It’s 8:30 a.m. in the president’s house at Miami University of Ohio, and Newton, a 2-year-old golden retriever, takes off with my water bottle clenched in his teeth.

“There’s certain things that you just can’t help yourself with, and that’s one of those for him,” says Newton’s owner, Gregory P. Crawford, the university’s president since 2016.

I retrieve the water bottle; it’s time to hydrate. Crawford and I have just returned from a 22-mile bike ride, a run up the stairs in the football stadium, and a brief weight-lifting session.

This is how Crawford starts his day as a college president.

During one week this summer, Crawford, as well as the presidents of Spalding University, in Kentucky, and Oberlin College, in Ohio, allow me to tag along on their workouts. The experience is an exercise (get it?) in understanding this intimate part of their day — and what it says about the modern college presidency.

Through each mile ridden, kilometer rowed, and tire flipped, a clearer picture emerges of the pressures on today’s higher ed leaders — and the sanctity of these early-morning routines to gear up for the day ahead.

MEET YOUR TRAINERS

Gregory Crawford

President of Miami University

Alarm: 3:30 or 3:45 a.m.

Start Workout: 4 a.m.

Routine: Crawford, 58, hops on his custom road bike — cycling nerds, it’s an S-Works Roubaix — and rides out to Hueston Woods State Park.

During the work week, he goes about 35 miles a day. On the weekends, he rides longer distances. He estimates that he puts away 200 miles per week.

When bad weather looms, he swaps in a set of runs up the stairs of Yager Stadium. If it’s pouring, he runs sprints indoors. He also adds in 20 to 30 minutes of weight training four or five days a week.

Snack: Crawford likes to start and end each workout with a glass of chocolate milk.

Carmen Twillie Ambar

President of Oberlin College

Alarm: 3:45 a.m.

Start Workout: 4:30 a.m.

Routine: Ambar, 55, works out with trainers at the gym. They include Josh, an intern with the Cleveland Browns, and Nick, whom a college spokeswoman jokes is the “Gym Reaper.”

Her workouts vary. Cardio two days a week, weight-lifting three days a week, and yoga one day a week; the schedule shifts when she is preparing for bodybuilding competitions.

The day I visit, we spend 45 minutes in the weight room with Josh. Then we go to an indoor track, where Nick makes us switch off first between rowing and flipping tires, and then between stationary biking and running around the track with a weight over our heads. It’s as hard as it sounds.

Big, full-body movements are Ambar’s favorites: burpee presses, toes to bar, tire flips. She says these exercises are “a hidden way to build muscle” that people who prefer cardio will enjoy.

Snack: Ambar doesn’t eat before workouts. But she’ll have some protein afterward.

Tori Murden McClure

Alarm: 5:30 a.m. On weekends, she’ll sleep in until 6.

Start Workout: 6 a.m., except on weekends.

Routine: McClure, 60, takes her scull out on the Ohio River. We’re not talking about a leisurely float trip: She was the first American and first woman to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

She does cardio four or five days a week and lifts weights two or three days. To mix things up, she’ll sometimes opt for roller-skiing, a sport she picked up while training to ski across Antarctica to the geographic South Pole.

The roller-skiing is on pause for now, though, as she heals from an injury.

“I broke my left wrist and fractured my face,” she says. “I have Invisalign because my teeth were all knocked out. I get great sympathy from teenagers because I’m like, ‘Yeah. I know what you’re feeling.’”

Snack: McClure eats an energy gel or half a bar on the way to her workouts.

Move #1: The Well-Being Warm-Up

Description: Exercise directly supports mental health. So these presidents try to fit in a sweat session most mornings.

Testimonials: “As a rower, balance is really important, both literally and philosophically,” McClure says. “That sense of changing things up, being in balance, having a sense that all humans are different and you need balance on a team, you need balance in the way you approach problems — it’s a big piece of my mental health.”

Adds Ambar, a mother of triplets: “It’s really one of the only times in my life that is purely my time. No kids. No job.”

Take It Up a Notch: The presidents say there are plenty of non-exercise things they do to take care of themselves. Ambar plays the piano and hangs out with her kids. Crawford walks his dogs around campus. And McClure meets with groups of faculty and staff for drinks and appetizers at the Noble Funk, a brewery near campus. (She and her husband pay for the booze, not Spalding.)

More Insight: In the 2023 edition of the American Council on Education’s College President Study, most presidents agreed that they used strategies to re-energize, like exercise, meditation, yoga, and nutrition. Ninety percent of female college presidents agreed or somewhat agreed that they used re-energizing techniques, compared with about 85 percent of male college presidents.

A wealth of research bears out the positive relationship between exercise and mental health. Studies also show that physical exercise is a buffer against symptoms of job burnout.

Erik Gonzalez-Mulé, an associate professor at Indiana University at Bloomington who studies stress and work, says people in high-stress jobs — like college presidents — need to be more deliberate about taking care of themselves.

“There’s quite a bit of evidence that shows that you can offset some of the negative effects of high-stress jobs with a daily recovery routine,” Gonzalez-Mulé says. “That could be physical health related. It could also just be detachment from work. What that means is kind of individualized. But this whole idea of some recovery downtime every day is really important.”

