Hiccup

I was on my back, lying on a cold table, but I was so hot that I was sweating.  My heart was pounding in my ears, rising from 180 to 190 to 195, hammering and hammering.  It’s hard to explain the rising panic caused from a high heart rate and strapped down wrists, immobility at a level of cardiac output only associated with maximum effort.  I was pumped full of stimulant, frantic with the energy and overwhelmed with the pulsing rush of chemicals and no output. Through the reflective ceiling- who puts a mirror on a ceiling, anyway?- I could see the bloody catheters being taken in and out.  The crimson strands draped across the table next to his capable hands, and I witnessed it all from the clouded mind of simultaneous sedation and adrenaline.  

My blood was everywhere, it was on his hands, on the table, on the catheters, and drenching the gauze used to stem the flow.  But I barely even registered it.  My leg was numb where they breached the femoral vein, and the only thing that I was aware of in my mind was the respite from pain.  Not pain in my leg, but pain in my heart.  

Tachycardia can hurt.  It can hurt a lot.  Low blood flow to the heart causes the same pain of a heart attack, because those are the same nerves firing.  Tachycardia hurts.  Burning out the part of your heart that’s causing the tachycardia hurts a LOT.  For a long time the only thing that registered was the pain and the brief respites from it, and the thundering of my heartbeat as it was artificially raised and lowered, raised and lowered.  

I remembered all the times preluding this one, but they were hazy on my memory the way that vision blurs in the dark- sometimes so faint that the only way you can perceive shape is to use the very edges of your vision and focus elsewhere.  

I have gone into supraventricular tachycardia literally thousands of times.  My particular breed was initiated most often through a high heart rate falling back down- the exact maneuver a biathlete goes through as they prepare to shoot.  I have shot at heart rates as high as 275 beats a minute, watched the manifestations of what I liked to call my “heart hiccup” cause vibrations the entire length of my barrel.  I’ve entered tachycardia in every situation - from going for an easy run in the open desert, alone, to the middle of the World Cup relay, when my teammates were depending on me to hit targets.  

Can you hit a target in tachycardia? Yes? Can you ski in tachycardia? Yes? Can you do it effectively? Certainly not.  Tachycardia inhibits the ability of your body to recover- your heart stops pumping blood effectively, so your cardiac output, while not complete stalled, is at low function.  Every time I entered tachycardia my chest hurt, to varying degrees, and every time it became difficult to catch my breath.  

I was in the middle of the sprint at the World Cup in Finland last year when my heart went off.  To break tachycardia, you have to break the loop by making a change.  Often that just means stopping, in extreme cases it means passing out to restart the heart’s normal function.  I couldn’t stop - it was race time. It was race time AND I was in the middle of the legendary Kontiolahti wall.  I tried (and sort of succeeded) at continuing forward, but it was like trying to keep my head above water while attached to a sinking anchor.

This is me in mid-tachycardia in the sprint in Finland-my technique completely collapsed,
and I sort of flailed my way up the hill like a six year old learning to ski.
Photo credit of this wonderful occasional by Nordic Focus. 

At this point in time, I had no idea what was actually wrong with me.  All I knew is that harder I tried to go forward, the less I could feel my arms and legs.  I couldn’t catch my breath, and the world starting spinning at the edges in a way that it generally doesn’t.  In this one lap, I lost 90 seconds to the leaders.  I remember this because after I crossed the finish line, the world sort of fuzzy around me, people kept asking me if I’d fallen.  No, I didn’t fall for it, I would never fall for it- what was the joke?  Ninety seconds… ninety seconds of what? 

I cleaned that entire race.  In the midst of of all of that, not having any idea what was causing the malfunctions popping up all across my rebelling body, I had the awareness to realize if I missed a single shot, I wasn’t going to make it into the pursuit.  My chest ached with the tightness and pain that I often though of as a mountain pressing down on top of it. The last lap took years.  Years and miles of fighting in the Finnish darkness, lost in a world that had stopped making much sense.  

I was pale as a sheet when I finished, and there were words and there were more words from our staff, but I couldn’t understand them.  My tachycardia would break and often restart over and over in a workout, or it could remain, spinning endlessly.  This time, it broke briefly at the finish line and restarted when I went to walk towards my warmups.  That was the closest I’ve ever coming to passing out of my own tachycardia, a “hard reset” of the heart that sometimes becomes necessary. 

Tachycardia is similar to an asthma attack, I imagine.  For a while it feels like you’re dying, even if you’re not- and when it’s over, you feel so much better than you did previously that you know you’re fine.  I knew I was fine when it broke for good that day.  Did my staff, who had watched me grab my chest and tumble to the ground? No.  Could I explain it to them? No, not really.  I just knew, I knew it was beating normally now, and that it wasn’t before.  The residual pain remained.

