Tiffany Sanders Roland: The Spirit of Gratitude
August 7, 2018
Tuesday and Thursday mornings this summer, before the sun comes up, Olympic and World Champion Shot Putter Adam Nelson arrives at an unassuming parking garage on Houston’s Buffalo Bayou and begins setting up equipment for an exclusive 6 a.m. workout.
The workout is invitation only. Invitations are extended to athletes registered to compete in The D10 Houston, the first Saturday in November. A ten-event athletic competition that raises hundreds of thousands of dollars annually for pediatric cancer research at MD Anderson Cancer Center, The D10 provides customized training experiences for competitors willing to tackle its mix of NFL Combine and track and field-style disciplines.
It’s late July, and even in the pre-dawn hour, the garage’s concrete surfaces are slick with dew, thanks to Houston’s summer humidity. Nelson has already set out hurdles, weights, mats and resistance bands when the regular crowd begins trickling in.
Among them is Tiffany Sanders Roland, Vice President in Wealth Management at JP Morgan Private Bank, which has enrolled several teams in this year’s D10 field as part of an event sponsorship agreement.
“I will admit,” Tiffany says, “The D10 was an unknown. JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York was already doing The D10, and we didn’t know it down here. It’s starting to get some buzz and build a reputation around the Houston office. When I found out what it was, I said, Oh that sounds like fun.”
Asked if Adam Nelson’s workouts are her idea of fun, Tiffany doesn’t hesitate.
“No, no, he is not nice at all.” She laughs. “His workouts are awesome, but they’re really, really hard.”
“It’s a great group,” she continues. “It is hard. As the mother of ten-month-old twins, I’ve been out of the game for two years, as opposed to just a couple months. I’d never had to truly start over.”
The human body had always fascinated Tiffany Sanders. Before moving into the financial services world, she had planned to study kinesiology and exercise physiology while attending the University of Houston. A full course load in addition to full-time employment during college left Tiffany scant time for extracurricular athletics, but her swimming and lifeguarding and track experience growing up had forged a permanent commitment to an active lifestyle.
“I’ve always had a great love of working out and challenging myself to do different things,” she says.
When Tiffany, with her husband, Darron Roland, became pregnant in 2017, she looked forward to “one of those pregnancies where I’d work out the whole time.”
She was healthy. She was fit. Her biggest apprehension was that she might tweak her back as the composition of her body changed.
“After my week-eight appointment, I got a phone call, and everything changed.”
Doctors informed Tiffany of multiple complications, and suggested that, in some scenarios, her own life would be at risk. “Overnight we went from super-excited because we found out we were having twins...to, We need you to prepare yourself not to make it through the first trimester.”
“God does not make mistakes. I’m a firm believer in that.”
-Tiffany Sanders Roland
Tiffany and Darron were grateful to become pregnant naturally. They were surprised and delighted to defy the odds again by conceiving twins. That Tiffany, these months later, can regard her pregnancy’s unusual complications as another unlikelihood in a larger design of improbabilities speaks to her faith. It allows her to discuss the events of 2017 with calm and candor.
It doesn’t mean that living it was ever easy.
“I had never known fear like that in my life,” she says. “I had specialists for the specialists I already had. The whole medical team got to know me, because I was this walking case study.”
But even walking wasn’t always easy, and Tiffany was put on “borderline permanent bedrest” during her first trimester. “The goal was week by week. We wound up making it 36 weeks and four days. At that point it’s the end of August 2017, and we were scared to death of me going through labor during Hurricane Harvey.”
Whatever else may have been part of the ultimate plan, Harvey didn’t factor in. Tiffany went into labor and had an emergency C-section. The early returns were good.
“I was prepared to be out of pocket for a while. Instead, the kids spent four hours in NICU, and then they were in the room with me.”
Riley and Hunter
“A year ago today, my world was very different,” Tiffany can say now. She is the mother now of a healthy baby boy, Hunter, and a healthy baby girl, Riley. When she delivered them, and exhaled, she did not know that the hardest part had not yet begun.
Her mother had taken time off work to help look after Tiffany and the babies when they came home from the hospital. The days went by in scrapbook fashion. The babies slept and woke, Mom recovered, the new family bonded. After such a precarious run-up, the simple bliss of what we often take for granted as a natural order of things had been restored.
The morning Tiffany’s mother was due to leave, she decided at the last moment to call in and take an extra day off. In a story of harrowing improbabilities, none rank quite as high as this.
“If my Mom had not been there, I wouldn’t have made it,” Tiffany says. “Everything changed in a heartbeat.”
Tiffany had begun hemorrhaging. She lost half the blood in her body in approximately fifteen minutes. As soon as her mother had called 911, she called Darron, so that Tiffany could speak to him.
“I just started crying and saying, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.”
One day Tiffany may tell you this happened, in a level tone. And what will you say to her? What words do we have to loop sense or reason around such things as these?
