She won the Charlotte Marathon by half an hour. But getting to that finish wasn’t easy.
Every time someone yelled encouragement to Erin Del Giudice as she ran the Charlotte Marathon on Nov. 12 — and such shouts were frequent, given the number of friends there to cheer her on — she smiled, made eye contact, and kept smiling till she had breezed by.
And upon catching her breath after completing the race, she looked pretty happy, too.
As well she should have: The Davidson College alumna and mother of a 16-month-old had just won the women’s title in dominating fashion. She was sixth overall out of more than 1,100 participants, and averaged 6 minutes and 29 seconds per mile for 26.2 of them, a pace just a small percentage of adults can hold for even one.
On paper, Erin had broken the tape on that muggy, cloudy Saturday morning in 2:49:51.
On a more spiritual level, though, it could be said that it had taken her more than six long, hard, sometimes-crippling years for her to get here. To get back to something resembling the level of fitness she had when she ran the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials in 2016; but far more importantly, in the grand scheme of things, to get there feeling mentally fit, too.
“The gift is not that I’m fast again,” Erin said last week, while sitting at the kitchen table of her Charlotte home with her daughter Emma, who popped Cheerios into her mouth as her mom talked. “The gift is that I have been able to train this much, and to enjoy it. It’s just a gift to be able to run at all.
“Because for so long, my mind fought against letting me just run and be happy with it.”
Happy memories of childhood running
When Erin first started participating in running workouts with a Tuesday night group I’m a part of, in September 2017, she appeared to be an ordinary runner. In other words, she blended in — since it’s a group largely populated by ordinary runners, like me.
Although she wasn’t particularly fast, and although she was younger than most of our members, she was clearly interested in socializing beyond the confines of what happened at the workout. So, she was able to make her way into the group’s “inner circle” relatively quickly.
People in the group would come to know her as the twenty-something schoolteacher and newlywed who was almost always up for an IPA, not as the former elite runner who had one of the better performances at the 2016 Olympic Trials.
Which is how Erin wanted things. She didn’t want any sort of special label. She wanted to blend in with the rest of us.
At some point not longer after she joined us, however, I became aware of the fact that she had been a star, and the journalist part of my brain was activated. In February 2018, I invited her to meet me at Amelie’s at Park Road Shopping Center, and I asked her if she’d tell me about the trajectory of her running career.
The roots of it were, and still are, easy for her to talk about.
The child of two University of Georgia swimmers, Erin (then Erin Osment) swam competitively for much of her youth; but she says she developed a love for running as an elementary schooler, during a roughly two-year period when her family lived in Switzerland. She remembers running through the fields by the farms, or on roads that would allowed her mom or dad to bike alongside her, and feeling nothing but joy.
She grew into a middle-school soccer player who embraced the running aspect of the sport, then as a freshman at St. Pius X Catholic High School in Atlanta — having given up soccer but feeling like she had to do something — she joined the cross-country team.
It was a good match. Erin eventually chose high-school running over club swimming, and by her senior season, she was the best distance runner on a team that finished third at Georgia’s state meet.
The following August, she arrived at Davidson. And this is where her relationship with running started to get more complicated.
‘My job is to train right now’
After a strong freshman cross-country season, Erin says she struggled upon shifting focus to the track in the spring, as “the transition to college fell on me like a ton of bricks.”
That struggle carried over into her sophomore year. She had fallen out of shape somewhat, couldn’t run as fast as she did a year earlier, started dreading workouts, and it all got into her head.
The unique environment seemed, in her mind, to exacerbate the problems. As she describes it, “Davidson is a pressure cooker, because you have to work really hard on your academics. You’re in a really small bubble. Everybody knows everybody. So your flaws are highlighted. There’s no crowd you can get lost in to hide your errors, and when I wasn’t training well and having bad workouts ... it was always there to remind everyone that I was struggling. And they probably didn’t care, but I cared. ...
“I think I’ve always been a little more concerned with what people think of me than with what’s actually going on.”
Finding herself in a leadership role as a junior helped her to re-focus and to return to peak fitness, though, and as a senior Erin ran her way to the 2015 NCAA Division I Track & Field Championship at legendary Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon. There, she set a new Davidson record and earned second-team All America status with a 34-minute, 14-second finish in the 10,000-meter event.
