Damaged on the Inside, Ugly on the Outside.
Looking through the old photo albums at my parents' house never fails to remind me of the days of my exile from the sport of speedskating. One picture in particular stands out. It was taken on the back porch of our old house in Mason City, Iowa, in the summer of '96, following my escape from the loathsome Iowa State University.
There I was, a look in my eye that dared Mom to take that picture; thighs like huge, shapeless potato sacks; a "smile" that was no more than the grim setting of the corners of my mouth against the unwelcome encroachment of a bulimic's chipmunk-chubby cheeks. It is only now, when I look back from my current perspective as a healthy, happy elite athlete, that I realize how truly sick I was back then.
Throughout the year of the Kearns Dirt Oval season, which was also my senior year of high school, my family was living in Iowa, while I lived and trained in Salt Lake City. If all had gone well with speedskating, I would have stayed in Salt Lake City, attended the University of Utah, and continued my training. Since I was no longer able to speedskate after USISA decided to label me a "troublemaker" (for asking them for help when my coach left and construction on the oval was being severely delayed), and I had made no other college plans, I sort of ended up at Iowa State by default -- so that we could pay in-state tuition.
Though I was sad to end my skating career, I still had a glimmer of hope that I could have fun in college. After all, I was always a good student, and I looked forward to hanging out with other smart kids. For this reason, and in the hopes of avoiding too much of the typical all-night college drinking binges, I chose to stay in the honors dorm. Maybe I'd stay up all night with my new friends, talking about the meaning of life! Isn't that what you do in college?
I soon found out that this would not be the case. Even the honors dorm turned out to be like one giant high school sleepover. Every Thursday evening, the girls would gather in the lounge to watch "Friends."
Since I had loved playing in my high school orchestra, I decided to join the University Symphony. One guy from my dorm thought it was pretty cool that I was walking around campus with a cello, and he invited me to come and hang out with his group of friends. But another time he was passing by my room and happened to see my collection of Southern California punk rock CD's. He picked up Pennywise's "About Time," flipped it over a couple of times, and said, "I can't believe you listen to this crap!" He walked out and never spoke to me again.
Though I had always been a good student, my depression over no longer being able to be a speedskater, combined with my disillusionment with college life, began to make it very difficult for me to study. I remember re-reading the same paragraph 6 times and still not being able to make any sense of it. I had very ambitiously signed up for 18 credit hours my first semester, but found myself having to drop out of my calculus-based physics course.
By second semester, I told my advisor I was "too dumb for college" - literally, in those words. I told her I planned to drop out and become a truck driver.
My brother, who was a senior in high school up in Mason City, had piano lessons in Des Moines every Sunday, and Mom would always stop by ISU along the way to pick me up for a little reprieve. Every time she had to drop me off afterwards, she said it was "like I'm returning you to prison."
One time, in February, I tried to run away. It was probably about 10 degrees outside, with 5-6 inches of snow on the ground, and my parents' home in Mason City was about 120 miles away. I walked out to the I-35 freeway, but my fingers had started to freeze, so I turned around, walked back to my dorm room, and got into bed. I slept for 48 hours straight, until it became physiologically impossible for me to keep my eyes closed any longer. Finally I gave up, and resumed attending classes.
After surviving a year at Iowa State, I decided to move to the Detroit area with my parents in the fall of 1996. Taking a semester off, I worked as a cashier in a local supermarket in order to convince myself that I really wanted to finish school. Then, I enrolled at the University of Michigan-Dearborn in January of 1997.
My eventual academic success at UMD only provides further evidence that my early college years were wrecked primarily due to the effects of the unfortunate ending of my speedskating career. By my senior year, I was maintaining a course load of 18 credit hours, 2 part-time jobs, and an independent research project in plant genetics. I was also the president of the school's chapters of Amnesty International and the Biological Honor Society, and had pulled my grade point average up to 3.96. I graduated as the top student in my major of microbiology, and was accepted into graduate school. Finally, after a great deal of unnecessary extra struggling, I was at least living up to my academic potential.
It sure looks good on paper, doesn't it? Finally, I had learned to study successfully through my depression, but I was still plagued by other problems that stemmed from an inability to cope with the way my speedskating career had ended. One of the worst was my exercise-bulimia.
A bulimic can consume vast quantities of food while on a binge, and then uses various methods of "purging" the food out of her system. My favorite method of purging was to immediately go on a very long, very hard run until, one way or another, all the food I had just eaten would get cleared out. When the "fullness sensor" switches off, it is not unheard-of for a bulimic to eat 10,000 to 30,000 calories in one sitting! I was once just a few pieces short of inhaling an entire 2-pound bag of peanut M&M's.
