Course Correction

by Ginny Gilder

  Maybe all my lungs had needed was a break from home. My entire first year I remained symptom-free. The next year, I quit my medical protocols cold turkey. Medication was for weenies, people who weren’t strong enough to take care of themselves. And what happened as a result of going AWOL from my shots and medications? Nothing. I survived just fine. No wheezing, no asthma, no sudden attacks, no emergency room visits. I was cured.

  Conned by the quieting of my asthma’s symptoms in high school and their continued absence through my freshman year at Yale, I forgot about my breathing condition. The diagnosing doctor had warned my mother: when asthma develops at puberty, it will likely remain a lifelong condition, but I was determined to disprove that rule. Two years and counting without symptoms, and during that period I’d become a college varsity athlete. I’d rowed an entire year asthma-free.

  Until now, October of sophomore year.

  One night, I woke suddenly in my dorm room bed and grabbed for the pillow that seemed to be covering my face, but found nothing. It was pitch black and cold. I was breathing hard, as if I’d been running in my dreams, but the weight in my chest woke me up to confront a nightmare.

  Breathing is supposed to come easy: an involuntary action, the most fundamental of survival skills. Conscious or not, awake or asleep, the human body keeps on inhaling, exhaling, doing its job.

  Not mine, not now. I tried to inhale rapidly, hoping a quick intake would force the air to the bottom of my lungs. No such luck. I tried exhaling quickly, following that push with a second sharp intake. The air whistled inside me as it tried to squeeze through my narrowed bronchial tubes. I closed my eyes and strained. Muscles across my back and chest, ill designed for breathing, pitched in to move the oxygen down.

  I wanted to yell, “I can’t breathe! Help!” but I didn’t have the lung power and I was all alone in my dorm room.

  I found my alarm clock. It was 3:30 a.m. I wondered when I could call the Department of Undergraduate Health Services and reach Molly Meyer, the nurse in charge of the varsity athletes. “Wait until morning” argued with “This is pretty bad.”

  Suddenly I didn’t even have the energy for the internal debate. I shut my eyes, forced my brain to shut up the panic chatter, and watched myself breathe. It was bad. Very bad.

  The moments ticked by. The attack did not subside. Wishful thinking wasn’t doing the trick. The snake had me by the throat; only medication would break its grip.

  But, there was no way I would follow in my mother’s footsteps and take pills to solve a problem I should be able to handle on my own. I had to tough out this attack. Giving in to my own demons would be the death of me, as my mother’s had nearly been for her. Five years had passed since my mother’s middle-of-the-night phone call to my father informing him she’d murdered their two youngest children, and she still had not recovered her equilibrium, continuing to drink heavily and pop mystery pills. She had spent much of her time living in Europe and maintained loose contact, writing aerograms and returning to New York for vacations and holidays bearing expensive gifts. But when it came to showing up as a reliable and sober parent, she struck out every time.

  Training is simply a repetitive execution of a pattern of movement. Learning describes the brain rewiring that occurs when we practice anything. New neural connections develop and strengthen as skills improve. When our patterns become second nature, they’ve been committed to cellular memory. Cognitive thought processes are no longer necessary. And in difficult moments, when fear is in charge and unleashes adrenaline to course through your veins, mustering reasoning skills is enormously difficult. When the chips are down, your cerebral cortex is last in line to receive sensory information. It has no time to solve your problem, but your muscle memory can function on automatic pilot.

  Now my fear, masquerading as intelligence, was warning me that if I took drugs, I could end up just like my mother. Weak. Dependent. Unable to cope. Mom had told me so herself one day when I was reciting all the ways she’d let me down. I swore I would be different. “Never say never,” she responded. “You could end up just like me.”

  What unwritten lessons had I derived from Mom’s breakdown? I’d never murmured a word of them to a sane adult. I didn’t know that mental illness and addiction caused similar behaviors; no one had even told me that my mother was mentally ill. Dad knew—he had spoken to her doctors—but he kept it a secret and let us kids think she just had a drinking problem. He pretended she would be okay, just as he always wanted me to pretend I didn’t have asthma.

