Monica Puig, Olympic tennis champion, set to run first Marathon in New York City

Just a few months following her retirement from professional tennis, Olympic Champion Monica Puig is ready for her next big challenge: Her first marathon.

On Sunday (6 November), the Rio 2016 gold medalist is trading in her tennis racket for running sneakers, set to hit the Streets of the Big Apple in the USA for the New York City Marathon.

I’ve always wanted to run a marathon, but never knew how, the Puerto Rican told Olympics.com recently. And we took it very seriously for about three and a half months, just training and putting in the mileage. And now it’s at our doorstep.

Puig only knows one gear: Hard work. And she applied that approach to her first foray into marathoning after trying a half marathon in January of this year.

The half, in Scottsdale, Arizona, proved to be a perfect lesson.

[I was] very naive with my first half marathon; I went into it without training and that was very, very tough afterwards, Puig admitted. And [my fianc] Nathan told me, You’re not going to run a Marathon without training. So, you know, we had this amazing opportunity to do it.

So Puig set off to start training in mid-July having played her final professional tennis match in May of this year. She had suffered from problems with her shoulder (and subsequent issues in her arm) through much of 2020, undergoing four separate surgeries and playing in just three matches that season.

She attempted another comeback this spring, the pain proved to be too much.

My body had enough, Puig wrote on her Instagram in a retirement announcement in June.

‘Your biggest enemy is your own mind’

Through the many frustrations, however, Puig had started to grow tired of the things she was told that she couldnt do. She was looking for something she could say yes to and that would say yes back to her.

After my last surgery, when I retired, I think I got to the point where I was really kind of bummed out from people telling me what I couldn’t do. I could not play tennis at a professional level. I could not lift heavy things, etc.

Puig was told she shouldn’t even be running.

But careful planning and her fiancé (Nathan Rakitt) as her training partner, Puig set off with NYC in mind. She found running to be a great stress reliever as she made a major lifestyle change away from being a pro athlete – and took the advice of her favorite Peloton instructor, Robin Arzonto Conquer the mental challenges that running offers.

[Robin talks about] training to callus the mind, Puig explained. During my long runs that’s been my mantra: Close your mind, callus your mind.’ Those types of things have really helped me. And it’s made me a mentally stronger person than when I played tennis.

While Puig said there have been times she wanted to cry as the runs tick over 20 miles in length, she has welcomed the different mental challenge that Marathon training has offered her versus tennis.

Some days you don’t want to get up and run, but you have to do it in order to achieve your greater goal of finishing, she said. Running is kind of like tennis because at the end of the day, your biggest enemy is yourself and your own mind. And that’s where you can succeed or fail.

I have been able to learn new things in this new running journey and still utilize those tools that I learned as a professional tennis player, too.

Learning new things in a new life

Its been a year of learning new things for Puig. As shes stepped away from pro tennis shes gotten more into broadcasting, doing commentary and courtside analysis for ESPNs Spanish-language broadcast.

[Writers note: Monica and I also co-hosted an early-morning show for the US Open called The Warm-Up, and she would often send me 5am selfies from the treadmill with the caption, Marathon training!]

While she will start (and finish) long after the elite marathoners on Sunday in New York, Puig will join the 50,000-plus community of Runners that make up the biggest Marathon in the world.

It’s just nice to have that shared experience, Puig said of participating. There’s [thousands of] other people who are sharing this experience with you… and I can take comfort in knowing that Im not alone, unlike on a tennis court. It’s not just you isolated out there without anyone else. That’s been huge. It’s been a good outlet for me to find another source of motivation in my life.

She added: I have put the goal in my mind that I want to complete the six major marathons.

That kind of shared experience is something Puig had no room for in her life over the last 15 years because it was solely consumed by tennis.

Now she relishes it.

I think the most exciting thing about retirement and I didn’t realize it at the moment was [that I got to] create my life away from the sport, which is something that a lot of people don’t understand, she said. For a lot of professional athletes, we don’t really have a life. Now Im able to be a normal person for the first time.

A normal person – who is about to run their very first marathon.