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Terry Schneider — Interview
Competitor, Team SCAR
Schneider, 36, of Aptos, California, a fitness consultant and myofascial release therapist, competed in the '97 and '96 Eco-Challenges, the '96
X-Games Eco-Challenge, the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic and '97 Mild Seven Outdoor Quest China. She also taught at the '97 Eco-Challenge school.
What is a myofascial release therapist?
It's actually a form of physical therapy working with the fascia or the connective tissue. If you had to relate it to something, it's sort of like rolfing, deep tissue massage but the way it's done is different so it has its own application. I do that part time and I also am an endurance coach. That's my main form of income. I do a lot of clinics, seminars, speaking, coach triathletes, runners...and things like that.
You're a biathlete, triathlete, dualathlete and have competed in 22 Ironmans. Adrenaline junkie? What's the motivation?
You can ask my mother this. I have been, since day one, a very driven, motivated person, very goal oriented. I started as an athlete when I was 10-years-old — started running competitively and I really saw personal results, personal confidence from doing sports, having goals and really going after it. It was exciting for me to see new sides of myself — to always come out of an event or even a series of training weeks and see a new side of myself and it never stops. That, I think, is what keeps drawing me to it. It was a natural evolution for me. I did my first marathon when I was 17-years-old, my senior year in college I did my first triathlon and I did that for a few years as an amateur and then turned pro when I was, lets see, I guess it was 1988, raced pro for about eight or nine years, triathlon. My forte was the Ironman distance. I'm not built like an ultra-distance runner but I tend to do really well in a strength event, long distance, triathlon or strength events and adventure races or expedition competitions.
How'd you get into participating in the Eco-Challenge?
Like [Team SCAR captain] David [Kelly] was talking about, getting into adventure racing when they were in Hawaii. He and one of my teammates watching me do the Ironman and their first impression was, well, Terry, you're doing triathlons still, you want to come be our assistant. I said, if I'm going to go to Utah for two weeks I'm going to do this stupid thing. But I was still racing triathlon and had commitments that way for myself and sponsors and things like that. But I decided, you know, I'm going to hop in this race. I was real naive about how much it would really take out of me. The race kicked my butt because it was that element of unknown. I had absolutely no idea how tough this thing was going to be. Day three we slept for a couple of hours and I couldn't put my shoes back on because my feet had swollen so huge, I realized that this was beyond anything I had ever done.
At your level of competition, was this "getting kicked around thing" new to you?
For me it wasn't a negative at all it was, 'wow.' The analogy I like to use is I do an event or a hard training session and all these little doors inside my heart and inside my head are opened up. You can make choices, you can look through the doors and see what's on the other side, see new sides of yourself. Or else you can close the doors or you can keep them open but maybe not go there depending on where you are in your life at the time. I tend to go through life and fling doors open all the time and I just jam through. For me, I feel comfortable with that. Being in a race and being in a lot of pain is a place in my life that is very comfortable because I understand what's about and I know how to deal with it. So, I embrace those situations and I enjoy it because it's always new and it's always exciting and it's always a side of me I've never seen before so it's this constant stimulus overload.
After having competed solo for so many years, how was the integration to the team format?
It was difficult for me to put my ego on a shelf and be there for the team in a sense of, I had a hard time allowing people to help me and asking for help and that was one of my biggest downfalls. Occasionally now, I will not go there but I've learned. Dave had to have sort of a heart-to-heart with me and say sometimes when you feeling down, we need to take some weight off your pack to help you move faster. It's not about you, it's about the team. How can we help the team move faster? A couple years ago I really figured that out and now I'm good with that. What can I do as a team member to help us move forward faster? How can I help someone else when they're down, look away from my own pain and give someone else some moral support or take somebody else's weight off their pack? That's really what it's all about.
What makes for a good adventure racer?
As someone that has a perspective on what they need to do — things go wrong and they assess the situation calmly and they move on. Then you come back to real life from doing a race and you're sitting in traffic for two hours trying to get to the airport and you're going to miss your flight. It's no big deal! It's not a big deal because that is nothing compared to what we go through in an event. I like that perspective. I feel like my patience is big for myself. I have a huge maturity in reference to what my limitations are physically and what I know that I can do in an event and it's also been exciting for me to see I have that innate ability to finish at all cost. I don't know why I'm like that, people ask me that all the time. I really think that it's something that I just have inside me. It's never a question for me.
What are the advantages to being a female in endurance racing?
One of the challenges of this sport is dealing with the sexes coming together. The reason it's challenging is because, generalizing, men and women tend to do things emotionally differently. Part of the challenge is again, for me, to be able look at the guys and acknowledge how they deal with things and for them to be able to look at me as a women and acknowledge emotionally how I deal with things. For instance, I tell my teammates, 'I'll probably cry during the race and you don't have to fix me. It's just a release for me and I'm okay. I might bitch and moan during the race and it's just kind of the way I am, it's no reflection on you, it's just what it is and it's okay.'
I also like to discuss and get a sense for how people are feeling so I tend to be the person on the team that says a lot. 'How are you guys doing? How are things going? Is everybody eating and drinking? — kind of the moral support cheerleader, so to speak. Women potentially can be that way more so than the guys. A lot of the guys will kind of go inside themselves and not say a whole lot. It's all functional and it all works well, it's just different. The biggest thing that teammates can do is accept that the person who's not the same sex is just different. It's not good or bad. Women, obviously, typically aren't as strong physically as men and I'm definitely the weakest person on my team even though I'm a pretty strong woman. My job is to acknowledge that it's true and to work with that. There are a lot of realms within me amongst our team that I'm stronger than the guys. I'm probably one of the better runners on the team, endurance wise and as far as being tough, I tend to be able suck it up pretty well as well. So there's strengths and weakness of each person. I think my team doesn't necessarily see me as the weak link. They see that I have weakness and I have strengths just like they do and we kind of come together.
How do you hope to place? What's your goal?
Our goal and my goal is to help my team to get as efficiently through the course as possible. I think if we do that we'll do quite well. It's important for me to have fun. We have some guys on our team that have great sense of humor and we're going to have a really good time up there. I wouldn't do the races with a bunch of people that I didn't know just to get out there and do it. It's not what it's about for me. Being in an event with someone is a very intimate thing that you do.
How do you feel about everybody seeing you cry last year?
Millions of people watched me cry on the Discovery Channel last year and a lot of people asked me how I felt about that. I didn't have a problem with it; it was what was going on for me in the event and I went through a really tough time. It was probably the lowest I've ever been in a race before. I was really sick and I had really bad diarrhea and I was vomiting and I still haven't quite figured out why. I may have eaten or drank something that did it. I was sick to the point where if I would have been regular person at home, I would have been in bed, I had a fever, I was very sick. So, it was all I could do to move forward in the race and we were trying to hit a dark zone which was really critical. It was a 3pm dark zone. If we didn't make it we would've had to sit there until 6 o'clock the next morning which would have been not good. So there was pressure on me, I put pressure on myself to make the dark zone with my team and I was slowing everyone down and so emotionally, it was difficult for me to know that I was absolutely the weakest link at that moment in the race. It was very tough for me to keep moving forward and I pushed hard. I just flung myself down the side of this mountain and made it happen. There was never a moment in my mind when I thought of quitting, ever. I look back on that situation and it was never even an option.
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