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i, I'm Iris Chen and I want to thank the Flyers for featuring me in this month's member profile. I look forward to getting to know many of you better.
grew up in Washington, D.C., and now live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I keep trying to move downtown but keep ending up here on the Upper West because Central Park is the best backyard ever!
’m the middle child of seven — four boys and three girls who became known as the ‘Chen Clan’ in my suburban D.C. neighborhood where there weren’t many Asians or Asian Americans. We grew up close in age and close as a family, but there was an unspoken rule against copycats. So, we all have completely different professions — journalist, consultant, physics PhD, me, doctor, engineer, and loans portfolio/risk manager. It makes for a little village, but we also have a rule against asking each other for professional help unless we’re desperate.
y little brother Roger started distance running some years ago and ran Chicago, though he doesn’t run much now that he has two young kids. My oldest sister Kathy recently started running, but shorter distances. The others are supportive of my running, but think I’m nuts.
ran track in high school, which was torture due to my lack of talent. There’s nothing like having to run faster for the team when you can’t. I also ran recreationally in college, but just as part of a baseline fitness routine, along with working out at the gym.
fter graduating from college, I moved to NYC in the fall of 1990 to start my two-year teaching commitment with Teach For America (TFA), the national teacher corps. That was TFA’s very first year of operation so it was an interesting year. I taught fifth graders in the Fort Greene area of Brooklyn, where my students grew up in the Farragut Housing complex underneath the shadows of the Manhattan Bridge. I didn’t have an auspicious start. My first day of teaching, even though I was wearing my best teacher outfit (skirt, high heels, and teacher bag), the school guard yelled at me to get back into the school yard. My students tested me relentlessly that year, and taught me much of what I know today about leadership and management.
learned a lot that year, but the most important thing I learned was also the saddest — which was how difficult the lives of my students were and how much talent we were leaving behind as a nation. Seeing the occasional victories of my students, when given encouragement and support, I also learned that it didn’t have to be that way. Realizing this, I knew I could not walk away. I had found my life’s work.
everal of my friends at TFA, including the founder Wendy Kopp, ran the NYC marathon in 1991 and that’s when I first started thinking about it. Then, at the last minute, another friend I’d met at a NYRR race asked me to run the final third with her. I think the longest distance I’d run until then was 10K, but I jumped at the opportunity. Back then, marathons were far less crowded and banditing was more acceptable.
t was an amazing experience, being among all the runners and seeing the energy and generosity of the crowds the whole way. More than an hour after my friend was supposed to reach our meeting spot it became clear we’d missed each other, so I ended up jumping in anyway and running the last 10 miles on my own. I felt guilty because everyone else’s last 10 were my first 10, and to spectator cheers I kept passing people who had been running much longer than me! I decided I had to come back the next year and do it right. So I ran my first marathon in 1992, in New York City
ost people think I’m relatively new to the club but I’ve been around since 1994 (recruited by Thomas Zweifel, who was a regular in the park), when the club was a lot smaller.
took a hiatus from the Flyers when I left New York for graduate school in Boston in 1998. Once I moved there it made more sense to run Boston than NYC, so I ran it the first opportunity I had — the spring semester of my first year in grad school. I ran Boston altogether three times while I was there (1999, 2000, & 2001) and my 2nd one remains my marathon PR. After moving back to New York in 2003 I rejoined the Flyers a few years later.
he club has gotten much bigger since the early years, but it has preserved its sense of community. I love running in the park and seeing Flyers everywhere. It keeps me motivated and reminds me that we’re part of a larger running community.
f you asked me what I would advise new runners, I would say, run with others! That, along with signing up for and running races, keeps me accountable. Unfortunately for my own training, I usually start training when I start panicking! I guess you could say procrastination is my worst habit. And for a longer view, think big and have a sense of possibility; i.e., focus on the goal and making it happen rather than wondering whether it can be done. It always works for me.
y most memorable running experience was running with a wheelchair athlete in 1996. Noel and I had some good laughs, but also some near cries and a lot of shouting. Back then, the wheelchair athletes started several hours earlier than the others and the city didn’t close off the roads or open up the First Aid stations until some time into our race. Noel, who had been training hard for what would be his first marathon, maneuvered himself in a rickety old wheelchair and would not keep to the side of the road where the police were directing us away from the cars. At one point he stopped cold and refused to go on if I wouldn’t leave him alone and let him ride in the center of the road which made for easier going. We eventually resolved that standoff, but that didn’t stop him from trying to break free of me. He’d speed downhill leaving me behind and trying frantically to catch up on the uphills. At one point, I completely lost sight of him and didn’t find him for another mile.
he greatest challenges were yet to come. Pretty early into the race, Noel’s hands started bleeding from the wheels and I had to tear up my shirt to wrap them. It was clear that from then onward, he was in a lot of pain.
