Fast Girl

by Suzy Favor Hamilton

  Peter praised the runners who he felt earned that attention, and I came to crave his approval, just as I had with my dad. Determined to make Peter proud, I made sure to never let him down. I was golden, and determined to stay that way. Unsurprisingly, Peter’s attention inspired jealousy from some of my teammates. This didn’t feel good, but I honestly didn’t care. I only cared about what Peter cared about, and Peter cared about winning.

  Peter had good intentions, but he was strict, and not just about his training regimen and how he expected us to behave during races. Peter recruited the most driven runners he could find, runners who, like me, were willing to do absolutely anything to be the best, and many of the girls he trained over the years developed eating disorders. I don’t think that there is a direct link, or blame to be placed. The 1980s were a different time in sports, and we were much less sophisticated in our knowledge of nutrition and how it could impact performance. There were no perfectly calibrated dietary guidelines for athletes, no protein shakes or energy bars. We were also teenage girls, having our first experience away from home. We didn’t think about balancing what was on our plates. We’d eat an entire bag of cookies, or whatever junk food was salty, fatty, or sweet, and then do what we had to do to get rid of the excess in our bodies. None of the coaches or trainers thought to address anorexia and bulimia as mental health disorders that required intervention and treatment.

  The bulimia I had developed in high school was full blown by the time I started college. I didn’t think I could change my behavior around food if I was going to keep winning, and I knew I couldn’t stop winning.

  So, I devised a method to manage my bulimia. Every day, I brought two bags to the dining hall—one plastic, one paper. I stuffed the plastic bag with large quantities of the kinds of comfort foods that were popular in the Midwest—casseroles, mashed potatoes, and brownies—and then put the plastic bag inside the paper bag, so no one could see what was inside. I then went back to my room at a time when I knew Mary had class, so I’d be alone, and I binged on my stash. Then, I purged right into the plastic bag, still inside the paper bag, and carried it out to the trash can in the hallway. There were plenty of girls who threw up in the bathroom of my dorm so everyone could hear. But I never wanted anyone to know the measures I was taking to stay lean and fast. I needed to maintain my façade of perfection.

  I liked the feeling of control the bulimia gave me. Right after I threw up, I felt physically terrible, worse than I had before I’d eaten all of that garbage. But soon after, I felt clean and orderly, which was a relief compared to how I usually felt. As much as I bent under the will of my father, first, and then Peter to determine what my priorities would be and what I needed to do to achieve them, sometimes I did pine to have my own voice. But that desire was overshadowed by the anxiety that came with my quest to be perfect, all the time, and my fears around growing up, boyfriends and sex, and my family. The bulimia felt like one thing I could control.

  No matter how skinny I was, I always felt heavy, especially because I didn’t have what I thought of as the perfect running body. I had big boobs, and they were noticeable when I ran. Deeply insecure, I felt it wasn’t enough to be a great runner; I had to look like a great runner, too, and I was constantly worried about the fact that I didn’t. I did everything to hide my large breasts, specifically ordering a team shirt that was too large for me and then cutting it apart and altering it to hang even more loosely on me. It didn’t work. One day my coach called me into his office and read me a letter he’d received from a female supporter of the team: “Tell Suzy it would be a good idea for her to wear two sports bras when she runs.”

  As these words left his mouth, I slunk lower in my chair, unable to meet his eyes. I was mortified. I couldn’t understand why someone had sent this letter. What did this woman know about my body? What business was it of hers how many sports bras I wore? I was trying to be a serious athlete. I devoted nearly every waking moment to my training, and now I had to fight this judgmental voice in my head, too? I slunk out of his office, deeply ashamed. But I started wearing two sports bras when I ran.

  My shame turned to rage later in my college track career, when I learned that one of the coaches of the men’s track team had filmed me while I was training and showed his team members a video of my breasts bouncing as I ran. A shot putter on the team, who happened to be my friend, told me. The coach was disciplined, but not before I’d been humiliated all over again. What the coach meant as sexist ogling, I took as a testament to what was wrong with me.

  Soon after the video incident, I had a stress fracture to my femur, which is extremely hard to do and extremely painful. The injury could become serious, and it meant that I had to back off from my training. This pushed me to obsess about my weight that much more. To make matters worse, my injury wouldn’t heal. I gave myself a rest, but I wasn’t getting better. Before then, I’d never thought about what bulimia might be doing to my body other than keeping it thin. I wasn’t aware of how the lack of nutrients in my body might make me infertile or destroy my bone density. When I got injured, I began to observe other runners on the team and notice that the girls who were obviously anorexic became injured more frequently than those who weren’t. But I still wasn’t concerned enough to stop my bingeing and purging, which I felt I needed to do more than ever now in order to keep my weight down. It wasn’t until later, in a nutrition class, that I gained the kind of specific knowledge that meant I could no longer downplay the connection between eating disorders and injuries.

