Box Girl (26 page)

People would tell me I was too skinny. The doctor told me I was too skinny. I would sit in her office, my hunched-over spine poking through the back of my hospital gown, and say, “Okay, I will eat more fat and carbs, I promise.” Then I would leave and drink a bottle of water to stave off my starvation and smile. Every time someone told me I was too skinny, it just motivated me to stay that way. “Too skinny” wasn't an insult in my mind; it was a compliment. At track meets, I would push my tiny self so hard I often threw up right after my race—crossing the finish line and staggering half-conscious toward the nearest garbage can.

I was recruited to run for The University of Colorado, which was, and still is, one of the best Division I distance-running programs in the country. I wasn't an “official” recruit in that I didn't receive a scholarship to be on the team. I was a “walk-on.” Based on my times in high school, I was someone they were interested in developing. An assistant coach called
me a few times over the summer and told me how I should be training, how many miles I should be running. He said that when I got to Boulder at the end of August, I'd practice with the team, but in early September, I'd have to run a time trial to earn an actual spot on the roster.

Because I was just a walk-on, I started practicing with the team much later than everyone else. Most of them had arrived in early August to acclimate to the 5,300-foot elevation, and some had trained all summer in Boulder. Plus, in mid-August, they had all spent a weekend together at training camp, running and bonding at 7,000 feet. I missed all of that.

My second day in Boulder, I went to the field house to meet the head coach, Mark Wetmore, who is considered by many to be the best collegiate distance-running coach in the country. He was lean to the point of gaunt—hadn't missed a day of running in almost twenty years—and his hair was tied into a graying ponytail, tucked under a black Nike baseball hat. It was immediately apparent that he was a very serious guy. The screensaver on his office computer said, “Res severa verum gaudia,” which he told me meant, “To be serious is the greatest joy.” Wetmore was intimidating, but not unlikable. We chatted for a little while but he cut the conversation short, saying something like, “Well! Get out of here! Go run!” Wetmore was short on small talk. In his world, you did your talking with your feet. Two of the freshman girls on scholarship entered the office around that time. “Perfect!” he said, “They are headed out for a run, too.”

The three of us trotted gingerly down a hill.
Wonderful
, I thought,
I can keep up with this pace
. Then we took a left on the Boulder Creek Path, and they started booking it. As their long, lean bodies bounded along like deer, they chatted easily about training camp and what they were doing for dinner that night. It was obvious that they were already friends. They tried to include me in the conversation, but the elevation
rendered me incapable of talking. After two miles, I felt like I was choking on the thin mountain air, and I finally had to stop and walk. The girls didn't wait for me, which was fine. I knew I couldn't keep up. They took off ahead of me, just chatting away as if that pace, at that altitude, was nothing. There was a fork at the end of the creek path, and I was so far behind, I couldn't see which way they had turned. To the left was a narrow track ascending a steep hill. Seeing as these girls were clearly gluttons for pain, I figured this was the way we were supposed to go. Now, if altitude is a kick in the shins while running on flat ground, it is an absolute kick in the face while going up a hill. When I finally got to the top, I didn't see them. I was happy to be alone because, like a very tall and very skinny baby, I crumbled to the ground and started to cry.

Fortunately, acclimating to altitude is a real thing. By the following month I was able to summit that hill, and many much larger hills, without crying. I was also able to run fast enough in the time trial to make the team.

In high school, I was one of the leanest people on my team, but in college—training next to some of the best women in the world—I wasn't even close. Some of my teammates looked like they were going to die in their sleep. I heard a rumor that one girl, who was five foot ten, was not allowed to practice unless she weighed at least ninety pounds.
Ninety pounds
. Some of the girls on the team were covered in fuzzy yellow hair all over their arms, chests, and faces, and they were always complaining about being cold. I now know these are signs of anorexia. When we went out on training runs, we looked like a pack of skeletons, our size-extra-small spandex hanging loosely off our legs. The prevailing mentality was that every extra ounce on our bodies was extra weight we had to carry
around the track. Thus, we wanted to have as little as possible. But with that came injuries, so at any given time, half our team was hurt, the other half winning NCAA championships.

At the end of the fall season, the top seven women on our team (I, of course, not being one of them) competed in the National Championships—and won. By that spring, I had bursitis and tendonitis in both my knees and stress fractures up and down my shins. From the sidelines, with ice packs taped to my legs, I'd watch these women wobble on toothpick-thin limbs. I was frustrated and disappointed, but more than anything, I was disheartened. This activity that had given me so much, that I had loved so much, I suddenly started to hate.

The following fall, I wrote a six-page handwritten letter to Coach Wetmore telling him I quit. I think I was writing it as much for myself as for him. I really struggled with the decision because I had loved running, more than anything. It had, in some ways, defined me as a human being. It gave me my role in the play. Conversations often went like this: “That's Lilibet; she's a runner. She probably ran, like, six miles today. Lilibet, how many miles did you run today?”

“Eight.”

In the letter, I told him that running was no longer making me happy. That it was no longer fun. I told him I didn't feel like there was any sense of community on the team. These women were not supportive of one another; they were only competitive with each other. And you know what, they should have been. These were
literally
the best collegiate runners in the world. In individual sports like track and cross-country, your teammates are your competition.

