On the eve of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we’re sitting down with Denise Olsen, wife of Jeffery Olsen, a firefighter who lost his life as a first responder. She tells us the story of what she remembers about the day of the attacks, being under a microscope while coping, how she’s used fitness to heal and so much more.

Be sure to follow Denise Olsen on Instagram (@Strong_and_Soulful) to watch her “ruck” from Boston to New York City this week and to receive updates on her book, Strong and Soulful.
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TM: Can you take me back to the day of 9/11? Can you just talk me through what you remember?

D: I give people a little bit of background on this because right before September 11th, I had had a miscarriage and there were some complications with it, so I was not feeling great that day. I had sent my son, Vincent, off to school. My sister or my brother-in-law would come pick him up, drive him to school and the two babies, my daughter was three and Noah was 18 months old, for some reason, slept in. This is quite unusual because all of my kids are usually up at the crack of dawn, to this day. I wasn’t feeling great, so normally I never go back to bed, but I was like, let me just lay down for a little bit and rest. My phone was ringing off the hook and this is before cell phones. You have an answering machine that you could hear click on and off and voicemail. I was thinking in my mind it was probably my sister calling or my sister-in-law, people that I would talk to regularly. So I was just like, I’ll call them back later. Then, my father calls and my father doesn’t normally make phone calls and I heard him on my voicemail. I was like, that’s weird. so I picked it up. He said, “Where’s Jeff?” And I said, “He’s at work.” At the time, my father worked at Jersey City Medical Center and his office overlooked the water straight to the Twin Towers. And he said, “Well, a plane just flew into one of the Twin Towers.” He knew where Jeff worked. Jeff works in the firehouse that is adjacent to the memorial, so right on Liberty and Greenwich. I say this all the time and I know if you’re not in the fire service or married to someone who’s in fire service, you might not understand, but I honestly wasn’t concerned. I thought there was a fire and I was excited for him because he lived for fire. So I was like, “Oh, well, good for him. He’s gonna have a great, well terrible for the people that are on a plane and all of that. But I don’t mean that disrespectfully. But as far as my concern for him at the moment, the thought never ever passed my mind that something was going to happen to him.” While I’m still on the phone with my father, the second plane hit and he was like (my father does not curse), “Holy shit, another plane just flew into the other tower.” And we knew right away that something was wrong. It felt like we were under attack, but by who? From where? That was when the wheels fell off the wagon. Like, you don’t know what’s happening and my main concern at that moment was not only for Jeff, but it sort of shifted more towards, alright, I’m home alone with these two kids and my other one is in school, and I have no idea what’s going on. How do I keep us safe? So I put the TV on, then we started hearing about the plane flying into the Pentagon, the plane crashing in Shanksville, and I think I was more frightened over the idea of that we’re being attacked than fearful of what was happening to Jeff. It wasn’t until the first tower fell that I went back to that, oh my god, is he okay? When the first tower fell, I immediately just started to pray because you know they’re in there and after the second tower was hit, you knew that there were a lot of them in there, this wasn’t just a few companies responding to a fire. When I say this, I get so much shit for this, honestly. I’ve been on a documentary and my girlfriend was watching it and called me up and was like, “This is so you.” I was thinking to myself, if he gets hurt, I remembered he had said to me, “If anything ever happens to me, they will send someone to pick you up, and they’ll bring you to me.” So I was like, oh my god, I better get in the shower and get ready. If he’s hurt, I want to be ready to go to him. While I was in the shower, the second tower fell. We lived in a tiny house, I had the bathroom door open because I had the little ones, and I had the TV blasting. You could just hear the newscaster screaming that the tower was falling and I love to tell this story because it speaks to the beginning of my journey into yoga and spirituality and knowing that there’s something bigger than us. While I was in the shower, I was wearing a locket that Jeff had given to me and as the tower fell, the locket, it felt like someone was holding on to it and it got ripped off my neck and fell into the bottom of the bathtub. I don’t want to say I knew that he had been killed or anything like that, I just had this feeling of falling. The crazy thing with your brain is that when you get so frightened, it has this mechanism that immediately starts to compartmentalize things and doesn’t allow you to think in a logical way. I call it almost like magical thinking. There wasn’t a thought in my mind at that point that he could have died. Going back to the praying, it started out, oh, please don’t let them be hurt, and then it shifted to, please just let him come home. I don’t care what shape he’s in, I don’t care if he is paralyzed, I don’t care. I just want him to come home.