This was the first time I finally admitted to myself that the chest pain that had been accompanying me as early as 2014, and perhaps even before, might be abnormal.  I had used it to my advantage, a warmup indicator so I knew I had done enough intensity that I could safely start the race without getting a little heart hiccup.  

Three months later, I acquired a medical heart rate monitor from Silicon Valley Cardiology.  It gets stuck right onto your chest, and you’re told not to “sweat excessively,” because it’ll be measuring every single heartbeat while it’s on.  If you feel something, you press the enormous button and write it down.  Exactly how they expected me to refrain from “sweating excessively,” I remain uncertain. 

They did an ultrasound on my heart- he proclaimed in"beautiful," thank you very much.

A few days later, I flew to Lake Placid. I ended up getting it taped down with athletic tape and some sort of miracle spray adhesive by the recovery center of the Olympic Training Center.  They did such a good job of re-affixing the monitor which had been sweated loose in the first 24 hours that by the time I mailed it back into the center, I had to rip it and half of my epidermis off to detach it from my chest.  In case you were wondering, it smelled terrible.  

That sucker was STUCK. ON.

The Zio patch went into a little cardboard box and journeyed back to its spawning point, where the data was processed and sent to the cardiologist I had begged to be squeezed in to see in the Silicon Valley.  Barely four days after I sent that disgusting, itchy monitor back, I started receiving phone call after phone call.  Come in- immediately, the voicemails said.  Well, the life of a professional athlete isn’t privy to remaining in one place very long, and I certainly couldn’t jump on a plane and journey all the way to California. 

The phone calls kept coming.  I was to stop training immediately, said the cardiology clinic.  I had over 25 instances of tachycardia across something like eight workouts. My heart rate had reached a whopping high of 275 beats per minute just in the few days they measured.  But it didn’t feel dangerous to me, I didn’t feel like I was dying, I just felt like I couldn’t catch my breath.  

I didn’t want to be told I couldn’t train, so I did the mature thing and totally ignored it.  I finally asked my team doctors for help, and had the clinic send Brett (our USBA team doctor), who surely got the short end of the stick in working with me, all of the results from my monitor.  By the rules of HIPPA, I could force his silence- and I did.  I was, at this time, wildly paranoid that I would be banned from training by someone in the OTC or USBA network, for something that I felt, deep in myself, wasn’t dangerous.  

He connected me to Dr. Aaron Baggish, the head of the cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital.  After several phone calls with the incredibly patient Dr. Baggish- who reads heart monitor graphs the way you and I read children’s books- I was assured that it wasn’t, as I had suspected, dangerous.  It could, however, be incredibly inhibitive, which I had discovered along the way.  Most likely, an extra pathway in my AV node was allowing current to loop backwards, and giving the heart a signal to beat again.  If I chose, he would get me into the schedule in a short time frame, and they would do a catheter ablation to destroy the extra pathway in my AV node.  In other words, they were going to burn that f***er right out of existence.  

My biggest fear in this was that my heart would somehow have less functionality when I emerged from a procedure.  Even half of a percent difference could make or break an athletic career.  Strangely, the fact that they would be inside my heart and could potentially destroy the AV node in such a way that I’d need a pacemaker for life, never really occurred to me until later.  To decide if it was worth the gamble, I dove into my old Polar data.  

It was unbelievable.  My heart rate data, which stretched back only one single year (which is when USBA gave me my first heart rate monitor) contained a mass of evidence.  I had always been told that Polar errors, and that’s what caused the high heart rate reads.  For me, this wasn’t the case.  The evidence was there, staring me in the face.  Workout after workout, day after day, almost every single intensity, and multiple times in workouts.  I had to go back months and months and scrutinize individual workouts to find ones that didn’t have any tachycardia- they were few and far between.  

Some of my heart's "Greatest Hits"

This was about half an hour

Um... is there a level 6 or 7 that I can put into my training log? Maybe 8?

I got a week and a half between me understanding what I had and what was happening, and me flying to get it fixed to play with my heart.  And it was one of the most entertaining things I’ve ever done.  It seemed to have two different preferences.  One I thought of as the rainbow scrolling wheel when your Apple computer gets stuck, where you have to force quit the application overloading your computer, or restart it.  In this, my tachycardia would continue until I made a change.  This was my milder tachycardia, the spinning kind- it would initiate somewhat randomly, midway through distance workouts that I was holding a constant heart rate.  It would go off, and then it would remain until I either started a descent, stopped, or initiated what is called a valsalva.  In a Valsalva, which I recommend you google instead of listening to my fumbling explanation, you sharply contract your abdomen and try to startle your body into a reset.  This can also be achieved with cold water to the face, which my friends took no end of delight in attempting.  

