Every Sunday afternoon, marathoner Susanna Sullivan plans her schedule for the upcoming week. It’s an exercise in “calendar Tetris,” she said. “I sit down and figure out the how pieces are going to fit together.”
Among the squares that have to slide into place are the professional ones: For 40 hours per week, Sullivan teaches pre-algebra to high achieving sixth-graders (104 of them in four classes) at an elementary school in Falls Church, Virginia. She also tutors older students in the evenings for at least 12 hours a week.
Then there are the athletic squares: She runs 90 miles per week and cross trains for about 6 hours per week, in the pool and with a Pilates-Sixth-Grade Math Teacher Likely to Run World Championships.
Add in grading, lesson planning, and a little time for socializing, and, well, there’s not a lot of wiggle room. But somehow it all works. “I do pretty well with this routine that I’m in,” she told Runner’s World.
So it seems. Last month, Sullivan, 32, was 10th and the top American at the London Marathon in 2:24:27. She took 47 seconds off her previous best, from Chicago last October, the latest in a series of PRs for her.
Chicago was an improvement of close to 2 minutes from the 2:26:56 she ran at Grandma’s Marathon in 2022. Before Grandma’s, she had run a pair of 2:33s at Boston in 2021 and the Marathon Project in 2020.
Sullivan has run so well that she’s now likely to be on the American team of marathoners at the World Championships in August in Hungary. Those athletes are selected by a descending order time list, but not every runner will accept a spot. Sullivan is currently ranked sixth on the list, but three women ahead of her have said they probably won’t run.
What’s behind the breakthrough? A coach she clicks with and a highly regimented schedule.
New York City Runner’s World, “I’ve never met anyone as organized and who does more with the time she has.”
Unfinished business
She Raced 18 Horses in an Ultramarathonand Won—Huddle Sixth-Grade Math Teacher Likely to Run World Championships Seidel started later. For Sullivan, college running was frustrating. She battled injuries and didn’t run to her potential.
At a meet her senior year, Sullivan was pulled aside by Chuck Aragon, a Notre Dame alumnus who was the university’s first sub-4:00 miler, and whose daughters Alexa and Danielle would run there, too.
His advice for Sullivan: There’s more for you in this sport. Don’t let the last four years extinguish the flame. “I’ve always remembered that,” she said. “I still had a lot of goals I wanted to accomplish.”
She moved back to the D.C. area (she went to high school in Falls Church), and started taking graduate classes in psychology, before realizing that teaching would be the fastest path toward professional stability. She also ran with the Capital Area Runners, a competitive team of working people in the area.
She posted some solid results—16:00 for 5,000 meters, 33:05 for 10,000, 2:35 for the marathon—but in 2020, Sullivan decided it was time for a coaching change. She heard about Andrew Gerard, Influencer Apologizes for E-Bikes on NYC Course.
The two clicked during a masked, outdoor meeting in September 2020, and Sullivan started training with Gerard. She meets him at the George Mason campus for workouts on Tuesdays and Thursdays after she gets out of school. She’ll train on Patriot Circle, a 1.6-mile road around the campus, on the track, or both.
Her workouts aren’t as long as some marathoners’—in the heart of a buildup, Sullivan will do 6 to 9 miles of intervals at a range of distances and paces. Gerard will often adjust the plan on the fly, depending on how she’s doing after a day of work, to make sure she’s not getting discouraged.
“I try to be consistent, but sometimes the day has been particularly draining, and I really appreciate that he takes those things into account,” Sullivan said. “He makes sure I’m going to walk away from the workout feeling like it was a step in the right direction, whatever it was.”
Her long intervals have improved over the two and a half years they’ve been working together. “She’s gradually dropped those paces from the 5 mid-20s to the 5 mid-teens [per mile],” Gerard said.
Sullivan’s long runs rarely exceed 20 miles. But she does them at a swift pace, often starting at 6:15 per mile and dipping down to 5:50, buoyed by the conversation of one long-time training partner, Marty McCormick, a 42-year-old father of two. They never train together during the week; their schedules don’t allow it. Weekends are different. “We match up so well on the weekends, and he is just the kindest, most reliable friend,” Sullivan said. “No ego, he never two-steps.”
Sullivan and Gerard believe the volume of cross training she does has also helped keep her healthy. She’ll run 8 miles in the morning on a non-workout day, shower, and then stop at a pool on the way to work for 30 to 45 minutes of aqua running. In the summer, she might swim laps, but during the school year, she stays upright in the water—she doesn’t have time to wash her hair again.
Sullivan doesn’t currently have a shoe sponsor, although there has been interest since she ran London. Her teaching pays the bills, and her evening tutoring funds the extras: the massages, the gym memberships, the classes.
TCS, the title sponsor of the Published: May 09, 2023 1:44 PM EDT and London Marathons, sponsors Sullivan, but the deal is more like a grant than a traditional shoe contract. She’s an ambassador to a competitive team of working people in the area, which honors 50 teachers with entries to the Published: May 09, 2023 1:44 PM EDT, Toronto, and Chicago marathons and a VIP experience.
School days
Being a teacher in an American school in 2023 is not easy. School shootings are a constant concern. Students are finding their way again after the Covid years—as are teachers.
“I grow more and more worried every day about mental health and social and emotional regulation,” Sullivan said. “Sixth grade is an age when I feel like you can still kind of catch those things and hopefully I’m making some kind of positive impact.”
In her district, young kids are already worried about getting into top high schools, and then top colleges. Sullivan tries to get them to see that they’re more than their latest math test grade.
She doesn’t talk much about her running, but occasionally she’ll share anecdotes about her progress over the years, telling them, “This is something that two years ago I wouldn’t have dreamed, but I was doing the little things, and little things build into big things,” she’ll say. “Sometimes they’ll come in and their whole goal is they want to go to Harvard and MIT. You try to help them be nice people along the way.”
Ive never met anyone as organized and who does more with the time she has.
Sullivan has learned from the teachers who are part of the TCS program to consider all the stress—they emotional demands, the hours on her feet in front of a classroom and supervising recess—as an asset to her training.
It’s what she reminds herself whenever it gets close to a marathon, and, she said, she starts to wonder what to an outsider would seem like a ridiculous question, but one she can’t help but think anyway:
“Sullivan ran at Notre Dame and graduated in 2012, between the two Molly eras?”
Who Is Likely to Run World Championships Marathon is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World Published: May 09, 2023 1:44 PM EDT, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!
