By Jennifer Kirby
For the first half of his life, Rick Steinbacher had working out down cold.
A swimmer in middle school, he transitioned to football, basketball and track in high school and “lived in the gym or in the weight room.” In college, he played football at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he started 30 games at inside linebacker, earned third-team All-ACC honors and co-captained his team senior year.
But after graduation, everything abruptly changed. “I got married right away, I got a job right away, we had our first child within a year,” he says, “and I spent about 18 years making excuses why I didn’t have time to work out.”
Steinbacher worked for several years in sales and marketing before returning to UNC in 2000, working first with the football program and then as associate athletic director for marketing and new media. His current position, as UNC’s senior associate athletic director for external communications, is “many times a seven-day-a-week job,” he says. “I was not carving away enough time from work and family responsibilities to invest enough time in working out myself.”
That changed just over a year ago, when his oldest daughter, who at the time had just finished her junior season of high school tennis and wanted to stay in shape and get stronger in the offseason, suggested that she and Steinbacher get a personal trainer. They started working out, separately, twice a week.
The early results weren’t what Steinbacher had hoped for.
“After a month or two I was actually gaining weight. I’ve always loved to lift, but I think I was using working out as an excuse to eat whatever I wanted,” Steinbacher says. “My trainer challenged me to continue working out with her, because she was really helping me with strength training, core and some cardio, but her message to me was, one hour twice a week is not enough time for what you need cardio-wise. … She really encouraged me to start running more outside of the workouts and stayed on me to start eating better and kept making me get on the scale.”
So, for about six months, Steinbacher ran on his own. At the time, “the thought of running a half-marathon or a marathon was beyond me,” he says.
But the more he ran, the better he felt and the more he enjoyed it. Eventually, he was able to start running with one of his best friends, former Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Corey Holliday. Holliday, who was Steinbacher’s teammate and co-captain in college and is now a co-worker, encouraged Steinbacher to join him on long group runs.
“I think running with him and getting back in shape is what helped me go back to how I was in middle school and high school and remind myself how much I enjoy working out and how great it felt to be in shape,” Steinbacher says.
It also reignited his competitive streak: “I’m new to the distance-running thing so I’m honest with myself that I’m not gonna place in the top 10 or anything. … For me, being competitive is keeping up with [Holliday].” The two friends ran Steinbacher’s first half-marathon together last November.
In January, Steinbacher ran his second half-marathon with his wife, Valerie. “She’s always been a runner. She would go out running and I wouldn’t go with her. But now we run together a lot, and that’s been a wonderful thing that we’ve really enjoyed doing together,” Steinbacher says. They’re training for the Tobacco Road Marathon in March and the Tar Heel 10-Miler in April.
Finding time to exercise is no longer a problem.
“It’s been amazing that the more I run the more energy I have. I’ve lost a lot of weight and a year ago the thought of getting up at 5 or 5:30 a.m. to get a nine-mile run in would have been beyond comprehension. Now, I go to bed at night and I’m fired up that I’m gonna get up early and run before I go to work,” he says. “A year ago my excuse was, I don’t have the time. Now, next to spending time with my family, running is the thing I look forward to each day more than anything else.
“As much as I wish I’d done it 18 years ago, I’m thrilled that I got back to it eventually.”
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Jennifer Kirby is a writer and editor who lives, works and runs in Aberdeen, N.C. Contact her at jennkirby@alumni.unc.edu or via her website, http://www.jenniferdarekirby.com.