I was out running in the desert one day when I had one of my most memorable ones.  I kept running, trying to see how long I could get it to go off.  For twenty minutes I ran with a heart rate stuck unnaturally between 190 and 220.  Eventually, I realized that it would quite literally never end if I didn’t break the cycle, so I valsalvaed (definitely a verb) that sucker right out of my system.  It was the first time I had successfully done such a thing.  This type happened only once per workout, and once it happened, never recurred during the workout. I became immediately hopeful that perhaps they wouldn’t have to go fishing around my heart and burning it, because I could just sort of sharply flex my abs whenever it happened. 

For your viewing pleasure, I tracked down this workout.
 See, there I was, minding my own business, and then- WHAM!

Zoomed in version,
because it's kind of fascinating to see exactly where I valsalva-ed.

Well, it wasn’t to be.  The darker side of my tachycardia was a much nastier deal.  It initiated by way of a sharp descent of heart rate (shooting), in the middle of very high heart rate (hard workouts or races), and only broke when it felt like it.  For the first time in my life, I started reading my heart rate monitor while I shot, the way most people would read a wind flag.  It’s obscenely difficult to shoot like that.  The entire barrel shook with the force of my hammering heart.  It was like shooting in the midst of a mild earthquake.  And strangely, my tachycardia often broke as soon as I left the mat and raised my heart rate back to a *naturally* high heart rate rather than an artificial one.  In these workouts, the tachycardia would recur fairly often throughout the workout, rather than being one and done like its milder sibling.  

I could see my entire shooting career going into the toilet, because if my Polar wasn’t lying to me, my tachycardia was getting more often and more intense- specifically during the times I needed to shoot.  So, in August, two and a half weeks before August World Cup trials, I got on a plane and flew out East to have my broken heart fixed.  

The cardiology unit bears a striking resemblance to the geriatrics unit of a hospital.  The nurses who do blood work and chest X-rays aren’t exactly expecting to see a fit 25 year old.  Nevertheless, in I went to get my chest X-rayed and my blood work done (it was normal), roughly fifty people listened to my heart on a stethoscope (it was normal), and then I was escorted into a climate controlled room with a treadmill.  

I was supposed to get on this treadmill, do a max test while connected to a 12 lead EKG, and when my tachycardia went off, they could then map it and decide what was causing it, which pathway was the slow vs. the fast pathway, and therefore which one to burn.  This was preluded by them taking a Brillo pad and scraping what felt like all my chest skin off so that the the leads could be affixed more effectively with adhesive, (and probably they too were concerned by “excessive sweating”).  Now, I have wildly sensitive skin on the best of days, and my chest is particularly sensitive.  I think my screams are still reverberating around that small room, and after this I assumed the worst was over.  

The treadmill got steeper and steeper, and faster and faster.  I’ve never been a particularly great runner, and I have a particular hatred for it stemming from a high school running career that I didn’t enjoy.  This compiled with the immense pressure of needing my heart to go off, was just asking for a fun time.  To add to the joy, my tachycardia was triggered more by certain things: excessive caffeine, low sleep, and alcohol consumption the night before.  I’ll just ask you whether you want to do an uphill running test on only coffee, after purposely staying up late and having a glass of wine.  See, that last doesn’t sound so bad, right? It’s just the rest of it…..

I almost killed myself trying to get my tachycardia to initiate.  My heart went through what’s called the initiation beats, where it will double beat, a perfectly normal happenstance for any person, but in individuals with SVT this usually leads to tachycardia.  Today, my heart flat out refused.  Now you’ll recall, perhaps, if you read the long-winded description preluding this part, that my heart actually doesn’t tend to initiate tachycardia from workouts like this. In fact, my heart rate has to go DOWN in the middle to initiate.  

So I did this entire stress test, which was a max test, and got nothing out of it except nasty scrapes on my chest from the sandpaper, a whole lot of pain, hunger, and as an added bonus I got to do intervals afterwards.  Unfortunately, my heart was too warmed up by then to malfunction in the slightest.  

Yeah, this was before. Oh, it's going to be great... I'll just sort of lie here.

Regardless, at 8am the next morning, I showed up for a heart procedure with Dr. Conor Barrett.  He’s about as talkative as a granite rock, but exceptionally good at his job.  What they do first is strip you completely naked and then start putting enormous sticky patches all over you.  The nurses joked that they were running out of real estate, and that it would be better if I was fatter.  By the time they finished with this, I was head to toe in enormous sticky patches attached to even longer wires, attached to a multitude of machines that went “beep.”  Bare on my chest was a sharpied in triangle, so that “if something goes wrong, [they] know where to cut into the chest.”  I mean, this is a cardiology unit with some of the best cardiologists in the world, in a massive hospital…. shouldn’t they know where my heart is without the Rorschach sharpie markings?

