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Ann Gaffigan's Steeplechics.com Blog:
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You're a Bravebird
(posted on 03/26/08 at 1:19 am EDT, updated on 03/26/08 at 1:25 am EDT) | I read an article about a month ago that Stephanie Herbst, 42, had won a 10K road race in Atlanta in 34:47. It took a few seconds for that name to register as more than just someone who is a very impressive masters runner; Herbst was the subject of a book I had read my freshman year in college: The Silence of Great Distance: Women Running Long by Frank Murphy. It is an excellent book, and I encourage everyone to pick up a copy. But for those of you who have read it, you probably recall one passage of this book standing out in your mind more so than the others: the one about Kathy Ormsby.
In this passage, the author describes the NCAA Women’s 10,000m Final in Indianapolis, IN, in 1986. Herbst (running for Wisconsin) and Ormsby (running for North Carolina State and owner of the collegiate record at this time) were in the lead pack. With just over 8 laps to go, when Herbst’s coach Peter Tegen (now coaching at Stanford) was supposed to give his athlete an audible signal to make her move to take the championship, he instead was distracted by Ormsby running towards him with a blank look on her face. He thought she mistook him for her coach. But Ormsby did not see Tegen. She ran right by him, up the stadium steps and across a softball field, jumped a 7-foot fence, ran two and a half blocks to a bridge crossing the White River, looked over the edge and jumped, landing on the concrete next to the water 30 or 40 feet below the bridge. Her coach Rollie Geiger found her there several minutes later.
Ormsby was paralyzed from just above the waist down. She is still alive today. Many news reports called it a suicide attempt, but Ormsby denied it, saying she wasn’t exactly sure what had happened on that day. She said that about halfway through the race, she began to struggle to stay with the leaders; frustrating for someone who had the collegiate record.
''All of a sudden. . .I just felt like something snapped inside of me,'' she said. ''And I was really angry. I felt like it was so unfair. All of a sudden, I didn't feel like this was me because I didn't usually have reactions like that. That was not a reaction I had as a person, ever.''
This passage in the book is beautifully written and is the climactic portrayal of the author’s main theme throughout: the pressures felt, from within and without, by a typical female distance runner with a need for perfection, an eagerness to please, and a will to make herself achieve at all costs.
When I first read this chapter of the book, I felt like someone was about to find out my deepest secrets. Or had already learned them? Why did I feel the need to look over my shoulder to see if anyone was there? I realized that I related to Kathy Ormsby’s actions. I understood the incident. What she had done did not surprise me. I didn’t tell anyone these things for a while, not until reading about Herbst’s 10K in Atlanta in February. I brought up the book to some of my friends who are runners. I told them about Ormsby’s NCAA meet in 1986 and even read the passage out loud to some.
Come to find out, we all understand. She had a major panic attack. All of us have had some form of one, major or minor. I remember racing at the Footlocker Midwest Regional Meet in Wisconsin my sophomore year in high school. I was getting my butt kicked by the big dogs and the course was difficult. I felt like I was hyperventilating and a few minutes later was getting carted to the medical tent after passing out. What had happened? I was a perfectly healthy girl and the doctors could find nothing wrong with me. I had probably had a panic attack. I remember hearing about Julia Stamps collapsing several years in a row at the Footlocker Nationals, meters away from winning the title. I remember thinking to myself, “Of course she collapsed. She has the world on her shoulders. Everyone knows who she is, everyone is expecting her to outdo herself every time she races. Of course she collapsed.” Suzy Favor Hamilton has admitted that a panic attack caused her to collapse in the final stretch of the 2000 Olympic 1500m final, which she was leading.
Have you ever thought to yourself before or during a race, “Maybe I’ll break my ankle and I won’t be able to run today?” I remember relaying such a feeling to my dad, who then told his own story about racing a 10K road race in Springfield, IL, in the 80’s, and at the bottom of a hill he saw a group of bikers coming down from the hill’s crest and thought to himself, “Maybe they’ll just run me over.” Your body wants you to quit, but your mind and your pride won’t let you. So maybe if something ELSE made you quit, it would be OK because it’s not your fault, right?
In high school, I asked a doctor who was the mother of a kid I babysat why I would get light-headed in the whirlpool at the gym or why I would “white-out” (only see white spots and eventually all whiteness) on hot days during hard workouts. She said I was probably dehydrated and overextending myself and so my blood couldn’t get to all the places it needed to be: to my skin, my muscles, and most importantly my brain. I would get light-headed because my brain needed oxygen and wasn’t getting it. What happens after you get light-headed? You faint. Why does this happen? Because it puts you flat on the ground where gravity can help your blood flow to your brain. I thought “Wow, so your body eventually says ‘Enough of this, you’re going to lay down and recover and you’re going to like it!’”
I think Kathy Ormsby’s body took over. It said, “Enough. Running is torturing you. It has a knife at your throat. It controls every move you make. It looms over you, threatening failure unless you bow down to it. And you won’t give in because you are convinced It is right; that you are nothing without It and that everyone would be disappointed in you if you walked away from It. Well, I won’t let you keep doing this to yourself. If you won’t fight back, I’ll fight for you. Today is the last day you’ll run.”
I have a constant love/hate relationship with running. At the end of my horrendous season last spring, I was at a low. I felt worthless, incompetent, unsuccessful, embarrassed…you name it. And I was so angry that I felt that way. Because I knew it wasn’t the truth and yet I couldn’t get that feeling to go away. That is what this sport can do to you. Take all of your accomplishments, running and otherwise: then have a bad race or a bad workout and suddenly nothing counts but that one bad day. I like to think my days of struggling with self-esteem are over, but I fight hard to this day to not let a slow tempo run or less-than-perfect set of 1000m’s get me down. And yet on a day when a workout goes so well that it surprises me AND my coach, nothing can ruin my mood. It’s all I daydream about until the next workout. I call my parents and my boyfriend and tell them all the details: my splits, the weather, Jay’s grin when I was done. After a bad race, no one hears from me for days. I can’t bring myself to say, “I don’t know why, but I just failed miserably.” It’s the inexplicable failures that hurt the most. They lead you to believe that you just aren’t that good; that your successes had been a fluke. That is what Ormsby was experiencing: a deep pain, the root of which was the feeling that the collegiate record had been a gift; the runner she was on the day of the final, with the non-responsive legs and the labored breathing, was the real her; how dare she think she was deserving of any better. But that’s not fair. She had worked hard to get where she was. She deserved it. And she was finally feeling angry.
Please note that I do not claim to be able to read Ms. Ormsby’s mind. The above entry is simply my own relation to her incident as if it had been me who had left the track and jumped off the bridge. I would like to thank Frank Murphy for writing such an insightful book about women’s running. I would also like to thank all of the women featured in the book; your stories have reached out to other female runners just like you. I’d like to dedicate the following lyrics to you:
You’re a bravebird
Of the rarest kind
You may be one of the walking wounded
But still you fly
You’re a bravebird
You put yourself on the line
When you shared your secret with the world
You saved another mother’s child
--Amel Larrieux, “Bravebird”
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