Before Desiree Linden Won Boston, She Almost Quit Running
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I woke myself with a gasp: one big, sharp inhale. Ryan, my husband, didn’t stir. Our bedroom was pitch-black and silent. The wind off Lake Michigan was absent, for once, and I didn’t hear the usual rhythm of waves lapping at our shoreline.
It was the summer of 2017, a couple months after the Boston Marathon. I lay on my back and tried to process why I was awake when I had done nothing but sleep for weeks. There was no fragment of a nightmare floating in my mind, no pounding heart.
In fact, no heartbeat at all.
Fear surged through me. Had I woken up because I’d stopped breathing? I held completely still and listened for the reverb in my chest. Finally, I detected it, shallow and faint, alarmingly slow.
I was afraid to go back to sleep. I was afraid I wouldn’t wake up.
My life didn’t flash before my eyes. I didn’t review the tailspin that had led to this night, how I had spiraled in a matter of months from one of the fittest people in the world to someone who struggled to climb a flight of stairs, my senses dulled, barely functioning. There was room for only one train of thought in my head.
I don’t want to die. That’s an improvement. At least I’m feeling something.
As I fought sleep, knowing I would lose, I made a decision.
If I wake up, I’ll take the medication.
I made my marathon debut in Boston in 2007, and race day cemented my new love affair with the distance and the one-of-a-kind setting. Ever since then, even as I raced around the globe, in World Majors and two Olympics, winning Boston was my dream. “I’ve watched this race, and the winners aren’t doing anything I can’t do,” I told my coaches in 2010. The following year, I came in second place—losing by just two seconds.
The course and I had our ups and downs throughout the years, but 2017 was the year I was going to win in Boston. I visualized it every day for months: fighting for the win down Boylston Street, breaking the tape, feeling the olive wreath placed on my head. I was very public about that goal and my confidence that I could achieve it. It felt as if everything had aligned, and everyone around me—my coaches, my sponsors, the media—kept reinforcing that I had the endurance.
My concept of endurance included more than lean muscle mass, high cardiovascular capacity, mental toughness, and a finishing kick. It was about maintaining relentless forward progress, and I had done that. I’d dealt with only one major injury—a fractured femur—and failed to finish a marathon just once in my entire career. Otherwise, I hadn’t run a single bad marathon. I had slowly worked my way back and finally surpassed my fitness level from the near-win in 2011. I was ready to validate the work of the last 10 years. I felt due for a payoff.
And then it wasn’t even close. Edna Kiplagat, running Boston for the first time and looking to add one more accolade to her already brilliant résumé, accelerated at Mile 18 and torched the field. She split 4:50 at Mile 20 and won by a full minute. Edna was Edna, and the fact that she landed on the top step of the podium wasn’t a shock—the shock came from the way she demolished the rest of us.
What unfolded behind her was a surprise as well. I fully expected one of her two closest chasers to fall away: Rose Chelimo, from Bahrain, and Jordan Hasay. It was Rose’s second marathon and Jordan’s debut in the event. I followed my game plan precisely, splitting 1:12:33 in each half, knowing historically that it should give me a shot in the last six miles. But no one faded. Instead, they powered away at a pace I had never witnessed before in the Newton hills, and I finished fourth.
I didn’t register the whole picture until later; I couldn’t afford to think negatively on the road. Even when things didn’t seem to be falling my way at Mile 22 or 23 or 24, I had to keep pressing and stay in position to capitalize if my luck changed. I believed the race could pivot within instants if I caught someone going backward, and I knew how much ground I could make up even as late as the last few city blocks.
Reality hit me within a couple of hours. Nike athletes had swept both the women’s and men’s podiums. Both winners and three of the other four top finishers had worn the company’s new Vaporfly shoes, which had been a mere rumor at the Rio Games the year before. They were said to improve running economy by as much as 4 percent, and other companies were scrambling to match the technology. “You finished second of the athletes without bouncy shoes,’’ said one agent who sidled up to me afterward.
