Fast Girl (6 page)

Following my disappointment in Barcelona, I became aware of a rising backlash against me in the running world. I heard whispers that I wasn't good enough to attract all the money and attention I'd received going into the Olympics. Other female athletes criticized me for getting praised for my looks. I was making a lot of money, more than many of my peers who were running as fast or faster than I was, and they felt I was getting more attention than I deserved. All of this cut into my already shaky self-esteem. When I'd appeared on the cover of
Runner's World
the previous year, they'd severely airbrushed my photo, decreasing my bust size so I appeared flat chested, the way female runners were supposed to look. I hated that my breasts still drew attention to me and made me look anything other than the absolute ideal runner. That summer, I secretly paid eight thousand dollars for breast reduction surgery, even though the doctors warned me I might have trouble breast-feeding if I ever became a mother. Once I was healed, I was happy that at least I looked the way runners were supposed to look. But the surgery alone wasn't going to put me back in top form. As much as I'd enjoyed my time in
the paradise that was Malibu and a brief escape from the normal intensity of my running life, I always thought my coaches and father expected more of me, and as long as I was disappointing them, I couldn't be happy anymore. Although I was not enjoying the competitive aspect of running, I wanted to win for others in my life, and so couldn't feel good unless I was winning again for them. I missed training with Peter the way we had when I was in college, and I longed to have a more involved coach again, but I wasn't ready to move back to Wisconsin. I wasn't performing as well as I should be, and that meant that I had to find a new coach who could help me to be the runner I knew I could be. Hopefully this would help me to find my love of running again. My thoughts immediately went to my longtime idol, Mary Decker Slaney, whose former coach, Dick Brown, was based in Eugene, Oregon. A good runner friend of mine trained with Dick and had suggested I give him a try. It would be a big change from Malibu. Mark still had a year of law school at Pepperdine left, but I didn't feel like I could wait. I moved to Eugene alone and we spent a semester apart, and then he finished up his law degree at the University of Oregon so he could be with me, always sacrificing for me and my running career.

The change was exciting, and I threw myself into a new regimen and life. My new coach had strong opinions about many aspects of my life, even those that I felt weren't directly related to my running. He grew irritated with my post-race ritual of calling my dad to tell him how I'd done, as my dad expected. He thought my dad was overly involved in my life, and he encouraged me to finally create the distance I'd long
been craving. When my dad criticized me once for losing a race, Coach Brown was extremely upset.

I continued to be a natural pleaser who found comfort in being told what to do—by my father, my coaches, and my husband. But Coach Brown took this further. One day, after he'd led me through my usual series of sprints and my weight routine, he sat down with me. He was a micromanager, and I assumed we were going to talk about technique or new training goals.

“Suzy, there's something I've been wanting to talk to you about,” he said.

“What's that?” I asked, eager to do whatever he asked.

“It's about your performance,” he said. “If you really want to race well, you're going to have to stop having sex before races.”

I looked down quickly, blushing. Even though Mark and I continued to have a loving and adventurous sex life, this conversation with my
coach
was way beyond my comfort level.

“I don't know what you mean,” I said.

“I mean you need all of your energy to race. When you have sex, you deplete your testosterone levels, which you need to perform. I don't want any of that testosterone to go to waste. So no sex the day before a race. Or the day of. I'm your coach. I know what's best for you.”

“Okay,” I said, nodding, too embarrassed to look up.

I felt myself curl up inside, awkward and uneasy in my own body, like I had been when the male coach had been caught videotaping my breasts, or when Coach Peter told me about the letter recommending I wear two sports bras. I'd been so
uncomfortable about the unwanted attention that I'd had a breast reduction. But nothing was enough. My body wasn't mine. It belonged to my sport. My coach. Magazine editors. My peers.

Mark picked me up from practice as usual that day, and as soon as I was in the car with him, I told him what Coach Brown had said.

“You've got to be fucking kidding me,” Mark said.

