We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Mark Spewak. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Mark below.

Hi Mark, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about a time you helped a customer really get an amazing result through their work with you.

This question is always so hard to answer because I have been fortunate to work with so many incredible people. It’s cliche, but it feels like every client I get to coach could qualify for this answer. However, the story that comes to my mind is one of the first people I ever coached. This client in particular inspired me to start a business and I am incredibly grateful for him for that. When we first met, I was helping choose a new pair of running shoes at the running store I worked at. He enjoyed the service and conversation so much that he followed up a few days later with my colleagues to ask when I would be in next. The next time I saw him at the store, we had the chance to talk more about his personal running goals. After this second conversation, I knew that we would be a great fit for coaching so I pitched him the idea of me helping him achieve his goal of running the Chicago Marathon. His goal was to finish strong, lose weight, and push himself to new limits. During this training cycle, we learned a lot about each other and I got to see first hand just how resilient he was. It wasn’t until a few months later when he disclosed he had three heart attacks prior to working together! That’s usually something a coach wants to know before taking on a new client. However, he was never the one to make excuses and when he set his mind out to do something, he was going to be successful. Running had been something that his doctor encouraged and his health improved tremendously as a result. Throughout our journey, I helped him learn how to train smarter, not harder. We improved his overall health habits and focused less on weight loss and more on properly fueling his body. He reached the goal of completing the Chicago Marathon and got healthier as a result. What made this experience so special was that we built a great friendship in the process. He was a business owner himself and really took interest in my story. In the process of working together, he encouraged me to follow my own path and dreams. He told me after reaching his goal that I had to do this as a profession and he instilled the confidence and belief that I needed in me to do so. 10 years later, I am where I am personally and professionally because of him.

Mark, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I got into running when I was a kid and then, more seriously when I was in middle school. I always loved sports and played nearly every sport under the sun. My older brother was a competitive runner himself and when I got to 7th grade, I saw him having success at the high school level which inspired me to want to do the same. The rest was history, I went on to run cross country and track in high school. I got involved with a new running store at the time called Big River Running Company and helped them with their events. After high school, I ran a year in college for Rider University. I returned to St. Louis in the fall of 2012 and ended up getting my dream job at Big River Running Company. During the 5 years I worked there, I got to learn so much about the local running community, gain experience in the industry, and build confidence in sales and marketing. While working at Big River Running, I took on a coaching position at Ladue High School for cross country. I also took over the youth running programs for Ladue and Clayton. While coaching and working at the running store, it really motivated me to want to coach more people. I always knew that there were lots of adults that could have more success running if they had someone that believed in them while also having someone that could help adjust their schedule around their daily life commitments. During those years I got involved in putting on charity running events in the area that also inspired me to want to help more people and improve our community at large. This all led me to starting my coaching business Spewak Training in 2015. Whenever you start a business it takes time to gain clients and get off your feet. I was so fortunate to have a ton of support from those around me when I started. We really built the brand off referrals. My goal from day one was to provide a personalized experience with top notch customer service. It’s a standard I hold myself and our coaches to this very day. We aren’t always perfect but I am proud of the fact that we have grown as a business in clients, coaches, etc. while also continuing to maintain our core values in the process!

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

In the spring of 2021, I woke up one day and things weren’t right. I couldn’t feel my legs, feet, and hands. When I started to regain the feeling in those areas, everything just felt really heavy. I tried to go run and I couldn’t complete the run. I took several weeks off and underwent a lot of different tests that didn’t draw any conclusions for what I was experiencing. I figured once I felt more normal that I needed to start strength training and make changes to make sure I could continue to train healthy for many years to come. I got into the gym with my trainer Chuck Beckham that summer and took a huge leap in fitness. Come fall time, I felt stronger and healthier than ever. I had felt my issues were behind me. I decided that even though I hadn’t had a lot of time to train that I was going to run the Houston Marathon in January. After going through such a traumatic experience and then, having such a great comeback, I knew I wanted to capitalize and strike while the iron was hot. I ran the Houston Marathon that winter in 2:42:43 which was a personal best time by 7 minutes! I was ecstatic and thrilled to keep training harder after recovering from the marathon. However, after taking some time off, I started experiencing similar sensations and feelings that I had the spring before. Then, things took a turn for the worse where I started experiencing different debilitating pain in different areas of my body preventing me from being able to run pain free. Eventually that pain trickled into me not being able to walk normally, making it hard for me to sleep at night, and causing issues with simple daily tasks. I continued to seek out help from doctors and had a lot of support from my chiropractor Dr. Brennan Donahue who stuck with me throughout the whole process and encouraged me to keep seeking out answers and new health care providers. From the spring of 2022 through the early months of 2023, I tried to do what I could but I still had several problems. That’s when I decided to stop running completely until I could get some clear answers on what was going on. I switched over to the elliptical and made that my exercise of choice. I would suffer for over an hour a day on it and sometimes longer on the weekends. At first I was motivated by anger and frustration. Then, as time settled I realized this was going to have to be my new reality so I focused on simply enjoying what I could do and seeking out inspiring podcasts to help pass the time. As the months, went on my health continued to get worse to the point where I started falling regularly. My balance became worse and I started having severe issues in my neck and head. After months and months of exploring new doctors, new tests, treatments, etc. I found a doctor who was able to diagnose me. He determined from an MRI on my brain that I had a CSF Leak which is essentially a leak in your spinal cord. The treatment for a CSF Leak is a blood patch that I had scheduled in the fall of 2023. It takes around 2 months to fully recover from a blood patch and after nearly a year completely off running, I was cleared to start running again in the early months of 2024. Now a year later, I am able to run and strength train consistently again. My fitness is not where I was before my health issues showed up but I am getting stronger and healthier every month. I have learned a lot in this process. Often people ask me if it was hard to coach during this time and my answer is always the same….it wasn’t. I love coaching first and going through this health problem has made me a better coach. I had worked really hard since middle school for running to come pretty naturally the last several years. Now that I am experiencing the sport on the other side, I am learning just how humbling it is to progress and to build. My situation has given me a new outlook on life and more empathy for others health issues. I am grateful for this experience because I am a better person today than I was before I got sick.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

When the COVID shutdown began, I knew that this was going to impact my business tremendously. Races were canceled which meant people didn’t need a running coach anymore. However, something I knew to be true was that people were going to need my support as a coach more than ever with so much uncertainty in the world going on. Prior to COVID, I always prided myself on telling my clients that I would be there for them always. During COVID was the time to show them that I was a man of my word! I pivoted the direction of my business to putting on virtual running events for my clients and there friends to keep people inspired to train and have connection to community. These events brought us closer. Also, so many people lost fitness during COVID, where our clients improved because they had these virtual events and community to hang on to. If we couldn’t keep clients on for financial reasons, we offered to coach them for free. We tried to do right by our community and to motivate people during a time of need. The COVID shutdown was scary for everyone. Instead of being afraid of losing my business, I tried to see it as a chance to support those who had supported me. It’s a privilege to have a successful business and a clientele that is loyal to working with you. My mindset was if this was the end for Spewak Training, then, I better do whatever I can to serve the people who have stuck with me so long. People needed running for more than just training to get faster during that time. They needed it to battle the stresses of life and the uncertainty of the world at the time. By not putting pressure on the business or myself during that time, it just ended up making our organization stronger. I take more risks now which I am proud of. That’s all a direct result of how we pivoted during COVID.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://spewaktraining.com
• Instagram: Spewak Training
• Facebook: Spewak Training
• Twitter: Spewak Training