Except this is clearly not even at my heart,
so apparently I actually have no idea what they were going to cut into.
In any case, it's quite fetching.

The resident strapped my hands down to the platform, because if it hurts, and you reflexively reach up and grab the EP doing the procedure (since he’s down there at your groin with the catheters), then he burns parts of your heart that probably shouldn’t be burned.  The stimulant hits first, an entire flood of adrenaline pumped into my body artificially.  The artificial and manual stimulation of the heart happens next, the electro-stimulation of my heart to the desired number of beats per minute.  And just as it becomes unbearable, the heat from my blood circulating, the frantic energy coursing through my body while I’m stuck lying down, and the loud pounding and pounding of my heart, the heavy drugs hit.  

It’s a very limited amount-too much sedative and painkiller and my heart wouldn’t be able to pump at the high level required to induce my specific (and difficult) tachycardia.  But in this moment, it’s like it’s raining on parched ground.  Enough to let me breathe again for an instant.  

It’s just this edge of bearable now- just barely, and only because the alternative is actually incomprehensible at this moment.  It took almost an hour to coax my heart into tachycardia.  Like putting a racehorse through its paces as a warmup, I watched my heart rate rise and fall, my heart straining and fighting through the highest highs it will ever beat at, for an hour.  Then the actual workout started.  My tachycardia HURTS.  It hurts like crazy, like being crushed in the chest, while something deep within aches at the same time.  

He induced tachycardia over and over and over, because he had to map the way the current was flowing to determine which pathway to burn.  He had to find all the ways that the loop could form, to prevent it happening ever again. It was agonizing, and the only thing to look at was just my heartbeat on the monitors, rising, then falling, then rising and getting stuck in a tachycardia loop, then falling out of it, then rising again.  

Just when that too, became unbearable, and I was sweating under the layers of monitors and sterile sheets as my heart ran the equivalent of a marathon- except with a higher heart rate- it got worse.  The burning started, and the burning hurt worse than anything else that had happened before.  I could FEEL my heart being burned.  The nurse by my head told me not to breathe deeply, because the deep breathing would move the catheters in my heart.  How I could suffer through that level of burn, without moving, without breathing, without anything to grab onto and focus on, eluded me completely. 

I spent years in this cycle- burning, the piercing sound of the ablation machine echoing in the room, then in tachycardia, as the EP determined whether or not tachycardia could be induced.  Time after time, it still could.  Burn, tachycardia, burn, tachycardia, burn, tachycardia.  I thought I may as well just die right here on the table, because nothing could possibly be worse than this.  

Wrong again.

The nurse by my head spoke again, the disperser of the only drug that reduced pain, and so up until this moment quite beloved to me- and she warned me of the worst to come.  Just for a few seconds, she said, but it would be worse than anything that had happened before.  

First came the tachycardia. Then adenosine.  I thought someone had lit my entire body on fire, forget just my heart.  Adenosine restarts the heart, kicking it forcibly out of tachycardia.  This has some reason, but at the time the explanation completely eluded me.  If I could have returned to the part where only my heart was being burned, that would have been better.  If I could have screamed, I think I would have.  But the same mental block keeping me from moving was the same one that kept sound from coming out- anything to keep the catheters from being disturbed.  Motionless.  Silent.  It was only seconds, but it too lasted years.  

Breath returned into my body slowly, the way the rains bring water back to the Okavango.  As life returns to the Kalahari, so too did it return to me.  But that wasn’t the end for me.  The adenosine came again.  And again I lived a lifetime on fire.  

It trailed back into “regular” ablation.  Just my chest burning, just the galloping beat of my heart.  And then I was being put through the paces, over and over and over, to make sure that the connection couldn’t be made—that the tachycardia was gone.  My heart ran another marathon, rising and falling at heart rates I could no longer naturally produce.  

A short lifetime later, they slowly drew the catheters out of my leg.  The fast blood flow had required them to inject my leg with painkillers multiple times, as my system had flushed them out quite quickly.  

They started taking sticky patches off of me left and right.  It took four nurses five minutes to remove all these patches.  On my chest remained the scratches from the Brillo pad the day before. It seemed so inconsequential now, the small little pain the surface scratching caused, and I stared at it blankly, enunciated by the sharp black lines marking my chest cavity.  

