In Oct. 2014, Samantha Kanatzar, a sergeant in the U.S. Army, was deployed to Kuwait. Called to serve her nation, she was also going head on with a pack of personal challenges.
Her marriage was a self-described disaster. She was away from Jackson, her three-year-old son. She didn’t feel that she was performing to her own standards in her work, serving as a budget analyst at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. She had gained weight, in part because she was recovering from a shattered pelvis that she suffered when she fell from a rappel tower in a training exercise. Her self-worth was in freefall.
On Christmas Day that same year, two months after arriving, Kanatzar made what she calls the best decision of her life. She finally summoned the courage to go for a run with the running club at Camp Arifjan. She wanted to get back in shape and find an antidote for the drudgery of life on an isolated military base. She gained far more.
“When I say running saved my life, it helped me feel self-worth again,” Kanatzar said.
A little more than six months after that day, Kanatzar ran in the satellite race of the AJC Peachtree Road Race held at Camp Arifjan, joining more than 100 service members at the base at 2:30 p.m. local time to run 10 kilometers in blistering heat for a t-shirt and a sweaty Independence Day celebration. Monday, she’ll be part of the 60,000 to run the Peachtree in Atlanta. It is her tribute to the service members whom she ran with in the Kuwaiti version.
Kanatzar said that they “kind of made me fall in love with running.”
Kanatzar, 28, grew up in a military family. Feeling unfulfilled with civilian life after college, she joined the Army in January 2013. She serves the 1st Sustainment Command (Theater), which provides logistical support for the Army in the Middle East.
“Anytime the Army needs to purchase something or make a contract, they do it through my office,” she said.
The job took her to Kuwait for an 11-month deployment at Camp Arifjan, which serves as a forward logistics base for the Army. Life there includes 12-hour work shifts, sandstorms and temperatures reaching 130 degrees during the summer. The camp is outfitted with workout facilities and other means for beating back the tedium.
The club Kanatzar joined, the Kuwait Running Mafia, stands as a healthful option to provide community and training accountability far from home.
“(Club members) kind of take the place of being able to have family and friends and the support network you normally have after hours,” said Maj. Matt Myrick, a friend of Kanatzar’s through the running club.
In her workout partners, she found friends who challenged and encouraged her. They got together for post-work runs on Wednesdays, finishing it off with pizza and non-alcoholic beer (in keeping with Kuwaiti law forbidding alcohol), and an 11-miler on Sunday mornings along the camp’s perimeter. Her running diet grew to about 30 miles weekly despite the heat.
“I always joke that running is kind of my church or my penance,” she said. “When I’m on the road, it’s time when I get to think and kind of go through everything that is bothering me.”
Over time, about 35 pounds fell off and her emotional health returned. Not a competitive runner previously, she ran her first marathon, triathlon and duathlon in Kuwait. She was a regular in 5-kilometer races on the base and in the satellite races put on in conjunction with road races stateside and eventually began to help organize them.
“I felt like I’d failed at (marriage), and I’m not someone that enjoys feeling like I’ve failed, so I put myself 100 percent into my job and my (running) goals, because that’s what I had control over,” she said. “Being thousands of miles away and across an ocean, you can’t repair the damage that you’ve done, so I wanted to focus on the things I could control.”
“She just picked up running and used it as an outlet,” Myrick said.
The club became such a part of her life that she maintains friendships with her fellow runners and has joined them to run in the races whose satellite versions they ran in Kuwait.
She’ll come alone from Fort Bragg to Atlanta for the Peachtree; her divorce was finalized recently. Her son Jackson, now 5, is with his father for the summer. She wants to finish the Peachtree in under 50 minutes, a brisk pace that would roughly put her in the top seven percentile of finishers.
“I’m just determined and stubborn,” she said. “That’s the great part of running. There’s always going to be someone faster than you and always going to be someone slower than you. You have to run for yourself.”
She knows it well. Quelling her fears two Decembers ago, Kanatzar made the choice to run for herself. It has made all the difference.
About the Author
