Nicholas DiDesiderio

I started road racing later in life. I had been running short distances to help keep fit and since I enjoyed running, I tried running in the New York Road Runners races. In 2016, I ran the required number of races to qualify for the 2017 NYC Marathon. While training for the marathon, I stared getting pain in my left knee. I tried resting but that didn't help so I went to Dr. Moira McCarthy at HSS, who diagnosed the pain as runner's knee. I asked Dr. McCarthy if there was someone at HSS I could work with to address the issue and she recommended Pamela Geisel in the Performance Department. I started by taking a RunFIT class given by Pamela at HSS. The class was great, and focused on foam rolling, workouts with bands, and stretching. There were 4 people in class, so everyone was able to get undivided attention in a class setting. I also started working with Pamela in individual sessions at HSS to see if I could get ready for the marathon. Signing up for the RunFIT class turned out to be an instrumental first step in addressing the causes of my left knee pain as that November I completed the NYC Marathon pain-free. After the experience of running my first marathon, my goals running goals expanded to running additional marathons and hopefully qualifying for the Boston Marathon one day. I continued my weekly sessions with Pamela at HSS and completed the NYC Marathons in 2018, 2019 and 2021, plus over a dozen half marathons. In 2022, I was able to get an entry into the Chicago Marathon so we decided that Chicago would be the race to try to get a qualifying time for Boston 2024. Pamela set up a training plan including one day a week at HSS, a home strength training routine, a weekly running schedule including, Long runs, Tempo Runs and Interval runs, along with running in select races as part of training. On October 9th, 2022, I completed the Chicago Marathon, running my fastest marathon in a time that easily qualified me for Boston 2024. Four weeks later I also completed the NYC Marathon. Who would have thought that when I came to HSS in 2017, that in five years I would have run 6 marathons, including 2 in 4 weeks, and also qualify for Boston. All of this was possible because I came to the right place (HSS) and was referred to the right person (Pamela).