Olympic dream alive after times of trouble At 44, Tara Sheahan skis past illness, injury, rape

From: JWissmille (jwissmille_at_aol.com)
Date: 10/17/04 

Date: 17 Oct 2004 20:45:06 GMT

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Olympic dream alive after times of trouble
At 44, Tara Sheahan skis past illness, injury, rape

By Chris Barge, Camera Staff Writer
October 10, 2004

Tara Sheahan isn't feeling well. She trained hard last week, on roller skis,
in the gym and in the pool. Then she got a stomach bug.

That's no big deal for a 44-year-old. But it's challenging for an Olympic
hopeful in cross country skiing.

Half a life ago, she hung up her Nordic skis, frustrated that she'd
graduated from college without reaching her ultimate goal. But she has since
battled through deathly illness and confronted the dark event from her
teenage years that hovered like a black cloud over her life.

This winter, she says, she will finally be ready to make the Olympics.

To do that, she will have to ski better than all but two women in America.
The good ones are less than half her age.

She'll need a lot of gumption. In her heart, she says, she knows she has it.

But on this day, she isn't feeling well.

She runs anyway. Within minutes of leaving her house on North Boulder Park,
she's hitting her stride in a gravel alley, running up Mapleton Hill. Then
she feels much better.

Growing up in Breckenridge in the 1960s and '70s, Sheahan was a natural
athlete. Soccer, softball, gymnastics and skiing all came easy.

In high school, her combined high finishes in the downhill and cross country
state championships won her the official title, "Ski Meister of Colorado."
She made the U.S. Nordic Ski Team. Middlebury College recruited her to ski
and run cross country.

She was riding a natural high until one night, when she spent the weekend at
a boyfriend's family home.

This is how she remembers it:

Late at night, as his parents slept upstairs, she and he started messing
around on the living room floor. He went too far.

"No, no, no," she said. "I don't want this to happen."

He was big, athletic and muscular. He had a temper.

"It's OK," he said, as he pinned her down. "It's OK."

Every cell in her body revolted. But she had dated him long enough to know
she couldn't fight him off.

"It's OK, it's OK, it's OK," he said.

She rolled her head back, so she didn't have to see the violation.

She couldn't believe it was happening. Her parents had raised her to believe
that good things come to good people. Until that moment, she believed that
God watched over her.

Mentally, she left her body. A thought came to her:

"Where is my guardian angel now?"

A few days later, he sent her flowers of apology. But she felt shame, and
drew into a darkness she would feel for decades.

That summer, she tried to tell a couple of people about her experience. But
"date rape" wasn't yet a phrase people used. "Rape" was something strangers
did. Anything else was just sex.

Ambitions at bay

She went to college, resolved to put the incident behind her. And she had
the sort of college athletic career that would thrill most athletes. An
All-American in both cross country running and skiing, Sheahan was one of
the best female athletes ever to walk Middlebury's campus.

During two of her four years there, the school won national championships.
She quietly dreamed of Olympic gold, but never quite reached that level.
Many years later, she would look back on both a series of injuries and her
shattered self-esteem as factors that kept her highest ambition at bay.

"Rape affects you on so many levels," she said. "Trust, intimacy with self
and others."

In her last race, the NCAA championships, she tried to pass into first
place, but the leader lost control on a corner and knocked her into a tree.
Skiers piled on top of her. She says she took it as a sign: Time to move on.

"I think I was probably disappointed in myself that I couldn't achieve what
I wanted to, so I ran away to New York, which had no connection to skiing,"
she said.

She got a job after graduation in sports marketing.

A year later, her sister, Keli, followed, and the two became New York City
roommates. Keli watched her sister, as she always had, in awe.

"I describe her as a cat," Keli Lynch said. "She's one of those people who
can always land on her feet."

For 12 years after college, Sheahan "did the corporate thing" in sports
television and the ski fashion industry.

>From time to time as the years went on, she'd let boyfriends know she'd had
a bad experience.

As the term "date rape" became more common, she occasionally told close
friends it had happened to her. "Date rape" was the label that covered her
deep wounds.

"You may acknowledge the Band-Aid and make sure it's still stuck on you, but
you're not going to peel it off because the wound is still fresh," she said.

She met her husband, Casey Sheahan, at a ski industry trade show in Las
Vegas. The couple had two baby boys and eventually moved to Vermont.

She didn't lose sleep over the rape. It wasn't in her nightmares then. It
seemed like a thing of her past.

Something was wrong

Life seemed to skate steadily through the woods for Sheahan until March 1,
1995, while she was alpine skiing.

She heard a pop.

