Peninsula High grad on track to recover from Overtraining Syndrome

The stories are a sports-page staple: Athletes achieving greatness by tapping into some inexhaustible inner drive, and discovering the capacity to push through physical boundaries.

This isn’t one of those stories. In fact, it’s almost the opposite.

Amanda Peterson recently threw the javelin farther than any University of Washington woman ever – 174 feet, 2 inches. She currently ranks No. 3 in the country.

The distance is impressive because she’s just 5-foot-5 – considerably shorter than most who succeed throwing the sharp stick.

That it happened at all is more remarkable because it has been only a year since a curious illness and uncharacteristic apathy led her to withdraw from school and competition.

And it wasn’t her massive competitive drive that brought her to this point. It was only after she learned to harness that, and to listen when her body told her to slow down, that she reached this level of success.

With help, the UW junior from Peninsula High School discovered that she had repeatedly pushed herself past her body’s capacity to recover. It created a physical condition – Overtraining Syndrome – that endangered her health and threatened to end her athletic career.

As a sophomore at Eastern Washington, she grew disheartened by her performance. Her marks were not as far as the ones she had in high school on her way to setting the state 3A meet record.

“I expected so much more that I kind of decided to take my training into my own hands,” she said. “I’d do the stuff (coaches) would tell me to do, and then I’d give myself drills to do on top of it, and I started trying to fix my problems my own way.”

She thought getting lighter would make her quicker on the runway, so she began cutting calories to 1,200 to 1,400 a day. She wanted to build endurance, so she’d be up at 4 a.m. to run for up to an hour.

As her marks dropped, she pushed herself harder. And her body rebelled. She suffered a stress fracture in her ribs and some muscle tears, but those were only part of the problem. Her energy level dipped so low that she started drinking three energy drinks a day to try to stay alert in class or for studies in the evening. Diabetes compounded the physical problems.

“When it got bad, full on, I was sleeping 16-18 hours a day ... in bed ... out,” she said.

Previously an honor student, she began skipping classes. A lot of classes. And she was on the verge of flunking out.

“I went to doctors and they thought it was depression because I was always so tired,” she said. “And they experimentally said, ‘Hey, let’s put you on some pills.’ That was an absolute disaster because it made me apathetic. So not only was I tired, I didn’t care, either.”

For someone so highly motivated, to feel as if she simply did not care was a revelation she could not ignore.

“School has always come easily for me,” she said. “I’ve never struggled. And suddenly to be struggling, I knew there was something wrong, but I didn’t know what it was. The doctors said it’s in your head, it’s psychological, it’s depression.

“My dad knew my work ethic and my energy; he knew it wasn’t mental or emotional; there was something physically wrong,” she said. “I had crashed my system; it was like my body was in survival mode.”

She quit Eastern and came home to seek answers.

“I knew I needed to get healthy. I thought, ‘OK, the javelin is done; it was a cool dream but it’s done,’ ” she said. “I didn’t know why this desire to compete was so strong in my heart when my body wouldn’t let me.”

Dr. Emily Cooper at Seattle Performance Medicine provided the answers. The symptoms looked to her like Overtraining Syndrome, and Peterson’s blood tests confirmed it.

“I see a lot of it come in; even in people who aren’t athletes who are dealing with stress overload,” Cooper said.

Cooper described the condition, in which stress short-circuits normal neuro-endocrine pathways. In women, it most notably affects the levels of cortisol – a steroid hormone produced by the adrenal gland.

“People who get it often are the high-achieving, highly motivated people who see things as challenges rather than obstacles, and their focus on goals sometimes overrides the body’s signals,” she said. “The body tells them something, and their response is to push through it.”

Among many other things, Cooper teaches her patients the relationship of food to energy, and to understand the importance of recovery periods after training. It can be a lengthy reconditioning period.

For Peterson, “it took a year of coaxing my body into handling the stress of working out again” with small workouts and restricted heart rates. Blood tests every couple of weeks monitored her physiological response.

By last fall, she was feeling better but still not sure about competing. University of Oregon coaches welcomed her, but she balked and decided to try UW. Her first day, she met the Huskies’ top women’s javelin thrower, Brooke Pighin, and an important friendship formed.

“If I get too excited or overthink stuff, Brooke calms me down,” Peterson said. “She can see if I’m overthinking something on the runway, and she’ll tell me, ‘Take a breath, relax, enjoy it.’ ”

At first, Pighin would tell Peterson to take a break and get water when she sensed the intensity overloading. Peterson said she initially resisted and would argue with her over even minor suggestions like that. Now, the trust is there.

“Sometimes you can see she’ll be trying to analyze herself too much,” said Pighin, who is redshirting this season. “I think the hardest part for her has been learning to trust somebody else, to trust their opinion.”

Peterson is back on her feet academically, and on the track – her school-record throw at the Pepsi Team Invitational in Oregon was 20 feet farther than her best while at EWU.

Peterson competes in the Pacific-10 Conference championship javelin competition Friday afternoon in Tucson, Ariz. The biggest challenge: defending champ Marissa Tschida of Washington State.

The message of her experience?

“Perseverance, I guess,” she said. “You’re always, always going to hit speed bumps. Yes, I’m too short for this event, but somehow it works. And, yeah, I had this syndrome, it was a hurdle and I could have given up, but I had my family supporting me.

“This is like getting another chance, and this time I’m doing it the right way,” she said. “I have the tools, the support, everything I need to keep it going in the right direction. And it’s a blessing.”

Dave Boling: 253-597-8440 dave.boling@thenewstribune.com

About Amanda Peterson Class: Junior

Hometown: Gig Harbor High School: Peninsula

Personal: Born in Ellensburg. ... Won the Washington State 3A title in the javelin as a high school senior, throwing a personal best and meet record of 157 feet, 1 inch at Star Track, the state track and field meet. ... Best throw ranked ninth nationally in 2007 and fourth among all seniors. ... Was undefeated in the javelin her senior year, also winning Olympic League and West Central District championships.