(Photo by Clive Rose/Getty Images)
Being an Olympic-quality athlete is an incredibly time-consuming, grueling, and difficult endeavor. But you know, the economy being what it is, not everyone with Olympic dreams has the luxury of being a full-time paid athlete. So that means when the marathon Olympic trials happen this weekend in Atlanta, the hopefuls will include Biglaw associates. It seems like time-consuming, grueling, and difficult is their thing.
Sarah David, an associate at Perkins Coie, tells Law.com that running is a release from the Biglaw grind:
“Running is a great release from lawyer stuff, so I’m already looking forward to getting back to training after this weekend’s race,” says David, an M&A associate in Perkins Coie’s Chicago office. After running her first marathon in 2017, she qualified for the trials at the Indianapolis Monumental Marathon in November in a blazing 2 hours, 44 minutes and 11 seconds.
Unsurprisingly, David finds it easier to train in the morning, saying, “It’s easier for me to get into work at 11 a.m. then it is to leave work at 5 p.m.”
Miller, Canfield, Paddock and Stone’s Ashley Higginson seconds that sentiment, “Lawyers are notoriously not awake during the mornings. In the afternoons, something always comes up.”
Higginson, who was a professional runner before her Biglaw days, says the other key to being at an elite level in such disparate fields as marathons and Biglaw is to abandon guilt:
Higginson is no stranger to elite-level running. Before her law career, she was a professional runner and raced the 3,000-meter steeplechase in the 2013 World Championships. But when it came to running marathons as a law firm associate, she says she had to take on a different mindset and adjust her expectations. She worked with her brother-in-law, a runner and an in-house attorney, to create a training regimen that’s flexible enough to accommodate a busy legal career.
“I don’t feel consistently guilty for what I can and can’t do,” she says. “It’s critical for someone who wants to be working and has a fitness goal to be balancing the realities of physical demands of work with training.”
Other lawyers who qualified for the Olympic trials include Caroline Veltri, an associate at Frascona, Joiner, Goodman and Greenstein; Jessa Victor, who works at Hawks Quindel; and in-house counsel Veronica Jackson Graziano of Partners Healthcare.
Good luck to all the legally minded marathoners at the Olympic trials this weekend.
Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).