Two of the main ligaments in her right knee were severed. Sheahan had
surgery and expected to return to an active lifestyle.

But something was wrong. After months of rehabilitation, her pain
intensified, spreading to her other knee and her arms. Her brittle body
creaked from the inside out, like a house infested with termites.

The symptoms ate at her: tendinitis, jaw pain, hair loss, weight loss,
memory loss, earaches, mood swings, sleeplessness. She suspected she'd been
bitten by a tick carrying Lyme disease while doing yard work at home in
Williston, Vt. But the basic Lyme screen blood test came back negative.

She went to eight doctors. None could diagnose her.

Then, dementia.

She started forgetting her kids' names. She couldn't recall her own address.
One morning, she found herself driving the kids without a clue as to where
she was heading.

One afternoon, while carrying her younger son, Aidan, who was 3, on her
back, her body went limp. She crashed to the garage floor, paralyzed,
face-down in the grit, felled by what felt like three huge jolts from a
cattle prod. For 15 seconds, she lay there, her sons confused and startled.

And then it was over - like someone threw the breaker switch. For the first
time, she started to accept the idea that she was dying.

In 1996, a doctor in Colorado finally diagnosed her. Sure enough, it was
Lyme disease. She began taking three types of antibiotics, three times a
day.

She forced herself to go for short walks next to a lake near her house in
Vermont. She sometimes lay on the dirt road and stared up through the trees
at the blue sky beyond. Utterly drained, she marveled at the sky, and saw
hope that nature would set her free.

"This is the church," she told herself. "This is the healing church."

And then, she says, a voice within her told her to get up.

"If you stop moving, you will die," it said.

Later that year, the Sheahans moved to Colorado, to let Tara's parents be
closer to her, if in fact she was dying. By then they figured out that the
tick that gave her Lyme disease had also given her a malaria-type parasite
called babesiosis, whose treatment alone would take more than a year.

They settled in Lyons.

"I was honestly convinced that I was going to lose my wife at several
periods in that six to seven years," said Casey Sheahan, who is now
president of Kelty, an outdoor retailer in Boulder. "The Lyme disease was in
her brain and all of her joints and muscles."

She kept forcing herself outside. The doctors say that helped oxygenate her
blood and helped put the bacteria inside her into a less-active state.

Slowly, Tara recovered. And for a window of three good months, she felt
almost normal for the first time in five years.

But her peace did not last.

One day, Tara got sick to her stomach and stayed that way for six months.
She couldn't eat. A doctor told her that a valve in her intestines was
sealing shut, forcing her digestive tract to reject food.

Two years of unrelenting abdominal pains later, an examination found that a
tumor the size of a large orange had grown on one of her ovaries. The only
way to find out if it was cancerous was to have her reproductive organs
removed.

In June 2001, she went under the knife.

After surgery, the doctor told her husband that the tumor was gone. But
she'd found evidence of vast amounts of endometriosis. Rather than slough
off completely during menstruation, the cells on Sheahan's uterine walls had
spread to other organs and anchored themselves like a vine in places like
her colon. As they tore away, they left scars that looked like cigarette
burns.

"She's full of wounds," the doctor said.

All through college Sheahan had suffered through injuries. Then the torn
knee ligaments, the Lyme disease and the tumor. And now this. For the first
time, Sheahan saw her injuries and persistent illnesses as a metaphor. They
were all manifested stress.

In an instant, the source of all her suffering was clear.

"Rape."

She knew she had to confront it. But 24 years of repression would not come
undone easily. She held it inside a little longer as she went into
menopause.

In late September 2001, she got sick to her stomach again, because, she
said, "I had said I had to deal with this rape and I didn't."

She stayed in bed for three days. Her back started hurting.

A friend gave her a book by Dr. John Sarno, "The Mindbody Prescription,"
about repression. In it, Sarno argued that the body creates physical
problems to divert emotional trauma. As she read the book, she started to
lose control - at turns ready to laugh or vomit.

She told herself: "You are afraid of dealing with this rape."

"It was a huge light bulb for me," she said.

She made an appointment with her therapist of nearly five years and told him
for the first time that she'd been raped. She told him about the terrible
dreams she'd recently started having: of being raped; of watching a girl get
raped; of running from a livid rapist.

Her therapist told her she was every person in that dream. She was the
victim, the protector and the raging person who wanted to kill this guy. He
held up a big pillow and told her to unleash her stress. She pummeled it
until her rage was exhausted.

"It was such a release to be able to get rid of that," she said. "It was
awesome. It got me three-fourths of the way through dealing with that
trauma."

