Year: 2016

Eric ‘Ned’ Nedeau missed going to the Olympics by a crushing tenth of a second.  At the 1996 US Olympic trials for the 1500m, he finished 4th in 3:44.11.  The 3rd and final Olympic slot went to Jason Pyrah, who edged him in 3:44.03.  In 1997 Ned accepted the head coaching job at Amherst College for the men’s and women’s track and cross country teams.

Ned was revered.  The track team wore shirts that read Ned, 3:16.

According to Mark Lech, Erik Nedeau “was one of the fiercest competitors I have ever seen, certainly that I have ever had the privilege to coach. His greatest asset was his tenacity. He got every single ounce of performance out of himself. When he lost a race you knew it was just because the person who beat him was more gifted, but that he certainly was not out-finessed. He was able to get more out of himself than almost all of his contemporaries. This is not to say he was not talented; certainly he is one of the most talented athletes to come out of the State of Maine – his records speak for themselves. As a person, there is none better. He is a stand-up guy and I will forever be grateful that I had the chance to work with him and call him my friend.”

There is a great advantage to having such an accomplished athlete as your coach.  Ned was exceptionally knowledgable about how to train a body.  He had long-term vision about how to build base, hone speed, and hit your peak at just the right time.  He had ample personal experience in how to thread that micro-thin line between hard training and body breakdown.

Just three weeks after joining the team, I was breezing through workouts and Ned started inserting our young assistant coaches into my intervals to push me.  Ned asked, ‘The qualifying time for Nationals for the 1500m is 4:44.  Think you can do it?’  I didn’t hesitate.  ‘Definitely.’

Running was an all-consuming enterprise for Ned.  Maybe he had some secret pastimes beyond running.  Maybe he lapped up German philosophy in the evenings and drove to Boston for esoteric French film screenings.  But to our knowledge Ned’s life revolved around three activities: running, coaching, and thinking about running and coaching.

I had left Stanford and come to Amherst for the explicit purpose of having a liberal arts education and a balanced student-athlete life.  Stanford was the kind of place where you had to be subsumed by a single passion.  At Amherst, students weren’t penalized for pursuing multiple interests simultaneously.  It was like summer camp.  I spent mornings throwing ceramics on the wheel at U-Mass.  In the afternoons I studied molecular and evolutionary biology, Russian literature and language, art history, religion, and creative writing.  Twice a week we had formal team workouts at 4pm, but otherwise I squeezed in a trot when I could.  Some evenings I rode horses over fences with the Amherst equestrian team.  On weekends I had athletic events (track/cross country meets, soccer games, or equestrian competitions).  My ceramics professor gave me a key to the studio so I could go in on weekends and use the wheel on my own.  I loved going into the studio on a Sunday when it was just me and the purr of the wheel and the radio.

Ned and I remained on very good terms for most of my first season of indoor track.  I fulfilled my vow to qualify for the NCAA National Indoor Track & Field event in the 1500m, shedding 20 seconds off my time as the season progressed.  When a chick from Springfield spiked me from behind during a 1500m race and sent me flying into the infield, it didn’t escape Ned’s notice that I popped my bloody knees right back up and whirled around the track, passing runner after runner until I finally beat the girl that tripped me.  Perhaps I had the talent and the fire.

When I felt like running, I had more fire than anyone else.  In order for our cross country team to qualify for Nationals, we needed a top finish at Regionals.  As we sat on the bus the morning of the Regional meet,  I looked out at a field filled with women trotting around in different colored track suits warming up, face paint on their cheeks, ribbons in their hair.  I growled out loud, We’re gonna end all those girls’ seasons today.  That kind of statement wouldn’t bat an eyelash on the soccer field, where taunting and scraping each other up came with the territory.  But it wasn’t part of the running culture.  Everyone’s jaws dropped.  Ned’s eyes lit up, and he declared, That, that is the quote of the day!  I PRed by 30 seconds to help our team qualify for Nationals.  At Nationals I ran so hard I thought I’d made a terrible mistake and was going to blow up after just one mile, but held on and ended up slicing another 30 seconds off my PR to finish All-America.

But when I didn’t want to run, I was the immovable object to Ned’s unstoppable force.  Maybe my hamstring was bothering me.  Maybe I had my period.  Or maybe my legs were just sluggish and hadn’t recovered from the last workout, and it didn’t seem like a workout would accomplish anything other than setting my recovery back further.

It all came to a head on Saturday, September 15th, 2001.  It was a beautiful sunny day at Williams College.  It was my second collegiate cross country meet.  And I didn’t want to run.  There was nothing physically wrong with me.  No injuries.  No bugs.  But I hadn’t been able to run since Tuesday’s 9/11 attack.  I’d skipped the Thursday workout.  I’d barely trudged to class.  Tuesday night after the attack I’d slept for 20 hours.

