The Steeplechase: A Runner's Path to Sobriety

Editor's Note: We are honoring a request by "Nicole," the subject of this profile, to have her face obscured and name changed due to the unjust stigma surrounding mental health and substance abuse issues.

Here is Nicole, slight and fleet, less than 100 pounds soaking wet with her straight blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, pacing her Division III cross country team at a regional meet in Letchworth State Park, on the cusp of the Grand Canyon of the East. She looks effortless, fluid, far in front of her teammates. Afterwards, she flops into a pile of leaves near the finish line and smiles broadly, the kind of beaming smile which is brought out only by pain and exertion.

That smile belies terrible suffering. The agonizing fissures expanding across her shins; the apathetic frigidity; her isolation on the bus ride back to campus; the array of pills and emotions which wash across her nervous system.

She is laying in the leaf pile, smiling in pain, and she has just finished her last race.

"I've just never been the happiest child."

Nicole has always lived a somewhat dichotomous existence, one where her outward success in life's most empirical arenas—particularly academics and athletics—hid her mental health condition. A native of Chautauqua county, the westernmost county of New York, Nicole had been, for as long as she can remember, patently miserable.

"I remember the specific point when I learned to take substances to make it go away," she says. An AIM conversation in seventh grade sparked a Tylenol compulsion. Devouring well over the recommended dosages—by eighth grade, she estimates, a typical binge would involve 13 pills of the 500mg extra strength variety—she would lose herself and, however briefly and uncomfortably, shake her depression.

"I would pass out, and wake up with a horrible stomach ache," she says. "That was my method of dealing with things."

Cloaked in depression, Nicole's environment only served to exacerbate her condition, though not in the assumed way; her supportive and loving parents, and her desire not to disappoint them, caused her to feel guilty.

"I was like, 'Why am I so sad?' I had a wonderful home life, my family was great … I felt guilty for being sad because I was miserable, but there was no reason for me to be miserable."

By high school, Nicole had moved on to prescription pills, including hydrocodone, tramadol, and muscle relaxers. The summer before her senior year, she began snorting heroin. She started cutting herself as well—never with suicidal intent—and inducing vomiting, a chance to exercise control over her body and self.

Cutting, vomiting, drugs—these were Nicole'sways of taking control of her body. It is not uncommon for people suffering from depression and other mood disorders to do these things as a coping mechanism. Exerting agency on their bodies can become a way of reclaiming identity, instilling comforting baselines. When one does not know how they will feel each morning, any regular, self-induced result—even a "bad" one like bleeding or throwing up—becomes a kind of comfort.

Aside from physical abuse and self-medication, Nicole took shelter in structure, finding solace in the classroom and in cross country and track.

"That was like the only time that I wasn't fucked up," she says of running. Not the top runner in her school, Nicole assumed a "team mom" sort of position, cheering on teammates and encouraging the younger middle school runners who would train with the team. "All the parents loved me," she says, "which was weird, because I was like [this] extreme dichotomy."

A Janus-like high school career ensued, wherein she would strive mightily for personal records and academic success, then delve back into drug use and sadness. She excelled in the classroom, driven by a desire to be a naturopathic doctor, and rose to meet numerous challenges, the more difficult or "impossible" the better.

"I guess my motivation comes from people telling me I can't do it," she says, sounding like a typical athlete. But Nicole was not a typical athlete, because there was something more desperate in her need to succeed. "That's literally the only self-motivation I have."

That burning drive led her to tackling the steeplechase—a race originally designed for horses that, with its atavistic water pits and multiple-lane spanning hurdles, still seems savagely equine—despite being deemed "too short" and setting the school record anyway; it also caused her to fall to pieces whenever she failed to achieve her self-appointed goals. Running became both her anodyne and antagonist.

"If I did really good in a race, that was great," she says. "But if I did really bad, if I didn't PR [set a personal record], I would fall down into craziness. I'd like freak out … tear myself down." Coaches would have to counsel her on the bus, and the self-flagellation was proportional to the importance of the meet.

"My junior year, I missed going to state by like, I don't even know, one girl and a couple seconds," she says. "Killed me. Killed me … until I could redeem myself the next year."

