2008 Park City High School graduate Alyssa Puttkammer and her 19-month-old daughter, Blair, broke the world record last month for fastest women’s marathon pushing a stroller. The race, The Pacific Northwest Marathon, was held in Oregon.
The previous world record was 3:10:26. She ran it in 3:02:54.
“The first two miles were perfect,” she said. “My legs felt great and we were 10 seconds under our goal pace. Then Blair started crying and continued to cry inconsolably for seven miles, which was torture for me. She finally drifted off to sleep for three miles, and was happy and calm the rest of the race, thank goodness.”
On they went until the final sprint.
“Everyone was cheering,” Puttkammer said. “It didn’t really sink in that I had broken the record. Mostly I just wanted to lie down and drink a lot of water.”
She said she relied on the John Wooden quote, “Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do,” during the months of training before the race.
“Being a single parent provides a lot of barriers to training for a marathon,” she said. “I constantly had to reframe and ask myself, ‘OK, well, what can I do?’ This is a mindset I hope to carry forward.”
Puttkammer, 33, said she recognizes what she accomplished is fairly monumental, she doesn’t feel proud as much as reassured that she is still the same person she was before having a baby and going through her divorce. And that she is hoping that her world record does more than impress runners.
“I’d love for other parents to see Blair and me running, or hear about it, and decide to try running for the first time with their kids,” she said. “I’d be thrilled to see my record broken soon.”
Shortly after Blair’s birth, Puttkammer unexpectedly became a single parent.
“As I was going through my divorce, I longed to run again for my physical and mental health, but I worked full time, didn’t have family in the area, couldn’t afford babysitters often, and didn’t want to repeatedly impose on my friends,” she said.
Everything changed for the physician assistant who lives in Salt Lake City now when she decided to invest in a jogging stroller and it showed up on her doorstep.
“I cried as I put it together,” recalls Puttkammer. “My whole life had been turned upside down, and I was about to get a piece of my old self back.”