In high school, my teammates were my sisters. We cried together when someone on the relay dropped the baton, held each other's hair back when someone barfed in the bathroom after a race. We yelled out each other's splits and yelled louder to get each other across the finish line. We stretched each other's
hamstrings. That Pollyanna track team fantasy did not exist on the best Division I team in the country. At that level, it was all business. I wasn't going to find any hand-holding here. It was the 2004 Lakers, Kobe and Shaq on the same team. No one was passing the ball.

I bet I would have thrived on a Division II or Division III team. I would have probably been the captain. But at Colorado, I was struggling to keep up. Not to mention, I was missing college. Not classes, but everything else. For my teammates, running was everything. It was their identity. Their
entire
identity. This is not something to disparage. It takes an incredible amount of discipline and dedication and an excruciatingly high tolerance for pain. But for me, I knew running was just a part of my being, and in order to succeed at that sort of program, it had to be
every
part of you. My teammates would eat, sleep, and breathe running. I wasn't willing to do that.

Wetmore would often tell me I was one of the most inconsistent runners he'd ever coached. Some days, I was one of the first to finish a workout; other days I was pulling over to the side of the road, pretending to tie my shoes while heaving for breath and throwing up. During one particular twelve-mile-long run along Magnolia Road—a dirt road along a ridge at 8,000 feet, with a rolling, relentless ascent—I was struggling to put one foot in front of the other. Wetmore pulled up alongside me in one of the university-issued vans. “Late night at the sorority house?” he said, even though he knew I wasn't in a sorority. But still, he knew. He was on to me. He knew I was trying to play it both ways. To be the star runner and not miss the keg party.

In high school, I could get away with this. I had enough natural ability to pull it off. But in Division I athletics, everyone has natural ability. The difference was who decided to put in the work. For Wetmore, work ethic was everything. He expected a lot out of his runners, and in turn, he showed them
the same level of diligence and commitment. Wetmore would give periodic speeches throughout the season. They weren't preachy or overwrought; they got the point across in the most straightforward way. (Not surprisingly, the one that sticks out most in my mind was given before winter break when he told us not to let ourselves go that next month, eating too many cookies and drinking too many beers.) In one of his more substantial speeches, which is recounted in the book
Running with the Buffaloes
, about the 1998 men's cross-country team, he said, “Look, this is what I am . . . I don't play golf. I don't have many hobbies. I don't have a wife. The bottom line is I'm here to make you guys run fast. When I go to sleep at night, my mind's churning, thinking of ways to make you go fast . . .”

At practice one afternoon, during a tempo run on the Creek Path, I had fallen well behind the pack and was stumbling along at a totally unrespectable pace. Wetmore—who often ran not with us, but behind us—passed me. As he did so, he had only one word for me. It was not yelled, but very calm, and very clear: “Work.”

I think part of me was scared to give it my all. Wetmore was renowned in the collegiate community for turning more walk-ons into All-Americans than any other coach in NCAA history. I'm sure there was a part of me that feared this, that with enough success in this one realm, I'd have to sacrifice the rest of my life. What if I wanted to go skiing? Go to a concert? Eat a cupcake?

In my resignation letter, I didn't mention my concerns with what I considered to be rampant disordered eating on the team. Wetmore already knew about that. Eating disorders in women's distance running programs are so prevalent that a clinical diagnosis has even been assigned them: “The Female Athlete Triad,” which is a condition that occurs when caloric intake does not match energy expenditure, causing disordered eating, menstrual dysfunction, and premature osteoporosis.
This is present, to some degree, in all collegiate track programs, but it was notorious at Colorado. (My senior year, I interviewed Wetmore for the student newspaper, and he admitted they towed a fine line. That you had to. It was a dangerous but necessary line, with the highest level of fitness on one side and injuries on the other.)
Why should I say something in the letter?
I reasoned. I knew it wasn't going to change. And it never will. Look at all the Olympians and the people winning the big-ticket marathons: They are whittled to the bone.

When I walked away from the team the fall of my sophomore year, I walked away from running for a long time. I started to eat normally again. Without the internal and external pressures to be so thin, I was able to enjoy food like I used to. I ate the cheeseburger, the fries,
and
the milkshake. (There was a time, during the height of my running “career,” when I could not remember the last time I had eaten ice cream. Also during this time, I remember beating myself up for days after a barbeque because I had chosen the burger over the grilled chicken.) No longer consumed by a constant quest for perfection, I got back to a healthy weight. Flesh returned to my arms. My stringy thighs once again filled out my jeans. My butt was no longer just a muscle. The bony column down the center of my sternum gradually transitioned from a cage that protected my lungs and heart to a chest—a woman's chest. I finally looked less like an eleven-year-old boy and more like a woman.

A couple of years later, while watching several of my former teammates compete in the Olympic Trials (two of them would go on to compete in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing), it was impossible not to wonder, with an almost unbearable sense of regret, what if I had stayed with it? I was reminded of my cousin Marian's high school valedictorian speech in 1993. I was eleven at the time, a very impressionable age for a girl. In her speech, Marian quoted John Greenleaf Whittier: “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘it might
have been.'” I immediately scribbled it into my diary. I am not blaming this on Marian, but all my life I have lived under this sort of fear of unrealized potential, constantly tallying the what-ifs. Why was I given this gift of being good at something if I wasn't going to take it to the point of self-actualization? What if I had given it my full effort? Could I, too, be at the Olympics? It was depressing to think about.