‘Doctors Kept Ignoring My Autoimmune Symptoms Because I Was A Pro Cycler’
I was a hyperactive kid growing up, participating in every sport imaginable: I ran cross country, wrestled, played hockey, raced bikes, snowboarded, Nordic skied—you name it, I was doing it.
I’ve always been really competitive and athletic, but around 12 or 13 years old, I started to feel deeply fatigued, and I was also having some breathing issues. I wasn’t enjoying sports as much and playing them was taking an emotional toll on me. My mom took me to the doctor, and some things came back oddly on the tests, including my thyroid antibodies and function.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was given a tentative diagnosis of Hashimoto’s disease. Knowing something was going on with my thyroid, my mom then took me to a pediatric endocrinologist. But he told us, "Oh no, you are way too young to have a thyroid disorder. That's just a fluke. Don't worry about it."
At that age, I was really opposed to taking medicines—I don't know if that was something I picked up from my parents or the media, but I didn't want to be on medication. So when I got that reverse diagnosis from the pediatric endocrinologist, I thought, Hell yeah, I'm not taking this medication. Even though I have a history of thyroid disorders on both sides of my family, I convinced myself my thyroid was fine, and no one could tell me otherwise. (Later, as an adult, I got a copy of my medical files, in which I found that initial Hashimoto’s diagnosis. It included a note that said: "Patient diagnosed with Hashimoto thyroiditis; has declined treatment; wants no medication." I couldn't believe everyone listened to me at 12 or 13 years old and didn't press proper treatment at the time.)
Throughout high school, I would experience flare-ups where I felt fatigued and not like myself.
After being told at a very young age that nothing was wrong, that's how I continued to live (or, at least, tried to). Despite having symptoms come and go throughout my adolescence, flare-ups they were never as bad as they when I was 12.
At 14, I found cyclo-cross (a hybrid between road and mountain biking), and I got really hooked on it. That's when other sports started to get phased out in pursuit of cycling. But I had these race days where I was just really off, and I felt like my competitors were never as prone to those lows as I was.
When I won my first national championship in the under-18 category, that put me on the radar of a development team, which are typically the teams that are going to have younger riders. By the time I was done with the under-23 category, I had won four national championships. I had medaled at worlds. I was 20 when I signed with my first real big pro team.
At that point, I was doing pretty well, health-wise. I was getting sick sometimes, and I'd have those lows where I was not racing as consistently as other people. But, by and large, I was doing well.
by 2018, when I graduated from college, I was trying really hard to make the Olympics in mountain racing. But I also had a lot of pressure from my sponsors to continue to race cyclocross. I was on fire on the mountain bike. All the important people were saying, "It looks really good for you to be going to the Olympics in a couple years." I thought, Oh my God, it's happening!
Then I go into my cyclo-cross season. I probably didn’t take enough of a break, but I felt so good. I started the season on a winning streak. I won eight or 10 races in a row. I got on the World Cup podium, which is huge and quite rare for Americans to do.
Fast-forward to my first race in Europe, when my emotional and physical health all went downhill.
I was riding around on the course and I thought, I hope I get a flat tire so that I can stop. Immediately I thought, That's not me. That's not how I feel. It was all downhill from there.
Fatigue was always my predominant symptom, but I would cycle through others. They would come in groups: I would be in the rash and hair falling out phase one moment and the stomach-bloating and abdominal-pain phase the next.
In 2019, I finally started the arduous process of going to doctors and getting bounced around and shrugged off.
They’d say, "You're a professional racer. You're still riding two hours a day. How sick can you be?" And I’d respond, "I used to ride five hours a day, now I can only ride two, and I feel like shit. What does that tell you?"
I was 23, and I had no way of dealing with this emotionally. I would get my hopes up going to an esteemed doctor thinking they would help me. But they wouldn’t. It was super devastating. I felt as if I was running out of time. I needed to get this figured out because my whole career was riding on it.
I went to four doctors over about a six-month period before I got a diagnosis. I was relentless. A lot of people aren't like that; can't be like that; don't have the resources or the emotional capacity to be like that. If my entire livelihood weren’t hinging on this, I probably wouldn't have been that relentless either.