Was that it, I wondered? Did I just live through every bout of tachycardia I would have otherwise had across a lifetime, all in a four hour block, so that I would never have it again?  I wasn’t allowed to sit up for six hours, for fear of re-opening the slit in my femoral vein.  That’s a long time without peeing- either that or it’s a bedpan.  I’ll let the reader guess which one it was, because in the grand scheme of things, that was just one of the small annoyances that mattered a little bit less after I was no longer on fire.

I texted my Family text chain (you mean not everyone has one of those?) and told them I was okay.  I told them I was not the proud owner of a Pacemaker, just an ablated heart. I also told them that if someone had told me it was going to be like that, I think I would have just kept my heart the way it was.  They sympathized, but they assumed I was exaggerating.  I’m really not sure I was.  

After. It looks like I just did a workout, but really only my heart did.
A four hour one. At max effort.

It was two weeks without going to max heart rate.  One week without lifting anything over ten pounds.  Guess what though? My light little rifle- sleek and outfitted with carbon fiber parts courtesy of my parents - is significantly less than ten pounds.  It was game on for shooting for me.  High heart rate shooting? Not so much. 

Two and a half weeks later was August World Cup trials.  

Consider THESE odds. I had a congenital anomaly in my heart that lead to SVT. But instead of one extra pathway, like “normal” people with SVT, it turned out I had two extra pathways through my heart — three total.  That’s why it took so damn long to burn, and the odds of that are exceptional.  Mid-transit to Jericho, my rifle bedding broke.  I don’t know what the odds are on that, but they’re a lot higher than the unlikely heart.  Mid-race IN Jericho, a wasp stung me right on the tongue before the last shooting bout.  I’m not sure what the odds are on that, but to have all three combine in one unlucky scenario was so hilarious I actually just sat down at the finish line and laughed through my immensely swollen tongue.  

This is me icing my wasp sting because my life is so damn glamorous.

Back half of the broken bedding

I’m not even sure why I raced those races.  My body moved like a lumbering lawnmower when I wanted it to move like a heat-seeking missile.  I hadn’t shot at a high heart rate since before my procedure, and I was testing it out at the race.  Ours is a cruel sport, but lit in my still-bright flash of newness, I had never really had to face its dark side. 

The A team went to Europe a few weeks after this.  My newly healed heart and I joined the clan in Ruhpolding before we drove to Arber for German nationals.  It rained in Ruhpolding. It rained and it rained and it rained.  But did it matter? I was free, I was healed, I was back on track and I was ready to put the hammer down to make up for the two weeks I had missed.  

I was on a long downhill in Ruhpolding when a very familiar feeling took over me.  My chest wrenched in pain, and I gasped for breath.  I looked down at my Polar monitor to numbers I didn’t want to see. 

 I was assured before I left my bed in the cardiology unit not even a month ago that my heart would still go through those initiation beats.  That the feeling of tachycardia beginning would still remain through those beats, where heartbeats double for a beat, and I was not to worry when this happened— that it happened to everyone, and only for the blessed few with SVT was it something that caused a worse reaction.  It’s like turning on the cold water of the faucet and bracing for the impact of the waterfall of cold-only the icy cold and slicing water never arrives.  However, the feeling of horror as you flip the faucet remains. 

I relaxed back into stride and forgot this sudden moment of horror.  

But not all was as it seemed.  My heart kept hiccuping.  It hiccuped and it hiccuped until finally the ice water hit me full in the face.  In Ruhpolding, Germany,  in the middle of a head to head speed with the Swiss team- my heart returned to tachycardia.  For over an hour I was unable to break the hold unless I rose my own heart rate via a natural effort above 170.  The instant my body tried to recover, my heart rate would climb back up above 220 and remain.  Always I had a measure of control over my own tachycardia, always I could break its cycle by stopping if I had to.  But nothing stopped the inexorable pounding of my heart, the hummingbird speed with which it beat. 

I stood by the side and gasped for breath, and still it remained.  I continued the intensity workout, around the course and down onto the mat, and when I shot the sights were blurry with the shaking.  I think I turned the color of snow, and I felt no more alive than I looked.  

The series of record setting tachycardia broke at the very end of this workout, when I finally took off my rollerskis and called it a day.  And the relief it caused- like training in the rain for hours and hours, frozen to the bone until you finally return home and step into the hot shower.  Warmth and strength flooded back into my body and I breathed a deep breath- the first in over an hour.  My coach watched this transition, this sharp and defined moment when my heart stabilized, and smiled at me, saying: “THERE you are!”  And there I was.  But where had I been? And where must I go now? 

