Courtesy of USA Rugby; BI
When you think of an Olympian, you might picture someone who has been single-mindedly focused on their sport for years. But that wasn't the case for Alev Kelter, an American rugby sevens player who scored on Tuesday to help Team USA win its first medal in the sport.
Kelter, 33, is from Alaska and competed in her third Olympic Games in Paris this summer. She scored in the first half of the bronze-medal match against Australia on Tuesday, contributing to a history-making victory for her team.
But Kelter didn't start out playing rugby. Originally her sports were ice hockey and soccer.
She said she was recruited to play in Division I, the highest level, for both, alternating between ice hockey in the winter and soccer in the summer.
When she didn't make the ice hockey team for the 2014 Sochi Olympics, the head coach for Team USA's rugby team called her up to ask if she'd give the sport a try. She'd never even touched a rugby ball, but she thought ice hockey may have given her the right mentality for rugby.
She fell in love with rugby and her teammates in her first session.
"These women were so empowering, and they wanted to teach me everything they knew, not because there was something to gain but because they loved rugby and they loved me as a person," she said. "It was super inclusive, and I wanted to be around that."
In 2016, just two years after picking up a rugby ball, Kelter was among the first rugby sevens players to compete in the Olympics. Sevens features seven-person teams playing seven-minute halves instead of the traditional 15-player teams playing 40-minute halves.
Fast-forward eight years, and Kelter is the most capped American woman in the HSBC SVNS, an international rugby sevens tournament series, and has so far scored 1,015 total points over her career — something only four other American women have achieved.
Her rapid and continued success hasn't come easily — she trains hard every day, following a regimen she shared with Business Insider.
When Kelter was training, her day would start at about 7 a.m. with breakfast made by staff at the team's training center in Chula Vista, California. Then she and the team would work on skills like tackling, followed by a review session where they watched recordings of themselves and other teams to identify which skills needed refining.
She said that after a "big lunch," they'd do another two-hour training session, which varied.
At the beginning of the season, they were "just trying to get big," she said, so the focus was on weightlifting. Later they ran to improve their speed or did medicine-ball tosses to strengthen their cores and improve passing.
At about 5 p.m., after a full day of training, Kelter and her team would spend an hour recovering, rotating through saunas, hot tubs, and compression pants.
Every day the team met with a sports psychologist who assessed their playing together, their chemistry, and any mental roadblocks, Kelter said.
Kelter said mental training and mindfulness exercises helped the team embody their values of courage, resilience, work ethic, love, and selflessness.
"It's almost as important as the physical training," Kelter said. "I think that gold, silver, and bronze medals are all separated by mindset. Everyone is very talented out here, but not everyone has the right mindset under pressure."
To prepare for the competition, Kelter ate about 140 grams of protein daily, aiming for 30 to 40 grams in each meal.
She also made sure to eat a lot of carbohydrates, especially if the training was particularly strenuous or she was lifting heavy weights.
A typical breakfast for Kelter consisted of three eggs, a cup of oatmeal with some dried cranberries and a little bit of honey, and some fresh cantaloupe, peaches, or a banana.
She said that for lunch, which was prepared by staff at the training center, she typically ate a green salad with chicken, beets, edamame, cucumbers, and carrots — "just basically something to make that salad more fluffy" — and some whole-grain or brown rice.
In the evenings, Kelter cooked for herself, using lean meat such as ground turkey, chicken, and salmon and healthy carbohydrates such as sweet potato.
She also checked her macros to ensure she was getting enough nutrients based on her weight and targets for speed and strength. On days when she came up short of her nutrition target, she'd have a protein shake or yogurt with berries.