Nicole made state her senior year, and proceeded to earn good grades; she began her college search in earnest, bolstered by the knowledge she could go anywhere she wanted. Unfortunately, the 2008 recession hit, with the already economically depressed Western New York hit particularly hard, and her choices contracted along with the economy. She wound up at the State University of New York at Fredonia, 30 minutes up route 60.

Fredonia marked the point in Nicole's career when running went from a comfort to a cause of tumult. She vaulted immediately into the top spot on the team as a freshman, and found herself a pariah. After dominating a pre-season two mile shakeout to determine running order, she felt like she had immediately garnered the disdain of the upperclassmen.

Adding to her isolation was a new influx of drugs. After leaving all of the pills at home, determined to make a fresh start, Nicole found herself presented with a Vicodin by her new roommate shortly after she moved in. She began taking lithium and Adderall as well.

Stress fractures, which Nicole had been slowly beating into her shins since the beginning of the season, finally caught up to her as conferences and regional came up toward the season's end. Abstaining from practice and having been encased in walking boots and air casts, she toed the line at Letchworth and lead her team in her final race.

"After I stopped going to indoor practice, they [the team] all just fucking … that's it. That's the last of them," she says. "Which sucks, because if you're on a sports team in college, that's your fucking life, you know? I missed all of the introductory shit with the girls in my dorm; they had already established friendships with each other. And I just kind of … it was like November and December, and I just had no time to catch up."

It was as if her life had been taken away.

"Running was all I knew."

Fredonia, post-running, was a blur.

"My life just spiraled; I went crazy," Nicole says. "I was so, so unhappy."

One night, in the throes of despair, she called for her parents to come pick her up from the school before confessing her condition.

"I just told them everything," she says, "everything that'd happened in my life, ever. All the drugs, everything. I just felt like I had to come clean to them. Obviously they were fucking devastated, because they had no idea."

She went to a counselor—which lasted roughly a month—and a psychiatrist, who prescribed her Cymbalta. The drug left her in a somnambulistic state; she would sleep 15 hours a day during Christmas break.

"That whole time of my life, I tried to block out as much as I can," she says.

Nicole returned to Fredonia in the spring, falling in with a fellow student with whom she would consume morphine and shoplift at the Wegmans. She was arrested with him on campus for smoking weed, and the University Police found a fake ID, an empty bottle of Adderrall, drug-encrusted razor blades, and a set of brass knuckles in her car.

Despite carrying a 3.7 GPA, Nicole could not return to Fredonia to face suspension and her well-cultivated drug connections. A week-long heroin binge was the catalyst that sparked her desire to move roughly an hour east, to Buffalo, where she knew no one with drugs and could continue her studies at the University at Buffalo, where she would eventually earn a psychology degree whilst devouring benzodiazepines.

The turning point was sudden. Nursing a klonopin habit in North Carolina that saw her downing upwards of 7 of the most powerful iteration available a day—this with her petite frame the same size as it was in high school—Nicole would suffer a series of events that would finally cause her to dig in and get clean.

In the spring of last year, she had a seizure—perhaps provoked by the vast amounts of benzos in her system— and set out for New York not long after. "I popped a bunch of klonopins before we started driving, which makes no sense," she says. "We left at midnight, which also makes no sense. So by like 5 a.m., 6 a.m., I was driving, I don't know how I didn't die. I hit both parts of the rumble strips, I was driving all over the road."

She found herself home in western New York in a deep depression, feeling purposeless. She continued taking copious amounts of klonopin, and began dabbling in sexual practices that were generally out of character, including a brief same-sex relationship.

"I was out of my mind," she says. "People were noticing, like, 'what's wrong with you? Where did you go?'"

A series of seizures were the wake up call she needed. She weaned herself off of the klonopins, and got a prescription for Lamictal, a common anti-epileptic and mood stabilizer.

Nicole is better now. She manages a storefront back in North Carolina, and the structure which had been so beneficial to her before has been restored with her recent acceptance to grad school, where she wants to earn a Master's in counseling, to help others who have suffered like her.

The Lamictal leaves her listless, but she is as sober as she has been in nearly a decade.

She still does not run, as her legs are still fragile and running, without competing, is meaningless to her. But the wound the sport left is deep and psychic and you can still hear it in her voice, in the glimmer it takes on recalling past races and the bitterness she can't hide in discussing her career's end, a part of her life that has been taken from her, almost completely, and forever.

"I still can't stand to throw out my spikes," she says. "I can't do it."