For Runner With M.S., No Pain While Racing, No Feeling at the Finish | Hacker News Reader

For Runner With M.S., No Pain While Racing, No Feeling at the Finish

nytimes.com

53 pointsdanso13 comments

To me, this article is not about running or a runner. It's about MS. Sadly, it doesn't really go into how MS affects the 2+ million people around the world, or why this story is important.

My best friend has MS. She's had it for half her adult life. She actually has it "good", in that she looks normal and can function through life virtually the same as most other people.

But there are some exceptions, such as the debilitating, random, lightning-like pain that strikes her. The occasional year or two when she can't walk without the use of a cane. The hot summers that make her body almost completely immobile and intensify pain. The fact that she can't dance for more than an hour or two before her cognitive ability reduces to basic motor functions. That there's basically no medication that helps her except for high-strength muscle relaxers that dull the symptoms.

But you know? Besides all that, she has it "lucky". She can run without falling down. She doesn't need a wheelchair or a breathing machine. She even just had her first child with her new husband. But there's the real possibility that at some point, like many other MS sufferers, even feeding herself could become an impossible task, to say nothing of caring for her own baby girl.

I am not this teenage girl, and I can't know how she feels. If it were me, I would be scared of the disease progressing more rapidly by pushing my system. But she's clearly decided that in spite of that she's going to run as hard as she can while she still has the ability. I hope she keeps running and wins every damn competition she can.

I also wish they had interviewed the runner more deeply. I'd speculate that her advantage is almost entirely mental. Middle-distance races inflict pain on the whole body - guts, arms, neck, everywhere - the legs are by no means the only part under stress. The quote about not knowing how much time she had left was also telling: not many high school runners have that kind of motivation, and motivation to train and race is 90% of the competition at that level.

Other than this article seems to proclaim, running success is not predicated on ones resistance to pain, but is rather very strongly correlated with maximal oxygen uptake or VO2max (and in cross country, possibly the genetically predetermined makeup of your muscle fibers).

So instead of taking the othering approach of suggesting her success is the result of her M.S., let's take the rational route and suggest it is a combination of good genetic potential and, most importantly, effective training.

running success is not predicated on ones resistance to pain

For her age group, it generally is. It's rare to find a teen runner who has developed that SEAL-team-like mental resilience to blow through all pain barriers. At the elite level, sure, it usually becomes a matter of genetics handing out that last sliver of advantage. Even at the elite level though (generally 800m+), you still see feats of mental insanity narrowing the gap between actual performance and "genetic max" [1]

Have you ever run competitively?

[1] Obvious example: David Rudisha running his blistering 1:40.91 800m in London 2012, all 8 runners in that race were sub 1:44 and 7 set new personal bests.

I'm not talking about getting those last few seconds in an 800m event. Obviously, at that point VO2max becomes a blunt instrument of little worth. The point still stands, though: aerobic capacity (as indicated by VO2max) is a necessary (even if not sufficient) condition to be even listed on the same page with these people. No pain endurance in the world can get your feet into the door.

Of course, all the boring training doesn't make for a nice story.

huh. i have ms and run. i have not noticed this, although i do have problems "restarting" (when you stop and then need to start running again, it's hard when you're tired). i admit i've never pushed myself to the point where i collapse when finishing - that must take some will-power because it gets progressively harder to control what your damn body is doing.

unfortunately the disease is very unpredictable. in a sense, it's just random "deleting" of nerves. so each person has different symptoms.

anyway, good on her; i hope she's stable enough (things don't get worse) for this to continue (on the other hand, if it were me, and re-mylinization (recovery of damaged nerves) improved my control, i'd take that over running fast...)

This is a classic story of overcoming-adversity, but the astonishing part is that it's not about a great athlete continuing to win after M.S., but a poor athlete becoming great because of M.S. (and due in part, of course, to the girl's new perspective on life):

> Her trajectory as a distance runner has been unusually ascendant.

“When she was diagnosed, she said to me, ‘Coach, I don’t know how much time I have left, so I want to run fast — don’t hold back,’ ” said Patrick Cromwell, Montgomery’s coach. “That’s when I said, ‘Wow, who are you?’ ”

At the time, Montgomery was one of the slowest on her team, completing her first 5-kilometer race in 24:29; by last November, she had run a 17:22, placing 11th in the regional qualifier for the Foot Locker national cross-country championships.

I wish the article would have asked her specifically if she felt that she was able to accomplish this because of the numbness from the M.S. or because of a new found motivation from the diagnosis. Something only she could answer. Either way, I hope her all the best in college.

That's a really great question. I know it's her coach saying this, ‘Coach, I don’t know how much time I have left, so I want to run fast — don’t hold back,’, but hoping it's the latter. Either way, made me feel fairly lazy about not getting out of bed and running this morning

While I understand the attitude of wanting to try as hard as possible while there's still a chance to, I hope she's not actually doing more damage while not being able to really feel what's going on. How do you not destroy your ankles in cross-country while not being able to feel your feet?

At the same time I respect the attempt to triumph over adversity. Took me ten years to get a sub-20 5k, and I'm about the same height and don't have MS.

i think she's track? as i said in my comment, every ms patient is different, but in my experience you need to be running on pretty flat ground because you're basically relying on rhythm (it says this in the article too - restarting after stopping is hard because you really need to think about what you're doing, but once you have a rhythm, repeating is easier). for me, kerbs are a nuisance.

also, the damage can be very specific and subtle. i currently have pins+needles / little feeling in the ends of my toes on my left feet. but i can feel my ankles fine. my thighs, on the other hand, are a random patchwork of feeling and not. and what you can feel and what you can control are often not the same (it seems like nerves that control and nerves that feel are different, and damaged separately, in crude terms; on the other hand you loose the feedback loop).

it's actually very interesting if you can get a little removed from it all (which you do after a year or so). it's amazing how much redundancy there is, for example.

ps running (exercise in general) is encouraged. seems to help the immune system and the inflammation response. in fact, i "got" ms late, after running for most of my life, when i took a year off with a chronic injury. coincidence? who knows...?

This is quite insightful. Thanks for posting.

"left feet" :o) this is why i can't run fast! also "lose" not "loose", sigh...

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