The well-meaning comment added to my sense that something had slipped through my fingers and a lot of my hard-earned knowledge had become irrelevant. Boston’s unique course and the tactics it dictated had a hundred years of history. Not that any race was totally predictable, but there were certain patterns and trends I’d learned to count on. Was that all upended now? Had I just seen a turning point for how all marathons were run? Would Boston become indistinguishable from other races?
I was 33, and I’d never won a marathon. Maybe I needed to look for that somewhere else: a smaller-market race or a different event. Deep down, I still believed I was capable of winning a major, but continuing to chase that dream while competing against what felt like nefarious forces struck me as insanity. It seemed like time to readjust my expectations and where I chose to invest my energy.
I knew the Abbott World Marathon Majors were trying to keep elite fields clean and results believable. With prize money and credibility at stake, the WMM, organizers of the six biggest marathons in the world, including Boston, had instituted an additional drug testing program in 2015, but there was no foolproof system. If there were athletes exploiting the gray areas in anti-doping, I couldn’t outwork or outsmart them. They were playing a different game. I questioned what I would learn about myself by racing them. It felt like a waste of valuable time.
The way I saw it, my forward progress was blocked, and my window to win a major marathon had slammed shut. My 2011 stretch duel with Caroline Kilel, the winner of Boston that year, once so motivating, now loomed as a depressing reminder of what could have been. Overall, my sport seemed to be descending into disorienting chaos. It seemed easier to let go of ambition and stop caring.
When Josh Cox, my agent, began his formal conversations with Mary Kate Shea—who was then the elite athlete coordinator for Boston’s principal sponsor, John Hancock—about Boston 2018, she surprised both of us by bumping my appearance fee offer higher than it had ever been, without any of the usual negotiating. I took it as an acknowledgment of my consistent performances there and an indication that she still believed in me.
Now all I had to do was convince myself.
I took an unusually short break after my 2017 loss in Boston and jumped right back into training, trying to look at the road ahead, not behind. I told myself I’d run a strong race—again—and it was something to build on. Josh and I started sketching out the rest of the year, and decided I might run Chicago that fall, but negotiations dragged on longer than we expected. At one point, he promised to get an offer to me the next day. Three days later, he called me back with a six-figure deal. “I don’t care,’’ I snapped. “You’re late.’’ I ruled out a fall marathon.
Impatience was my default mood as spring shifted to summer—bouts of irritability and negative thinking I normally wouldn’t allow myself. It was the opposite of my mindset last year, when everything seemed to be lining up ideally for me. Now even the most reliable parts of my life seemed complicated and enervating. The newest version of the Glycerin, my favorite Brooks training shoe, felt heavy and tight and made my routine runs miserable. I had to stop, adjust the laces, and stomp and shake my feet because they were going partially numb. I’m getting blisters all over, the foam is not responsive, this is the best shoe ever, and they ruined it, I thought. I’m doing my job, why can’t they do theirs?
My training was solid, not great, but nothing clued me in to what was about to happen. I had entered the Gold Coast Half Marathon in Queensland, Australia, in early July, an atypical detour in my schedule. The goal was to crack a good one, put Boston in the rearview, and find a new way to progress. Kevin Hanson, my coach, and I were banking on the flat course, ideal conditions, and my residual marathon strength to guarantee a morale booster. That strategy backfired when I finished in 1:12:15, more than two minutes off the personal best I was shooting for.
I stood in the cooldown area, consumed with frustration. Kevin listened to me vent, sympathetic but as confused as I was. This felt like an inexplicable slump. I wasn’t injured or in pain. My body just wasn’t responding, and I couldn’t put my finger on what was wrong. I was desolate, sure that I had wasted a massive chunk of my life chasing a ghost, accomplishing nothing of meaning.
I was also losing faith in the Hansons brothers’ ability to adapt their training philosophy and help me evolve and improve as an older runner. Kevin, and his brother Keith, had shifted away from the founding concept of the Original Distance Project in a way that bothered me. When they added a marquee athlete such as Shadrack Biwott—whom I liked and respected personally—but didn’t ask him to move to Michigan from California, contribute to group training, or even follow the training program, it made me feel as if we were teammates in name only.
