M. Nicole Nazzaro

Create Your Wellness Playbook:
Stay Healthy in College and in Life

After losing her father to heart disease, the number-one killer of Americans, when she was a college sophomore, Nicole Nazzaro embarked on a sportswriting career, eventually covering four Olympic Games and multiple world-championship-level sporting events – without realizing that she was making the same health mistakes as her father. By the time she appeared in the pages of Sports Illustrated and on NBC Nightly News during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, she was forty pounds overweight with stage 1 hypertension. A photograph of her at a Seattle road race later that year (that she had to walk, not run, because of her weight) changed her life. She embarked on a quest to understand her family’s health history, learned how to take care of herself by setting realistic expectations – and reversed her heart disease, lost the extra weight, and came within 2-1/2 minutes of qualifying for the Boston Marathon four days before her fortieth birthday in December 2011.
Nicole’s message is simple: just like the world’s greatest athletes play to their strengths, we can create our own playbooks for health and fitness by focusing on what works for each of us individually. She combines her personal story with the no-nonsense science behind health and fitness – science that is thoroughly known, despite all of the scary health headlines that would make us think staying healthy in America is a lost cause. Nicole’s passion for helping college students set into motion the habits that will lead to a lifetime of good health comes through in all of her presentations, which she tailors to the specific needs of every audience. Nicole is also an accomplished speaker and expert on workplace wellness initiatives, and she is available to lead workshops with university wellness leaders in addition to her talks for college students.
M. Nicole Nazzaro has worked at four Olympic Games for NBC (2002, 2004 and 2006) and Sports Illustrated (2008) and is a longtime contributor to the Running Network. She has covered five world track and field championships (outdoor in 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2013; indoor in 2008) and has been published in Runner's World, Sports Illustrated China, the Beijing Review, the International Herald Tribune, and other publications. She is the co-author of Fit by Nature (The Mountaineers Books, 2011)