As a young child, I was dreadful at the typical sports played by children in the 1970’s. I had amblyopia (commonly known as ‘lazy eye’ where one eye is weaker than the other) and strabismus (where the eyes don’t work together). To put it simply, I had no hand-eye coordination and was totally rubbish at any game that involved balls – unless it was something like Kick-Ball where the ball was so big, you couldn’t miss it, or golf where the ball never moved and you might be lucky enough to strike it if you tried hard enough. So, I was the child who was never picked for the teams in elementary school, and generally tried to get out of physical education class since Gym teachers in that generation seemed to only know about ball related sports (baseball / softball, volleyball, tennis, etc.), and every physical education class involved being humiliated because you couldn’t actually do it.
While I enjoyed gymnastics, during that segment of the school calendar when we were allowed to try it for several weeks, my family could never have afforded for me to join a team or pursue it outside of regular school classes. So, I just considered myself to be not cut out for any sports at all. But, all that changed at 16, when my oldest sister married a runner. My new brother-in-law had run on his college cross-country team (and probably for many years before then). He was also a marathoner, and introduced me to the idea that running didn’t involve balls, hand-eye coordination, special equipment, expensive classes or anything beyond you, gravity and physical motion through space. I had finally found something I thought I might be able to do with some success.
As a 10th grader, I joined the high school track team. Our school didn’t have enough girls interested in running long distances, so didn’t have a cross-country team. The one girl in the entire school who was a dedicated distance runner joined the team of the all-boys school up the road from us, and ran ‘like a boy’ for their team. I discovered that I wasn’t all that fast, but I could keep up a consistent pace, so I was assigned to the 800 and 1600-meter races (or for Americans, that would be the half-mile and full-mile). I may not have been the fastest runner out there, but I actually did well enough that I stuck with it. That said, I actually hated running in circles, so while I fell in love with running, I wasn’t all that enamored with running track. The track is 400 meters around, so in my events, that meant going twice around or four times around – ugh! Given my vision, I also had no interest in the other events – hurdles? Oh my goodness, don’t ever expect me to judge how high I need to raise my legs to get over that obstacle. No, thank you, I’ll stick to distance.
When I left high school, and prepared to enter college, I decided to go ahead and join the cross-country team at Macalester. This was a big step since I had never actually run cross-country, and I fully expected that my teammates would be coming from schools that had such a team. What I found was that cross-country is one of the most supportive sports out there. We were competing against the clock, our own physical condition and our minds. While we were on a team, and there were finishing times to chase, none of the other members of the team were upset if you happened to have a better race on any given day. If you did well, they celebrated with you; if you did poorly, they cheered you up. We had one of the best runners in our collegiate circuit, and she was one of the most modest and supportive teammates I’ve ever had. So, while we were competing at a personal level, we were never competing against each other.
My 2nd year in college, the coach decided that we should run two workouts a day. This seemed all well and good, until my knees decided to launch a protest against doubling mileage overnight. I ended up with patellar tendonitis, which was so painful that I had trouble walking, much less running. The treatment was to sit with my legs in an ice bath – this is a big bucket of ice (and some water) where you insert your legs up to the knees and sit for 20 minutes. While the treatment helped me to be able to walk (and go up and down stairs in the academic buildings), any time I tried to run, my knees painfully reminded me that they were extremely unhappy. I spent most practices walking the route that everyone else was running, and missing race after race.
I finally decided that something was structurally wrong. My parents (and, by extension, me) didn’t have medical insurance at that point, so I decided to try out the chiropractic college clinic. The concept was that you’d be seeing students, under the direction of a full doctor, and only paying ‘cost’ for the services. After x-rays and other exams, I found out that I had lower back scoliosis. While we had scoliosis tests in elementary and high school, they were looking at the upper back. My issue was in the lower back. As I dramatically increased my running mileage, I had created a situation where my back reacted and sent messages to the nerves in my legs that caused the quadriceps to freeze up – which then caused the tendons in my knees to constrict, and voila! I had patellar tendonitis. The treatment plan included adjusting my back to try to straighten the spine as well as ‘stripping’ my quads to get them to relax and release the tendons in my knees. The ‘stripping’ involved the chiropractor applying physical pressure to the quad and pressing it into submission. This wasn’t a massage – it was torture that I paid for every time I went in. During this process, I was also confined to the swimming pool for exercise. This is the time when swimming became a punishment for me – I ‘had’ to swim when I couldn’t run. To this day, I still view swimming as the punishment for being injured and unable to run. Though, I did end up taking a class at Macalester to learn how to swim properly, so I guess it was a good thing (ha! No, it wasn’t!).
After several months of treatment and being confined to the pool, I was finally able to get back to my running. I found that I now had a limit of distance though – anything fewer than 5 miles was fine. If I tried to push beyond 5 miles, my knees reminded me that they were not happy and would (if I pushed it) ensure that I’d be hobbling across campus in no time. Fortunately, the standard distance for women’s cross-country was 2.7 miles, so I was fine.
My third year in college, I was back and training within my limits. I had a new appreciation for my body and what I could do, and ensured that I respected it. We also had a new coach who was really great. Over the season, I ran as the #5 spot on our team. At the time, a cross-country team scored by how their runners placed overall, as well as their finishing time. The score was based on the top 5 runners from a school, so I was the ‘closer’ for the team. At the end of the season, our coach awarded me the ‘Prudential Rock’ – I was not the fastest runner on the team, but I was the most consistent. I always placed either 4th or 5th at every race. My finishing time was within 30 seconds every race. While the other girls would have issues with ‘that time of the month,’ stress, exams, etc., that never effected me. I would finish consistently, which was actually really good for the team overall. She would try to get me to improve my time, but I did what I did, and finished ‘spot on’ in every race. She finally realized that this was a really good thing – other girls could be flighty and be all over the board, but I was the one sure thing at every race.
During this time, I found my love of running and I have never lost it.
