Dr. Cathy Utzschneider, Coach

“It’s never too late to achieve your personal best.”

Motivating and coaching women to achieve their running goals and juggle them with the rest of life has been Cathy’s professional, academic, and personal focus for the past 15 years. Since then, she’s coached women from beginners to Olympians through MOVE, a performance coaching practice.

Her own experience in competitive running reflects the fact that it’s never too late to excel at a new sport. She started competitive running at 40 and within ten years earned a number 5 age group world ranking, a silver medal at the Nike World Masters Games (40 – 44), three U.S.A. National Masters Track and Field titles (45 – 49) and one Canadian National Title (40 – 44). In November 2005 she won the U.S.A. National Masters Cross Country Championship (50-54) and in January 2005 she finished first in her age group (45-49) of more than 1,100 women at the Arizona Rock and Roll Half Marathon. She just participated in the 2009 Masters Championships (WAVA) in Finland, where she finished 11th out of 29 in her age group in the 8 kilometer cross country event. In addition to being a member of Liberty for many of those years, she served as its president for several years. During that time she obtained sponsorship for Liberty from New Balance Inc.

She understands the demands of balancing athletics with a family and career. At 40 she had the first of her two children and began a doctoral degree at Boston University (Ed.D., Human Movement). There she wrote her dissertation on women who took up running after 30 and who became national or world class after 40.

Cathy continues her research on women athletes through coaching, teaching, and writing. Cathy is a professor at Boston College, where she teaches peak performance and goal setting. A columnist for National Masters News, she writes articles on topics related to women and running and performance through the decades.

She is currently finishing New Athletes, New Women, a book on women over 30 who have taken up and excelled at new sports in middle and later adulthood, showing that it’s never too late to improve their lives dramatically by pursuing athletic goals.