Kathy Smith previously shared how she got her start into personal fitness and running as coping mechanisms following the separate, untimely deaths of her parents. "My father died of a heart attack when I was 17; two-and-a-half years later, I lost my mother in a plane crash," she told Ability magazine. "It was a very depressing time for me, and that's when I started running and doing aerobics. In college, I attended clinics given by a doctor who was working with marathon runners who'd had heart attacks but were on the road to recovery. I was drawn to what he was doing with these men and was excited about how running and aerobics were changing my outlook on life." 

In May 2021, Smith shared more details about her parents and their tragic deaths. In a Mother's Day post published on her blog, Smith explained how her father Carl died three days before she graduated from high school. "He was at the office, standing up to give a debriefing, and because he had a very good sense of humor, everybody thought he was joking when he fell down," Smith said. "When they realized he wasn't, they rushed him to the emergency room. He'd had a massive heart attack." Shortly after that, her mother Lorraine, who had already been fighting with alcohol use disorder, started having even more problems with drinking. "The drinking was so bad that she wasn't functional ... And I was aware at that point of a shift in our relationship, how in some ways, I became the mother," Smith said.