In defeat, God would teach me about humility. In the face of challenges, God might teach me a new way of doing something. If I failed, God was with me as I reevaluated what had gone wrong. And I don’t just mean on the track. God teaches me, disciplines me, and shapes me every single day in my relationships, in my work, and in my marriage. There’s no area of my life from which God is absent.
Does God Care?
Because I do recognize God’s presence with me and God’s presence with my competitors, it grieves me when people say, “God doesn’t care if you win or lose.” Honestly, it really aggravates me!
The reason for my annoyance has nothing to do with winning or losing. It has to do with those first three words: “God doesn’t care.” While I don’t think God injects divine energy into a runner who didn’t put in the training, I am convinced that God does care. Because God cares about me, and because God cares about you, God does care if I win or lose, and he cares if you win or lose. God cares about the things that I care about and you care about!
And because God cares about me, God’s engagement with me doesn’t end with the fist pump or the pat on the back. The same way my dad helps me learn from my mistakes on the track, God uses everything in my life—wins and losses, joys and sorrows—to shape me more and more into the image of his Son. I believe God wants to teach me to depend on him. To trust him. To thank him. I believe that God wants to form me into the kind of woman who loves her teammates and loves her competitors. I believe God wants to use all my experiences, on and off the track, so that I become a beautiful reflection of Jesus.
I don’t think that God values us according to whether we win or lose, but I do think that God is attentive to every detail of our lives. If it matters to us, it does matter to God.
And because I matter to God, God matters to me. Having a personal relationship with my Maker, the Father of Jesus, is the most important thing in my life. And just like I make time for my relationship with my husband, family, and friends, I also put a priority on making time for my relationship with God. For me that means carving out time for prayer and spending time in God’s Word.
But I don’t believe that Christians were ever meant to keep our faith bottled up as a private commodity. I value the importance of fellowship with other believers. When I’m in Austin on Sundays, I’m at my church home with my church family. And my time spent with God, in conjunction with being among the body of Christ, is what fuels me to be God’s woman in the world.
Responding to God’s Nudge
One of the ways to stay connected when I’m on the road is through Bible study with other athletes. In one competition, a chaplain was leading us in what God’s call to love others looks like in our lives.
Thinking how easy it is to love the folks who love me and are on “Team Sanya,” I remarked, “It’s easy to love our friends and support them, but the challenge is to love and support people who aren’t our friends.”
It was as if a light bulb came on in that room as we all realized that, as competitors, we have that opportunity more often than most! I wouldn’t label my competitors as enemies, but there is definitely a tension that comes with wanting the same prize.
As we all began to chime in about what that looked like for each of us, an athlete about two years younger than me chimed in.
“Well, Sanya,” she began, “I’ll never forget tryouts for the U.S. Team.”
I remembered them as well. I had made the team, as had a few other girls in our Bible study circle that evening, but this girl had not.
She continued, “You came over to me and asked if you could pray with me.”
I remembered that sad and happy moment.
She reflected, “I never forgot that. I’d felt so low, like the life had been drained from my body. That meant so much to me. I don’t know if I ever told you that.”
Another girl chimed in, “You did that with me too!”
I don’t invite others to pray because I’m particularly strong or super-spiritual. I asked these girls to pray because I knew how disappointed they were and I didn’t know what else to do. I just wanted them to know that they not only mattered to me, they mattered to God. He could do the rest.
While I believe God calls us to share our faith, it’s really not my style to be preachy about it. I actually don’t think it’s God’s style either. More often, I think, God quickens our hearts to engage with others in moments that are more genuine than quoting a verse at them or wagging our fingers. But it does take courage to say yes when God leads us to care for others or share with them in ways that take us outside our comfort zones. I always want to be the woman who says yes when God calls.
Counting the Cost
Recently, a friend and I were chatting, and she asked me what my faith has cost me. I thought it was a great question. And as I reflected on my journey, I realized that it has looked a little different in each season of my life.
In high school, it cost me a guy.
I had made a promise in church when I was thirteen. I’d promised myself, and promised God, that I wouldn’t have sex in high school. There was a guy I really, really liked, and he was pressuring me to have sex. When I made it clear that wasn’t going to happen, he chose not to date me. That deeply hurt.
What made the situation even more difficult was that a good friend of mine, who at one time had shared my moral convictions, had recently lost her virginity. It didn’t change my conviction, but it muddied the waters. She’d compromised and gotten the guy. I’d remained true to what I believed and lost the guy. Though it was painful at the time, today I’m so glad I stood my ground. I don’t regret it for a moment.
As I got older, sticking to my convictions didn’t get any easier. One of my favorite teammates from the University of Texas and I were racing in Europe. Rassin and I had a down day in Paris, and had gone out to lunch with some runners from Eastern Europe. Rassin was telling us how she’d had a killer headache all day.
Another athlete reached into an unzipped pocket of her backpack and pulled out a little baggie filled with pills.
