Kill the Silence

by Monika Korra

  I sat there wide-eyed. How could somebody break a record by such a huge amount?

  “I wish that every one of my athletes could make such a huge leap in their performance,” Coach Wollman said. “It would be great to be able to run a PR every time out, but no one has ever done that. It’s just not humanly possible. It was your first race of the season. You can’t expect a miracle jump like Beamon’s. But you can get better, which is why we measure your times in tenths and hundredths of a second. Even a fraction faster is still a PR. And you know how much work it takes to get better, even by a tenth of a second.” He snapped his fingers to indicate just how short a period of time that was.

  I nodded. Progress comes slowly. Once you got to our level, huge breakthroughs with seconds and seconds of improvement weren’t common. The longer the race, the greater the chances you’d have a bigger improvement, but still the point was true. If you looked at the big picture and did one thing every day a little bit better, put a little bit more effort into some aspect of your training—in the weight room, on the track, while stretching in the infield, or in your mind in developing confidence or trusting your training and your race plan, you’d get better results at some point down the line.

  “Think of the building blocks we always talk about. You’ve got a solid foundation. Let’s figure out how to get progressively better, build up the rest of the structure. The Mt. Sac Relays are this weekend. I’d like to see you do the 10K. I think a thirty-eight-minute time will put you in a good place.”

  I walked out of that meeting both eager and anxious. I didn’t know if my body was ready for a ten-thousand-meter race (6.2 miles), but I wanted to give it a go. I hadn’t ever competed in the ten thousand meter on the track, just in many road races, so this all felt fresh and new to me. Running one on the road was one thing; in comparison to being on a track, a road race was relatively straight. You had a few turns and some ups and downs, but they weren’t marked out as regularly and consistently as a track was. I liked road races a lot because of the variety of the course, the less predictable nature of it.

  Upping my race distance was going to be a challenge. At that point, I didn’t know if I’d have the energy to finish a 10K. My training had been interrupted, and I still wasn’t sleeping well, but I wanted to give it a shot. My PR in a 10K road race was 35:40. Targeting two minutes and twenty seconds slower than that would have normally been unthinkable. Why set out to not do better? But this was good. Modest expectations. New experience.

  For the past three weeks, I’d tried so hard to keep to my usual routine, tell myself the usual things during my mental preparation before and during the race, and tried so hard to act and think in the ways that I had in the past. This time, though, I accepted that things had changed for me. I told myself that it was okay to repeat to myself what I’d been thinking since that run with my father: I am bigger than this. I am not my struggles.

  Before we finished our conversation after that disappointing five-thousand-meter race, Coach Wollman had suggested I do something else to help relax me and energize me—yoga. I was surprised that he suggested it. Normally, he was strictly against us doing something different from staying focused on our goals and believed that all training had to be running-specific. But he understood that my mind and my body were intricately connected. There was no way my body, which was feeling much better, was going to be able to perform if my mind and my emotions were still impaired. Maybe I was able to deceive people into thinking that I was better by hiding my darker thoughts and emotions. But the stopwatch didn’t lie: I wasn’t doing as well as I wanted everyone to believe. As much as I tried to convince people that I was back and ready to resume my previous life on and off the track, the numbers told me and everyone else that wasn’t the case at all.

  That was one of the great things about having coaches. Coach Wollman and Coach Casey cared about me as an athlete, but also as a student, and a person. During my ongoing moments of crisis, they were able to coach all of me. I didn’t think of this then, but it seems appropriate that Coach Wollman was our “head” coach.

  The first yoga sessions I took left me more stressed than ever; my mind kept wandering to all the “have tos” and “should haves.” In that hour spent stretching, I found myself thinking, I could have covered at least eight miles, or I could have read an entire chapter in my anatomy book. But something told me that I had to stick to it, keep showing up at yoga one to two times each week, and maybe I would learn how to calm my mind eventually—something I clearly needed. After a few weeks, it started to click. I felt a gradual release in my body; my muscles started to let go of the tension, my mind started to slow down, my breathing got back to its normal rhythm. It felt so good; I was mastering the positions and the breathing, and I was mastering my own stress levels.

  More important than the poses and the movement in yoga is the emphasis on controlled breathing. Most of us don’t think about how we breathe. That’s because the body can regulate that function automatically—or autonomically, as it’s more technically known. In learning yoga, just as in running competitively, you’re taught to consciously breathe from the diaphragm. A big part of running efficiently is breathing efficiently. Diaphragmatic breathing is sometimes known as “belly breathing”; when you breathe properly, as you do when you’re asleep, your chest muscles aren’t really activated and your rib cage doesn’t rise and fall. Instead, the muscle just below the rib cage, your diaphragm, descends and in so doing changes the internal pressure in your lungs and you inhale.

  I realized that, since the rape, I hadn’t been breathing properly. My muscles were so tensed up because of anxiety and stress that I wasn’t getting the proper amount of oxygen into my system. I had to turn off that fight-or-flight response and get back to breathing optimally in order to counteract some of the physical stresses on my body as well as some of the emotional ones.

