Nancy Hogshead

Asthma Taught An Olympian To Take Care Of Herself

August 20, 1989|By Nina Burleigh.

Olympic gold medalist Nancy Hogshead was on her last race at the 1984 Olympics. She had won three gold medals and a silver medal. Suddenly, she had a bronchial spasm, and fell to last place in the race. Exercise-induced asthma was diagnosed. Since then, Hogshead, now 27, has earned a college degree and taken a job as a motivational speaker for corporations. Recently in Chicago for the Chicago Lung Association, Hogshead talked with freelance writer Nina Burleigh about her asthma and on how she uses attitude to overcome limitation. I used to turn purple-all through my years of practice. But if you want to be the best in the world, you are going to be out of breath. It seemed natural.

I knew something was going on with my lungs around age 14, when I was the number one woman swimmer in the world. I knew I breathed much harder than everyone else during a race and that it took me much longer to recover.

I used to come into the room after practice breathing so hard it irritated people. My friends would think I was faking it to make the coach think I was really working.

I used to pass out during practice at least twice a year. That was a really scary thing. I got bronchitis twice a year. My coach used to tell me at the beginning of a race, `Make sure that you breathe enough.` He was aware that I needed more oxygen than other people did.

In retrospect, it seems of course something was wrong.

At the point where I had the attack in the `84 Olympics, I had raced four of the last six days. There`s a saying we have in swimming-`The bear jumped on my back.` It means when you watch someone else swimming, it looks like they are just stopping in the water. If you are on the sidelines, you are like-`

Move! Get to the wall!`

Usually that happens when someone is swimming too hard before the end of the race.

Well, I just died, I stopped right there. The muscles between my ribs were just as tired as any other muscle I was using vigorously, like my arms or my legs. And the first thing I did when I got out was cough, cough, cough.

A doctor there asked, `Do you cough often after races?` I said yes. He put me on a treadmill; the diagnosis came back, asthma.

I said `Hold on a minute.` I thought he was wrong. I had just been on the cover of Newsweek and my name is real hard to forget. So I said, `Wait, it`s Hogs-head.` He said, `Yeah, yeah I know, but you really do have asthma.` He started ticking off all the symptoms and I recognized them.

The first time I ever took medicine and went out and ran I knew. It was like not having a monkey on your back.

I already knew that was my last Olympic. I had accomplished everything I wanted to accomplish. I had never held a job. I was postponing things in my life. I was 22 and there`s no money in athletics. I had been working out for eight years; that was a long time.

Because I was 22, and I wasn`t young for an athlete, it didn`t occur to me that I couldn`t live the life I wanted. Instead, it was somewhat comforting, because now I knew why I was so sick.

For me it was important to know how not to get sick. I am now running better than I ever did during training. Before, I was the worst runner. Swimming is really good for asthmatics, which may be why I wasn`t diagnosed. If I`d been a runner or a cyclist, I might have had a harder time. But when you swim, you are breathing warm, humid air right on the surface of the water, which is good for the lungs.

It took me a while to learn how not to get sick, though. While I was training, I used to swim 14 miles a day. It took about four or five hours to do, and that kept me in good shape. But after the Olympics, I went back to college at Duke University, and didn`t train anymore.

I`d say the incident that most changed me was having to go into the hospital for asthma two years after the Olympics. It was the first summer after college. I was still athletic, but I was not in shape. I was traveling to more than one city a day for three weeks, doing a public relations tour promoting the Olympic festival, fundraising, all over the country. I was living with different people, new people at every place. I was getting exhausted, but I was planning to go to Ireland for vacation at the end of the three weeks. I just kept telling myself keep working, keep working, vacation`s coming.

I got this cough. I kind of knew what it was, but I kept going, kept drinking coffee, kept staying out late.

Then when I got over to Ireland, I was so sick (with bronchitis), I had to go to the hospital and it ruined my vacation. I wasn`t in shape, I wasn`t exercising and I was pushing it too much. I still had this idea that as an athlete, as an Olympian, I had an impenetrable body.