Last October, Chelsea Sodaro, a triathlon world championship rookie, achieved the grueling sport’s ultimate title. Sodaro, then a 33-year-old mother of an 18-month-old, became the first American woman to win the Ironman World Championship, held in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, in a quarter of a century. Her story went viral in the endurance world, garnering the kind of attention and endorsement offers she never would have dreamed of even a few weeks before.
And that’s when her life began to fall apart.
All of a sudden, a woman whose fitness and mental fortitude had been steely enough to triumphantly swim, cycle and run for 140.6 miles through rolling seas and across the hot volcanic rock of Hawaii’s Big Island struggled to go to the grocery store without descending into panic.
After a rocky winter, Sodaro is preparing to race Saturday for the first time as the Ironman world champion at the Ironman 70.3 Oceanside in Southern California. But as the endurance world figured she would be basking in glory, she was, in fact, wondering how she would compete again — or even make it through the day.
“Basic things got hard for me,” she said during an interview earlier this month.
Professional triathletes are supposedly the apotheosis of human strength and fitness, the ultimate Type A perfectionists who are intentional about every stroke in the pool, every push of a pedal, every step of a run, every morsel of food. They reduce their lives to a series of numbers displayed on gadgets during countless hours of training in the water, on roads, at home and in the weight room.
Sodaro had done all this, comforted by routines and metrics that made her feel successful and in control. Her near-constant pursuit of measurable perfection had led directly to that glorious last stretch of the run in Kona, where she surged to a nearly nine-minute lead over her closest competitor, until she could see her daughter, Skylar, waiting on the other side of the finish line.
But then the race was over, and life started again. It was a new existence filled with seemingly limitless opportunities, and everything felt out of control. It was just like those dark weeks after Skylar was born. Back then, Sodaro tempered her anxiety and depression with endorphins as she powered through grinding workouts. That wasn’t working this time, though. And she had no idea how to make the anxiety stop — or what might happen if it didn’t.
Training as Therapy
The first time Sodaro felt like she had failed at something big was in 2016, when she came up short at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials. She had targeted making the Olympic team for four years, since graduating from the University of California-Berkeley.
Her husband suggested she try triathlon. She had loved cross-training while living in Arizona to prepare for the Olympic trials. She swam competitively when she was younger. So she moved to San Diego, a haven for triathletes, and began training with a professional team. Within two years, she was reeling off wins in Half-Ironman races.
The next time Sodaro said she felt like she was failing at something was in 2021, when she could not get her infant daughter to nurse properly.
Already an anxious person, Sodaro said her anxiety increased significantly during her pregnancy. For the first time, her anxiety, which she had always managed with her perfectionistic drive for control, became something more than feeling “really stressed out.” During her third trimester, she began to feel nervous in enclosed spaces. She once sprinted out of the pool because she could not handle being in a fenced-in area.
After Skylar was born in March 2021, things only became worse for Sodaro as her daughter struggled to nurse and to gain weight. Sodaro said she and her husband were at the pediatrician’s office every other day for weigh-ins and lactation consultations. When her hormones became a postpartum roller coaster, Sodaro said she would sit in the pediatrician’s waiting room and cry.
“I felt like I was a capable person and this was something I should be able to get done,” she said. “I’ve never worked harder at anything in my life than trying to breastfeed.”
As it turned out, Skylar had a milk protein allergy that required some major changes in Sodaro’s diet, as well as a posterior tongue tie, which is a band of tissue underneath the tongue that can prevent proper latching, making nursing all but impossible. After six mostly sleepless weeks, Sodaro took her doctor’s advice and began giving Skylar a bottle.
She also began training again, but with her anxiety sky-high and her hormones off-kilter, she found little joy in her work. She tried therapy but felt like she was being judged, especially when she resisted medication because she feared it would hurt her athletic performance. Sodaro felt like both a bad triathlete and a bad mother, and her anxiety spiraled.
She feared being in public places where she felt like she or her daughter might be unsafe. She had a very particular fear of being trapped during a mass shooting with Skylar. Plenty of parents check on their newborns at night for the first few weeks to make sure they are breathing, but Sodaro said she “did that for well over the first year of Skye’s life.”
She sought refuge in the training, in an environment that felt controllable, one in which she was rewarded for powering through physical challenges.
She had been working with a new coach, Dan Plews, a pioneering former triathlete who oversees the training for a half-dozen elite competitors from his home in New Zealand.
Sodaro had hired Plews because of his focus on physiology; his data-centric approach, built around measurements of heart rate variability, took her brain and her emotions out of the training. Plews gave her targets to hit, and she tried to hit them. Plews was also the father of young children, meaning that a new mother’s emotional swings, her struggles with breastfeeding or urinating in her training shorts during runs didn’t faze him.
As Skylar’s first birthday approached, both Sodaro’s numbers and how she felt in training began to improve. In Hamburg in June, she came in fourth in her first full Ironman competition, finishing in 8 hours, 36 minutes and 41 seconds, the fastest debut by an American woman. A subpar performance at a competition in August followed, but she nailed her workouts during a training block in Hawaii in September, then went to the starting line for her World Championship feeling she might be on the verge of something special.
She glanced at the sky near the beginning of the swim and saw a rainbow. During the run, as her lead stretched to seven and then eight minutes, she forced herself not to think about winning, to stay in the moment and not slow down.
It was a day of so many good decisions. The furthest thing from her mind was that soon she would struggle to make them at all.
Relapse and Recovery
Sodaro knows that the catalysts for her relapse into crippling anxiety were things her competitors would kill to have to deal with: an avalanche of press requests, offers from sponsors, and other opportunities for money and attention. So much hard work and good luck had come together to bring her this good fortune, but Sodaro had convinced herself that she could fritter it all away with one bad decision.
Life began to feel unsafe again. She tried to train, but it was hopeless. The grocery store once more became a frightening place. The idea of flying terrified her. She experienced thoughts of suicide — though never actual planning.
“Life felt really out of control,” she said.
In early January, her husband and her parents, who had been urging her to seek help since Skylar was six weeks old, saw that Sodaro was in a dark place again. They told her it was not normal, that she didn’t need to live that way.
Sodaro called Plews in tears and told him that she needed to take a break and that she did not know how long it would last. He told her to do whatever she needed to do.
Sodaro found a psychiatrist who diagnosed her with obsessive-compulsive disorder and prescribed a low dose of anti-anxiety medication that would not violate antidoping rules or hinder her athletic performance. The diagnosis brought both relief and despair because of the stigmas connected with therapy and mental health medication.
Sodaro’s family told her that her brain was injured and that she needed to treat it like any other body part in need of rehabilitation. That resonated with Sodaro.
And as she looked at her nearly 2-year-old daughter, she thought of how even the youngest children pick up on their parents’ emotions. She wanted Skylar to see her as a joyful person.
Therapy and medication have helped with that and made it possible to train for races where Sodaro will compete as a world champion for the first time, with all the external pressure and expectations that will bring. Mostly, they have helped her feel more like herself again. She’s been nailing her workouts lately, too.
“An interesting season,” Sodaro said of the past year. “Life changed a lot in some ways.
“And then in other ways,” she added, “not at all.”
If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
Matthew Futterman
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