Giving It Everything They’ve Got

During the U.S. Men's Olympic marathon trials Nov. 3, runner Ryan Shay, who had been diagnosed as a child with an enlarged heart, died of cardiac arrest. The next day, new mother Paula Radcliffe, who had trained throughout her pregnancy, won the New York City Marathon. The exact cause of Shay's death is still unknown, and Radcliffe's daughter is fine, but both are cases of athletes pushing themselves to daring extremes. (Teammates say Shay would run on a treadmill until he collapsed.) In "The Agony of Victory," Steve Friedman writes about this tendency and what he calls the "dark nights of the soul of elite athletes." He spoke with NEWSWEEK's Jennie Yabroff.

Is there something unhealthy about how hard these athletes drive themselves?
[Star cyclist] Graeme Obree was pushing himself so hard he was spitting up blood. In ultramarathons, people run until they are hallucinating, puking, cramping.

Have you met any athletes who enjoyed their successes?
There are people I've written about who seemed perfectly content and happy, but they tended not to be champions.

Why do these athletes need to push themselves so hard?
These are people who felt a lack in their lives that only athletics could fill. Scott Williamson, who hiked from Mexico to Canada and back, seemed incredibly lonely, and his solution was to be alone for seven months.

Do you think that with the recent scandals in sports, people are interested in reading about the darker side of athletics?
I hope so! But I wrote the book because these are such great narratives. The question is, did they succeed in their sports because of, or in spite of, this yawning hole they felt in their lives? I think because of it.

© 2007