, both physically and emotionally. My ferritin levels dropped so low—a mere 4—that I could barely walk up the stairs to my dorm. I was in the middle of my first-year finals, completely exhausted, and yet still unwilling to stop. Around that same time, I had the opportunity to run at the Stanford Invitational, something I’d dreamed of as a kid. But I could barely move. I ran slower than I had in ninth grade. I remember finishing that 800m race and feeling completely detached from the girl who had once loved to run free around a schoolyard. Somewhere along the way, I’d lost her.
In that dark space, Nietzsche’s words found me years later like a mirror. The camel that once carried every expectation had finally collapsed. And in that collapse, I began to sense the stirring of the lion, the part of me that was tired of saying yes to everything that hurt.
It didn’t happen overnight. I was lost in college, but in that lostness, I found something that would quietly change my life: the bike. I had a bike throughout my childhood years, always loved it but never saw it as more than a fun activity with friends. I used it to get to track practice when I didn’t have a car. Before I left college, I wanted a bike and saw my first ever triathlon bike in our local shop. I had no idea what it was, but I loved it. I took all the money I had saved from lifeguarding and bought the $6,000 bike. I took it to college, where it sat. As a track athlete, I simply didn’t have time to ride it. But something in it always had a pull.
I eventually got through my first year and sold that bike, hardly using it. I did end up buying a road bike. A gal on my track team rode bikes and yes, after another stress fracture I saw that the bike could be an outlet for me for cross training.
At first, it was just a way to move, to get away from campus and from my own mind. I’d ride until the noise in my head turned into wind. It was freedom again, the way running used to be. Cycling became my secret language, a way to breathe without rules or judgment. It became my solace, my rebellion, my reminder that effort could still feel like joy.
I met a group of guys that rode (I can’t quite remember how), but I started riding with them on weekends. I experienced my first bonk, and moments of riding away from them uphill. I was praised at how well I could ride, but I simply just loved the feel of it more than anything else.
I also started swimming during that time -nothing serious, but I swam a bit when I was a lifeguard and swim instructor and wanted to find ways to stay fit amongst the injuries and feeling subpar doing track. The water was forgiving in a way the track never was. Swimming felt like erasing lines, like finding space again. I didn’t realize it then, but this was the slow emergence of the child -the spirit that creates, that plays, that finds meaning again after struggle.
By the time I graduated, I was drained but awake. I’d been through something that stripped me down to the core. I didn’t have answers, but I had curiosity. And that curiosity would become the quiet engine for everything that followed.
Part 2 — The Lion’s Road
After university, I stepped into the world I thought I was supposed to enter. I had earned my Master’s in Physical Therapy, found a stable job, and was doing what people my age were expected to do. It looked right on paper, but the pulse underneath it was faint. I was living with my high school boyfriend, he soon became my fiancé, and from the outside, I had everything lined up. The perfect white picket fence was waiting. Marriage, kids, the next chapter. But inside, something in me was stirring.
I started riding more. The bike had carried me through the hardest parts of college, and it kept pulling me forward. I’d ride after work, on weekends, whenever I could steal an hour of daylight. It wasn’t about racing; it was about breathing, about remembering what it felt like to be alive in my own body again.
At that time, I was swimming more, too. Between the three sports, I kept hearing people talk about triathlon. The idea intrigued me. I started reading about it and wondered what it would feel like to bring all of that together—swim, bike, run.
One night I came across a small indoor triathlon in rural Alberta. My mom offered to come, and we drove five and a half hours through the mountains and across the province, just the two of us and the unknown ahead. I had borrowed gear, barely knew what transitions were, and had no idea what I was doing. The swim was messy, the bike was pure fun, and the run wound through the woods where I found myself grinning ear to ear. I crossed the line exhausted and smiling, and someone told me I had won. I laughed out loud. It wasn’t about winning, it was that the joy had come back.
That race was the first time in years I felt completely alive.
I went back to work on Monday, but I couldn’t shake the echo of that feeling. I kept thinking, What was that? Not How do I win more races?—just What did that wake up in me?
So I followed it.
I found a coach online, started training seriously, and began entering local cycling and triathlon races. Before long, I went to a triathlon camp in California, a leap that felt both terrifying and inevitable. I fell completely in love with it: the community, the training, the way each day demanded something new of me. It was the first time in my adult life that I felt fully aligned with something.