  With all those hormones being secreted, my body and brain chemistry was being altered. I won’t go into all the specifics of this, but mood disorders, depression, anxiety, etc., are caused by imbalances in our bodies’ chemistry. When I ran, I breathed properly and as a result derived many of the same benefits that someone who practices yoga would. Also, that kind of activity released endorphins into my system. Those are chemicals your body releases when you exercise hard. They act on neurotransmitters in the brain to reduce the experience of pain that you have associated with exertion. Generally, they improve your mood and produce what some people refer to as the “runner’s high,” an elevated feeling of wellness. From my science studies, I knew that exercise has been proven to reduce stress, ward off anxiety and feelings of depression, boost self-esteem, and improve sleep. For once, the science nerd in me had proven helpful.

  I was grateful that Coach Wollman recognized how down I was mentally, how preoccupied I’d become, how my thinking needed to be slowed in order for my body to run fast. I can’t say that at the time I understood the nuances of the scientific process. I kept doing yoga because it felt so good, because I wanted to, because my body and mind told me to. I found pleasure in taking on another act of using and challenging my body. I enjoyed it so much, in fact, that I would eventually become a yoga instructor. I want to teach others to fall in love with yoga the way I did, for its powers to calm the mind, its importance to mental health, especially in the high-speed society we live in.

  In that first semester back in Dallas from Norway, I was fortunate to be surrounded by so many people who were able to form a recovery team around me. I was fortunate that my training made me so physically aware of my body, and that I had an identity that I could use to define myself as something other than a victim.

  Running and exercising were a habit and how I identified myself. I was fortunate that I didn’t suffer such a blow to my self-esteem that I didn’t want to be around other people. I didn’t always seek people out, but as was true in the case of Kelly, they sought me out. And by exercising my body, and using yoga to calm my mind, I was producing a posi
tive effect in my brain. With Dr. Soutter’s help, I came to understand that the fear I experienced, the involuntary reactions I had to sights, sounds, and other stimuli, the nightmares and images, weren’t rooted in reality. They were all in my brain. She assured me that one day my brain would calm down, and those thoughts and images and responses that had me questioning my sanity would diminish. My body had been on autopilot for a while, but I would gradually regain control.

  Running and yoga helped me regain control of my brain and my body, restored order where there was disorder, and I knew that I wasn’t just grasping at any concept I could: solid scientific evidence supported that I was doing the right things. My logical side and my emotional side were having their different needs met at the same time.

  Maybe there was some other way I could have done that, but everything I’ve read about exercise pointed to it as having a powerful connection to recovery from trauma. I was also learning a bit about patience, taking things as they came to me, and being grateful for the many blessings I’d received. Being able to laugh and smile, to go to the frozen yogurt shop with friends and teammates, wasn’t as good as winning a gold medal might have been, but pleasures come in different flavors.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Candles

  The Mt. Sac Relays are held at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California. They were first held in 1959 and have the motto “Where the World’s Best Athletes Compete.” Those words are the truth, and famous Olympians like Carl Lewis, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Marion Jones have competed there and set meet records. Thousands and thousands of individuals and relay teams in divisions from high school students to masters (athletes older than thirty-five) all compete. Our three-day event was known as the Distance Carnival and Invitational, and it really did have a carnival-like atmosphere. For a distance runner, this was one of the events to participate in. I loved seeing so many other athletes there; it made me wonder what it must be like to participate in the Olympic Games.

  Normally, I would have been too focused on my race to enjoy being there, but the atmosphere was so great, the crowds so large, that I told myself to have fun and just enjoy the experience. An hour before my race was to start, I left the rest of my teammates and walked around the outside of the stadium to warm up.

  All that week leading up to the race, I kept thinking about that thirty-eight-minute goal. That meant that I’d have to run each mile in 6:07. That was slow compared to what I was used to. But it wasn’t the pace that was worrisome. Would I be able to run more than twice as far? Could I trust that my legs would hold up?

  As I walked among the various tents and busses and displays, my stomach began to feel off. I found a bathroom and discovered that my period had started. Under any other circumstances, getting my period before a race, or having to race during it, would have been a cause for worry. When your body is taxed like that, it’s difficult to perform well. This time, though, I was actually happy about it. Since the attack, I’d been experiencing amenorrhea, or an interruption of my monthly cycle. That happens frequently to distance runners due to the physical stress they put their bodies under; in my case it had occurred because of the emotional and psychological stress I’d been under.

  This was a sign that my body was returning to its normal rhythms. Maybe my reducing some of my expectations for myself was a good thing. When I joined the pack of runners at the start line—there were fifty of us crowded there—I took a quick glance up in the stands. Coach Wollman was there with his stopwatch and clipboard. He gave me a big smile and a wink. I smiled back. In the past, we would have both had our game faces on—all serious business. But he was reinforcing that this was supposed to be fun—it warranted hard work and dedication, but it was also something to give us pleasure, make our lives more enjoyable. His being there, and his gesture, also reminded me that I was part of his team. He’d pulled me back from the brink when I’d thought about quitting, when I had all those doubts about whether the struggle was worth it.

