Courtney
Spencer

I was born in South Dakota and raised in Houston. Thirteen years of gymnastics, then track, cheer, and lacrosse — and four years of collegiate lacrosse at Baylor, where I took a degree in journalism and learned that I would rather ask the questions than answer them.

Then New York. I moved with almost nothing and worked as a fitness journalist, which is how I ended up in a shared office kitchen on 28th and Park the afternoon a stranger told me I had the perfect body type for a sport I had never heard of. I was twenty-six. I signed up for the combine before I could talk myself out of it, finished dead last, and went back anyway. Three seasons later I had trained on the Park City track, competed for a place on the national team, and learned the only piece of coaching I have never stopped using.

Embrace the hit. Don't brace. There are no brakes on a skeleton sled, and bracing is what breaks you.

Alongside the ice, the work kept moving. I co-founded MYX Fitness, which was later acquired by Beachbody. I anchored and reported the news in Waco. I was selected as a QVC program host — one of twenty-four out of more than seventeen thousand applicants — and went live to more than a million homes at two in the morning, which is its own kind of training. Today I host CBS Deals on CBS Mornings and produce for HopeScope.

Somewhere in there I was adopted, grew up, got baptized, got married, buried a pregnancy, had two children, lost a job, got sued, and wrote a book about all of it. That book took ten years, and I understand now that it could not have been finished any sooner. The last chapter needed the hardest year.

I am a Latter-day Saint. That is not the whole of me, and I don't lead with it in a corporate room — but it is the load-bearing wall of the story I tell, and I am not going to pretend otherwise on my own website.

I live in St. George, Utah with my husband and our two kids. I speak, I write, and I still think the hardest part is showing up.

Short bio

Courtney Spencer is the author of Embrace the Hit, a national TV host for CBS Deals on CBS Mornings, and a former QVC program host. She co-founded MYX Fitness, anchored the news in Waco, Texas, and competed as a USA Skeleton athlete. She holds a BA in journalism from Baylor University and lives in St. George, Utah, with her husband and two children.