Right after graduation, she and her college sweetheart Sal Del Giudice (pronounced “Dell-JOO-dee-chay”) moved to Charlotte’s South End area.
Sal had run for Davidson, too, but would mostly pivot away from the sport as he settled into his new job in the finance sector. Erin, however, wasn’t able to find work as a teacher right away and — feeling “a little groundless” — decided to build on her fitness as a distance runner and try to qualify for 2016 Olympic Marathon Trials.
“I just poured it all in,” she recalls. “Training, training, training. I was definitely like, ‘My job is to train right now.’ And it was good to have that at the time, but in hindsight, it didn’t help that I didn’t have anything else going on.”
She eventually was running 80, 90, even 100 miles a week, often with other former college runners (never with quote-unquote more ordinary runners). And ultimately it paid off: On New Year’s Eve in 2015, she punched her ticket with a 1:14:17 at a half marathon in Jacksonville, Florida.
Six weeks later, on a brutally hot day in Los Angeles, Erin astonished even herself with a 2:40:42 at the Trials, good for an 18th-place finish out of nearly 200 women who were at the start line.
But six weeks after that, everything started to fall apart for her.
‘I was hiding out, basically’
By her own admission, she tried to run too hard too soon after the marathon.
It was the 5,000-meter event at the Raleigh Relays, a track meet at NC State, and on that day she ran 17:33 — at least a minute slower than what Erin thought she could run.
“So I was pretty mad,” she recalls, “and it spiraled from there. I continued to be mad at myself all the time. ... I would start the run mad. Then I would run too hard, then I would be sore, and I would keep trying to run, and it was an endless cycle of punishing myself for not running the time that I thought I could run. ...
“I would go out on runs and be sad and sit down and cry on the sidewalk, and all that negativity built up. Mentally I was very unhappy.”
“I also still didn’t have a job,” she continues, “so that was a little bit stressful. Sal was working a lot, and he was enjoying for the most part his job, and I sort of felt like, ‘What am I doing? Running isn’t fun. I don’t have a job. I’m just sitting around in the apartment all day. I’m useless right now’ ... and those thoughts took over.”
By the summer of 2016, she had stopped running completely.
The pastime she’d once loved had become a key source of shame. “I had always been this fabulous runner, and now I was not running, gaining weight ... so I was embarrassed. I was hiding out, basically. I just laid around a lot.”
At the same time, Erin was able to make forward progress in other aspects of her life. In August 2016, she finally landed a job — teaching social studies at Holy Trinity Catholic Middle School on Park Road — and it gave her “a new community of people who only knew me as a new teacher, not as a runner. It was a fresh start, in a way.” The following July, she and Sal were married.
Not long after that, Erin’s mother happened to read a story about Kelly Fillnow, a fellow Davidson graduate and a professional triathlete who also worked as a coach for amateur athletes in Charlotte.
Erin recalls her mother saying something to the effect of, “Why don’t you just meet her and see what she’s like? And if you feel good about her, maybe she could help you start over.’”
In a meeting at Starbucks on East Boulevard in September 2017, Erin told Kelly that she hadn’t been training and felt bad about her running, but that she wanted to train again. Kelly told Erin she thought she could help her, and Erin almost immediately trusted Kelly. So she hired Kelly as her coach.
But Erin would have to walk before she could run. Literally.
Warming to the group dynamic
Kelly’s first assignments for Erin involved alternating intervals of a minute of running followed by 30 seconds of walking.
“For someone who’s been able to run a hundred-mile weeks, that’s extremely humbling,” Erin says. “Extremely humbling. But I did it. I made myself follow what she said to do. And it was easier to balance (short runs) because ... I was working a ton of hours trying to get ready to teach all the time. I could do a 20-minute morning run and just wipe from my brain after it. However it went. Because I would go to work and then I was totally preoccupied with teaching and whatever was going on at school.”
A month after she started trying to re-engage with running, she joined the Tuesday-night group workout, which is coached by Kelly’s twin sister Meghan. Less than four months after that, I met with her at Amelie’s and I bounced the idea of writing a story about her renewed relationship with running.
We mutually agreed to hold off, and that was a good thing — because it would become clear she wasn’t mentally where she needed to be yet.