Move #2: The Leadership Lunge

Description: Leading a college is hard. These presidents’ exercise routines help shape their mind-sets and management styles.

Testimonial: Ambar, the Oberlin president, says that one of her trainers, Nick, often motivates her through grueling workouts by saying, “This is the hardest thing you’re going to do today.”

“So no matter what meets me during the day,” she says, “it won’t be harder than flipping tires for 12 minutes.”

Take It Up a Notch: As an adventurer, McClure has had to survive in remote habitats.

So she’s learned to triage the countless decisions she has to make each day. Which paint color to use on campus? She’s neutral. Cheese or pepperoni? Whichever is fine.

But, “folks learn pretty quickly that if somebody is bleeding, the president is going to get really dictatorial. If nobody’s bleeding, she’s going to have another kind of leadership mind-set.”

More Insight: Sian Leah Beilock, president of Dartmouth College, thinks about stress and leadership a lot — and not just because she’s in a strenuous new leadership role. Beilock is a cognitive scientist who studies the phenomenon of choking under pressure.

“It’s hard to be a leader,” she says. “It takes a toll on all of us mentally and physically. We’re making tough decisions that not everyone always agrees with. We have to be okay [with] not always being liked, not always being able to fully explain or defend every aspect of what we’re doing.”

Beilock, too, sees her workout routine as integral to her leadership. She says running on trails in the Upper Valley, a region of Vermont and New Hampshire that includes Hanover, has helped her make creative connections and led to “aha” moments.

Move #3: The Relationship-Building Regimen

Description: Fitness is a helpful tool for engaging with students, staff, alumni, and parents. The presidents use exercise to connect with their communities.

Testimonial: When McClure became Spalding’s president, she tried at first to separate her identity as an athlete from her role as an academic.

“I looked at the head of marketing and I said, ‘If you ever mention a rowboat, I’m going to fire you,’” she says.

It didn’t work. Students thought her being an athlete was cool. The majority of Spalding’s undergraduates, after all, are athletes, McClure says.

Now, McClure goes on backpacking trips with students and participates in wilderness first-responder courses with faculty and staff.

Take It Up a Notch: Crawford has ambitions to make Miami University “the healthiest campus in the country.” He and his wife, Renate, an adjunct professor of physics, host a variety of events designed to get students moving, like “Spin and Movies” in the campus gym and boot camps at the president’s house.

“These workouts that we do with our students really are intentional,” Crawford says. “I mean, it’s a health and wellness platform, but it is a way for us to really speak with them, talk with them in a different way.”

If students miss Crawford and his wife at these public workouts, they are sure to catch the couple riding their bikes around campus.

“We believe that it’s also good for us to be out there riding our bikes between meetings and seeing people on campus, so they see us leading a healthy lifestyle as well,” he says. “But sometimes they see me at Graeter’s.”

More Insight: On a sunny day in November 2020, 123 Oberlin students signed up to try to flip more tires in one minute than their president. The ones who succeeded won prizes.

Perhaps the true winner was Oberlin College. A parent sent Ambar a note to announce an anonymous donation of $18,000 in honor of the 18 tires Ambar flipped.

“I literally said to my son, ‘Damn, I wish I had flipped 20,’” she jokes. “I would have been much happier with $20,000, but I liked 18.”

Ambar says her fitness regimen makes her more approachable. Members of the Board of Trustees join her for yoga. Parents follow her fitness Instagram and reach out.

“I just think people see you in a different way,” she says. “They feel more able to come and approach you about any topic because they see you engaged in this way.”

Before heading to Miami, Crawford spent eight years at the University of Notre Dame. While there, he developed a close relationship with Ara Parseghian, the legendary Notre Dame football coach. Parseghian had lost three grandchildren to a rare genetic disorder called Niemann-Pick disease type C. As dean of the College of Science, Crawford wanted to do something.

So he rode his bike across the country five times to raise money for research. Some contributors sponsored Crawford before the rides began. Other donations came through alumni fund raisers in the cities Crawford rode through. In his final ride, Crawford raised $2 million for a clinical trial.

The Collegiate Cool-Down

Sometimes it feels like we know so much about college presidents, from their schedules to their work histories to their home addresses. Most presidents will tell you they live in a fishbowl.

But usually, we don’t really know what’s going on in their lives. We don’t know what motivates them and what stresses them out, or how they cope with the pressures of their job.

Presidents Under Pressure

Photo by Michael Theis, The Chronicle

College leadership has never been a job for the faint of heart, but few would disagree that these days it’s especially tough.

The stories here help explain why, and what that means for the health of higher education institutions.

How much the public deserves to know is an open question. Some presidents draw a hard line between their personal lives and their public personas. Others blur it.

I got a peek into an aspect of college presidents’ private lives that has a surprising amount to do with their professional lives. Their workouts are the foundation on which they build the rest of their routine.

“It’s a huge part of how I feel good about starting the day,” Ambar says. “If you have a great workout — and most of the time any workout that you finish is a great workout on some level — it’s like, ‘Okay. It’s going to be fine.’”