Frozen Teardrop

by Lucinda Ruh

  On boarding the plane my father offered my coach his first class seat back to Zurich. He arrogantly barked back that he could not be bribed and he sat in the back with a pout on his face. We were taking care of the coach once again instead of the coach taking care of me. He did not look or speak to my mother or me for the next couple of days.

  On arrival in Zurich my coach said he would not stay with us at our home (I’m not sure where he was thinking of going to go but drama was definitely his middle name and he proudly lived up to it). However, my glamorous sister greeted us with a beautiful big bunch of flowers and the minute he saw her he quickly changed his mind and said, “Now I’ll come to your house.” In Zurich he lavishly enjoyed the dinners at my parents’ and our friends’ houses and at beautiful restaurants, and he enjoyed my sister’s company as well, but again not even once did he look or speak to me or my mother during the whole time.

  On the morning of our flight back to Toronto my mother, wanting for me to be friendly, pushed me to play a game of chess with my coach at our home. I lost. I did not really care but he proudly held his head high. As the plane took off, my mother, wanting to gain my coach’s forgiveness, presented him with a huge box of truffle chocolates from Switzerland. He gobbled the whole box at once as if he hadn’t eaten for days! On the plane before we landed my coach wanted to play another game of chess with me, and this time, I won. He, for some reason unknown to me, suddenly started talking to me again. Now he respected me, since I won? It was a game for him but to me it was over. For me when someone toys with me, my skating, my intentions, or takes advantage of me, it’s over fairly quickly. I forgive, but do not forget and really don’t want that person in my life anymore. I knew inside I would not want to train with him anymore.

  On our return to Toronto my training continued as my coach appeared at times and did not appear at other times, and I started feeling very uncomfortable with him on the ice. I didn’t know how to have a discussion with my coach because I never had one before, so instead of talking I just wouldn’t really do what he told me to do. One practice he sat me down on the bench and asked me if I wanted him to represent me at the next competition. It was a big Grand Prix event. For the first time in my life I had the courage to just bluntly say, “NO, I would not.” He again, as he had at the airport, stormed off the ice with his fur coat swaying in the wind shouting all sorts of things that were quite incomprehensible. He threw his skates off in the lounge area, and then passed by my mother to scream at her that no one had ever spoken to him like I had in his whole life, and that he would be flying off to Mexico the next day. That was it. I was to never see him again. I think he longed for us to run after him, call him, and drop down on our knees to plead him to come back, but we did not. I could not trust him anymore but as time has passed we have become friends once more, and although he still blames my mother for not having pushed me to stay with him, he and I have wondrous and intriguing conversations over the phone. He has been a brilliant education for me.

  A mere six months after we moved to Toronto my mother started searching for a new coach for me. The Swiss federation suggested a quite famous lady coach in San Francisco and we took a trip there for a few days to see if I liked it there. Of course this was the absolutely wrong thing to do. During a trial period of a few days the adrenaline is rushing through you and the new coach is on her or his best behavior since they want the business. So of course everything goes nicely and smoothly. It’s a new environment, it is exciting, and it persuades you to think, “Yes, this is it. This is perfect.”

  Then, when you do move and he or she is sure you are staying and paying them well, the coach suddenly changes and the whole saga starts all over again. My mother now says she would never again do a national sport like skating outside of their country because you end up with no support, no one really caring, and pretty much struggling alone to make things happen. It has been said it takes a village to make a champion. I had only my mother with me and my father far, far away.

  And so yet again, we had a home, a coach, one good friend, many new acquaintances from a new life in Canada that we had tried so hard to get used to, but found ourselves coming full circle to where we were only a mere six months ago in Japan. We were left with empty hands and once again with nothing left to grasp. When you refuse to see what is in front of you, refuse to understand what is causing the problem, and refuse to peel the onion layers so that your eyes can tear before you start cooking, you will only get the same results. Without changing yourself you will always end up at the same bus stop. But the fear of looking at the cause can be most terrifying of all. The day came, but only much later in my life, when the risk to remain in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. When death is by your side, that risk seems small compared to what you are faced with.

  7

  Misunderstood and Crushed to Pieces

  (SAN FRANCISCO)

  You can only give when your glass is full and no goal is worth the sacrifice of your most prized possession in life, which is your health.

  Maybe I have led my parents on and caused my own pain and if that is solely what people think of my life and me, then I would never be able to forgive myself for it. People might never understand what I went through and my story is not to make them understand or force my ideals on them in any way. I mean for my story to help others going through similar experiences in order to let them step back to see more clearly what is happening in their own lives. Back then, I never claimed to understand anything and I still do not completely understand what happened. Maybe I was innocently leading my parents on by my own confusion about my aspirations and reactions to my circumstance, or maybe I was misunderstood or maybe we had been just unlucky.

