Apolo Ohno used to drive Marin Richardson to practice.
They'd hike 2,768 steps up a mountain together on weekends. When you train alongside someone at that level every day, it recalibrates what you think is possible. You stop thinking about limits because nobody around you believes in them.
She was 15.
Most people who know Marin now know her as a PR person — a former broadcast journalist who built Disrupt PR into what Bulldog Reporter named the Best Boutique PR Agency in the United States. Very few know the chapter that came before all of it.
Marin was a member of the US Short Track Speed Skating national team. The youngest at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs at the time. She left school two days into her sophomore year to test the ice in Torino ahead of the 2006 Winter Games.
US Speedskating just featured her in their Alumni Spotlight. When asked what the sport actually gave her — not the résumé version, the real answer — here's what she said:
It's 2026 and we live in an era that celebrates slowing down — and there's real wisdom in that. Life is not a race. But what speed skating gave me wasn't speed. It was structure. It was the understanding that every decision you make positions you for the next one. That strategy compounds. That the mental toughness you build on the ice doesn't stay on the ice — it travels with you everywhere you go.
That's exactly how Disrupt PR runs campaigns. We don't make our move too early. We read the landscape, position our clients carefully, build momentum — and then at exactly the right moment, we push. The results speak for themselves: 72 placements in 60 days. BBC front page. TIME Best Inventions. Websites crashed from the traffic.
And maybe most importantly, sometimes the best things in your life start because a boy named Matt said he was faster than you.
Whatever your next chapter is, the sport already gave you the tools. You just have to recognize them.
"The ice formed my heart. My desire. My brain. I wouldn't trade a single lap."
— Marin Richardson
Read the full US Speedskating Alumni Spotlight here (https://www.usspeedskating.org/news/2026/april/17/alumni-spotlight-marin-richardson). Ready to work with a team that brings that same intensity to your brand? Let's talk (https://www.disruptpr.com/contact/scheduling/).