The story of how I eventually cured myself of this problem is kind of funny, and I still can't fully explain how it worked. The idea came to me during the time when the problem was at its worst, and I would go on a binge about once a week. I got so tired of the feeling of being so full I was afraid my stomach would burst, and then the stomach ache that would last for days after I ran it all out of my system. I wondered if all it would take for me to give up this cycle forever would be to make it just a little bit MORE painful for myself....just one time...
My own personal cure for exercise-bulimia had a soundtrack, and this was a Lunachicks song called, "The Day Squid's Gerbil Died." This song brought up just the combination of futility and annoyance that I was looking for, so I filled one 45-minute side of a cassette tape with this song, repeated over and over again. Once I had The Song, I then located The Hill. It was a little pimple of a sledding hill, visible from I-75 just south of West Rd. in Woodhaven, and it took about 20 seconds at the most to run up it the long way.
By the next time I had stuffed myself with all the junk food within reach, I was prepared. Driving to the park with my Walkman, I vowed to run up and down that hill as hard as I could, listening to "The Day Squid's Gerbil Died" until the tape ran out:
"The day Squid's gerbil died,
Oh my god, how she cried..."
(Up.
Down.
Up.
Down.)
"...came in from playing one day
and he was dead on location..."
(15 minutes...Urp! Whoops... a Ramen Noodle just came flying out of my nose. I spat, and kept right on going.)
"...Dad gerbil bit their heads off,
Squid came too late to pull him off..."
...and so on, and so on, and so on, until the tape finallly ended.
Believe it or not, it worked. I never binged and purged again.
---
I guess the most extreme self-abusive thing I used to do during my college years was cutting up my arms and legs with razor blades and safety pins. Judge me if you want, but you'll never understand what I've been through until you've done finger paintings in your own blood on your bedroom walls.
---
The things I went through after my first "retirement" are not unusual. I'm sure that after those USISA/Minnesota Mafia officials ended my career through the lies they spread about me, they probably expected no less...that the girl would crawl away and hide somewhere and begin living the life of a typical self-abusing college student. What none of them ever counted on was that, eventually, I'd be strong enough to come back.
And now, sitting here at my parents' house, looking through those old photo albums after the most successful speedskating season of my entire life, I'm adding a new caption to that most hideous snapshot of my Blackball Days. It reads:
YESTERDAY CRIES, TOMORROW LAUGHS.
AND THE JOKE IS ON YOU, US SPEEDSKATING.
Looking through the old photo albums at my parents' house never fails to remind me of the days of my exile from the sport of speedskating. One picture in particular stands out. It was taken on the back porch of our old house in Mason City, Iowa, in the summer of '96, following my escape from the loathsome Iowa State University.
There I was, a look in my eye that dared Mom to take that picture; thighs like huge, shapeless potato sacks; a "smile" that was no more than the grim setting of the corners of my mouth against the unwelcome encroachment of a bulimic's chipmunk-chubby cheeks. It is only now, when I look back from my current perspective as a healthy, happy elite athlete, that I realize how truly sick I was back then.
Throughout the year of the Kearns Dirt Oval season, which was also my senior year of high school, my family was living in Iowa, while I lived and trained in Salt Lake City. If all had gone well with speedskating, I would have stayed in Salt Lake City, attended the University of Utah, and continued my training. Since I was no longer able to speedskate after USISA decided to label me a "troublemaker" (for asking them for help when my coach left and construction on the oval was being severely delayed), and I had made no other college plans, I sort of ended up at Iowa State by default -- so that we could pay in-state tuition.
Though I was sad to end my skating career, I still had a glimmer of hope that I could have fun in college. After all, I was always a good student, and I looked forward to hanging out with other smart kids. For this reason, and in the hopes of avoiding too much of the typical all-night college drinking binges, I chose to stay in the honors dorm. Maybe I'd stay up all night with my new friends, talking about the meaning of life! Isn't that what you do in college?
I soon found out that this would not be the case. Even the honors dorm turned out to be like one giant high school sleepover. Every Thursday evening, the girls would gather in the lounge to watch "Friends."
Since I had loved playing in my high school orchestra, I decided to join the University Symphony. One guy from my dorm thought it was pretty cool that I was walking around campus with a cello, and he invited me to come and hang out with his group of friends. But another time he was passing by my room and happened to see my collection of Southern California punk rock CD's. He picked up Pennywise's "About Time," flipped it over a couple of times, and said, "I can't believe you listen to this crap!" He walked out and never spoke to me again.
Though I had always been a good student, my depression over no longer being able to be a speedskater, combined with my disillusionment with college life, began to make it very difficult for me to study. I remember re-reading the same paragraph 6 times and still not being able to make any sense of it. I had very ambitiously signed up for 18 credit hours my first semester, but found myself having to drop out of my calculus-based physics course.