  After the gun went off, I tried to avoid getting caught up in the tangle of limbs as we all fought to gain our normal stride as quickly as possible. I knew the pace that I had to keep, and I was determined to stick with that. As we came around to complete the first of twenty-five laps, Coach Casey was on the inside of the track and told me what my time was. I was pleased that I was right on target, and I remained on that pace through the first ten laps.

  “Right there, Monika. Just like that. Stay right there,” I heard Coach Casey say again. This time, there was something in her voice; it was now higher pitched, more excited than it had been. I wasn’t even at the halfway point, and for her to be expressing that kind of emotion clued me in. She must have seen something about me, about my stride, about my facial expression, how I was carrying my body, that she liked. I was feeling strong, and even though I’d just completed a little more than four thousand meters, or slightly less than 2.5 miles, I wasn’t feeling any kind of strain at all. My shoulders and arms were relaxed, my spine straight, and my legs seemed to be moving easily.

  I was on the inside lane, but there was a mass of other runners in front of me. I couldn’t stay behind them all. My body was feeling too good to be hemmed in by all these other women. I took a quick glance over my shoulder and edged to the outside. I’d be covering slightly more distance, but the path was clearer. One by one runners fell away behind me. With each lap, I heard and saw Coach Casey’s growing excitement. At one point, with five laps to go, I heard Kristine yell, “Monika, you’re flying!”

  It felt that way. The week before, my legs and the rest of my body had felt so heavy, as if with every stride I took I was sinking into the track’s surface. This time, I felt like I was gliding along on the slick surface of the track, barely making contact with it, feeling its rubbery surface propelling me forward.

  As I came around on the final lap, I heard Kristine’s voice again, and I felt lifted by her words. I went into a furious kick and sprinted toward the finish, passing a few more girls. As I crossed the line, I threw my hands in the air and shouted, “YES!” as loud as I could. I slowed a bit and then stopped. Instead of sagging to my knees or collapsing on the ground, I walked along with my hands on top of my head, gasping for air, but absolutely elated. I didn’t care that I had finished in twenty-first place or that my little victory celebration seemed out of place given where I’d finished in the order.

  I had set out to run a thirty-eight-minute race, and I had finished in 36:50.34! One minute and ten seconds faster than my goal; one minute and ten seconds behind my PR. To me, that was as if I’d set a world record, won the world championship, done a Bob Beamon. I felt like myself again. I’d loved every second of the race. I’d dug deep late in the race to find something extra to give and I’d found it. That night, when I called my parents to let them know how the race had gone, I could barely contain my excitement.

  “Congratulations! I’m so happy for you,” my mother said.

  My father echoed her words with praise of his own.

  I hung up and realized that for the first time in many months, I wasn’t just pretending that I was myself again; I truly did feel like myself again. I knew my parents felt a huge relief receiving that phone call, too. It was such a big contrast from when I had called them in December. Then we had all tried to convince one another I would be okay; now for the first time we saw signs of my progress in black-and-white. Being able to reassure them, as they had me, made me feel so good.

  —

  WHILE MY TIMES on the track occupied much of my thinking, at least I felt like I had some control over them. There was another event on the horizon, and its time was completely out of my hands. In our first meeting, Erin had told me that the trial was going to take place in May. I placed that on my mental calendar and prepared for it emotionally. But not long after that, the trial got delayed because the DA’s office needed more time to prepare the case. That was better than going into it underprepared, so I recalibrated my expectations. A month’s to six weeks
’ delay wouldn’t be ideal—that would put it into June or early July, when I’d be back home in Norway—but I was prepared to do anything asked of me, and at least this way it wouldn’t interfere with final exams.

  With everything else going on—my breakup with Robin, the mixed bag of results in training and in races—I was balancing a lot of hope and hurt that entire semester. I was back to living the “have to” life: I have to get good grades. I have to get back on the track and do well. I have to graduate on time. I have to stay strong and independent. I have to be ready for the trial.

  The “have tos” did make the time pass quickly, and before I knew it the semester was almost over. A couple of weeks before final exams, in early May, I received a text message from Robin’s sister asking if I wanted to get together for coffee. She was in town to visit Robin. I’d known that the two of them were very close—he described her as his best friend—but I’d never met her in person. Seeing Anna made it even more clear to me how much a part of my life he was and what a void his absence had created. She reminded me so much of him. She had so much of the same upbeat energetic personality and way of making me feel comfortable that I opened up to her immediately.

  I told her how much time I’d spent listening to heartbreaking love songs, and about the pleasant/painful tears I’d shed in thinking about the brief time we spent together. As we talked, I thought about how I’d felt about Anette’s ex-boyfriend Jonas. Right after I’d called Anette to let her know about the attack, she’d gotten in touch with Jonas. They’d been apart for six months, but she realized how much she missed him and needed and wanted him in her life. They resumed dating, and I gained back the big brother I’d missed so much.