You can have no doubt that less than a year later, she is attending high-intensity workouts at 6 a.m. on the Buffalo Bayou in a parking garage with a former Olympic Gold Medalist.
You will perhaps have questions you want to ask, and some other questions you know you cannot - questions that every person needs to answer for themselves.
You may thank her, after silence and a swelling in your heart, for sharing this story with you.
“I don’t think my story is all that special,” Tiffany says. “I think of myself as a vessel.”
“The recovery from there was not fun, to say the least. Walking at a 3.0 on a treadmill was so painful.”
-Tiffany Sanders Roland
Tiffany returned to work in January 2018. Some time later, she met D10 founder Dave Maloney, who’d visited the JPMorgan offices to spur enrollment.
“I thought, Oh my gosh, I gotta do it,” Tiffany recalls. “For me, it’s the perfect storm. I love sports. I love fitness. I love being around people who are very successful, very driven. I’m finding that everyone in The D10 has a personal story. Everyone has a reason why they’re doing this beyond ‘I’m competitive and I’m athletic.’
“One of my teammates, his wife just went through a battle with cancer herself, and MD Anderson was her home during her treatment. It puts everything into perspective. People who, from the outside have it all put together, typically what you find is - it’s not always what you think.”
Tiffany chose Pull-Ups as her “Marquee Event,” a feature of The D10 that encourages donors to place sliding, or “performance-based,” donations on an athlete’s Game Day result. If Tiffany can get to four Pull-Ups on November 3, the dollars pledged in her name to MD Anderson will double.
“Every Pull-Up I am able to do is a Pull-Up for the mom fighting her own battle, or the kid fighting cancer.”
Tiffany's D10 Houston 2018 team
The D10’s team competition allows athletes to pick and choose among the ten events, because only a team’s top two scores in each event count toward the team’s total. Tiffany is looking forward to the Football Throw and eyeing the 40 Yard Dash and the 20 Yard Shuttle Run.
“The jumps, I’m not too sure about,” she says, before adding warily, “My husband has convinced me I can do the Bench Press.”
As for the 400 Meters, “I am not a sprinter anymore, I am a jogger.”
What about the 800 Meters?
“I am definitely not doing the 800! I want to do things that I haven’t done before. It’s ‘let’s see what I can do!’ For me, just to be running again, even that is in and of itself a push. I’m not going to win The D10. I’m not going to break any records. It’s all about showing up and challenging myself.”
Asked about Tiffany, who has faithfully attended every one of his 6 a.m. workouts since their inception in early July, Adam Nelson reflects: “She’s comfortable pushing herself into the uncomfortable. She’s relearning how to move properly and understands you can’t just go through the motions. There’s intent behind every step, and she’s growing stronger each workout.”
Nelson’s workouts have attracted D10 Houston athletes of all different ages and backgrounds, from one-time high school track athletes to total neophytes to a former Big 12 varsity football starter. None of them, to be sure, has come as far in so short a time as Tiffany Sanders Roland.
"Her story provides a legitimate excuse to stand on the sidelines,” Nelson adds. “But Tiffany knows that life happens out on the field.”
The 6 a.m. crew
"To whom much is given, much is required.”
-Tiffany Sanders Roland
While Tiffany’s athletic training continues, she comes at The D10’s fundraising component - a required minimum of $6000 for MD Anderson Cancer Center, per team - from a place of longstanding strength.
She serves on the Board of Directors of the Houston charity Kids’ Meals, and volunteers and sits on advisory boards for a few others. “I have a soft spot for children, so my charitable endeavors typically revolve around them.”
She acknowledges that asking for donations is never easy. It simply needs to be done: “I remind myself that me not asking for those dollars for Kids’ Meals means one of those kids we’re trying to support may not eat.”
Asked if she’s had to step away from her charitable commitments, given all the changes and demands of the past year, Tiffany answers firmly: “You’ll make time for what you find important.”
She and the other members of “Team Blewbyu” are confident they can reach the initial fundraising goal of $6000 and then blow past it.
“I am fortunate enough to have a phenomenal group of friends, who know the journey I’ve been on.”
Tiffany and Darron
She has, too, a new group of friends, forged in the dew and sweat of Adam Nelson’s demanding morning training sessions.
“Every practice is a very humbling moment,” Tiffany says. “It’s really hard to put into words, what I feel when I’m out there - the spirit of gratitude and camaraderie.
“Don’t get me wrong: it’s painful. During Tuesday’s finishing drill I couldn’t feel my eyelashes. I really didn’t want to do that last push-up. Like Adam says, you have to push through that. There’s a voice in my head saying, A year ago you couldn’t do this. Now you can, but you won’t. Can’t and won’t - those are two different things.
“Who knows? I may get out there on the field in November and compete in everything. For me, it’s just so real, because I was not even supposed to be here.
“None of this is supposed to be possible.”
Support pediatric cancer research at MD Anderson Cancer Center by donating to Tiffany and to Team Blewbyu.