Still, this was heavy. It felt out-of-balance, to struggle for seven years
against physical ailments, only to dive into such psychological turmoil.
Each time she felt overwhelmed, she went outside.

"When things are hard and I get stressed, I go for a walk or run and relax
because I feel I have this connection to the natural world. It's very
comforting spiritually," she said.

In the winter, she began running again. And in little time she realized that
a reservoir of talent and desire still existed inside her. Her body
recovered from her workouts, not like a 42-year-old, but like it used to,
when she was 18.

She wondered ... .

She went with her family to watch the cross country skiers compete at the
2002 Winter Olympics near Salt Lake City. One by one, she analyzed the
athletes less than half her age. She decided she could be fast again.

She called Kerry Lynch, a ski coach and a friend.

"Now don't freak," she told him. "I want to run something by you and I truly
want to know - I'm a big girl - I truly want to know what you think."

Should she shoot for the 2006 Winter Olympics?

'Ability to recover'

Sheahan had steeled herself to confront the fact that she'd been raped. Now,
that weight felt balanced by the hope that she might again feel the light
side of being 17.

Lynch put her on a training program and watched in awe as she rose to every
challenge, then came back the next day with the energy of a teenager.

"I ran her through the gauntlet and she took more than any athlete in the
country," he said. "I'd never seen that. She just has this ability to
recover. I call it the Lance Armstrong effect, where someone has been
through trauma in their life."

When her body healed, he said, it became stronger than ever.

For a full year, Sheahan trained hard. It felt good to once again stretch
for a lofty goal. Except this time, that goal was not survival. It was the
Olympics in Turin, Italy.

She had catching up to do. Most significantly, the cross country discipline
of skate skiing had not existed when she was a classic cross country skier.
Developed in Scandinavia in 1984, skate skiing allowed skiers to get out of
the double-grooved rut of classic skiing and skate from side to side on
wide, groomed trails. It enabled skiers to move faster, especially up hills.

She trained on roller skis and watched tapes and DVDs of the world's best
skaters. She recruited several coaches. She soaked up their advice.

"Her work ethic is incredible," Lynch said. "She wants to know it all and is
just a sponge. When you coach people like that, it's just a real treat.
You're not pushing at all. It's just, 'OK, here it is, let's go,' and you'd
better hang on."

Her first year back on skis, she won the women's overall division of the
Governor's Cup in Frisco and the Frisco Gold Rush races. At this year's
Spring Series in Colorado, Sheahan beat many of the country's elite racers.

Her sister said she believes Sheahan will make it to Turin.

"It's a dream she'll realize. I haven't doubted her for a second," she said.
"When she told me she was going to do it I said, 'Great.' She deserves it."

Sheahan has trained all summer, in Boulder, in Jackson Hole and, most
recently, in New Zealand, where she placed sixth in a 21-kilometer race
against members of the U.S. Ski Team and the Canadian National Team.

At a coffee bar one morning in New Zealand, she happened to meet US Ski and
Snowboard Association President and CEO Bill Marolt, a former University of
Colorado skier, ski coach and athletic director.

"Bill, it's really nice to meet you," she said. "I'm Tara Sheahan and I'm
going to the Olympic Games."

Sheahan knows her steepest climb lies ahead of her, this winter. A team
player by nature, she nonetheless knows she could be perceived as a threat
to those who have invested in America's newest generation of elite cross
country skiers. All she can hope for is a fair trial.

Her sponsors, at least, are giving her one. Fischer and Swix, ski gear
companies that sponsored her from age 17 to 20, have picked her up again.

Many more people, however, have told her she's too old. Their skepticism is
normal, not exceptional.

Sheahan returned from New Zealand in late August and immediately began
training again in Boulder, under the tutelage of coach Wolf Wallendorf.

Each day she rises early and runs or roller skis behind her house, around
North Boulder Park. She lifts weights and watches tapes.

She is constantly buoyed by her friends and family, who realize that while
it's easier to expect that Sheahan will fail, it's more inspiring to believe
she will prevail.

"It is amazing," she said, tears forming in her eyes. "I tell my kids, this
disease, all this enlightenment, has made me realize it's easy to think
about death and dying when you've lived so much. I feel blessed to have been
able to live this life. And I never would have been able to live it unless I
had gotten sick and dealt with the trauma of being raped."

She wants it known that she is not a victim.

"I take full responsibility for my happiness, today, tomorrow and every
day," she said. "I'm blessed to be here."

Contact Camera Staff Writer Chris Barge at (303) 473-1389 or
bargec@dailycamera.com

Copyright 2004, The Daily Camera and the E.W. Scripps Company.

 

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