I sighed and looked out the window. I missed Malibu and the beach and our friends. I was working so hard, only to be devastated by anxiety and the constant assessment of every part of my life and body. I wanted to be invisible.

Once again, my best friend Mary came to my rescue. Mary had given up running in college when she realized she didn't have the passion to do everything that went into competing at the professional level. She was now a successful lobbyist. Even still, she came to my meets when she could. That summer she flew to Europe to watch me run and enjoy some time abroad with us. It only took her a few days to get a handle on something that had been nagging at me for months. She didn't speak to me directly because she knew how personal a runner's relationship with her coach is, but while she and Mark were sitting on the beach in Monte Carlo, she told him that she couldn't understand why I was working with Coach Brown. She thought he was terrible for me because of the way he smothered me. As soon as Mark told me what Mary had said, I knew she was right. But changing coaches was a big deal. We'd made a major move to Eugene, and another big move seemed daunting. Plus, my results had improved from what they'd been in Malibu.
Even though I wasn't happy, I kept my head down and kept my sights on the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

I was overjoyed to qualify for the team again, although Dick had me compete in two events—the 800 and the 1,500, a decision I questioned, and I only made the team for the 800. Although the 1,500 was my specialty, I had run out of gas going into the final after running six rounds in less than a week, and finished last. To be honest, I didn't have particularly high expectations for the Atlanta games, but I tried to focus on the fact that I had made my second Olympic team. And then that June, the unthinkable happened: my longtime idol and Coach Brown's former athlete, Mary Decker Slaney, was suspended by the International Amateur Athletic Federation on suspicion of using performance-enhancing drugs. Even though her suspension was later lifted, the scandal cast a shadow over her reputation as a runner. I couldn't believe she might have taken drugs. I knew they were everywhere in the sport, and I'd long struggled to keep a positive attitude about being beaten by runners who were giving performances that seemed like they must be drug enhanced.

I didn't win in Atlanta. I wasn't surprised, but I was still disappointed. Once again the whisper campaign started. I wasn't living up to all the hype. Reebok was thinking about bringing an end to their sponsorship of runners, which would mean cutting me, and Nike didn't seem overly interested. The public only cared about track during the Olympics, and I had never won a medal. I wondered if I was being naïve about drugs. I'd always vowed to run clean, but maybe that was a mistake.

When we got back to Eugene, I sat down with Coach
Brown. “Am I missing the boat here?” I said. “Should I be using drugs? Everybody seems to be doing them.”

He held my gaze for a long time, letting me know how serious he was.

“You are absolutely not going to do drugs,” he said. “You don't need them. You're talented enough.”

I was relieved. I didn't want to break the rules. I was a good girl. But, still, I wondered what I needed to do to win.

“I guess I'm just a little frustrated with where our training is going, then,” I said. “I sometimes just don't think it's intense enough.”

He quickly reassured me, outlining a scientific plan for a new approach to our workouts that would bring my performance to a higher level. But I'd heard this from him before, and I'd never seen the results I'd been promised. I wanted, needed, to win. I should have pushed back this time, but I wasn't strong enough for that.

In 1996, I was approached about doing a swimsuit calendar, and I immediately loved the idea. Even though I'd been self-conscious about my large breasts before my surgery, I was comfortable showing off my body off the track. I'd even gone topless on a beach in Europe when I competed there, although Mark worried the whole time that I'd be spotted and photographed, leading to a scandal, and so I finally put my top back on at his urging. I wanted to do something that would make me feel good, for a change, when racing wasn't doing it for me. I loved every aspect of putting the calendar together, from the shoot on a beach in Hawaii, which the entertainment news show
Extra
sent a crew to cover, to the process by which we
chose the twelve photos we would use for the calendar. When I received boxes of the finished product, I was proud that I'd finally created something I'd enjoyed and was an expression of my personality. The calendar wasn't available in retail stores, but we advertised it a bit, and it became an instant success. We quickly sold out of the five thousand copies we'd printed, and it seemed like we could sell as many again if we printed more. And then our phone rang. It was Dad.