  While I was trying to be so good to others I might have done more damage to them than I comprehended. Skating (which had become my lifeline) and I had a love-hate relationship. I did love skating but the fear of who I was and who I would become without my skating was much more potent than the fear of who I was and would become with my skating. I could not stop skating, no matter what. It was my oxygen and my food. It had become all of my identity and me. It seemed that to stop would be to suffer and to live in fear, but maybe if I had, I would have ultimately lived more in my own truth.

  I think to feel misunderstood is one of the worst feelings someone can go through. If nothing is said of your turmoil, it scratches away at the surface of your soul and eats you alive, especially when you are misunderstood by your family, someone close to you, or a teacher to whom you so want to show how good you are. I feel my coaches have misunderstood me for most of my life on the ice. I truly laid out my heart, soul, and dreams in front of them very day and I prayed and hoped they would tread softly. It has been said that great people are often misunderstood. I never felt the need to have people understand me, think like me or see my vision the way I did since I realized it would be too arrogant of me to influence someone else. I had no right to do that.

  I wasn’t looking to be understood but I was looking to be heard and not to be condemned for my thoughts and feelings. But I knew even if I did speak, I would not be heard and I therefore remained silent. Silence is golden and can be the loudest scream I know of, and I only wanted to speak when I could improve the silence.

  I owe everything I am and what I have achieved to my mother and father. In many ways they brought me up with delicate care and a love that cannot be surpassed. A whole book could be written just about how they were the best possible parents. They dropped their whole life, and their wishes and their dreams to fit mine. They followed me everywhere and gave me all they had. They sacrificed themselves and everything they believed in for me and ironically at the same time I was trying to sacrifice myself for them.

  My mother does not like the word “sacrifice” because she says she did it because she loved me. Sacrifice to her has a negative connotation. But sacrifice can mean releasing something and my mother did release all else to free her hands so she was abl
e to hold my strings. My mother and father never put themselves first nor did they ever second guess what they would have to do for my skating and me. They willingly threw themselves into the burning fire. I know that I will never be able to be thankful enough to my parents, although I have always tried my hardest to express this.

  I have been fortunate in my life to have experienced increasingly diverse cultures with each coach that I have had. Each coach I had has given me a gift. My Japanese coach gave the gift of respect, focus, meditation and dedication. In Canada, I was given artistry, knowledge, and freedom. In San Francisco I learned to understand the human mind better, the need to assess a situation, and the priority of health. In China the lesson would be stillness, loving life, and myself and being a master of mind and spirit. In Switzerland I would find that it is still my true home to which I can return to any time, and in Russia I would receive passion, confidence, and the fight to win and, finally, in America I truly came to know freedom, freedom, freedom, and finding me.

  To our disbelief we were inching our way back again closer to Asia by moving to San Francisco by the end of 1996. Once again a hotel would be our home for a long period and this time it was in Alameda, which was far enough from the unstable city of Oakland where the ice rink was. I had a full season ahead of me, including nationals and the world championships and all was going pretty smoothly.

  My name was rising in the ranks and unquestionably in the media. I was getting standing ovations everywhere I went for my spinning abilities. The crowd loved me but the judges were harsher since skating was mainly judged on successful jumps that were still not my strongest point. Spinning was undoubtedly harder, and took more time and strength than jumps, yet spins were a side dish to the main meal. Skaters used the spins to rest. I used them to be the highlight.

  I was training hard and since the team around me was new and I had consecutive competitions, I did not have the luxury of changing my technique to fit the new coach’s way of jumping at that time. Yet this was the suicidal idea that would reveal itself it later. Everything was to remain pretty much the same until the season was over and when we could really work on making me stronger to work on new tricks. My new coach was accommodating about my training habits that came with the package and she taught me with care. She was proud to have me as her student and especially liked to accompany me to the many competitions in wonderful cities across the globe. It had been a while since she had been on the world stage and she felt comfortable being back. Meeting all her old friends suited her well. My mother and I slowly again moved into a new apartment. I was very much missing the quality of the Japanese lifestyle and missed the food, people, and all the childhood memories that were etched in the furniture I had grown up with. I missed my home and to me what were somehow still “my people.”

  As the World Figure Skating Championships in March of 1997 came to a close and my name was on the tip of the tongues of the people that mattered in the skating world, I was excited to return to California to start the summer training for the next 1997-1998 skating season. The next year would be the most important in my skating career and galvanizing because it would be the year of the 1998 Olympics. I was ready for hard work and great results.

  To my dismay my skating training took an ugly turn. When the season ended my new coach had the opportunity to show her real self and she took over completely. The only way I can describe it was that she turned into a complete stranger and it felt like I had a new coach all over again and not one I would have wanted to move to San Francisco to train with. But as always, a teacher is to be followed and I continued to believe in her teaching. Believing is the almighty ritual of power and power was to be abused here. Her husband was a medical doctor and he magically seemed to have invited himself into the team to be my off-ice trainer. He claimed to have trained accomplished athletes and to have had his training method proven by doctors. He said he would work miracles and I would have to do as he said since I could not follow his wife on ice without following his lead off-ice. He said they came in hand in hand like apple pie and whipped cream and I would have to do as told.