Back home, that feeling only grew stronger. The life I was building: the job, the engagement, the stability, felt smaller by the day. I knew I couldn’t ignore what was calling me, even if I couldn’t explain it. When I was offered an opportunity to work with a coach in the United States, I couldn’t say no. I didn’t overthink it; I just knew I had to see what this pull was about. Curiosity drove me more than ambition.
So I left Canada with $2,000 in my bank account, one bike, a small suitcase, and no clear plan, just a quiet certainty that I’d regret not chasing this. Looking back, that was the lion in me: the part that Nietzsche described as learning to say I will.
Those early years were messy, beautiful chaos. Every coach, every camp, every mistake taught me something. Training became my way of thinking through life. Long rides turned into conversations with myself. Races became experiments in honesty. I was beginning to understand that endurance wasn’t about proving strength; it was about staying open in discomfort, meeting yourself again and again.
But it wasn’t easy. I lived meagerly, scraping by, learning to make do with very little. I found myself in an emotionally abusive relationship: a kind of darkness that stripped me down and forced me to rebuild from the inside. I questioned everything.
When I turned professional (my first year), it didn’t feel like arriving. It felt like starting over.
There were breakthroughs: my first win Boulder 70.3, then Ironman Chattanooga in 2014, along with many wins at the 70.3 and Ironman distances. From the outside, those looked like triumphs. Inside, they were quiet recognitions: You’re still in motion.
Endurance sport gave me everything: purpose, identity, community - but it also broke me down. Hip surgery, broken bones, ligament and tendon strains, Lyme disease, and days when simply walking was painful. Each time I thought I was finished, I asked, What can I learn from this? Nietzsche once wrote, “What does not kill me makes me stronger,” but I’ve learned that what hurts us also teaches us how to listen. Strength isn’t about pushing through blindly; it’s about knowing when to pause, rebuild, and start again.
Those years were lonely, too. There were moments when I couldn’t go back home, at least not in my mind. Going back felt like failure, so I stayed. I earned my P-1 visa, which allowed me to race and live in the U.S. as a professional athlete. I built a life around motion.
There were days I felt stripped to nothing, but those were often the days when the child in me reappeared; the part that laughed again, that found joy in a good ride or a messy open-water swim. The child doesn’t need medals; it just needs movement.
Even now, that’s what I chase ; not the podium, but curiosity and wonder.
Part 3 The Child in Motion
Coaching came into my life almost by accident, though looking back, it was inevitable. Endurance sport makes you a student forever. You learn from every race, every failure, every comeback. Eventually you realize you’ve gathered language. Coaching became a way to share it.
I’d lived burnout, injury, triumph, loss. I’d learned that endurance is rarely about physiology alone: it’s about belief, boundaries, and the courage to be honest when things get hard. What I try to teach isn’t about eliminating fear; it’s about learning to coexist with it.
Nietzsche wrote that “one must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” Every athlete holds a little chaos, doubt, comparison, expectation. My job isn’t to erase it; it’s to help them find rhythm inside it.
I still compete as a professional. I feel most myself when I’m moving through swim, bike, run. The motivation has changed over the years - it’s less about achievement and more about curiosity - Ironman, gravel, mountain bike, stage races, anything that challenges me to keep learning. I’m forty-three, strong, healthy, and still in the mix. I love that. This sport continues to shape me; it’s the way I move through life. I’ve never wanted to retire from discovery. Every course, every terrain, every start line still asks something new of me.
I used to think growth came from grand transformations. Now I know it’s progressive, unfolding year after year. The longer I do this, the more I realize that curiosity doesn’t fade with age; it sharpens. The body changes, yes, but so does perspective. What once was about proving has become about exploring what’s possible when you stay open to the journey.
That girl on the schoolyard never really left me. (She’s the reason I started I Race Like a Girl: as a reminder. It was about returning to that feeling of running for chocolate milk, of doing something simply because it made you feel alive.
Sometimes I think about that girl running circles around her schoolyard. She didn’t know anything about Nietzsche, or endurance, or identity. She just knew what it felt like to move without limits. Maybe all of this: every race, every injury, every question: is just my way of finding her again. Me.
And maybe that’s the whole point.To stay curious.
To keep moving.
To see how far the spirit can go when you stop trying to arrive.