“What is going on with this ridiculous swimsuit calendar of yours?” he growled into the phone. “I didn't even know anything about it, and suddenly, I'm getting teased at work. You've really embarrassed me.”

“Dad, this is something I wanted to do,” I said, even though I felt queasy standing up to my father. “I love to model.”

He was angry and embarrassed, believing the calendar reflected poorly on our family, and I was feeling worse by the minute. I'd finally found something I really enjoyed, and now my dad was taking all the joy away.

“I wonder if I was a stripper, Dad,” I said, “would you disown me?”

He didn't answer the question. By the time I hung up the phone, I was anxious and depressed and feeling plenty of guilt. When Mark came home not long after, I was still crying.

“What's wrong?” he asked.

“My dad called and he's really angry about my swimsuit calendar,” I said. “He wants me to stop doing it.”

Mark had been completely supportive of the entire project, even helping me to pick out the swimsuits I was photographed in, and he paused now before taking a side.

“You loved doing the calendar,” he said. “And it's doing really well. If we print an additional ten thousand, I'm sure we can sell them out. But it's your call.”

Within a few days, I stopped selling the calendar. I still couldn't bear to make my father unhappy. But I was angry about his reaction and the fact that I'd caved to his pressure. And so, even though I wasn't strong enough to fully rebel, I did pull back from my parents even more. And this was a crucial moment for me to do so because Mark and I had decided to make another major change. Every time I got tempted to focus on something other than running, like modeling or public appearances, they took me away from what I was here to do: run fast. It was time to double down on my training. Modeling was flattering and fun. But at the same time I still wanted to win. The inner conflict was tearing me up.

Although the next Olympics were still three and a half years away, I was going to show the world what I could do. I'd been a professional runner for six years, but I hadn't achieved anything like the success I'd had in college. And I knew there was only one man who could get me back to the competitive level I'd been at then: my old coach, Peter Tegen. For some reason, training with him long distance never worked as well as it did when we were on the track together. It was time to go home. It was scary for me to be moving close to my parents again, just as our relationship had grown more strained. Such tension was one of the reasons I'd left in the first place, and the physical distance between us had felt like a good thing to me. But Mark really felt the move was what I needed, if success on the track was my goal, and I eventually agreed. I was
sick of hearing the whispers about how I wasn't living up to expectations. I was sick of mediocrity. I wanted to win.

In early 1997, we moved back to Madison. Immediately, Peter and I fell back into our old rapport, and my running began to improve. I had a great year in 1997, winning in Paris and Lausanne. And then, in 1998, I had one of the best running moments of my life, competing in one of my favorite venues: the Hercules Meet in Monte Carlo. Because of the upswing in my career, Nike had finally come calling, and they'd written a clause into my contract stating that if I could run a mile in under four minutes, I'd receive a one-hundred-thousand-dollar bonus. The race happened to fall on my thirtieth birthday. I didn't win the race. I came in eighth, actually. But I ran it in a personal best, 3:59, which meant I'd earned my sub-four-minute time bonus, and I felt like I was back where I wanted to be, running the best I could at that point, holding my own with the top athletes in the world.

My happiness didn't last long. That night, while I was attending a post-race celebration party, the meet promoter for one of the most prestigious meets in the world pulled me aside for a private conversation.

“You could change the sport of track and field,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said, feeling proud.

“I mean it. With everything you've done with your modeling and the press you've received, you could really help the sport in America. But you have to do better. You have to win, and to do that, you know what you have to do.”

My smile instantly faded. I stepped back from him a little, tears forcing their way out. I was shocked and offended by
what he'd just said without saying it: in order to be the best, I had to use steroids. If I did, I could change a sport I loved dearly. If I didn't, it was my fault if I lost.