PORTLAND, Maine — For athletes who’ve excelled in college sports but aren’t good enough to play professionally, there comes a time when some hard decisions have to be made. The question generally comes down to: What am I going to do with the rest of my life?
When Morgan Frame was a student at Waterville High School, her basketball team won three state championships. As a senior she was named Miss Maine Basketball and Maine Gatorade Player of the Year. In the spring she did track and field, and that team also won three state championships. In college she starred in basketball for the University of New Hampshire. Then came the tough question. What to do next?
Frame eventually went to work in pharmaceutical sales. It was an awkward fit, in part because she and the huge company she worked for had sharply contrasting visions of how to take care of oneself. “I’d been raised on health and fitness and moving your body and eating well,” she says. That was not the approach embraced by a company looking to boost sales of its prescription drugs.
“One of the drugs I was selling was for IBS (irritable bowel syndrome). So there was a lot of ‘Do I want to give a pill? Or is it something that can be fixed with nutrition and taking care of your body?’” Her employer, not surprisingly, had little interest in the latter approach. “It didn’t quite match up with what I’d grown up knowing,” Frame says diplomatically. “So that was when I kind of realized that I wanted to get back into the fitness industry.”
Now, as a fitness coach at the Orangetheory gym in Portland, Frame is getting ready for the next chapter in her athletic career, the most ambitious one yet. Her dream is to compete for the United States in the 2024 summer Olympics in rowing.
Here’s the kicker: Frame had never even tried rowing until this year—and now she hopes it will be her ticket to Olympic gold. How does she plan to make that dream come true? Watch our interview to find out.