TAMMY HSIEH
In Her Own
Time
Words by Amory Rowe Salem
Photography by Tony Dipasquale
Tammy Hsieh says that if given the choice among late, punctual or early, her family and friends would probably say she runs late. “Or maybe on time. They might say I’m on time,” she corrects herself, with a quick and comfortable laugh.
There’s no denying that she was exquisitely punctual at the recent California International Marathon (CIM) in which she clocked a dead-even 2:37:00 and became the final female to qualify for the US Olympic Marathon Trials to be held in Orlando, Florida on February 3, 2024. Given that Hsieh qualified with zero seconds to spare and on the last viable day of the 23-month qualification window, one might conclude that she’s a bit of a time daredevil, a temporal Icarus enamored of flying dangerously close to the fiery clock.
But the truth is that for Hsieh, these days, running – and life writ large – have less to do with measuring herself against an objective clock and more to do with making continuous incremental improvements. “It’s not about the time,” she remarked over a recent mid-day coffee. “I don’t run for time. I don’t run for time goals. For me, it’s about progressing.”
The 33-year old bioanalytical chemist possessed of two Master’s degrees in neuroscience is a self-described “late bloomer” who tags her parents (both of whom have their PhDs), her classmates and several friends as the “high achievers” in her orbit. But the facts on the ground – routine 5:30 am wake-up calls, nine-hour work days, 100-mile running weeks and a marathon PR trajectory that looks like the base-to-peak elevation profile of Mount Washington – tell a different story.
Over the past two years, Hsieh has made marked progress in the marathon, improving her personal best by 11 minutes: from 2:48 at CIM in 2021, to 2:45 in Indianapolis in the fall of 2022, to 2:37:44 in Ottawa in May of this year and, finally, to the aforementioned 2:37:00 at this year’s CIM. (Hsieh also logged a casual 2:46 in Boston this past April as a training run for her A race in Ottawa six weeks later.)
That said, Hsieh would be the first to caution you against relying too heavily on the clock to gauge her progress. She herself cops to the fact that she didn’t look at her watch once during the 26.2-mile race from Folsom to Sacramento. Hsieh and her coach, two-time Olympian Kim Conley, had agreed in a pre-race phone call that she would sideline thoughts about time and focus instead on getting the most out of herself on the day. “[Kim] told me I run well based on feel. So I just trusted what she said,” Hsieh explains.
“I told her not to think of [the race] as going for the standard. Just think of it as going to CIM and running the next race on your calendar,”
Conley shared in a recent call
Conley has coached Hsieh since June of 2022 and says Hsieh’s “ability to run on feel as well as she does” is one of Hsieh’s most distinctive attributes. When asked about the ways Hsieh has grown as an athlete over the 18 months the two have been working together, Conley points not to her 11-minute marathon PR improvement, but rather to Hsieh’s expanding willingness “to surround herself with people who are achieving at high levels and going after big goals. She’s embraced being pushed by people,” Conley observed. “She’s embraced competing.”
While that kind of athletic improvement – a competitive leveling up – is not easily quantifiable, it’s exactly the kind of progress most top-level athletes have to make: to diversify the ways to gauge growth to include metrics both external and internal. So when it came to designing a race plan for this year’s CIM, Conley explained, “I tried to adopt her mindset.”
The intrinsically-calibrated race approach stands in stark contrast to Hsieh’s CIM experience just two years prior, in 2021, before meeting Conley, when she was temporarily undone by an ill-timed Garmin crash just minutes before the race start. “The screen just went black,” she recalls. “I was asking around in the corral to see if anyone knew how to reset it.” Eventually she was able to coax the watch back to life before the gun went off, but she remembers it being a stressful few moments.
One gets the sense that had her watch blinked off in the pre-dawn quiet of this year’s CIM elite athlete corral, Hsieh might have just shrugged it off and rolled watchless. As it stood, the only timepieces she used during the marathon were the race clocks that popped up roadside every five kilometers – those and the finish line clock that hove into view the moment she rounded the last turn of the race: a left off of 8th Street onto the Capitol Mall. Even from 75 meters away Hsieh could read the numbers: 2:36:50. She’d thought a lot about her what for’s and her why’s over the preceding ten miles. She remembers thinking “time went by slowly” after mile 16 and that afforded her the chance to be “really aware of [her] surroundings.”
She’d found and been separated again from friend and fellow racer Lianne Farber. She’d overtaken training partner Brian Word-Sims, who had shouted encouragement at her as she passed. “Go get it!” he’d said. There was no mistaking his meaning.
And this is how the woman who didn’t care much about the clock came to care very deeply about the clock for the next several seconds. This is when Tammy Hsieh – the person who sets early morning alarms that she rarely relies on to wake her, who is tied so closely to a stopwatch during her work hours in the lab that she makes sure that her runs are more time-agnostic, whose coach explains with great clarity that “she didn’t want to fixate on qualifying, she just wanted to be the best marathoner she could be” – this is when Tammy Hsieh decided time was a powerful motivator and kicked with every remaining ounce of her strength and energy.
When she crossed the finish line timing mats, Hsieh looked again at the clock: 2:37:03. Within moments, though, teammates rallied around her wielding cell phones with real-time tracking data. Hsieh’s gun time was 2:37:03 but her chip time was 2:37:00. She’d done it: she’d run her best race and she’d run her way into the superlatively accomplished field of American marathoners set to gather in Florida in nine weeks.
Those moments are few and far between when the universe offers up to you the brass ring you swore you were not chasing. So much of what we’re taught about ambition holds that we must approach our most audacious goals with forethought and clarity, to plant them on the horizon and set our daily courses by them, methodically closing the distance between where we are and where we most want to be.
But what if it’s more complicated than that? What if we – especially those of us who traffic so eagerly in the unimpeachable algebra of running: heartrate, distance, time – borrow from Hsieh’s example and loosen our grip on those objective performance metrics? Progress becomes less easily quantifiable, but also more broadly so.
Hsieh doesn’t measure her progress in minutes and seconds; she measures it instead in her relationship to those minutes and seconds: how much they matter, when they matter, how much sway they hold. In this way, the clock ceases to be the athlete’s jury, and occasional executioner, and becomes instead a simple tool of the trade, a measuring stick, while the athlete wholly and solely owns the responsibility of judging her performance.
When asked about running plans beyond the Trials, Hsieh lights up and mentions the possibility of a 50k or maybe another attempt at her favorite event, the Mount Washington Road Race, a 7.6-mile climb to the top of the Northeast’s highest peak. It seems a fitting crucible for an athlete whose progress trends inexorably up and to the right.
Whatever she chooses to do – and however she makes meaning of those pursuits – it’s clear that, as Hsieh herself says, “I’m just getting started.”
