The man on the Zoom screen sits inside an office at his home in Calgary. He is, briefly and also rarely, not in motion. The walls behind him are covered with memorabilia, all from his past lives, as a college decathlete and then an Olympic bobsled champion. There’s a picture from an F16 ride he took once, a flag a veteran flew for him in Iraq, and Olympic credentials and opening ceremony tickets from the three Games he participated in.
“There’s you guys,” Steve Mesler says, pointing to one of two framed Sports Illustrated covers in the background. Someone sent him one, from 1961, with bobsledders on the front. He earned the other, by winning gold, becoming part of the first bobsled-focused SI cover in almost 50 years.
Bob Martin/Sports Illustrated
Mesler segues into a counterintuitive notion, in light of his most recent athletic goal. While becoming an elite athlete in multiple disciplines, and while doing what U.S. bobsledders almost never did, he could lift and pivot and push and sprint. But within the vast spectrum of elements that form athleticism, he always, always, hated one more than any other.
“My relationship with distance running,” he says, “was similar to my relationship with, like, getting punched in the face.”
As a college decathlete at Florida, he disdained the 1,500-meter run more than the rest of the events combined. His lack of competence in that part of the decathlon helped nudge him into bobsled, where one bonus was the kind of running necessary to compete on world stages. Mesler could handle sprints, especially in that sport, where he ran and pushed as hard as he could and then, well, sat down for the rest of any run.
On the surface, the next athletic feat he targeted—running and finishing the New York City Marathon on Sunday, Nov. 5—seems like the last option he might have chosen. He’s clear on what is obvious: that participating in three Olympics does not make a long-distance runner. Not even for a star who helped net the first U.S. gold medal in bobsled in more than six decades.
Not even Mesler expected this, especially when he woke up in the Olympic Village in Vancouver in 2010. His four-man team had just triumphed, making history, then partying all night Saturday, then attending the closing ceremonies Sunday, with many, many, many interviews in between. He woke up feeling … weird. “Like I had been thirsty my whole life,” Mesler says. “And I wasn’t thirsty anymore.”
He knew, right then, regardless of whether some of that thirst to compete—and win—returned. It was time to retire. He had poured every ounce of available determination into becoming one of the best bobsledders on the planet. That day, Mesler understood he had nothing left to give. He felt “satisfied,” even, which might sound nice but isn’t necessarily for an elite athlete. He wanted to desire something again, to want that thing more than anything else, and to do that, he’d need to find another challenge.
So he did. It wasn’t easy, not with everything that happened. Not when he lost two Olympic teammates who were still young, in terms of lifespan. They had accomplished the impossible together. They had much to live for—and many months to live. Both of those teammates died by suicide, and when Mesler, in his grief, absent sport and competition, descended into depressions, darkness, even suicidal thoughts, he came to believe he understood their mindsets. Gold was great. Gold was complicated.
He wondered whether they were all searching for the same answer, even if his teammates weren’t aware of the questions he often asked himself. What does one do if they peak in their 30s? How do I move forward when I’m already defined?
So he founded an organization called Classroom Champions and became the CEO. Mesler recruited Olympians and their para counterparts. He targeted schools, then districts, expanding throughout Canada and the U.S. Classroom Champions improved engagement from students, fashioned growth mindsets and inspired positivity in classrooms.
Which was great, all the positives revealing themselves to Mesler during the darkest period of his life. He had a wife and two children of his own at home, people who needed him, depended on him. What he did have also showed Mesler the only thing he was missing at that point—scratching the competitive itch embedded in his soul. The guy who woke up on that Monday in Vancouver feeling satisfied realized he needed to find that satisfaction once again.
Whether fate or dumb luck, he heard from the New York Road Runners organization around then, earlier this year. This person knew of Classroom Champions and wondered whether Mesler might want to raise money for his organization by running the marathon held every November in NYC.