Ned was baffled.  No, I hadn’t lost any friends or family in the bombing.  No, I hadn’t seen a counselor.  Yes, I understood that every other Amherst runner was lacing up and competing that day.  I couldn’t describe what I had.  Malaise?

I agreed to toe the line.  The gun went off and I followed the surge.  But I was in a haze.  I just kept slipping back, getting passed on all sides.  The world was at war, a nasty surreptitious war with invisible enemies and civilian targets, unlike anything ever fought before.  And somehow I was supposed to care about who ran faster from one point to another in Western Massachusetts.  I started walking.  And then I zombie-walked off the course and stopped.

When the race was over, Ned did not disguise his disappointment.  I typically recall these kind of memorable conversations word for word.  This one’s a blur.  Just a lot of Ned’s finger pointing at me and my teammates.  The ones who had all toughened up and raced today.  The NCAA had cancel events during the week, but decided to hold Saturday’s meets.  It was clearly time for everyone to move on.  And there I was, reduced to muffling snot-faced sobbing.  Totally at a loss of words.  I didn’t know if I was crying because (a) Ned’s words had sunk in, and I actually felt guilty about dropping from the race, (b) because I could no longer pretend my coach wasn’t a total a-wipe, as I’d long suspected, or (c) it was still sinking in that I now lived in a world populated by crazy jihadist terrorists who might blow up people I loved at any moment.

When a cat pees on your furniture, it’s almost impossible to get the smell out, even with powerful chemicals.  When Ned and I lost respect for each other that day, every tiny skirmish from that day forth was magnified.  Ned thought I was a princess.  I thought he was a Neanderthal.  It became personal, and a power struggle.  Ned won most of the power struggles (No, you have to wear the bunhuggers.  Yes, even for individual track events.  Why?  Because girls don’t look good in shorts.)  But in our power struggle there were really no winners, just two big losers as a pair who should have made an invincible team came to detest each other.

Ned and I were on moderately good terms after xc Nationals.  I think Ned recognized that I’d made a powerful push to return to form following my month-long suspension, and ran the race of my life at Nationals.  Then one day I told him about my plans to study abroad the next semester in Melbourne, Australia.  I’d be going with Katelyn, my lab partner and friend from the soccer team.  As experimental biologists, Katelyn and I had discovered that if we chased our vodka shots with a squirt from a bottle of Hersheys chocolate syrup it made getting drunk a lot more fun.

After Nationals, Ned had taken my All-America award to have a professional calligrapher inscribe my name.  A couple weeks later I stepped into his office and asked if the document was ready.  He opened his palms and said he didn’t know where it was.  Maybe it had been misplaced.  He didn’t try to look for it.  It was only then that I realized how wounded and fuming he was over my decision to study abroad.  There was a weird phenomenon: whenever Ned and I locked heads, his facial features would start to distort in cartoonish ways.  The gap between his teeth would enlarge.  His forehead extended.  His eyes got beadier.  I always left Ned’s office feeling much worse than when I arrived.

I never got my All-America award.  I ventured into Ned’s office a few more times to ask for it, but always got the same response.  You could cut through the tension in the air with a butter knife.

Sometimes I fantasize about driving up to Amherst, cat-burglaring into Ned’s office (in a skin-tight black cat suit with slicked hair, of course), rifling through all the file drawers until I find my award, and stealing it back.  I know it’s something that I’d just store at the bottom of some drawer with other old documents.  But it’s the principle.  I know was an obstinate little athlete.  That I never lived up to my potential, or the dreams of my coaches — and my father before them.  And I know I’m a big whiner.  Aaron recently titled one of his Strava runs: Tenleytown / Georgetown in which the Marmot comes along for half the run, and she demonstrates her ability to whine even at a brisk pace.  But honestly, I wish other people would whine more.  Like for all those years when Aaron silently suffered through Lyme, with me naively clippetty-clopping along utterly unaware how uncomfortable he was.

I know Ned doesn’t think I deserved my All-America award.  That I didn’t put in the work.  That I never lived up that ascetic ideal that runners should surrender themselves to the sport, powering through pain and injury and hardship like an inspirational Nike ad.  As time has passed, I’ve tried to see Ned’s perspective.  To spend all your time devising meticulous training plans, with a specific purpose to each workout and training run.  And have me foil them, over and over.  In truth, Ned’s fury actually was his way of caring about me.  For most of the runners, he would’ve shrugged if they’d scooted off to Melbourne for a semester or dropped out of a race.  He desperately wanted me to run the way he did, like my soles were on fire and nothing would stand between me and my goals. For someone who came so tantalizingly close to his Olympic dreams, maybe he couldn’t help himself.