The doctor that finally gave me the diagnosis was so kind and took me seriously from the beginning. The reason I went to see him is because I had heard he was especially compassionate to people with mysterious illness. I had even read a blog post of his before the meeting where he described diagnosing people with atypical bloodwork, and how he really focuses on the symptoms more than the markers. That gave me so much confidence, because I felt like he was actually going to listen to me, and he did.
The amount of money that I personally spent is kind of unfathomable. There was a time where I was probably paying $10,000 a year or more. Despite that, finding the right treatment took a lot of trial and error. The conventional medicines I was prescribed weren’t working. My doctors—even the very compassionate one—were not enthusiastic about my trying other options. Nevertheless, I began trying holistic solutions. I started poking around and found out gluten and dairy can be triggering, so I cut them out entirely. That was the first time that I remember feeling a difference.
Another big step forward for me was finally sharing my story.
I didn't tell anyone that I had been diagnosed for a long time. I kept it a big secret. Finally, in May of 2020 during the height of COVID, I decided I had to get it off my chest. I made a video, and the response that I got was so amazing and so positive. It made me feel so much less alone.
During the pandemic, too, I moved to Boulder and made a lot of progress with my health—so much so that I did a socially distanced training camp. I was the healthiest and fittest and happiest I had ever been.
I did my first race back in April 2021. It was two weekends in the same location. The first weekend was okay. I struggled a little bit, but this was just the first step. The second weekend, however, I was crashed out by another rider, and I fractured my spine in three places.
All of the hard work and all of the healing that I had done since 2020, it was gone. All of my symptoms came back tenfold. I didn't need surgery, but I spent 11 weeks in a clamshell brace. After two weeks of rest, I was cleared to do a small amount of training riding upright. A little while later, I started swimming.
The experience just completely shattered my mental health, and I just couldn't do it anymore. Finally, my coach was like, "You can walk out of here and just be done, and we'll deal with the consequences and we'll figure things out from here." And I was like, "Really?" I immediately started bawling my eyes out. That's what I needed and what I wanted.
I’ve been on a sabbatical since 2021. I talked to a clinician about how I was feeling, and I was prescribed an antidepressant. That first one wasn’t exactly what I needed, so four or five months later I switched to another one, and it’s been working really well. My other big change has been supporting my parasympathetic nervous system. I've finally found a place in my life for the self-love necessary to carve out time for meditation, pranayama, and yoga. It's not perfect, and it's not a cure-all, but in combination with weekly therapy and medication, I feel like I am starting to see a new version of myself show through.
My mental health improved long before my physical health.
I only started eating enough, sleeping enough, and being kind to myself to feel any sort of improvement not that long ago. I stopped looking around every corner and thinking there was a flare-up just waiting for me. I told myself, I need to believe that I'm healthy, and I need to believe that I'm capable. I started to see myself as a healthy person again, and I started to make real progress.
For any women who might find themselves in a similar situation, where a physician is dismissing their symptoms—for whatever reason: Just because they don't see you or see what you're going through does not mean that what you're going through isn't valid and isn't very much happening to you. Be comfortable advocating for yourself, and remember that sometimes, you've got to fake it 'til you make it.
Also, if you need a a mental health break from pursuing physical health ailments, take it—I did. I needed to not be in a doctor's office. I had to stop constantly talking about the things that make me feel sick.
Now, I'm slowly starting to train again. It's a very scary decision. It's not the safe choice, and that's part of the reason why I want to make it, because I feel like so many voices in my head are saying, "Don't do it. It's high-risk." But I miss it. I'm an athlete at heart—and I feel like I have some unfinished business. That said, I am working on giving myself grace.
I have so many mantras that I am constantly repeating to myself. I am reminding myself that I am doing this for me, doing this for a different challenge than last time. That I'm not on a timeline. And every day that I push through that self-doubt, rather than give into it, it gets a little easier. Some days it just isn't in the cards, and that's okay. If everything feels like a mess and I just need a "self-care" day to clear my inbox and clean my room and go to Costco, then that's a day when I let myself take training off my plate. And when I get back on the bike the next day, I do it with renewed peace and clarity.
You Might Also Like