You can see very distinctly when tachycardia starts and breaks

The answer was Boston.  Two days, phone calls, e-mails, and text messages to a very patient Dr. Aaron Baggish later, and I was back on a plane.  With my beloved biathlon rifle, and all the gear for a European training camp I couldn’t finish- I showed up to Massachusetts General Hospital.  The date was now three weeks to October World Cup Trials.  

I like to look at this like a Buy One, Get One free situation.  If you’re going to meet your deductible, why not go ahead and use that health insurance you’re paying for! Actually, the USOC pays for my health insurance. It was a careful and deliberate several days in July as I pored over paperwork and called many insurance companies trying to figure out which plan to be on as I entered what was sure to be an expensive cardiac procedure.  Unfortunately, my over $1000 Zio patch was just days before I decided to make the switch.  At least if I was going to wear a smelly, itchy, annoying patch on my chest it was an expensive one!

Well, if you’ve gotten this far into this essay you obviously want to reach my happy ending.  I’ll spare you the gory details, because it went about as it did the first time, only this time the end of the procedure testing to make sure my heart couldn’t enter tachycardia actually lasted over an hour.  The stress test the day before I actually did twice.  Brillo pad twice and everything, and the cuts from *that* took as long to heal as my heart did.  My heart refused, both times, to initiate, and I did over two hours of intervals that day, complete with the driest of dry dry firing (firearms aren’t allowed in Hospitals). 

I can't actually row, but I tried my best

The driest dryfire

Dr. Baggish wanted me to try everything humanly possible to recreate what triggered my tachycardia.  So that meant getting off the treadmill and lying down as if I was in prone, then leaping back up and charging forward.  The second time around I alternated running and rowing machine and prone simulation, running and rowing and prone simulation.  Over caffeinated (again) and totally exhausted, all I could do was put myself into the hands of the capable Dr. Barrett and hope that he understood enough from the first time around to zap that f***er the rest of the way.

Long story short, he did.

I was slightly more sedated the second time around

I rallied an insane mental effort to lay down the skiing law in October trials, but my shooting, a month of high heart rate practice lost, couldn’t hold up to the challenge.  Twenty four years of skiing and less than two years of shooting— one I can pull out of nowhere, but the other can be as elusive as the Himalayan snow leopard.  My chance at a World Cup Period One start was forfeited the instant my femoral vein was breached.  I knew this to be true, and yet I went to the starting line like a lamb before the slaughter and did my worst.  

This is me racing fast

And this is me missing.
But on the right side of this picture, Maddie was hitting, so that was sweet.

All eleven readers here are biathlon fans- you know the path that was laid out before me then.  Minnesota Trials, four IBU Cups, one World Cup, and then the Olympics.  I went to it, I did it, I hit the targets when it mattered.  Because when your whole body was once lit on fire from the inside, the pain of racing seems just a little bit less.  

When I returned to Germany in the winter to race the IBU Cup, my body recoiled in horror from the memory of being here.  My heart rate elevated in a twisted salute to its previous highs, and my body shook with the memory of it.  For me to race my last IBU Cups of Olympic Trials in this place that had placed such a horrifying brand on my soul was just another barrier to hurdle.  But that’s the way of the world, to place us in front of our fears and see if we can rise up and fight them.  

I have four tiny cuts on my right leg now.  They are all the evidence of a saga of a hiccuping heart.  They are all that remains to prove that sometimes, when the weight of a relay team lies upon you, your heart really, and scientifically, can go nuts.  They are all I have to remember that my story could have been much worse.  Like so many things in life, this isn’t the path I expected to be on, but I’m here now, and I’m braver for having walked it.  

I have held my silence on this because I think that you cannot whine or cry when challenges come across your path.  But this one is over and done now, and in less than five days I will land in Korea to don the red, white, and blue of Team USA.  I am afraid if I let myself forget all the pieces of this story, then I will become less for not remembering my own battles.  So here it is, laid out for you now.  From start to finish.  All four cuts. 

Keeping my heart rate low for shooting post-procedure

Because I'm an athlete, I packed post-procedure recovery snacks.

I received this fancy new watch from Polar in early summer, because mine was erroring
and showing me all of these really odd heart rate spikes.
Turns out, nothing was wrong with the watch!

How To Get Better

I’ve been thinking a lot about identity.  This happens to me every time I work on technique, which is really every workout.  Supposedly, there was an article published on Fasterskier that argued that reduction of range time was useless.  In all honesty, I didn’t read it, I just heard the summary of it from some people who didn’t agree (I’m sure it was totally unbiased).  Well, seems to me if range time is useless, then so is technique, because they’re both effortless ways of shaving time off of your race time.  And in the words of Susan Dunklee “why wouldn’t you save every second you could in every single way you can?” Thus, technique.  