My disenchantment turned to anger shortly after I got home from Australia, when I read—on Twitter—that the Hansons had signed veteran marathoner and former Nike Oregon Project athlete Dathan Ritzenhein.
A U.S. Anti-Doping Agency investigation into the group alleged violations and bending of anti-doping rules were both nauseating and infuriating. It included the bombshell that Alberto Salazar, the head coach of the Nike Oregon Project and legendary marathoner, had experimented with the use of supplemental testosterone on his own sons, who were not professional runners. The report confirmed the rumblings we’d been hearing for years. I limited myself to one snarky Tweet on the subject in June, posting side-by-side images from news stories. The first showed Alberto gesticulating, wearing a backpack, under the headline “Two years and counting: the investigation into the Nike Oregon Project continues.” The other was of a carrier pigeon nabbed by police for carrying a little pack filled with Ecstasy pills. My caption was: “But who wore it better?”
Dathan had cooperated with the investigation, and his name was all over the report. He’d given an extensive interview under oath to USADA about his six years with Alberto, during which he was often injured and in fear of having his Nike contract terminated or reduced. He told USADA that he’d started taking synthetic thyroid hormones at Alberto’s urging to try to raise his testosterone level—even though nothing in his reported bloodwork outwardly suggested a need for that treatment. Dathan also received injections of L-carnitine, an energy-boosting amino acid that wasn’t a banned substance but had been administered in doses that appeared to be over those allowed by anti-doping rules. Signing him two months after these details had become public blew my mind.
The Hansons had talked to me earlier in the year about their desire to bring on Dathan. He was from Michigan; they’d known him since he was a kid. I told them I thought that was great. I’d been a fan of his even before I witnessed his stellar 5,000 in Zurich back in 2009. Everyone liked Dathan, he would be a high-profile add to the group, and I was always inclined to give athletes the benefit of the doubt. But the revelations of the report changed everything, from my perspective. “Wow, lost a lot of respect for Dathan,” I emailed Kevin. They never brought it up with me again. After I posted the double-backpack tweet, Kevin texted to let me know that one of my training partners thought it was “hilarious,’’ but he didn’t respond when I asked what Dathan thought. It was admittedly passive-aggressive on my part, but at least I was trying to start a conversation. I did reach out to Brooks for advice on how we were supposed to handle questions about Dathan and was told we would figure it out when it happened.
How could the Hansons proclaim they had zero tolerance for shortcuts and then sign someone who had flirted with ethical lines, from a group that was still under investigation? My take was that they were turning their backs on everything they had asked the team to believe in. Our communication began to break down at that point, but there was no big, dramatic rupture between me and the Hansons. It was more like a hairline crack that widened, imperceptibly at first and then more obviously into a rift that couldn’t be patched. And my inner pessimism clouded over any motivation I might have had to repair at the time. I couldn’t even run a decent half marathon, so what was the point?
Hard to say what I might have done if I hadn’t had the prospect of a good payday in Boston. I committed to that deal in mid-July 2017 and told myself I had nine months to get myself ready. I didn’t count on having to deal with the biggest blindside hit of my life.
“We’re going through an absurd amount of Drano,’’ Ryan said to me one day that summer. Clumps of hair pulled loose in my hands every time I took a warm shower, something I found myself doing two or three times a day because I felt cold all the time. My legs tingled, and my feet kept falling asleep—as they had in the buildup for Australia—even when I wasn’t running. Could that really be all down to the shoe? My training log, usually hard evidence of inspiration, started to resemble Swiss cheese, with more holes than substance. My mysterious lack of motivation and the way I was laboring through recovery runs made me wonder if I might be iron-deficient, and I got some bloodwork done.