  But on this night I wasn’t going to just lay there and let myself ruin my life. Betrayed by my deficient body with its ineffective lungs, I needed help. As much as the idea terrified me, I had to follow my mother’s path. I needed medication to breathe, just as she had thought she needed alcohol and drugs to survive.

  Slowly, I sat up and swung my legs over the side of my bed. I stood up, wheezing, and waited for the dizziness to subside. I shuffled to the phone, dialed the number for the campus health services. All I could think about was one deep breath reaching all the way down to my core, giving me a chance to live another day. Just give me that one hit of breathing.

  “Ginny, you can’t keep doing this to yourself,” said Molly Meyer, who stood by my hospital bed, stethoscope hanging from her neck. Starting with that October asthma attack, my breathing had gone to hell: now it was winter and Molly could justly claim me as her most frequent visitor to Health Services. The presiding physician, Dr. Jokel, knew me on sight.

  Night was ready to yield to dawn. Molly held my hand and stroked my forehead. My hair felt damp, my skin clammy. The aftereffects of the adrenaline were wearing off. My heart had stopped romping and slowed to a trot. I was breathing normally, gratefully.

  “It’s okay. I’ll be fine.” I was drowsy. Finally, I could relax and sleep. I was safe.

  The next day I discovered how safe.

  “Wait, what did you say?” I sat in a chair in Molly’s cramped office. Disbelief made my voice squeak.

  Molly shrugged, as if helpless and unhappy, but I could see the no-nonsense look in her eyes. “It’s not safe for you to continue rowing without using daily medication to control your asthma.”

  “But I’m fine. Look at me, all better! Besides, I can’t do that.”

  “You can’t keep ending up in the emergency room in the middle of the night. Asthma is a serious condition. People die from it.”

  “Meds don’t help. They make me feel horrible. I’ll be okay.”

  “You’re right. You will be.” Molly handed me a sheet of paper. “This is for Nat. He needs to know you’ve been placed on athletic disability.”

  “What?”

  “No more rowing until you deal with your asthma.”

  “You can’t do this!”

  “I can and I have. Dr. Jokel agrees. He approved the decision,” Molly said calmly. “Ginny, you have a serious health problem. You need medication. Why is this so difficult for you?”

  “I can take care of myself. I have to.”

  “You have to … what? There’s nothing wrong with getting help when you need it. Your body can’t handle what you’re doing to it.”

  I heard the drumbeat start in my head and braced for the voice that would follow. Wimp, you can’t do anything. What’s wrong with you? That’s right, take the easy way out.

  Molly continued, “You are not responsible for being asthmatic. This isn’t something you can fake or control. Your bronchial tubes are hypersensitive. They perceive danger where there isn’t any and close up to protect you. You can’t will them to be different. You have an overly vigilant defense mechanism with a hair-trigger response to many everyday allergens, and you can’t ignore that anymore.”

  “Everyone else does just fine without meds. I’ll be giving in if I take them.”

  “Giving in to what?”

  “To my weakness.”

  “No, you’ll be acting like a responsible adult. You’ll be recognizing your limitations instea
d of denying them. You’ll be taking care of yourself, instead of acting like a child and pretending that the problem will go away if you ignore it.”

  I wanted to row: Molly had me, and she knew it. Now I sighed, “Okay, what do I have to do?”

  She smiled and held out her hand. “Give me back that paper. I’ll get you on Dr. Jokel’s schedule so he can get you started on daily medication. Ginny, I promise you will be all right.”

  Molly hugged me. She was not a small woman, and she didn’t scrimp on the care or affection she bestowed on her charges. Her body felt soft, yet her words were strong. I didn’t believe I could be okay, but I knew I had to trust her. For me, that was an unfamiliar feeling, confusing and unsettling.

