Posted on 02/28/2020 7:51:15 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Four years ago, Molly Seidel wasn’t just the next big thing. She was the top female distance runner in the NCAA with four national titles and the Olympic Trials on the horizon.
But instead of signing a splashy contract with a shoe company, Seidel was sidelined with a sacral stress fracture and watched the U.S. Olympic Track Trials from the stands at Hayward Field, where her Notre Dame teammate Dani Aragon gave her a reality check.
“You look like you’re dying,” Seidel remembers her friend saying. “You need to get help.”
The truth was, the fastest woman in the NCAA was struggling with depression and an obsessive-compulsive disorder that manifested itself in disordered eating.
Seidel turned down the lucrative sponsorship opportunities to quietly enter treatment for her eating disorder. She came back to Notre Dame for a fifth year, citing unfinished business at the college level, but it was really because the sponsorship dollars weren’t there anymore. She barely competed and got injured again.
But in 2020, Seidel is retaking control of the story—starting with the Olympic Marathon Trials in Atlanta this Saturday, February 29. It will be her debut at the distance, but she’s widely regarded as one of several wildcards who could make an impact.
“You never really know what it’s gonna be like until you get there,” Seidel told Runner’s World. “It’s going to be an unknown of what your body can do. Keep an open mind and know how much it’s going to hurt, and be prepared for that amount of pain.
“Tenth to 20th range would be a good day for me. All of these women are really good and have the times [to back it up]. I want to go out and be realistic, but not count myself out.”
(Excerpt) Read more at runnersworld.com ...
Good luck to Molly during her come back effort.
Have a back up plan or two in case this doesn’t work out as you expect it to. Be flexible and appreciative.
When I saw the topic involved a female and the Olympics, I thought this would be another article about Trans-Women continuing their invasion of Women’s Sports.
Not this time.
Not going to be any Olympics this year.
As a former sprinter, I tend to believe that years of long distance running can mess with one’s mind and/or body chemistry.
In both my high school and college teams it seemed that there were always some distance runners struggling with anorexia/bulimia, depression, etc. Almost non existent among sprinters/jumpers. Perhaps building muscle mass and lots of anaerobic exercise benefits your mental health more than burning fat and muscle with constant aerobic exercise. Male distance runners were usually kinda weird, but then distance running lowers testosterone levels.
Or maybe it’s the prima donna attitude of sprinters (according to distance runners everywhere) that keeps them from harmful behaviors.
It does, and it damages your body just by the excessive wear. And in women a lot more than men, its just how it is.
Female leg angles from the pelvis, for example. Less muscle density than men, generally bones that can’t take the stress as well.
I was a distance runner in HS. A lower back injury at age 10 would cause some pain if I tried to build muscle for heavy lifting, jumping, and sprinting.
So I would run the mile and 2 mile.
An L4-L5 microdiscectomy at age 46 gave me a back I hadn’t had since the injury. I soon found an exercise routine to be fun, and was easily sprinting faster than when I was a teen.
At age 54, while working out in the parking lot of a truck stop, another driver said I looked faster than his son, that was at the time, a HS sprinter. I told him: “I hate jogging, so I get the running portion of my workout over with as fast as possible.”
I considered trying the senior olympics, but never followed through.
I have seen eating disorders to be quite common among women who race long distance. In fact there was a women’s running team in NYC during the 1980’s where at least half of the runners had some eating disorder. One of the giveaways was frequent “junk” injuries. The team was led by a prominent coach who published books on running.
She’s not man enough to compete with a tranny...
Sprinting is fun, isn’t it? Competing against others is even better; it’s like a brief intense rush. You should run in the senior Olympics at least once just to experience it. It’s a different feeling than competing in a distance race-I was in cross country in high school as well and it wasn’t just my lack of talent in CC that made it less thrilling;-).
As a former* distance runner, I tend to believe that since I was too slow to compete in the sprints, had I not trained for distances (mile to marathon) I would not have competed at all, so I would not have stayed fit, and when the heart attack in 2011 struck I'd have been a goner. There were days in my 30s and 40s when I felt like I could run all day, and that lifted my spirits. If I missed a couple of runs I'd get antsy and resentful.
*Former due to an arthritic knee that's OK for basketball, but the repetitive motion and joint friction of running more than a half hour at a time just hurts too much. I still jog through a couple of 5Ks and 5 milers each year, but now treat them as fun runs. I used to win or place in my age group consistently.
I still look back fondly on a finish at Boston in under three hours, in my 40th year. 37 years ago this April.
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