Holding out two pills in the palm of her hand, offering them to Rassin, she said, “Here, you can try these.”
I read Rassin’s face and realized that she might take them, as if they were aspirin, to be polite.
I whispered under my breath, “You can’t take that! Don’t take it.”
Emboldened, she agreed.
“Thanks,” she replied, “but I’m good.”
We finished our lunch, but on our walk back to the hotel we wondered what the pills might have been. Though they didn’t look to me like over-the-counter pain relievers, it’s possible they were European aspirin! But I also knew that drugs have, unfortunately, been rampant—in various eras—in international track and field.
In a nutshell, performance-enhancing drugs are substances that boost athletic performance. They include steroids, human growth hormone, stimulants, and others. Most are illegal. For example, a drug used for “blood-doping” increases aerobic capacity by increasing red blood cells. It was banned by the International Olympic Commission in 1985, and made illegal in 1986, but has made a resurgence in recent years among both runners and cyclists. Too many athletes use that shortcut. It’s been proven that a number of athletes who broke world records in the mid-eighties—some who’ve never been stripped of those titles—were abusing anabolic steroids. There was such a rapid drop in race times that even thirty years later we haven’t caught up in many events!
I was never willing to compromise my values, or my integrity, for a win I didn’t earn. And it makes me so angry that the sport I love has been tarnished by the abuse of drugs. God has designed human bodies to do amazing things. If you only turned on your television once every four years to peek at the Olympic games, you’d see a spectacular demonstration of what human beings are capable of achieving. I think it’s remarkable, and I think that performing clean honors God as our good Creator.
Empowered
People wh
o don’t know me, who’ve only seen me race from the stands or on YouTube, don’t know what propels me. When I pull ahead of the pack in the last fifty meters of a race, they assume it’s because of my thick quads. Or a natural ability. They could chalk my achievements up to nature or training or even good luck.
But I know that I’m fueled by something more powerful than highly developed muscle tissue and good genes. Whether it’s in a moment when the wind stands still, as it was in Eugene, or under the rigorous pressures of teen life or professional demands, my power, my motivation, my drive, and my integrity all come from God. He is the one who can say to my heart, in any situation, “Peace, be still.”
RIGHT ON TRACK CHALLENGE
Is your faith empowering you to run your race well?
•Are you carving out time to spend in God’s Word?
•Are you fellowshipping with other Christians?
•Are you setting aside quiet time to pray?
•Are you responding to God’s voice in faithful obedience?
Whatever is important to you is important to God. If you want to deepen your relationship with him today, seek out someone you respect as a spiritual leader and share your heart.
CHAPTER 13
SAILING OVER HURDLES
Do you want to be the best?”
As I trace the long path to reaching my goals, searching for when it began, I think back to a conversation my dad and I had in high school. I can still see the look in my father’s eyes and hear the serious tone of his voice. I remember him sitting across from me in our living room the summer before my senior year of high school.
When I failed to answer quickly, he asked again.
“Do you want to be the best?”
That season in my running journey was a pivotal one. I’d suffered from a hamstring injury my junior year and hadn’t competed well at nationals. Until that point I’d been running and winning, but I wasn’t working much harder than my teammates and competitors from other schools.
After the state finals that year I’d gone on to the Junior Olympics, where I’d finished fifth in the long jump and sixth in the hundred. My dad’s poignant question, about whether or not I wanted to be the best, made me take ownership for my own performance.
After he asked, I never looked back.
On the heels of being injured, he helped me recognize the difference between those who are good because of innate talent and those who put in the hard work to be great.
I wanted to be great.
Bad Toe
The large toe on my right foot began bothering me toward the end of the season during my junior year of high school. After some rest before the season revved up for senior year, I was feeling relief. But by the end of senior year, I was again experiencing a quiet, nagging pain.
Each year, the pain would return earlier and earlier in the season. By 2007, it had become a real problem. I’d made the world championship team, but my toe had really been bothering me during the four or five competitions leading up to it. And when I say four or five competitions, I mean every day, every warm up, every workout, every step. That small little digit caused a lot of trouble.
The joint at the base of the big toe is arguably the most important joint in the foot for running. So my parents scheduled appointments for me with the very best sports medicine doctors. I was diagnosed with hallux rigidus. It was a hereditary condition my mom also shared, but without the same constant wear and tear my toe was subjected to, hers had not gotten as bad as mine. If you think about the torque that’s needed to run, particularly with the right outside foot on every turn, my toe was put through an incredible amount of abuse every day for thirteen years.
One doctor we visited prescribed custom orthotics, molded to the contour of my feet, for support. Another ordered cortisone shots. And while those did help to mask the pain, over time the joint was destroyed. By 2007, I’d had four shots. Although it helped a bit, I knew I was headed down a path of no return. The cartilage that protected the joint would eventually wear completely down.