 

Fast Girl: A Life Spent Running from Madness (2015)

Suzy Favor Hamilton

Many athletes have a hard time retiring….This was not the case for me.  I had hated competing for decades, since high school really, and had been looking forward to retiring for years.  –SFH

I devoured Ms Hamilton’s memoir in three days.  Most running books — think Born to Run — glorify the thrill and natural beauty of running.  Since we’re high on Star Wars at the moment, we can think of this as the ‘light side’ of running.  The endorphins, the alpine forests, the satisfaction of laying out a challenge for oneself and completing it.  Far fewer books foray in the dark side of running.

The dark side of running isn’t the pain, or exhaustion, or the daily trudge of training.  Those are difficult, yes, and at times unpleasant.  But the dark side is what resides within the mind.  The gnawing self-doubt, the suffocating weight of performance expectations, and the terrifying loss of control over one’s own body.  And the feeling of entrapment, that you don’t want to let your family down, or your team, your coach, and everyone else.  Suzy Favor Hamilton suffered from crippling pre-race anxiety.  In one episode she recalls wishing her leg would break.  Child sports stars often feel like passive spectators in their own circus.  Like many other young athletes, bulimia was Suzy Hamilton’s way of exerting a measure of control over her teenage years.  Her longterm eating disorder was a clear sign of larger psychological problems, including what eventually manifested as bipolar depression.  Suzy was certain that members of her family knew but never addressed her bulimia.  After all, she was winning.

Some professional athletes have admitted to how much they hated competing (Andre Agassi is a prime example).  But public exposure of Ms Hamilton’s post-career foray into Las Vegas sex work compelled her to be unusually candid about her mental illness, including the roles of compulsion and mania in driving her success as a runner.

Being bipolar means being insatiable.  The high of the mania is never high enough.  There is always a desire — a need — to push the high to the next level, in the same way that a drug addict constantly requires more and stronger drugs. — SFH

According to the book, Ms Hamilton’s slip into prostitution was simply a different outlet for the same manic drive that took her to three Olympics and a record 9 NCAA titles.  Only after intentionally throwing herself to the track during the 1500m finals at the Sydney Olympics did she finally say enough and retire from the sport.  However, bipolar is a demanding mistress, and ultimately she only ended up substituting one compulsion on the track for another in Vegas.

An interesting foil to Hamilton’s experience is her best friend Mary Hartzheim, who joined the University of Wisconsin’s running program with Suzy as an equally talented freshman.  Mary is the paragon to which Suzy aspires — a balanced, charismatic girl who ran hard but was never consumed by it.  After running four years at Wisconsin, Mary calmly walked away from the sport.

~            ~            ~

I never had a mental illness.  Or an eating disorder.  But that doesn’t mean I never tangoed with the dark side of running.  That I didn’t regularly wish the bus would break down on the way to a track meet.  That the smell of icyhot doesn’t still give me a jolt of panic decades later.  That I couldn’t relate to everything Suzy Favor Hamilton experienced as a runner (no, not the sex worker part….).  The dread.  The wish that it would all just go away.  The trapped feeling of not wanting to run, but also not wanting to let everyone down.

It took me a decade to cease hating running.  To learn how to run and compete in a healthy, sustainable way.  It took a lot of friends along the way.  It took Aaron.  It took pine needles and pileated woodpeckers.  The Cook Street Track Club, the Nittany Valley Running Club, and WUS.  The Teton Crest Trail.  My mom.  I had to claw my way from the dark into the light side of running, over years and years.  Starting with a particular summer 15 years ago in New Mexico.

~            ~            ~

The August sun in New Mexico will punish you for sleeping in on a Sunday.  But the possibility of rising before 9am never even occurs to a 20-year old kid.  So I affixed my anti-solar armaments: a $10 pair of sunglasses, a Boston Red Sox hat, and a pair of old biking gloves I had borrowed.  I can remember so many details about the man who lent me those biking gloves, but after a decade and a half I can no longer recall his name.  On my first day in the Albuquerque sun I had managed to slather SPF 50 sunblock everywhere except for the backs of my hands, and now I put on the biking gloves religiously each time I left the house.  I wore them driving the 1992 4-runner (lent to me by the same man who’d lent the gloves), going for runs, and riding the neighbor’s black Tennessee Walker.  Within ten minutes of heading out the door, I could feel the sun’s noontime rays cooking the backs of my hands, even through the gloves.

Twenty-year olds also don’t carry water on runs, and my mouth was fully parched after two miles.  But the dryness hardly registered.  My mind was too busy churning over a single question, which rolled over and over  inside my skull like waves tapping on the shore.  To run or not to run…..