  Breathing is so basic. A normal person doesn’t have to devote conscious thought to inhaling and exhaling. A normal person can rely on her lungs to do their job, allowing her to focus on the world beyond. But my body was an unreliable partner.

  I had tried to bully my way through my asthma. That had always worked before, with everything: just keep going and no one will notice. But someone noticed this time. Someone stood up for me. Molly saw that I needed help, and she threw me a buoy. I grabbed it and hung on.

  8

  I took medication every day, twice a day, and still ended up in the emergency room a couple more times. I developed mononucleosis, too, and missed more training in the winter. Good old Anne Warner wasted no time in early February sharing her prediction with me: “You’ll never make varsity this year.”

  There’s a black-and-white photograph of the 1977 Sprints-winning Yale women’s varsity eight, right after the end of the race. The stroke has left her seat and is standing with her back to the coxswain, facing her teammates who normally see only her back: Olympic stoic Anne Warner. Her feet precariously balanced on the boat’s gunnels, she towers over me. I am sitting directly in front of her at her feet. To reach me, she has climbed over four rowers and now clasps me by the shoulders, caught forever in the careless glee of victory. I am returning the embrace, reaching for her with the same sense of unmitigated joy.

  That photo likely captured the only time Anne and I smiled at each other that entire year. Anne was tough on me, no question. And no question, I deserved it.

  Everyone knew I was abrasive, obnoxious, and brash. No one, not even I, knew I was timid, anxious, and afraid. I had never won anything big. Nothing. Suddenly, I was a champion, best in the Ivy League, a member of the fastest crew at a major regatta. I had helped something good happen.

  We landed at the awards dock, proudly received our medals, and gave our coxswain the traditional victory toss into the lake, but the best moment was standing in a huddle with my teammates after the victory ceremony. The taste of closeness derived from shared success, not suffering. For once, caring enough to go the distance worked. I had learned how to pull, if not quite for myself, for my teammates. I was still unsure whether I deserved to win, but I knew for certain they did. I had become a team player, in spite of my external attitude and my internal disarray.

  A month after our Sprints victory, in late June, thirty women rowers from all over the country converged on Madison, Wisconsin. Jay Mimier, the women’s coach at the University of Wisconsin and the head National Team coach for the women, had invited us to participate in the selection camp. Four Yalies, including me, were vying for a seat on the US National Rowing Team. Nat also joined us; Jay asked him to serve as an assistant coach during the camp.

  One coxswain and ten rowers—an eight and two spares—would be named to the National Team at the end of the monthlong process. That team would travel to Amsterdam, Holland, to compete in the 1977 World Rowing Championships in August.

  I was finally taking the first step to realize my dream of Olympic stardom.

  Madison summers were hot and humid. Thunderstorms frequently rolled in across the wide and often wild Lake Mendota in the late afternoons, chasing our boats off the water and shortening our afternoon practices. I welcomed the weather only because there were so few other opportunities to escape the heat. The lake water was so warm that swimming felt like bobbing in a bathtub, and the only place that offered sustained air conditioning was the movie theater. The lack of cooling doomed everyone to a near-constant state of sweating. Our rowing clothes, perpetually damp, disintegrated into moldy threads.

  The entire point of a selection process, irrespective of the program’s competitive level, is to determine the combination of rowers who together will best move a shell down the race course. Coaches consider rowing technique, power application, physical fitness, raw strength, and mental toughness in matching athletes and composing lineups. They devise various challenges to identify individual strengths and weaknesses, both on and off the water.

  Practices were scheduled twice a day: in early mornings before the wind kicked up and disrupted the sunrise gleam of perfectly flat water, and in late afternoons, which often took place on land or were cut short by the bad weather. Regardless, we rowed six days a week, with Sundays off, usually cramming in eleven or twelve practices.

  I was eager to prove myself to Jay, but as the weeks ground on, my confidence diminished. The selection camp differed radically from the atmosphere of college, and I was not ready to rely solely on myself or to fight only for myself.