Starting in 2007, I taped my toe every single day. My physical trainer had developed a technique to support the toe that resembled a soft cast. In conjunction with caring for that toe with heat and continued cortisone injections, I was able to keep running through the pain.
I knew that one day I’d need to have surgery, but I planned to put it off as long as I could. I wanted to avoid missing the training time I’d lose during recovery as well as the unforeseen complications that were always possible.
But it was getting harder and harder to postpone that day.
Searching for Help
My husband Ross had introduced me to a doctor he knew from the NFL. He assured me that the surgery my toe needed was simple and straightforward. While I’m sure that could be true, especially in the hands of a talented surgeon, I’d also heard horror stories of athletes who experienced career-ending complications in the wake of “simple” surgeries.
As the 2012 Olympics approached, the doctor urged me to have the surgery with enough time to recuperate before the games. While I knew I needed it, something inside felt unsettled about agreeing to the surgery before the Games. I decided to wait.
In October, three months after winning gold in the 400, I checked in to New York City Hospital in the hopes that surgery would provide the relief I was after.
Relief, though, was not what I experienced.
If my pain prior to the surgery had been a 9 on a scale from 1 to 10, it shot up to a 15 after the procedure! If I had known how excruciating it would be, I might have chosen to limp along the way I’d been, managing the pain the best I could.
Post-surgery, I had no mobility in the joint. But I’d been told that in order to heal, I needed to keep moving the joint. I was assured that it would become more flexible and gain more mobility.
One day after practice, I complained to my dad, “Dad, something really isn’t right. I feel like I’m breaking the bone.”
Because he’d heard the same instructions I’d heard, he kept encouraging, “Keep trying, San. Keep trying.”
Several months later I was desperate, and I turned to a doctor I’d seen before in Houston. Showing me the x-rays, he pointed to bits of bones. The shards of bone looked like remnants from a nail file.
He exclaimed, “I don’t know how you ran on this for three months!”
I’d run on it for three months because not running wasn’t an option. Like my dad suggested, I kept trying. After all, we’d been assured that doing so would loosen the joint. But, as my intuition and body had told me, I was only tearing up my toe further, breaking the bone as I ran.
In 2013, I was forced to undergo a second surgery. It repaired some of the damage, but I continued to suffer with daily pain.
In 2015, an airline passenger sharing my row exited by climbing over me. In the process, all of his body weight landed on my already-traumatized big right toe. As he apologized, I yelped in excruciating pain. Barely able to limp off the plane, I was in the operating room again within a few months.
For the last four years of my running career, I battled a silent, invisible foe. When the fiery blast of shooting pain would dart through my roots, I tried my best to stand strong.
I’m Not Alone. You’re Not Alone.
Pain can be wildly isolating. As much as my family cared for me and wanted to relieve my suffering, I was the one who had to bear it. Through tears, and through clenched teeth, I could describe the pain to them, but I bore it alone.
When I stood on the podium, as I did in London in 2012, I knew that what people saw was my wide smile and Team USA uniform. I looked like I didn’t have a care in the world. When I see those pictures, there isn’t an ounce of pain in my smile, even though I remember feeling it that day.
The perception of perfection isn’t a foreign feeling. We’re exposed to it every day on social media! We see people’s successes, but we’re not privy to the entirety of their stories. So while they might look great on the ou
tside, even people who seem to be living the dream face the same kind of obstacles and hurts you face. The win is in hurdling over the obstacles and pushing past the pain. The NBA finals are a great example. Those games are coming at the tail end of a season with over eighty games. Most of the athletes in the finals are pretty dinged up! Many are living with aches and pains, but they push through the entire season to be named as champions.
Pro athletes can’t always wait until we’re functioning at 100 percent to reach our goals. Neither can you! If you’re waiting for the perfect moment to chase your dreams, you might be waiting forever. Now is the moment. Believe it can happen and prepare your heart and mind and body for success!
Everyone experiences obstacles they must overcome. One of mine has been my wily, difficult toe. Others, who might look awesome on the outside, are healing from emotional or physical abuse. Even that family at church that acts perfect and looks perfect is much more real and flawed than you’d imagine. Off Snapchat, various slim girls are battling eating disorders. After they’ve posted to Instagram, other ones fall into their beds, exhausted with depression. And the list goes on.
No one who saw one of my Nike ads knew I was battling a skin disease. They couldn’t tell I was in pain each waking moment. They didn’t know the private struggles I faced.
I suspect you have your own obstacles that not everyone can see. Maybe you struggle with a learning disorder. Maybe your home life is more difficult than even your friends know. Maybe you’re caught in the grip of an addiction and you have no idea how you’ll ever break free. Maybe you’ve made a choice you never dreamed you’d make.
Sister, I’ve been there, and I want you to hear that you are not alone. Social media might try and convince you that everyone else has it all together and you are the only one who struggles. The only one who stumbles. The only one who suffers. Trust me, it’s not true.
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