Initially, Mesler balked. He couldn’t remember the last time he ran a kilometer—he uses Canada’s preferred metric system throughout the interview—and had never traversed more than eight kilometers in one day in the rest of his life.
Figuring he’d say no, Mesler entered a 10K race in April, just to see whether he could finish one. He did. In June, he tried a 12K and finished that one, too. The next weekend, he entered a 15K and completed it. Then, on one random training day a few weeks later, he reached the halfway point of his goal that afternoon, didn’t feel tired and decided to keep chugging. He didn’t stop until completing 21 kilometers, or roughly half a marathon.
It was hard, all those kilometers spent immersed in the pursuit he so disdained. He never did stop hating running. But Mesler came to love what running did for him, for his body and his mind. He liked running in the morning, while most of Calgary woke up. In mid-October, he finished a jaunt of 30.5 kilometers, or just over 20 miles. Along the way, along those local roads, he learned. A lot. Like that 80% of distance running should be performed at a slow and easy pace, and plodders should expend maximum effort only the other 20% of the time. He couldn’t will his way into a faster marathon time without training, strategy, recovery and rest.
So he did all that, too. Mesler dived deep into the running community. He got coaches, met with advisers and trained with help from veterans. He started looking out for marathon-related news; his eyes nearly left his skull when he saw that a Kenyan runner, Kelvin Kiptum, had shaved some 34 seconds off the world record mark.
Courtesy of Steve Mesler
The best part is what happened after the gold medal but before he started running with finishing a marathon in mind. Mesler tended to his mental health, which improved. He gave children in two countries tools to do the same. In combination—helping self and helping others—he discovered something like purpose. But that’s a vague, encompassing term—and what Mesler found signaled so much more.
His goal isn’t to win. He realizes the new world record is about half of his desired finishing time of under four hours. He wants to show his children and those who benefit from Classroom Champions to see him as he is: accomplished and determined, intent to rise back up, but also threatened by guilt, grieving his friends and redefining what counts as a win. In this case, it’s completing the marathon. In a more ideal scenario, it’s completing the marathon in under those four hours.
“This resonates with me,” Mesler says. “I competed with six guys. I had to bury two of them from mental health issues,” along with another close friend. He’s referring to Jeret “Speedy” Peterson, a U.S. aerial skier who competed in Vancouver and landed his signature move, the Hurricane, to move from fifth into the silver medal slot. Peterson also died by suicide, at 29.
Around then, in what Mesler describes as “the deepest pit of depression,” he found himself walking through downtown Calgary one day. He noticed buses driving by. And he felt an uncontrollable urge from deep within. He wanted to jump in front of one, and how deeply he wanted that surprised him. He worried about those thoughts and CTE and the next tragedy that might be lurking nearby.
Mesler also did the work, therapy, meditation and all the rest. What he missed was competition. Hence the marathon.
He will carry his teammates with him across that finish line. Mesler’s not sure how. He just knows that he will. He also knows that fear and excitement start in the same place, that they’re almost the same emotion, that wanting to do well and accomplish tasks can be expressed in a positive sense or a negative one. He doesn’t want to fear the marathon. He wants to change his truth. And to do that, he’ll lay out his running gear and breakfast the night before each morning, motivating himself to get up before the sun does. But when friends invited him to a music festival in Edmonton—the kind of event he would have skipped for bobsled training—he went and did his kilometers in the morning, same as always, like never before.
“I don't want to live the rest of my life based upon this thing I did when I was 31,” he says. “I want to go do other stuff. I’ve been on both sides. Winning gold, there’s not many things more joyous than that. And I’ve been one wrong decision away from killing myself.”
He pauses over Zoom, framed magazine covers hanging in the background.
“I just feel so fortunate,” he says upon resuming. “I’ve gotten to live this whole spectrum, and it’s given me an appreciation for what it means to perform and means to stay healthy.
“My life now is about trying to fill in as much joy as possible.”