At age 17, Mary Cain was the fastest girl in the country and the youngest American Track and Field athlete to make a World Championship. In 2019, she published her story in the New York Times, exposing the emotional and mental abuse she faced in the Nike Oregon Project, which is now defunct. Today, Mary is the CEO and President of Atalanta New York. 

In this episode, Mary Cain discusses falling in love with running, abuse in women’s sports, mental health, eating disorders, and so much more.

Atalanta NY is a NYC-based nonprofit that employs professional female runners to mentor young girls in the community. Check out the online experience, Building Resiliency, here.

Connect with Mary on Social:

-Website: RunMaryCain.com / AtalantaNYC.org

-Instagram: @runmarycain / @atalantany-Facebook: Mary Cain

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A LOOK INSIDE THE EPISODE:

Tough Mudder: When did it come to your attention or everyone’s attention that you weren’t just good at this, you were one of the best, if not THE best, at your age or in your generation?

M: I look at it as little moments along the way. In elementary school, I was always the fastest kid in school. The story you’ll hear from a lot of people who’ve had success in a sport, their gym teacher would be intrigued because they’d be like, “You’re super fast on the track.” They would time your one lap and realize you could keep going past the one lap. So by the time I was a fifth grader, I did a mile time trial, and I ran 6:10 and I had zero run training, like this was totally just making that up. And my dad was like, “I don’t think I can do that,  like this seems kind of fast.” I remember him sitting down to Google it and he looked up whatever would have been the age group rankings. He’s like, “You might be in the top 10 in the country, right now.” I had no idea what that meant. It wasn’t something that we were impressed by, it was just kind of just a weird thing. Then, the next year as a sixth grader, I ran 5:47, and I think it was like, even better than the rankings. Whatever we were looking up could have been completely inaccurate, but in the back of our heads, everybody’s telling us this is really surprisingly fast. As a seventh grader, I did my first ever season of track and I qualified for the State meet, I competed in the National Championship, and I immediately asserted myself as being one of the best middle schoolers, at least in New York State. Then by freshman year of high school, I was the number one ranked person in the country for the 1500. In high school, number two ranked under 19 runner. Then by sophomore year, I was the national record holder. So it was a super fast progression, not because I increased training, but I probably went from zero miles a week to like 30 over those four years.

Tough Mudder: RED-S, Relative Energy Deficiency in Sports, is where if you are not getting the correct nutrition, bones start to break. This started happening to you, right?

M: Yes, essentially, what happened was that I lost my period for three and a half years and part of that was from overtraining. I was told that because I wasn’t in as good of shape as the other girls, I had to do more workouts than them and do more core training so that I could try to lose weight. Some of it was just I was physically doing more than I really should have been and doing more intense work that I probably wasn’t even doing right because nobody was supervising me. But I was told to go do 30 minutes of core, so I just kind of made it up when I did it. The other part of it was the fact that I was so under-eating and just not even eating right and properly, there was no balance to my diet. So I lost my period, I ended up having very low estrogen, and I started to have bone loss. I think the most frustrating thing was that when you develop something like RED-S or Amenorrhea, it’s not like you immediately break. Normally, it’s like a buildup of time where your body finally is like, “Okay, it took me a year to lose bone density, for example.” And I think what was really cruel was that it wasn’t until I left the team that literally within like two months, the first bone break happened. In retrospect, every doctor I’ve talked to has said, “Yeah, that’s because it usually takes that long for the bone loss to really start to kick in and it happened because of everything that they were doing and all of the thoughts they were putting you through and the physical load.” I never had this really big, brave moment with the team. Instead, it was like a lot of really sad feelings of defeat, where the first time that I “left,” was after my freshman year. I had gone to Alberto and Darren and I had told them that I had been cutting myself. Both of which they deny happening and say they don’t remember. One of the most pivotal moments in my life and most traumatizing moments, they told me they want to go to sleep, so I guess they were too tired to remember. And I called my parents and I didn’t tell them I was cutting myself because I was really embarrassed and ashamed of that. But I did tell them I was really struggling with food and I was getting scared that I was going to hurt myself. At that point, there had been a lot of moments where my parents, from very far away, had seen these moments of panic, like I was clearly not doing well. But they would call me and be like, “Are you okay?” And I wouldn’t tell them because if I did, I was gonna get yelled at by the team. So this was like my first moment of just being like, I’m a loser, I can’t handle it. I need help. My parents immediately were like, “You’re coming home, we need to address this. Get the hell out of there.” My parents at the time were super, super upset. But again, in my mind, I’m not thinking it’s their fault. They don’t have the full context of the situation because I’m too embarrassed to like, really get into the nitty gritty of everything that happened. We’re trying to fix something that we don’t even know what the issue is. Over the course of the next year, I went on training trips with them, but I still lived remote. It really changed the dynamic of the relationship where I was constantly pressured to move back out there. I was just like, “Hey, you guys know I have an eating disorder issue, you call me a head case every day. I want to move back out, but I’m trying to fix it.” What happened was I ran trials again, 2016, and that whole weekend had been horrible. Some really nasty things had been said to me and I was made to feel like I shouldn’t even be there. Like because I was just too bad…