  My health wasn’t the only thing that took a backseat to my running in college. When I entered the University of Wisconsin, my academic adviser was well aware of how poor my grades had been in high school and how difficult it had been for me to get into college, even with my obvious running talent. At the start of my freshman year, my classmates were given the opportunity to test out of our required math and English classes. Not only did I not qualify to skip the basic courses in these subjects, but my particularly low scores on the English portion revealed that I most likely had a learning disability. I had such myopic focus on my running that I didn’t take the time to really absorb what this might mean, and no one I encountered in the school’s administration or athletics department ever addressed my academic prospects: they simply wanted me to keep winning.

  By the time of my first meeting with my adviser during freshman year, I was already having trouble with my classes. “I’m really struggling,” I said.

  “You’re going to make it,” he said. “I guarantee you. We will get you through college. You will have no problem.”

  My adviser arranged for me to have a tutor so my grades wouldn’t become so low that I was disqualified from competing. Then he pulled out the catalog and helped me schedule a course load of what the other athletes and I called the “blow-off” classes. It didn’t matter that college was supposed to prepare me for a future career, after running. I was going to enjoy the treatment of a star athlete, which meant easy classes and professors looking the other way if I didn’t do my work on time or well. I was not accountable for anything except how I did on the track. This suited me perfectly. The normal star athlete major was physical education, but I couldn’t pass kinesiology, and so I lucked out and got to fall back on a major that was actually something I loved almost as much as running: art. Even so, I still couldn’t make it through college on my own. I had a tutor who wrote a couple of my papers for me. I was not her only client, though, and she once wrote the exact same paper for twenty-five student athletes. This incident almost got me expelled, but I knew deep down that I would never get kicked out of school. I was too valuable as a runner for the school to make that move. Another time, I had a psychology final the day after I got back from the national cross-country meet where I’d just placed second. I hadn’t studied one bit. I hadn’t had time, and even if I had all the time in the world I didn’t have the ability to study. I never had and I didn’t know how. Mary and I were together in our room when I confe
ssed.

  “I’m going to fail,” I wailed. “What am I going to do?”

  Mary was the kind of person who always pulled everything off at the last minute, with maximum grace, and she knew exactly what I should do.

  “Call the professor,” she said.

  I hated confrontation or drawing attention to myself in any way, and I was extremely nervous, but I gathered my courage. When I got the professor on the phone, I got right to the point.

  “I know we have our final tomorrow,” I said. “And I didn’t study one bit. I just got second at the cross-country nationals.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “You don’t have to take it. We’ll just average your grades from your previous tests, a C and a D, and give you a C.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  And that was that.

  I was relieved and grateful. Now I could get away with not studying, without a single consequence. Sitting in a classroom was torture for me, and I hated anything I wasn’t good at, so I didn’t even try. As far as I was concerned, I was already good at something—so why bother with the rest?

  Thankfully, I had Mary. She became like a sister to me. She was my best friend, and the only person in my life who ever made me feel like I could completely be myself. Mary was as serious about running as I was, but unlike me, she was incredibly bright and always did very well in school, even when she was putting papers off until the last minute because she was in the midst of some wild adventure.

  I was in awe of Mary and so glad to be her friend. She was a total tomboy, but gorgeous even so. She had beautiful wavy brown hair, a huge smile, and a natural glow, so she never had to wear makeup. I used to have fun trying to make her more feminine—curling her hair and making up her face. But even without that, all of the boys had crushes on her, and it was obvious why. She was the life of every party. She didn’t need to be the center of attention, she simply was. People paid attention to Mary and wanted to be with her. She had a profound influence on me. Mary wanted to be a standout athlete, too, but she wasn’t obsessive like I was. She wasn’t plagued by anxiety. She was the one person who made me relax.

  We couldn’t drink much, because we had to stay in top shape, but there were a few times, just after nationals, when we let loose. These are some of my fondest memories of college. Just before Christmas vacation during freshman year, we got all dolled up. I curled my hair and painted my face, then Mary let me do the same for her. We bundled up against the cold weather and hurried over to this bar called the Kollege Klub, known as the KK. As we walked up to the door, I took in deep gulps of the cold, damp air. Snow was on the way. I was nervous. I’d never been to a bar before and I was well aware that as freshmen, we looked like babies to the older students. I was afraid, too, of doing anything that might harm the image of perfection that I had worked so hard to create. But I wanted to be wherever Mary was. Plus, we’d been working hard all semester. We had made it through our first set of finals. I felt like we deserved a little fun. As we flung the door open, a gust of warm, beer-soaked air washed over us, along with an Aerosmith guitar lick and the shouts of some excited male students who had clearly been at it a while. A beefy older student in a letterman’s jacket stopped us short at the door, and my heart sank. Mary laughed. I looked more closely. He was on the track team, and he knew us, which also meant he knew we were freshmen. He let us in anyway.

