Vanessa Fraser is a professional runner, a Stanford alum, and the newest Carbs Fuel athlete. But it hasn’t always been that way.
Like so many other college runners across the country, Fraser got to May of her senior year and faced the blank page of the next chapter of her life.
For so many dedicated athletes, they have reached the last finish line of their elite careers. Many are okay with that. College running, after all, is a grind. Mixing classes with double work out days – cross country season, indoor season, track season – it all adds up.
Yet, for the best of the college runners, or the lucky ones, or the most persistent ones, they keep going. Vanessa Fraser was one who kept going.
“Initially, continuing on was very easy. I had a storybook collegiate career where I just kept improving every single year. I did five years at Stanford and every year I chipped away and improved my 5km PR by almost exactly 15 seconds every single year.”
The preferred walk-on status that Fraser started with turned into a fourth place finish at nationals at the end of her college career. That, paired with a collection of top collegiate teammates she had to look up to, meant running professionally went from something she didn’t consider, to a viable career path.
“Why wouldn't I keep going when every year I just kept getting better?”
For a few years, the improvements continued, but that positive tide began to shift when the injuries Fraser had been avoiding on her steady climb to the pro ranks began to come to ahead. In 2020, she had bi-lateral Achilles surgery, she battled over-training and REDs.
Yet, instead of pivoting towards a non-athletic career, Fraser kept going. Just because she had been blessed with good health through college and into the pro ranks didn’t mean she couldn’t rally some resilience.
“My running has always been rooted in the same thing: believing in myself, believing in my potential, and seeing what I've been capable of at different points in my career. It has kind of taken on different meetings at different phases of my career, but it all comes back to that.”
Olympic cycles and tinkering to find her best performance
For Fraser, her career like so many other professional runners, is run on a tight four year cycle. The Olympics are just the most important thing, even if it is an outside chance of making the team.
Over the last two Olympic cycles Fraser has been fighting for that spot. While it has yet to convert into an Olympic appearance, it has pushed her to try to get the absolute most out of herself. Out of that, her focus has shifted, slightly, to a longer event as the Olympic cycles have passed.
“The 5km has changed so much in the last five years,” Fraser said. “There was a time where I really was one of the top five runners in the country and that has changed so much. Now, you have to be able to close the last mile US championships in the 5K with a 4:20 mile. I can't even run a 4:20 mile all out cause I'm just not a speed based runner. That was never the case five years ago."
“I have a very high anaerobic tolerance and I can hold the hard pace for a long time, so 10km really feels like a natural fit in that it plays to those skills best and I don't have to close the last mile in a 4:20 in order to be competitive with the top athletes of the country.”
Nevertheless, Fraser has stayed on the track despite the speed of racing that only seems to be accelerating. Many of her peers have upped their distances away from the track and to the roads. And while she has dabbled on the road, she keeps coming back to the track.
Fraser has kept that dream that started her running career and it is still going, even with the hiccups, injuries, and appeal of the longer events along the way.
“I feel like I have a lot to learn now from my younger self in terms of mentality,” Fraser said. “I had this beginner's mindset and a naïveté about the sport and the competitive landscape that really benefited me. I was just so focused on myself and getting better.
“I struggle a lot with comparing myself to other athletes and it's kind of a constant battle of going back to that mindset of just doing it out of pure love of the grind and pure love of seeing how fast I can be.”
The wisdom of carbohydrates comes with age
What brings Fraser to partner with Carbs Fuel is that pursuit of finding small marginal improvements. While she isn’t making the massive jumps in performance she made in college, there is a lot left on the bone to make strides to be a better runner.
Carb consumption, lower-case in this case, is the biggest of the gains to be had.
“I trained with one of the best professional groups in the world at the Bowman Track Club for four years from 2018 to 2022,” Fraser said. “So many of my teammates were Olympians, major marathon winners and world championship medalists.
“We didn't fuel on our long run, which is insane. Now, that group has evolved like everyone in the professional space and the collegiate running teams are fueling a lot more especially. But in the running space I feel like it is still more old-school, like, ‘you don't need to fuel, just be tough,’ and that's just ridiculous.”
Fraser has been working on unlearning that old school way of thinking for the past few years. Yet this year, with Carbs Fuel as a partner, that is going a step further. What’s more, Fraser is a high school peer of our co-founders Gabe Multer and Aaron Gouw in Northern California.
All of this makes it easy for Fraser to lean in and really get the most out of the carbohydrate revolution in running.
“The number one thing is the simplicity of it,” Fraser said of Carbs Fuel. “The consistency of it, it goes down really easy, it packs a bunch of carbs into one gel, but also I really struggle to find a fuel that works well with me. I had like some different stomach issues for a couple of years and I struggled to get fuel down on runs.
“To find something that sat well with me was a big win.”
We are thrilled to welcome Vanessa Fraser into the Carbs Fuel family and we cannot wait to see how she continues to keep going with Carbs Fuel in her pocket.
