JENNIFER
VOLLMANN

On being lost in motherhood

Jennifer’s mother was a stay-at-home mom, and Jennifer had spent her whole life determined not to follow that path. But when her daughter was born, she looked at the math — no sleep, a husband who traveled, a job that couldn’t flex — and made the call. “I found myself a stay-at-home mom I never wanted to be,” she said. “I was just her mom all of a sudden, and that’s all I was. And I had never wanted to just be a mom.” The loneliest part wasn’t the early years. It was when her daughter finally started sleeping and she had time to herself — and realized she had nobody to fill it with and nothing to fill it with.

On what the first race changed

A former pro triathlete at her gym gave her a training plan. Jennifer had always been a runner but never a competitor — her high school P.E. teacher told her she was too feminine to bother. She entered her first triathlon and won her age group. “I’ve never won anything athletic in my life,” she said. “My joke growing up was that I’m an Olympic-level athlete — I just haven’t tried my sport yet.” After that, she went all in. She trained at 3 a.m. before her daughter woke up, ran during nap times, and put all the energy she’d once used to run a nonprofit into becoming the athlete she didn’t know she was.

On outgrowing her marriage

The triathlon didn’t end her marriage, but it exposed what was already there. “Our relationship worked really well when he was one up and I was one down,” she said. “When I started to claim more space, there wasn’t any.” Covid forced them into the same room for the first time in years, and the truth was undeniable. She moved out at 38 and fit everything she wanted to keep in two trucks. “I was like, wow — there’s my life in two trucks. That’s it. I’m starting completely over. But if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it the way that I want.”

On racing to the top of the world

Eight years after that first triathlon, Jennifer has competed at four Ironman World Championships, earned a finish at Norseman Xtri and raced the Himalayan Triathlon in Nepal — where the run course ends at the base camp of Annapurna, the 10th highest mountain in the world. Before that race, no woman had ever made the time cutoff to reach the top of the run course. Three women did it that day. Jennifer was one of them. “To be somebody who was never picked in sports and then to be one of the first women to do something at 42 — that’s the thing I’m most proud of.”

On what she knows now

Jennifer coaches triathletes and entrepreneurs using the same framework: every event is a neutral circumstance. Your thought about it creates the feeling. The feeling drives the action. Change the thought, change the result. It sounds simple. It rewired her entire life — her racing, her shame about the divorce, her fear of starting a business with no income. When Erica asked what she’d tell 25-year-old Jennifer, she didn’t hesitate: “She’ll lose herself a little bit. But she’ll get it back in the end.”

Jennifer Vollmann is a mindset and triathlon coach and host of the Finding Your Endurance Mindset podcast. She coaches beginners through world-class athletes and works with female entrepreneurs on the mental game behind building something from nothing.
🎧 Finding Your Endurance Mindset (podcast)