She was among the select few on the planet who’d never heard of COVID-19.
Social distancing? That phrase puzzled her when she pulled out her phone and started catching up on the world at large. She thought it must be some kind of new Instagram trend or something.
It was April 2020. Alyssa Vassallo had just spent the past four months in a North Carolina residential treatment facility for anorexia. This was a place with no TV, no phones, no computers, no newspapers. She wasn’t even permitted to say the word “calorie,” much less step outside and burn any.
Her time in treatment just happened to coincide with the origins of a pandemic, but she had no idea. When she stepped back into real life, she says “it was like a movie,” a Rip Van Winkle experience.
But at a time the rest of us felt like prisoners, Vassallo had never felt more free.
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Alyssa Vassallo is a third-year medical student at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine. She’s also an elite distance runner who can blaze a half marathon in a shade over 80 minutes.
The fact that she insists on doing both concurrently is a surprise to nobody who knows her. The 27-year-old New Jersey native earned dual undergrad degrees in chemistry and exercise and sport science at North Carolina in only two and a half years. She starred in cross country in high school and for the UNC club team. She’d always been athletic, smart and driven.
She’d also been struggling.
Vassallo’s anorexia first sent her to the hospital when she was 12. Her organs were shutting down from a lack of nutrition.
“There’s a lot of underlying pathology and psychology behind eating disorders,” Vassallo says. “It’s a lot about control. For me, personally, especially when I was younger, the only thing I could control was food. I didn’t feel like I had control over the other aspects of my life.”
As Vassallo got older, the problem persisted. She never got her period. The lack of estrogen in her body meant she kept injuring herself when she ran.
Vassallo told herself it was just overtraining, but she knew better. It was denial. And even as she twice finished in the top five in the nation as a UNC club cross country runner, her anorexia was holding her back.
“She was struggling with that when I first met her,” says Andie Cozzarelli, who’s known Vassallo since her college days and recently began coaching her. “She was still a good runner then, but it was only going to be so long that you can train at a good level when you’re struggling with an eating disorder. I always thought then that she had a lot more to give, and once she could get healthy, she’d definitely see that.”
Vassallo suffered many breaks before she reached her breaking point. She snapped the femoral neck in her hip five times. She broke her pelvis and tibia.
From 2015 to 2019, she endured 13 stress fractures.
“To say that’s unhealthy is a complete understatement,” Vassallo said. “Femurs are big, thick bones. Your hip bone is not some little finger bone or something. To break them five times — and my pelvis. The thickest part of my tibia, I went right through. There were a lot of health repercussions that came from so many years of anorexia.”
In November 2019, she’d finally had enough. Vassallo made boarding arrangements for her two dogs — one stayed with her parents, the other with Angels of Assisi — and left her Roanoke home for Durham. She figured she’d be there four or five weeks.
It turned into four months — the most difficult ones of her life.
Every day was the same for Vassallo. Breakfast, group counseling, snack, group counseling, lunch, group counseling, snack, group counseling, dinner, group counseling. One more snack, and then it was time for bed.
All the meals were prepared for her. Nutrition labels were blacked out. Vassallo knew the calorie counts of every food because of her years of obsessiveness, but it did her no good there.
She was given roughly 10 times the amount she would normally eat — and she was expected to eat it. If she didn’t finish, she was required to drink supplements.
“There were a lot of red-light words and topics in treatment,” Vassallo said. “I couldn’t talk about running. I couldn’t talk about exercise. You can’t talk about calories. You can’t talk about trauma or anything. I have stayed far away from anything calorie-related, anything tracking-wise since. Those things are really triggering to me.”
She was required to stay until she built her nutrition levels to an acceptable level and demonstrated that she could eat healthy amounts consistently.
Finally, that April 2020, she reentered a strange but promising new world.
Vassallo stresses that she is not “cured.” Much like an alcoholic might, she describes herself as being in recovery.
“It’s always an active process, and it’s not something in the past and passive,” she says. “You literally have to work on it every single day, and you have to make the decision to fight those eating disorder thoughts every single day.
“I definitely like to frame it as being in recovery instead of being recovered. In terms of where I sit on the recovery spectrum, the thoughts will always be there. It’s realizing if you’re listening to them and you still think they’re rational or irrational.”
As her health and vitality improved, Vassallo decided to get back into competitive running by late summer of 2021. In September, she entered the Virginia 10 Miler in Lynchburg — her first competitive race in seven years.
Vassallo ran it in 1:02:47 — a per-mile pace of 6:17. She finished 12th out of 406 women and first out of 77 women in her 25-29 age group.
It made her crave more. Last month, she entered the Philadelphia Half Marathon, racing that 13.1-mile distance for the first time in her life.
“It was my big debut,” she says. “I had been waiting so many years. So many. The last time I was healthy was in college, which was all 6K stuff. I’d literally start training and just get injured. So even just being able to get to the starting line was surreal.”
It was even more surreal when she crossed the finish line in 1:20:31 — a 6:08 pace.
“Smokin’ fast,” says Cozzarelli, her coach. “When you’re talking about a 1:20 half, you’re talking about getting into the elite level.
“For some people, their first time doing a specific distance can be their fastest and sometimes it can be just a starting point. For her, I think it’s just a starting point. … I really feel strongly that she’s got a lot more to give.”
Vassallo thinks so, too. She’s been offered an elite spot in next month’s Houston Half Marathon and has been training daily with Cozzarelli’s help in the hopes of breaking 1:20 in Texas.
Of course, Vassallo knows what social distancing and COVID-19 are now. She understands she’s still in recovery.
But she also knows this: She’s been running about 80 a miles a week in Roanoke, and she hasn’t been injured once.