Nutrition - Weight Loss Kim Smith has endured radical foot surgery, childbirth, and a stint in the cardiac intensive care unit, it may be surprising that her most painful day of the year—psychologically, at least—came last Monday, when her teammate Molly Huddle last Thursday, said that she texted Health - Injuries.
“I was so upset, I cried afterwards,” said Smith, who followed the race online from her home in Providence, Rhode Island. “I can’t even imagine how upset she is. It was awful. It was sickening.”
Considering that in the past 12 months Runner’s World Newswire last Thursday, said that she texted Huddle after the race, but had yet to speak with her. “I just want to leave her to grieve,” Smith said. “But [the race] shows that she can win a medal in Rio, I think, and she just needs to focus on that.”
The Rio Olympics are also Smith’s competitive focus following a series of major—and in one case, dangerous—medical challenges. Last summer, after struggling through more than a year of left foot pain, an MRI revealed that the three-time Olympian for New Zealand had ruptured her posterior tibial tendon, and that the tendon had retracted up her leg.
“An earlier MRI showed it was just tendinitis, so I was still running 80 miles a week at that point, and trying to do tempo runs that were extremely painful,” said Smith, now 33. “I thought I was just being a wimp, but it turned out I was being crazy.”
Advertisement - Continue Reading Below Foot Locker XC Results to repair the damage. “It involves taking a tendon from your little toes and drilling a hole in the navicular bone, threading it through, and attaching it to your tendon to replace it,” she said.
Two weeks later, Smith became pregnant. “I knew I was going to have to have an extended time off, so it ended up being good timing,” she said.
Smith and her husband, Patrick Tarpy—who got married in 2012, less than a month after Smith placed 15th in the London Olympic marathon—were pleased to be expecting. But a major medical ordeal was in front of them. At some point, either when she had the tendon surgery, or else, she guesses, during her pregnancy, Smith developed several large pulmonary emboli—blood clots in the lungs.
“Halfway through [my pregnancy] I started feeling bad,” said Smith, who rehabbed her foot during her four months of pregnancy and then started running again at five months. “I ran every day until three days before I gave birth, but I was really tired—I would run and then I would have to sit on the couch all day. I just thought it was harder to breathe because I was pregnant. Looking back, I had a lot of the signs that I was developing these clots in my lungs.”
Smith delivered a daughter, Violet Mary, via cesarean section on June 5. “Six pounds, two ounces of cuteness,” the proud mom tweeted.
But in the weeks after bringing Violet home, Smith struggled with overwhelming fatigue. “I thought I was just tired from having a newborn baby,” she said. “I started crying all the time, and I thought, Oh, maybe I have postnatal depression, but then I was like, this doesn’t feel right.”
The situation culminated in the first week of July, when Smith, who had developed a cough, went for a walk and felt breathless. The sensation reminded her of an incident from 10 years earlier, when she had developed a pulmonary embolism following Achilles surgery. Recognizing the feeling, Smith called her doctor, who sent her straight to the emergency room. Initially, the ER doctors didn’t think she had an embolism, but a CT scan showed many large clots in her lungs.
Smith was transferred to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston for a relatively new (and voodoo-sounding) surgery, throughout which she was conscious. “They actually put a catheter into your lungs through your neck and exploded the large clots with medicine,” Smith said. “I Googled it before I was getting it and saw that Serena Williams had had that same procedure and was back playing at Wimbledon three months later. It actually makes recovery faster.”
A relatively speedy recovery was little consolation for a new mother whose weeklong hospital stay forced her to be separated from her newborn child. And despite suffering from excruciating post-procedure back pain, Smith woke up in the hospital every three hours to pump breast milk. Tarpy, a Brown University graduate and former 13:38 5,000-meter runner, transported the milk in a cooler back to Violet in Providence, sometimes making the Providence-to-Boston trip twice a day, in what turned out to be an Olympian effort by the whole family.
Smith tested negative for the genes that indicate a predisposition to blood-clotting disorders; the cause of her repeated pulmonary emboli remains a medical mystery. What is clear is that she will be on Warfarin, a blood-thinning medication, for the rest of her life. She says she opted for Warfarin over some newer anti-coagulant drugs, which require less-frequent monitoring, because she knows from her previous experience with it that the drug doesn’t adversely affect her running.
“The years that I was on Warfarin, those were my best years of running,” she said. So might there be a performance benefit? Will a therapeutic-use exemption be required? “Oh god, no. It’s basically rat poison. So it’s definitely not a good thing [to be on], but it doesn’t seem to devastate me too much.”
Smith, who set her marathon PR of 2:25:21 at the 2010 London Marathon, has resumed running, with an eye toward competing in the 10,000 meters at next summer’s Rio Olympics. (New Zealand’s Olympic committee set a marathon qualifying standard of 2:27, and she might not have enough time to run that fast a race, recover from it, and be ready to go 26.2 miles again in Rio.) She says her repaired foot and de-clotted lungs are holding up well, and she hopes to intensify her training in a few weeks, when she’ll have a part-time babysitter to look after Violet.
For now, she’s enjoying her new daughter, taking it easy, and celebrating the fact that she is back to running after her brutal ordeal. “It’s definitely been rough, but I’m running over an hour a day now,” she said. “I know people get injured after having babies a lot, so I’m trying to take it slow, and I definitely have some reasons to take it slow.”