  College athletics centers on a team experience. Of course, there are dog-eat-dog aspects of competition: my team certainly had our share. But those weren’t the only moments or even the defining ones. We all knew we were stuck with each other as long as we rowed. We were part of each other’s experience, and we came to rely on each other for inspiration, consolation, and honest appraisal. We were each other’s cheerleaders, even if we didn’t all like each other so much. Besides, our bond had extended beyond our on-water experiences to our lives beyond the boathouse. Many of us weren’t merely rowing buddies anymore, but friends. And finally, we had endured difficult experiences together, character-forging moments that required us to stand together in order to move forward.

  I was not prepared for the dearth of camaraderie that characterizes the National Team selection process, or for the psychological demands of that process. Emotionally, I wasn’t equipped to stand on my own two feet, to cheer myself on, to quell my private doubts, to reinvigorate my resolve, to discern what to focus on, or decide what to ignore. I hadn’t realized the powers of persuasion my Yale Women’s Crew sisterhood wielded when it came to muting my private demons.

  It wasn’t that my fellow National Team aspirants were unpleasant. They just didn’t care about me or the team. They weren’t behaving callously or selfishly; they weren’t rude or careless. They knew how to get along without going deep or getting weepy. They focused on the job they were there to tackle: competing against everyone else to win a seat. Pure and simple. They had to survive the selection process; then teamwork would matter.

  Without sufficient emotional grounding, lacking a determined “I’m a top dog” belief in myself, the question of my physical prowess ended up moot. All the cardiovascular fitness and muscular strength in the world couldn’t help me. Scaling the heights to greatness is impossible without a foundation of internal solidity. I needed mental toughness as much as I needed lung power and leg strength.

  The Yale Women’s Crew had supplied me with a ready-made structure of support, a community I could be part of, learn from, and lean on. I had not yet realized I was missing a piece of the competitive puzzle. My inner voice knew how to prepare me for the next disaster, but it wasn’t used to cheerleading. Usually galvanized into action by fear of the future, I had no experience with positive thinking. My ignorance cost me.

  A few days before making his final selection, Jay scheduled an afternoon run of several miles in lieu of going on the water. The course was an out-and-back romp along the lakeshore. The group set out and remained bunched together for the first half of the run. Once we turned around and headed for home, everyone knew the distance that remained. The pace picked up and the group stretched out in
to a long strand of individual runners. Jay loped along the course with the slower runners, lagging behind as the end approached. As we came into the last half mile or so, he pulled alongside me.

  “Come on, let’s see what you can do.” He puffed the words out between short breaths. Of course, I picked up my pace to match his, determined to stay ahead. “You better beat him; otherwise it’s all over,” I thought.

  I started to sprint the last bit, keeping up with him, pushing to make sure I would take him.

  “I can’t do it. My quads are burning. I’m running as fast as I can. I’m just too slow,” I said to myself.

  No other internal voice piped up to challenge me. The kick-ass, show-me voice that spoke so loudly and authoritatively during practices vanished in my moment of need, silenced by the pressure to prove myself to an outsider, one who didn’t have a stake in my success and who just wanted to see what I could do. I translated that neutral stance into a negative, believing that Jay wanted me to fail, instead of hearing his challenge as an invitation to show him how great I could be. That mental lapse cost me. Just like that, my sprint died. Jay passed me and left me in his disgusted dust.

  The end of my first National Team tryout came with no surprises. No one wants a quitter. Before Jay announced the final set of cuts, I already knew I wouldn’t make the team.

  A day or two after the lakeside run, he posted the list of athletes comprising the 1977 US Women’s National Team eight. Of the four Yalies who’d spent the better part of the summer sweating through the selection process, just one earned a spot—Anne Boucher, who had been a mere freshman the previous year. Forget the fact that she had rowed in high school with a rowing résumé twice as long as my meager two years; she was a more seasoned athlete in nearly every dimension, calmer and more confident, stronger, better technically, and apparently unflappable. But, still, I wasn’t prepared for the wallop of disappointment and the internal turbulence that began battering me immediately.