But technique brings my identity into question.  To have better technique, I was once told to find someone with my similar body type who has the desired style (say a great V2) at the most elite level, and then watch them.  And the words of the excellent aforementioned Susan during a training camp, “I want to ski like Fourcade ALL the time.” I salute her for this, because no matter how hard I try, I’m pretty sure I’ll never be a six foot tall Frenchman, but when Susan puts her mind to something, she generally achieves it- so if you see a duplicate of his perfect technique skiing around in an American suit- she probably did it.  

Technique is often very fluid for me, I think about my different teammates and I slip into how I perceive their technique to be, and I then get lost because I don’t know which one is right and which one is wrong.  Who has the better arm position- Tim or Sean? But to take only their arms is impossible, you need to adopt the entire structure of the skiing style- from head to toe. Then I start to think about how easy it is to slide into these different ski styles- a different ski persona.  I feel this way about my own personality sometimes.  Which parts of my personality should I nurture and grow, and which parts am I supposed to train back out of me?  

They say your 20’s are one of the times of major personal growth.  That you more clearly define who you are and gain a deeper understanding of yourself.  Fluid personalities seem to be frowned upon in this society- we should know who we are, always, and where we’re going.  We should stand for what we believe in, and that should never change.  I wonder, then, how we shift to see other people’s perspectives if we are supposed to always stand firm inside our own.  I can’t figure out the pieces of Lowell’s technique just by watching him do it and never trying.  

It turns out the most “interesting” part of my athlete personality (according to people with no authority whatsoever) is my goalessness.  It’s like lawlessness, only apparently vastly more shocking.  I see goalessness as part of the fluidity of life that I embrace.  I don’t always know where I’m going, I’ve actually started workouts where I haven’t decided what I’m doing yet, and over half the time I get in the car and start driving without making up my mind where I’m going.  

I admire targeted, direct people.  But I do not aspire to be one of them.  My path will not flow seamlessly from point A to point B, hitting the correct steps in-between.  There will be no regression analysis, especially not a linear one, that will be able to figure out where I’m going, or even how the hell I got here.  I will never wake up in the morning and leap gracefully to my feet, my eyes bright and full of the goals that are driving me forward.  In fact, I don’t see why I should have to be this way at all- who made the required list of traits that an athlete has to be-that a successful person has to be- because I have a bone to pick with them.  I have choice (D) None of The Above. I will not fit into your mold, and I will not apologize for not being so.  My fluidity will teach me better technique, and it has lead me here, and wherever it is I’m going.

So here’s where I am.  A silence that has echoed across the sweeping expanse of the ten people that read these words.  I’m in Canmore, Alberta for the national team training camp.  The silence has continued, I believe, since the World Cup in Antholz where I botched the relay singlehandedly, but in the silence there was a story.  Even in the botching itself, this story rests.

I will tell you this story, the saga of “the mountain that landed on my chest,” but not now, since it stretches across years and culminated in a health issue with a recovery that almost knocked me entirely out of trials…. both times.  That story isn’t quite finished, or ready to be told.  

Instead, I will tell you the words that a 25 year old is certainly too young to be lecturing to the world, and has little to nothing to do with the blog of an athlete in an obscure (in America) sport.  Life is the messy bits, it’s letting your personality grow and change until it finally fits you, and then accepting there is still growing and changing to do.  It’s the mistakes you make and the obstacles you overcome.  My mother once told me never to whine in a post-race interview.  Never make excuses, never complain.  If you don’t like your result, you walk away and better yourself until you create a result you’re proud of.  Whether or not your skis and poles broke into pieces because someone stepped onto the course with a baseball bat and smashed them, you do not whine.  You pick up the pieces and you make yourself stronger.  

And how? By finding the parts of you that can be made better- and that comes from perspective, by seeing what it’s like to be different, and then deciding whether or not to keep it.  And that’s exactly how you learn technique.  

And in case you think I'm not good at breaking things down, here's a small sample (less than 30%) of the iPhones I've broken.

Antholz, Racing and Training before World Champs

Hi CBC,

It turns out I'm not a very good blogger (surprise).  We are finishing up our long stretch in Antholz- just one more week, and then off to Hochfilzen for World Championships.  Somehow, when I arrived here in the very beginning, way back when the World Cup was here a whole two weeks ago, my standing shooting took a vacation.  I'm not sure where it went, but I'm guessing someplace tropical.  