By second semester, I told my advisor I was "too dumb for college" - literally, in those words. I told her I planned to drop out and become a truck driver.
My brother, who was a senior in high school up in Mason City, had piano lessons in Des Moines every Sunday, and Mom would always stop by ISU along the way to pick me up for a little reprieve. Every time she had to drop me off afterwards, she said it was "like I'm returning you to prison."
One time, in February, I tried to run away. It was probably about 10 degrees outside, with 5-6 inches of snow on the ground, and my parents' home in Mason City was about 120 miles away. I walked out to the I-35 freeway, but my fingers had started to freeze, so I turned around, walked back to my dorm room, and got into bed. I slept for 48 hours straight, until it became physiologically impossible for me to keep my eyes closed any longer. Finally I gave up, and resumed attending classes.
After surviving a year at Iowa State, I decided to move to the Detroit area with my parents in the fall of 1996. Taking a semester off, I worked as a cashier in a local supermarket in order to convince myself that I really wanted to finish school. Then, I enrolled at the University of Michigan-Dearborn in January of 1997.
My eventual academic success at UMD only provides further evidence that my early college years were wrecked primarily due to the effects of the unfortunate ending of my speedskating career. By my senior year, I was maintaining a course load of 18 credit hours, 2 part-time jobs, and an independent research project in plant genetics. I was also the president of the school's chapters of Amnesty International and the Biological Honor Society, and had pulled my grade point average up to 3.96. I graduated as the top student in my major of microbiology, and was accepted into graduate school. Finally, after a great deal of unnecessary extra struggling, I was at least living up to my academic potential.
It sure looks good on paper, doesn't it? Finally, I had learned to study successfully through my depression, but I was still plagued by other problems that stemmed from an inability to cope with the way my speedskating career had ended. One of the worst was my exercise-bulimia.
A bulimic can consume vast quantities of food while on a binge, and then uses various methods of "purging" the food out of her system. My favorite method of purging was to immediately go on a very long, very hard run until, one way or another, all the food I had just eaten would get cleared out. When the "fullness sensor" switches off, it is not unheard-of for a bulimic to eat 10,000 to 30,000 calories in one sitting! I was once just a few pieces short of inhaling an entire 2-pound bag of peanut M&M's.
The story of how I eventually cured myself of this problem is kind of funny, and I still can't fully explain how it worked. The idea came to me during the time when the problem was at its worst, and I would go on a binge about once a week. I got so tired of the feeling of being so full I was afraid my stomach would burst, and then the stomach ache that would last for days after I ran it all out of my system. I wondered if all it would take for me to give up this cycle forever would be to make it just a little bit MORE painful for myself....just one time...
My own personal cure for exercise-bulimia had a soundtrack, and this was a Lunachicks song called, "The Day Squid's Gerbil Died." This song brought up just the combination of futility and annoyance that I was looking for, so I filled one 45-minute side of a cassette tape with this song, repeated over and over again. Once I had The Song, I then located The Hill. It was a little pimple of a sledding hill, visible from I-75 just south of West Rd. in Woodhaven, and it took about 20 seconds at the most to run up it the long way.
By the next time I had stuffed myself with all the junk food within reach, I was prepared. Driving to the park with my Walkman, I vowed to run up and down that hill as hard as I could, listening to "The Day Squid's Gerbil Died" until the tape ran out:
"The day Squid's gerbil died,
Oh my god, how she cried..."
(Up.
Down.
Up.
Down.)
"...came in from playing one day
and he was dead on location..."
(15 minutes...Urp! Whoops... a Ramen Noodle just came flying out of my nose. I spat, and kept right on going.)
"...Dad gerbil bit their heads off,
Squid came too late to pull him off..."
...and so on, and so on, and so on, until the tape finallly ended.
Believe it or not, it worked. I never binged and purged again.
---
I guess the most extreme self-abusive thing I used to do during my college years was cutting up my arms and legs with razor blades and safety pins. Judge me if you want, but you'll never understand what I've been through until you've done finger paintings in your own blood on your bedroom walls.
---
The things I went through after my first "retirement" are not unusual. I'm sure that after those USISA/Minnesota Mafia officials ended my career through the lies they spread about me, they probably expected no less...that the girl would crawl away and hide somewhere and begin living the life of a typical self-abusing college student. What none of them ever counted on was that, eventually, I'd be strong enough to come back.
And now, sitting here at my parents' house, looking through those old photo albums after the most successful speedskating season of my entire life, I'm adding a new caption to that most hideous snapshot of my Blackball Days. It reads:
YESTERDAY CRIES, TOMORROW LAUGHS.
AND THE JOKE IS ON YOU, US SPEEDSKATING.
posted by Eva at 12:30 PM
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