ut the hardest part came in the second half of the race when all the able-bodied runners who had started several hours after us started passing us by the hundreds. Noel was exhausted and discouraged and by mile 20 he could barely go an inch further. What had been a battle of wills between us became a shared battle to cross the finish line together. There were times when I was not sure if I should encourage him to quit or push him to finish. But in the end, by taking it several minutes forward followed by several minutes rest, we crossed the finish line together, nearly seven hours after we started. Now, more than a dozen marathons later, I still consider that my toughest and most rewarding race.
traveled to Paris in 2008 and ran the Paris Marathon, which was an amazing experience. There’s nothing like ending a marathon at the Arc de Triomphe. The Parisians served wine and sausage on the course (which I had enough sense to pass on) and provided water in water bottles.
he runners there — mostly extremely lean men — were much more homogenous than here. The race organizers let some of the women start at the very front, with the fastest men. The men looked at us quizzically but didn’t complain even though we were like a brick wall in front of them.
he way the marathon came up and down overnight was surreal. I walked around the day before and from what I could see, none of the banners or bleachers had been put up yet. Nobody seemed to know a marathon was taking place the next day — they were surprised when I told them I was in town for that. The night after the marathon, I turned on the sports news and there was no mention of the marathon, like it never happened.
ran my first untramarathon, the Knickerbocker 60K, on a whim. I had gotten curious about ultras and also wanted to get an extra star for
marathon maniacs, (a web site for, you guessed it, marathon maniacs) which I'd just qualified for that fall. It was one of those things where I
ran one, then two, then three marathons all at the last minute over a matter of weeks and so wanted to see if I could run a fourth (not that I'm
obsessive or anything ).
o the week prior to the race, I started thinking I might do it depending on how I felt. But I was so ambivalent that I spent the night before at a friend's place, eating several platefuls of Thai food and red wine and didn't get home till midnight. I was still undecided, so I spent an hour reading about the race on Runners World forums. After hearing how laid back it was (e.g., stopping every lap to regroup and have pretzels and soda!), I decided to run at least part of it and see how I felt. Once there, I told myself I'd run the marathon distance and then maybe drop out if I needed to. Of course, once I hit 26.2 miles, it was hard not to finish, so I kept going.
found the "Knick" to be a lot easier than a marathon — much more relaxed — and there is something manageable about the idea of eight 4-mile laps around the park, as opposed to 26.2 winding miles. The fans in Central Park were great, including those who had no idea what we were doing, but cheered us on anyway. By now I’ve run the Knick three times, and am planning to run it again this fall.
am a big believer of multiple marathons – after all that training, you might as well leverage it! I’m also a big believer in a pre-race meal of pad thai and red wine. It works for me every time.
ver since my teaching experience with Teach For America nearly 20 years ago, I knew my life’s work would be in education. When I decided to go back to school for my JD/MBA in 1998, I knew that I wanted to stay involved in education but I hadn’t decided in what capacity. I was interested in learning more about business and management, which I thought would be critical to taking the education sector to the next level. At that time we were starting to see more examples of successful business leaders leveraging their business know-how to serve the broader community.
ight after business school, I joined the private sector as a management consultant, thinking that might be a good way to increase my understanding of business and prepare myself for greater impact in education. But in the end, I returned to education more quickly than I anticipated, having been called back by an unprecedented opportunity to contribute to educational reform in NYC with the arrival of Mayor Bloomberg and NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. Wendy Kopp asked me to come back as NYC Executive Director, with the goal of significantly growing TFA across New York City, from 225 to 1,000 teachers. The idea was to support the Mayor and Chancellor’s reforms by bringing more talent into the field. It was an opportunity I couldn’t walk away from.
n 2007, I joined the “I Have A Dream” Foundation as President & CEO. Like Teach For America, my organization is working to expand educational opportunity for all children in the nation. Today in our nation, only 50% of students in low-income communities are expected to graduate from high school and only 10% are expected to graduate from college. We are working with many others to change this reality. Specifically, we sponsor entire cohorts of students beginning at an early age, and we promise them college tuition support if they graduate from high school, then work with them to help them get there. We are always seeking new champions, so please let me know if you’d like to get involved!
don’t tend to have one favorite anything, but I love Gandhi’s quote, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” It speaks to my idealistic side and serves as a powerful moral compass. I do love to cook and entertain. And I’d have to say Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, because it combines food, friends, and gratitude. Putting it all into a few words, cliché that it is, I love to eat and run. In terms of my unfavorite things, as it relates to running, one of my pet peeves is when folks walk or run in a wall three or four strong — or with a dog leash that cuts everyone off — oblivious to others around them, or thinking they have the right of way.
ot many of my running friends know that I fell down a manhole in China and broke my foot. I still have a bump on my left foot from the disastrous setting at the hospital, which makes it hard to wear certain running shoes. I was there for junior year abroad in 1988. I wish I could say it was running related but it wasn’t. I was walking backwards, taking a picture of my friends and fell in. My friends had to pull me out it was so deep, and I had fallen all the way in. The driver who took me to the hospital said it was the second or third time he had taken someone to the hospital who had fallen in and he wasn’t sure why no one had covered or fixed it. I guess that back then, there were no real options for litigation or compensation and little incentive on the part of the authorities to fix these things.
gotta run.