Beth Ali showed up to 216 Coworking with a resume that shouldn't fit in one person's life: English teacher, freshman composition instructor at Kennesaw State, doctoral candidate, life insurance agent, dirt bike rider, and a state-record-holding powerlifter and strongwoman who didn't step on a competition platform until she was 50. Host Logan Lewis got all of it — the soccer-mom origin story, the barbell records, a dirt bike wreck that ended with her face in a Georgia clay embankment, and a hard turn into what she calls, only half-joking, 'the tism.' By the end, it was clear the through-line of Beth's whole story is the same thing her ex-husband once complained about: she's too much, and she's done apologizing for it.
Soccer Mom to Barbell Convert
Beth didn't walk into a gym looking for a sport. She walked in because her son needed a trainer. When he was in eighth grade, she and a few other soccer moms hired a certified Olympic lifting coach to run offseason workouts for the boys' team — and then, watching from the sideline, thought it looked fun enough to join in themselves. 'So we're all being trained in Olympic lifts,' she said, 'the deadlifts, the squats, but also... the snatches and the clean and jerk.' That coach talked the moms into a CrossFit competition none of them had trained for, complete with a river event Beth, a self-described 'doggy paddle girl,' was in no way prepared for. From there it was a weekly boot camp up Kennesaw Mountain — sprint the flats, mountain climbers, lunges, repeat, all the way to the observation deck — where she says she was reliably the last one up the hill every single week. Cardio was never the point. Showing up was.
A PR and a Podium the First Time She Ever Competed
The turn came from a friend at that boot camp who told her, flatly, 'I think you should come and do a powerlifting meet with me.' Beth had never competed in anything beyond high school track and field. She trained herself, with no coach, and walked into her first meet at age 50. She PR'd. She podiumed. 'I was like, what? How is that?' From there she joined Marietta Barbell, trained four days a week for two-plus years, and set Georgia state records in the 50-plus division — first in a non-drug-tested meet, then again in a drug-tested one at 52. Powerlifting gave her a technical foundation her original Olympic-lifting coach had already drilled into her, but she got bored training the same three lifts every cycle, and her coach didn't love that she kept sneaking off to play soccer or run obstacle races on the side. 'There's more to life than just,' she said. So at 51, she moved into strongman.
Nationals, Bulging Discs, and a Coffin-Shaped Implement
Strongman gave Beth what powerlifting couldn't: variety, camaraderie, and athletes who, in her words, 'don't take themselves too seriously' — a direct shot at powerlifters, who she says would get genuinely mad at her for chatting between sets. She set multiple state records and qualified for nationals three times, once making it to New Hampshire the year after COVID, flight chaos and all. At that meet, women weren't grouped by bodyweight — she competed against women up to 200 pounds while weighing 157 herself, in front of a 300-pound deadlift she had to work for a full sixty seconds. She'd also just found out she had three bulging discs, which explained why lifting anything over 130 pounds had started to feel like her back was seizing. She took a cortisone shot before competing and picked up an implement she calls 'a coffin with arms' — 165 pounds, more than her own bodyweight, that she'd never even trained with. She moved it four feet. 'That is a PR when you have never even tried it and you weigh less than the implement,' Logan told her. She agreed it was one of the proudest moments of her life.
From Homeschool Mom to English Teacher at 39
The athletic story only makes sense next to the career one. Beth homeschooled her two kids starting when her oldest was ten months old — right around Columbine, which she says 'would scare any parent shitless.' She went back for her master's, ran a homeschool soccer nonprofit out of Noonday Park that she says still exists 20-plus years later, and spent six years as her kids' soccer booster club treasurer before finally chasing a dream she'd had since she was 14: teaching English. She spent nine years in public school, at Austell Middle and East Paulding High, coaching wrestling and throwing events on the side, before moving to Kennesaw State University to teach freshman composition — 'the bridge between what they did and did not learn in high school.' She's now finishing a doctorate, with a dissertation on social-emotional learning in the high school English classroom, built around a theory she and Logan spent a good chunk of the episode unpacking: that COVID gutted a generation's soft skills, and that most of what schools taught about 'learning styles' for decades was based on research that, as she put it, 'never actually happened.'
Reinvention After Divorce and Menopause
Beth and her kids' father split in 2019, and she's blunt about what came after: 'The first thing I said was I'm gonna be authentically myself and F anyone who doesn't like me.' She credits a transformational workshop program, E360 Trainings, with helping her identify old fear-based reactions before menopause finished the job. Her theory, delivered with zero hedging, is that estrogen biologically wires women to be compromisers and nurturers — and once it exits stage left, so does the compulsion to keep everyone else comfortable. That freedom is powering her next chapter: she now runs Beth Ali Speaker, coaching and facilitating corporate workshops on communication, with a specific focus on veterans translating military communication norms — where 'urgency' means immediately — into civilian workplaces where it usually just means by Friday.
Listen to the Full Conversation
This recap barely scratches the surface. Beth also gets into the horrific dirt bike crash that put her face-first into a Georgia clay embankment, her Gen X childhood in an interracial family outside New York City, her dad building one of the first Apple-era home computers on the kitchen table, and a rapid-fire round covering Lord of the Rings, Texas Roadhouse rolls, and her Grom. Catch the full episode below.
Listen to Episode #512
Catch the full conversation with Beth Ali on Your Morning Drive, wherever you listen.