When we chatted last week, Erin told me about how after our 2018 meeting, as she trained for her first full Ironman, she would frequently not do the workouts Kelly was assigning to her but lying and saying that she was doing them.
“Honestly,” she says, “it’s a reflection of my mental health at the time. And that I was still trying to hide.”
She did manage to complete the Ironman — in Chattanooga, in September 2018; but after that, she gave up on being coached by Kelly, mainly because she continued to be unhappy with herself and with her performance. Her running, which had improved during that training cycle but hadn’t come close to where she was at her peak, started to regress again.
Still, even though she was ashamed about how she was running, she continued to make Tuesday-night run-club appearances on at least a semi-regular basis, because of how good and how normal being with the group made her feel.
Over time, she says, she couldn’t help but be taken by the fact that “it doesn’t really matter how fast you’re running, but that you’re all putting in the same effort. That is the coolest thing, I think. ... I’m just so impressed that people come and show up every week. People with lives and kids and jobs. Real, normal people who are busy, and sometimes don’t have time for this kind of thing.
“They all show up, and then they’re so supportive of everyone else, that it makes me want to also contribute and be supportive. There’s this bond you have over working hard together, instead of working hard to try and beat one another.”
Meanwhile, between 2017 and 2019 Erin says she also went on medication to treat her depression — and that that helped, too.
By late 2020, she was as happy as she’d been in years, was a regular on Tuesday nights, and had signed up with Kelly again to start training for a spring half marathon.
Then, that December, she learned that she was going to have a baby.
‘Now it’s about having fun’
Erin gave birth to her and Sal’s first child, daughter Emma, on Aug. 1, 2021.
And once she was able to start running again, she felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude. “Any run — no matter how long or how short — I was just like, ‘Oh, I got a run in today. Yay me! I did it!’ I was able to separate the mental pressure of running and really be kind of like the kid runner that I used to be. Just to be happy to be running. To be out there. Then after I finished my run, I’d have a million other things to do.
“I wasn’t overthinking it anymore. So, allowing myself to take the pressure out of it and just enjoy it has taken away a lot of the limitations.”
Seven months after Emma was born, at the 2022 Atlanta Half Marathon, Erin placed 14th out of nearly 1,500 women, her most impressive finish at a race in nearly six years. Then she won the Charlotte Racefest Half Marathon in April, then a local four-mile race in July, then a local 5K in August, as she built up for November’s Charlotte Marathon.
Asked what she would attribute her resurgence to, her upper lip stiffens. She doesn’t reply for a few seconds. Then:
“I mean, I don’t love saying this, because to me it sounds snobby. But the competitor in me is not gone. And after Emma was born, I felt like I could still be the old runner that I was before ... and like whatever I do will be an example for Emma, eventually, about going after her own goals.”
“I don’t know, it’s like the runner that I used to be and the runner that I am now have converged. I’m still competitive and I still have goals, but it’s easier for me to be mentally healthy about them because now I have Emma to run for, and I have this life that we’ve built together, and this community that I train with.”
Erin turned 29 in July. She’s not currently teaching, but she’s in the homestretch of a graduate program she started in the fall of 2020, studying history at UNC Charlotte. She and Sal would like to grow their family, perhaps sooner rather than later.
So now she views running as mainly “about having fun. Going for your goals, but also I’m very content if I don’t reach these goals. Because I’m still able to enjoy everything else that I have. I’m still able to come home and —” Emma interrupts her with a whine, which makes Erin smile “— have a cranky toddler to talk to, and fulfill the other parts of my life.”
Yes, she admits that if she’d not done well at the Charlotte Marathon two Saturdays ago, it might have made a little mad, frustrated and disappointed. “But it would have been a lot easier to move past it. It would have been like, ‘OK, that’s it.’ You know? ‘Now I’m gonna come home, take care of the baby, hang out with my friends, and watch the game with my family.’”
As it happened, though, Erin ran so fast that she beat the runner-up by nearly half an hour.
Then?
She headed home to take care of Emma, went to hang out with her running friends of varying speeds, and watched the Georgia football game with her family — parts of Erin’s life that, to her, all are gifts even greater than running.
This story was originally published November 22, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "She won the Charlotte Marathon by half an hour. But getting to that finish wasn’t easy.."