As best I can describe what happened, I'm an incredibly high energy person.  I like to sleep, a LOT, but as soon as I wake up I'm going. I don't really nap, and I don't really slow down much (ever).  Some point on the road between Germany and Italy, my energy levels overloaded.  You know that freshman stunt where you drink an entire pot of coffee before your first final, before you realize that's a horrible freaking idea, and then you get more and more jittery and it feels like your eyeballs are about to shoot lasers?  That's roughly how I would describe this feeling.  Every time I stopped skiing to shoot I felt like I was going to leap right out of my boots at the massive amounts of jittery energy raging through my body.  And really, it didn't stop much when I was skiing, either.  I felt like I was skiing like a sort of spastic fish, arms and legs all disconnected, and my glide phase totally gone.  And downhill cornering when your legs are shaking like you took a straight shot of adrenaline?  Yikes! Well, it was one hell of a ride.

For a week and a half, this lasted, before, during, and through the races.  That's a damn long time to be riding what feels like an epic caffeine high, with no way to slow down.  I took a lot of days of off shooting after the races here, in attempt to re-center my shooting, specifically standing. It has slowly, ever so slowly, come soaking back into me as I've resettled back onto planet earth.  

Things that re-centered me...

-Firstly, my amazing family often gets up to watch me race, and from the West Coast that's one heck of a time change.  Every time I clean a stage they all get a piece of chocolate.  They are happy skiers themselves, and they really couldn't care less how often I miss at standing.  They're going to be so mad I put them on the internet :D. 

Since Truckee got that ENORMOUS snowstorm of doom, they’ve just been playing in the snow for the last couple weeks (at least that’s how it seems from the pictures).

My mom, conquering the world

My dad, proving that all black is still the most intimidating ski outfit. Fact.

My second oldest brother, Carl, who apparently ran into some wet Sierra snow.

My oldest brother, Garrett, who has never let anything in life bring him down.

-Susan freaking Dunklee.  Seriously, that woman can do anything.  I have what I would best describe as an occasional breathing problem, where it feels like a mountain landed on my chest.  Susan came into my room when I was having an argument with said mountain, and sort of having a loser-like spazz on the floor.  In the next ten minutes, I was changed, up, moving, walking, and breathing like a normal person again.  

I got to do a bunch of workouts with Susan this week, and I decided that I was just going to shoot as fast as our rockstar, and screw where the bullets actually landed.  This worked out really well about half the time, and about half the time I probably sent some fliers right over the mountaintops.  It's really good practice, and really fun to get to shoot with one of the fastest shooters in the world (Susan) and one of the best in the world (Maddie).  Anyway, riding the ski tips of Susan was really fun, because her strongest skiing sections are totally opposite than mine, which forces me to get technical and press sections that apparently I usually just slack the hell off in.  See, this is why you should have friends who kick your ass.

We locked up her crazy though, we'll unleash it for World Champs

I re-f**ked my shoulder on the bench press.  That's the last time I'm EVER doing that workout.  Either I have fragile shoulders (? tendons?), or it's maybe just not the best workout for me to be doing in the middle of ski season, regardless, I don't care what the training plan says, it's out.  Another thing I learned from Suz- stand up and fight for what you believe in.  Anyway, it's not nearly as bad as last time- I can get my arm over my head! I've been giving it a break on easy days so that I can still engage it on intensity days, and it has been soldiering on.  So, all eyes turn to Hochfilzen now.  

-MOUNTAINS.  Woohoo!  

-Also, you guys.  The emails poured in telling me they forgave me for singlehandedly tanking the American relay.  I promise I'll do better, and a special thank you to CBC sharpshooter Julia Collins for sending me a sweet email and some tips on how not to miss :). 

A random assortment of pictures:

This is how we attend morning lectures at 8am.
Me and Susan just chillin in the back getting outraged at bad statistics because we're NERDS. 

Recovery drink..........?

Russell was pissed that I podium swept the high scores on his Tetris
So.....he finally beat me. 

Susan has a grill sponsor, so we did some biathlon tailgating during the men's race

Picture from my friend Gwilbaud of France, who always has a smile for me when I'm warming up, something nice to say after the race, and is his own entire amazing cheering section, singlehandedly.  

This guy... this guy actually kicked me off my mat during zero, because it wasn't as laser-sculpted flat, or something.  I also got booted off my mat during pre-race zero by one of the overly aggressive brass sweepers.  I mean... which one of us is really more important? Not me, apparently!

Grilling pizza out on the deck (courtesy of Susan's grill sponsor). Or, as my mom said,
"A Hawaiian pizza cooked by orange munchkins outside in the snow😋"

Let's just say... we're sort of derpy at picture taking, but we skied to the top of the pass and it was lovely.

That time I started less than an hour after the first starter, and actually got to warm up on the course.

That other time I got to ski a lap with MDH herself.

See you back in Colorado, someday!!

-Joanne