  So the training started. Looking back it was the most demonic schedule possible and I became a slave to my coach. I wanted to be perfect for them as I thought they knew what they were doing and that it would only help me. My mother and I were not accustomed to questioning the coach in any way. I wanted to skate and be the best so this is what I thought I had to do. Questioning was just not done in Japan, but only later on we did learn that in America questioning a coach or a teacher is allowed, and you do have the right to your own opinion! Having no knowledge of this we just plodded on as we followed their demands, not thinking twice about anything.

  In Japan the coach is first on the priority list, then the parents, then the skater. In America it’s the skater first, then the parents, then the coach. Wow, it would have been nice to grow up in the United States! We could have said NO, but we did not know that word.

  The on-ice training and off-ice warm ups that I always did with jogs, ballet, Pilates, stretching, etc. stayed the same and amounted to about five hours a day, but what became so incredibly damaging was having the extra off-ice training. I was to do one hour of stationary bike every single day except Sunday along with a whole weight training regimen three times a week that when all completed would last about two and a half hours or more each time. The problem with the weight training was that I wasn’t able to do the whole list in one day and then repeat it two more times a week along with all the other training I had to do off and on ice. I was way too exhausted and there really was not enough time in the day to do all of this. But since I have a personality that can never cheat or lie (truth is always written all over my face), I ended up having to do my weights every single day to be able to finish the complete regimen. I was in the gym for hours on end every day. I had a sheet of paper that I had to fill out and give to him to show him that I did it. I could not fill out an entry for the exercise if I hadn’t done it.

  There was another male skater who was on the same schedule and I didn’t want him to do it when I did not, so I worked twice as hard. The problem was that I never saw him in the gym, yet his sheet seemed to be always all filled out and the off-ice doctor coach always praised him and I was not. I was puzzled but just thought I wasn’t good enough, so I worked more.

  A few years later he confessed to me that he never did that list of weights. He said he thought it was way too ridiculous and he wouldn’t jeopardize himself. How foolish and naive I had been. I know now, that weight training is deadly for skating. It only makes the muscles heavy and slow. A little weight training is fine but exercising as I was doing it was like becoming a weight lifter. I was doing squats with incredibly heavy weights on the bar resting on my shoulders, as well as clean and jerks, and other extreme exercises. I mean the list was endless, and he would make me go up with the weight load every week. I was so proud of lifting so much. Little did I know how detrimental it was.

  This weight training was exhausting. In the end I was doing about eight or nine hours a day of serious physical work. I was working out all day, but here is the thing, I also loved it. As hard as it was, it was also addictive and I loved working and working. I would feel incredibly guilty if I didn’t do something. I was proud about going to the gym, and I felt my mother was proud, too, the more I worked out. I could focus with incredible intensity and nothing would distract me. Since I knew I was not ever allowed to gain weight, I thought all this time I spent exercising was also beneficial because if I ate something I could burn it off right away. Basically not having time to rest worked really well, or so I thought!

  To add to all the pressure, the beatings and abuse continued and became much more severe. I was becoming very depressed, had constant high anxiety and was so exhausted. My body felt weak and I was feeling dizzy a lot of the time. A Swiss international skating judge had a house in Newport Beach, California and she invited my mother and me to come visit her for a few days of
rest. Surprisingly my mother accepted the invitation. We went and the landscape was incredibly gorgeous. While my mother and she talked and enjoyed each other’s company, I did not want to rest for fear that I would lose all my talents and all my strength in one day! No one ever said I was doing too much or held me back so I just continued. Since I would not skate for two whole days I went on long, long bike rides under the heat.

  The last evening when we went out to eat I felt incredibly nauseous and hot. When I got up to find the ladies room, the next thing I knew I had fainted and was laying outside on the ground with pain on the back of my head where I hit it when I fell. When I got up and walked back into the restaurant I was oblivious to all around me, hearing nothing but my heart beating loudly and in rhythm to my footsteps and pounding head. I collapsed again into my mother’s arms. The next thing I knew I was again on the ground in my mother’s arms outside of the restaurant where I had first fainted. I heard my mother trying to wake me up and screaming and crying with tears.

  Then I heard an ambulance arrive and I was quickly put on the stretcher. They could not find my blood pressure at first since it was so low. When they finally found it the high was only forty! At the hospital all I remember was feeling terrified and confused. With my mother and the Swiss judge by my side, they treated me for heat stroke, dehydration, and exhaustion, and after letting me sleep for a couple of hours they released me in the early hours of the morning. I felt extremely weak and disorientated but with my mother holding my hand we went back to the Swiss judge’s home.