“The Ultra OCR Man,” Evan Perperis, served in the United States Army Special Forces, allowing him to excel in the extreme sport of Ultra Distance Obstacle Course Racing as a result of 44 cumulative months of combat experience. In this episode, Evan discusses overcoming challenges, giving back, living life to the fullest, combat stress, the Infinite Hero Honor Challenge and more.

Find information about the Infinite Hero Honor Challenge here.

Read “What is the Infinite Hero Honor Challenge?” written by Evan Perperis here.

Connect with Evan on Social:

-Instagram: @ultraocrman

-Website: TeamStrengthSpeed.com

-Facebook: Evan Perperis

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A LOOK INSIDE THE EPISODE:

Tough Mudder: Why was your experience with Boy Scouts a significant time in your life?

E: It’s kind of crazy when you draw a link from where I am now back to six year old me. But, it was the first domino of a series of events that led me to where I am today. It’s just crazy. So I joined Boy Scouts as a six year old and made good friends with all the people there. All those guys who I was in Boy Scouts with were in my wedding party. It was because of Boy Scouts that I went into the military. It was because of the military and the ROTC program I was in in college, that I met my wife. And because of that, the guys specifically I was with in that program, were the reason I went Special Forces. It was just the domino effect. 

My best friend from Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, who was also my best man in my wedding, in 2012, he was  like, “Hey, I’m doing this thing, Tough Mudder, you should do it. It’s awesome. I think you’d be really good at it.” And I was like, “Nah, sounds stupid, not interested.” I should have listened to him because two years later, I found it and I just loved every minute of it. And I was like, “Dammit, he was right.”

Tough Mudder: How did you get into the armed services?

E: I went through a program called ROTC. Essentially, it is a college class you take, and then once a week, you essentially dress up like a soldier and you do army stuff, and you go to army class. I went through a normal college experience for four years at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland. And then when I graduated, instead of going into the civilian workforce, I went in as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Army. So doing that process, they paid for school. It was a great deal. At the time, I was like, “Yeah, I’ll probably do like four years and get out.” But the longer I was in, the more I enjoyed it, and things just kind of rolled from there. As you can see from my racing, when I find something I like, I go all in to the excessive amount.

Tough Mudder: How did you get involved with the Infinite Hero Honor Challenge?

E: I got an email from the CEO of Tough Mudder, Kyle, saying, “Let me introduce you to Johnny.” And he’s like, “I know you’re a longtime Tough Mudder guy. You’re physically fit and seem like a hard worker. Would you want to come and help out with this?” And I was like, “Yeah, this sounds like it’s right up my alley.” Looking for a blend between Tough Mudder and the Military; that’s me. We’ve got some other Veterans that are involved in Tough Mudder, too. But they offered it and I was 100% in and the events lined up, like literally in the gaps between my race calendar, which I couldn’t believe, I was like, “This feels like a sign.”