  I laughed, giddy with excitement and relief, and followed Mary into the bar, where our fellow athletes were already calling out her name and waving her over. As we shed our coats and threw them over the backs of chairs, I already felt at home. It didn’t take long for us to learn how to get guys to buy us drinks. Before I knew it, Mary and I were together in the area of the bar that had become an impromptu dance floor at some point in the night, drunk and happy, dancing so hard we called it our second workout of the day. We drank and danced until last call, soaking up every second of this freedom and abandon. Before I was ready, the lights came on, revealing the sticky floor and bleary college students, getting in every dance and flirtation. Only then did we force ourselves out into the winter night. Giggling madly, we fell into a cab together and rode back to our dorm room. In our pajamas, we both climbed into Mary’s bed and waited for the night’s final treat—a giant pizza from Uncle Jim’s, the best pizza on campus. When it was delivered, we ate every bite, breaking one last taboo before passing out in our little bunk beds. Those were the best times, in college, because we were actually living like normal students.

  I wish there had been more moments like these. Even if that night off was bad for my running, it was good for my spirit.

  Chapter 4

  I’M GOING TO MARRY HIM

  In January of my freshman year, a friend who I had gone to high school with set me up on a blind date with one of his baseball teammates. He had also come to the University of Wisconsin, and he wanted to introduce me to a freshman pitcher from California, Mark Hamilton. I found a way to spy on Mark beforehand. I know it was shallow of me, but if I was going to take the time to go on a blind date, I wanted to at least make sure I found the guy attractive. The day I checked him out, Mark was wearing white jeans and a blue shirt, and to me, he looked like Val Kilmer in Top Gun, with that same flattop. I thought he was gorgeous.

  I went out and bought a cute pink sweater with a lace collar. I purposely wanted to look very sweet and innocent for the date. Not that it was an act. I hadn’t really dated much in college yet and I was still a virgin.

  I was actually late for our first date because I was at a doctor’s appointment for my injured femur, so I called Mark to let him know. When he eventually came to pick me up, he brought me flowers. Oh, wow, I just meet this guy, and he’s already bringing me flowers. Nobody’s ever done that before.

  Mark didn’t have a car, so we walked up Bascom Hill, which is the heart of the university, and then on to the restaurant. I was wearing these silly boots that were trendy but slippery. When my feet hit a patch of icy ground and started to fly out from under me, it gave me an excuse to grab him.

  “Can I hold on to your arm?” I asked.

  It really wasn’t like me to be so forward, but from the moment I met Mark, I felt like I knew him. He held out his arm, and I slid mine through his, and we walked the rest of the mile and a half to have pizza. Once we got to the pizzeria, we slid into a booth, grateful for the restaurant’s warmth.

  We were both too nervous to eat that night, worried about getting food on our faces or spilling sauce on our shirts. But everything else between us was relaxed and the conversation flowed easily. I knew he was at school on a baseball scholarship, and he knew I was a runner, but we didn’t talk much about our sports. I was obsessed with Madonna at the time, and my friend had told me that Mark’s parents had recently moved near her in Malibu, so I asked him about that. We told each other stories and made each other laugh.

  As we walked back to my dorm, my heart was fluttering with happiness and excitement. We stopped outside and Mark smiled at me.

  “I have a baseball trip, but I’ll call you in a few days when I’m back,” he said.

  I smiled up at him. He leaned in and kissed me on the lips. It was just a little kiss, a peck, really. But that was enough for me. I’m going to marry this guy, I thought, as I tore up the stairs to my room, so excited to tell Mary every detail about my night. All I could think of was whether or not he was going to call, and when the day of his return came and went without the call, I was so disappointed. I had been so sure about him. And then, the next day, my phone rang.

  For our second date, we hung out in his dorm room. After that, I saw him every single day. Mark would later tell me that he’d gone out with me just to be able to say he’d done so, really—I was always in the school paper, and people on campus knew my name. He’d expected me to be just another arrogant athlete who could only talk and think about myself, and he’d been pleasantly surprised by how humble I was, how easy it was to talk to me, and how much fun we had together. I�
��d never met anyone like Mark. I was used to men from Wisconsin, who were good, strong, hard workers, but reserved to the point of silence. Mark was open-minded and stylish, and he wanted to talk about everything. He became my new obsession, second only to my running. Fortunately, because he was an accomplished pitcher, he understood what it took to be an athlete, and he understood that running had to come first for me. In fact, looking back, he was probably glad I had something else to focus on besides him.

  I now created a new routine. Every day after classes, I went to track practice, then lifted weights with the rest of the runners. I always did my workout as fast as I could because I couldn’t wait to see Mark. I was always the first person out of the weight room and into the showers. I made sure I looked good, and then I hurried to wherever he was. Mark was taking night classes, and had a nutrition class that was taught by video, so there was no instructor in the room. I would literally go to his class and sit next to him while he watched. Mark didn’t take blow-off classes like I did. He was an A student, and he got his only B that semester, because of me. I gave him mono, too, but luckily neither of these turned him against me. And it was in Mark’s nutrition class that I finally learned the damage my bulimia was doing to my body and began to think about trying to stop my self-destructive behavior. But I couldn’t give up my belief that it helped me to win.