My soccer season had been a bust.  I didn’t like the Amherst dining hall’s offerings and had lost too much weight at the start of the fall.  Under-strength, I injured my Achilles and never really bounced back.  But just a couple weeks after the soccer season ended, I came roaring out onto the indoor track, winning the opening pre-Christmas mile and ending up 10th at the NCAA National meet in the 1500m, despite some rookie mistakes.

The question boiled down to: should I do something I’m mediocre at but love (soccer), or something I’m talented at but detest (running)?  Should I be happy?  Or should I be good?  In all my (rather expensive) Stanford/Amherst education, from Plato to the Buddha to Tolstoy, none of it seemed to offer any kind of insight into this simple but life-defining question.

If you were looking for a sign of where my athletic loyalties lay, you had to look no further than my clothes. Sweating through the New Mexico desert, it’s appealing to imagine me in some slick little running outfit, maybe one of those Oiselle tank tops and some Sonja-style spandex over my sleek 110-lb frame.  I can guarantee this was not the case.  My thighs were most certainly swimming in baggy Lanzera soccer shorts.  You could have fit three of me inside one of my billowing cotton tees from an old soccer tournament.  If running was stupid, running clothes were even stupider.  Except for long running tights that were absolutely necessary to survive the New England winter, I didn’t own a single piece of running apparel.

I had given running the slip before.  That was the whole point of escaping to Stanford, the one university that hadn’t recruited me to run.  I didn’t have Suzy Hamilton’s kind of manic drive propelling me to run.   In junior year of high school, when I started throwing races, my parents sent me to a sports psychologist.

‘So, why are you here today, Martha?’

‘I haven’t been running very well.  I dropped out of a race.’

‘How do you feel when you run?’

‘Like I’m going through the motions.  I hate running.  I’ve always hated it.  I don’t want to do it anymore.’

The point of going to the therapist was to identify and treat the mental blocks that were preventing me from performing.  I walked out of there with a carte blanche to never run a step again if I didn’t want to.  As far as I was concerned, therapy rocked.

But choosing a university because it’s track program is too elite to notice you wasn’t exactly sharp decision-making, and transferring to Amherst after freshman year had been, far and away, the toughest and best decision I’d ever made.  At Stanford I wasn’t good enough (or committed enough) to do anything.  Doors swung wide open in the Pioneer Valley.  I could study biology — and Russian — and creative writing.  I could play varsity soccer — and compete on the equestrian team (pony jumping!) — and something even lured me back to the good ole track.

The problem with running wasn’t the pain.  I played soccer through broken bones, bloody noses, heat strokes, etc.  One year in Cocoa Beach, FL we played through a raging hurricane that pelleted our faces so hard the opposing team forfeited at half time.  Even when I got benched in 7th grade for being small (I was 4th percentile for weight), my love of soccer never flickered.  The problem was that running felt like something I was forced to do, simply because I was good at winning races.  On Sundays when I was supposed to do a long run I would delay all day.  Finally, just before it started to get dark I’d shove two or three cupcakes in my mouth and try to get myself out the door.  I ran all my runs the same: slow and miserable at the beginning, and then at some point I’d realize I was only a mile or two from home and I’d dash home with such delight that I was done.  And not have to run again, at least for another day.

The desert has a way of distilling complex issues, melting them down to their essence.  Something deep in my bones wanted to run, and I could feel it out in the open sands.  The desert is so still, you can hear voices you’ve never heard before.  Prophesies whispering through the sage.  Not promising victories or crowns.  The glow of victory lasts two weeks, tops.  No, I was promised something sweeter: ownership.

There was a different kind of running out there.  Not the circles around the track.  No smell of icyhot.  I was not beholden to Ned, my track coach, or even my teammates or parents.  I’d have to follow my own nose, but there was a different kind of running out there, and it would lead me to everything that would be important to me in life, everything that I would love and hold sacred.

This New Mexico adventure had been my first night spent alone in a hotel room.  My first solo road trip.  I had ordered my first beer (they didn’t seem to card out here) and sat at the bar drinking alone, just like in the movies.  I called from pay phones to let my family know I was still alive.

That day I made a deal with the desert.  I would run.

I ran cross country that fall, but fiercely on my own terms.  That made for tense coach-athlete relations, and Ned suspended me from the team in the heart of the season, from mid-September to mid-October.  I trotted around on my own, and returned for the last meets.  I PRed by 30 seconds at Nationals (17:44 for 5k) on a cold November day in Wisconsin, earning All-America with a 19th place finish, and propelled Amherst women to a best-ever 7th place team finish.  And then I walked away and never competed for Amherst again.  Everyone thought I was burned out.  But I was just beginning.