The famed, the feared, and the fast. Larissa Schendel is it all. As much as she is known throughout Rocky Mountain High School as a tough English teacher who demands the best from her students, she is also a caring, funny person who works ten times harder so that they will succeed.
Schendel applies the same work ethic to running as she does to her English classes. She continuously pushes herself to run farther and be faster which has been an incredibly rewarding experience for her. For someone who is now signed up to run the Boston and Chicago marathons this year, one would think that she has been running her entire life. Instead, she believed that she “…was very unathletic” her whole life and stayed to the theatre side during high school.
She began running when she was 31 after having her second baby and gaining weight.
“I know that running burns calories which I think is a terrible reason to actually start running, but then I realized I was actually pretty fast and pretty good at it then I just fell in love with it.”
Even though Schendel admits that her reasons to start running were less than ideal, she found peace and happiness in it.
Training for a marathon is no easy task and Schendel knows this well as she ran 21 miles on a slight downhill through the Poudre Canyon as a training exercise. Her coach made her do this as the Mount Charleston marathon had 21 miles of slight downhill. The payoff was incredible last spring as she crushed her goal time and qualified for the Boston Marathon that is set to take place this April.
“I have a group of women I train with who are some of my favorite people ever,” says Schendel when she describes the three women who she trained with to run Mount Charleston last year.
All four of them qualified to run the Boston Marathon, but, sadly, so many other runners qualified as well that the race had to lower the cut off time and one of the women in the group is no longer able to run Boston. Luckily, she has found a new race and the group still continues to train together because “…four hours by yourself can be really painful…” when it comes to the long runs.
For Mount Charleston, Schendel and her friends started together but then all went at their different paces so didn’t finish together. She plugged in music for that marathon except in the last five miles of the race her airpods died and she couldn’t recharge them.
“I trained so hard, like, I mean obsessively…I was just literally sobbing, crying when I finished because I had worked so hard for that…”
Her hard work paid off and it was interesting to see her strict regiment between her professional, home, and running life as she trained for the marathon last year.
Her normal routine for shorter runs is listening to a podcast and to get going early in the morning because it is difficult to fit in a longer run or get together with her group before she has to get to her job and drop her kids off at school.
Schendel describes her love for running as she does her love for Virginia Woolf. Only one of those would a sane person agree with and it is surely not the cross country option, but I digress.
All the luck to one of the best English teachers at Rocky Mountain High School in her upcoming marathons, not like she’ll need it though with how hard she works. Good luck, Ms. Schendel!