I was convinced I had to be allergic to our new golden retriever puppy (named Boston). It was the only big change in my surroundings. Within a few days of having Boston, my eyes dried out and itched constantly, and I felt short of breath. I had zero practice at feeling this bad for no discernible reason. It was unnerving, and I felt myself becoming combative.
Our friend Reid Buchanan was running a mile race in Charlevoix. Ryan invited him to stay with us—even though he was going to be out of town for 10 days.
It was bad timing, leaving the four of us together: Reid, who had retriever-level drive himself; Boston, the exuberant, oblivious puppy; my older dog, Atlas, who hated nearly everyone; and me, who definitely hated everyone at that juncture. Verbally jousting with Reid was usually a favorite pastime of mine on training runs, but I didn’t have the energy or sense of humor for debates, so, instead, I sniped at him, “Shut up. I don’t care.’’
When Reid’s training stint ended, I drove him to Detroit Metro Airport, four hours south. I had to keep the radio on high volume and the AC on full blast to keep myself from nodding off at the wheel. I shouldn’t be driving, I thought, and actually pulled over to nap on the way back. When I got home, I put Boston in his crate and crashed. It was my 34th birthday, and I spent most of it either sleeping or crying. I didn’t know why I was so sad, and I had no interest in figuring it out.
I went back downstate again for a scheduled workout with Kevin. He asked me how I’d been doing since Australia, and I told him a very condensed version of the truth: Not good. My training runs had been a minute per mile slower than usual yet seemed significantly more difficult. I had put on weight while building up mileage, which didn’t make sense. He rattled off the prescribed session, a simple progression run to gauge where I was at: “Six-mile workout, super easy, start at six-minute pace for two miles and build into it.’’
I started crying. Kevin was a little stunned. So was I.
“You don’t have to do it,’’ he said.
“I think I should. I need to get back in shape.’’
That’s what I said out loud. Inwardly, the thought that I might not be able to execute a simple workout completely flustered me. I couldn’t stomach another disappointment. After years of being hungry to learn and know what was next, I didn’t want to discover that the magic I’d always found in running, the inner light of talent and self-belief, could be ebbing away. I was mentally running alongside my former self and getting dropped.
My fears materialized as soon as I started. Right foot, left foot, no rhythm. First mile: 5:59. I couldn’t breathe. Second mile: 6:20. No way would I be hitting any splits.
We stopped the workout. “Go home,’’ Kevin said. “I don’t know what’s wrong, but something is clearly not right.’’ I got the results of my bloodwork later that day. The level of the muscle enzyme creatine kinase (CK) in my blood was off the charts: 900, when the usual range is below 100. My iron level seemed fine, and my white blood cell count was a little low. I forwarded the numbers to John Ball, my chiropractor, who was in Canada.
“Did you have a hard workout?” he wrote back. Yeah, no.
Back in Charlevoix, I huddled under a pile of blankets on the couch, freezing in early August and brain-fogged, with zero attention span or ability to concentrate. I was attempting to read the novel A Gentleman in Moscow but couldn’t hold the book upright. My arms, shoulders, and neck were leaden. I felt as if I were on a dimmer switch being dialed down by some unseen hand, watching it happen from the one lucid corner of my mind, a hostage powerless to change it. This is who I am now. I don’t have any motivation to be better. I don’t want to be a nicer person. I just want to stay in bed. I wasn’t consciously suicidal, but I also didn’t care if I woke up.
Ryan had been pestering me to eat since he’d come home, only to watch me doze off at the table. I kept telling him I had to be allergic to the puppy. The first week of August, his concern peaked.
“You can’t walk up a flight of stairs,’’ he said. “You have to go see someone.’’
I was beyond being combative. The next day, Ryan drove me to the Urgent Care clinic, where a doctor saw me, took my information, and ordered a blood panel. The voice mail message came in hours later: “You have severe hypothyroidism.”
I called Kevin. I laughed when I told him the diagnosis, and I knew he would appreciate why. I was convinced that hypothyroidism was a buzzword, a trendy diagnosis especially prevalent in my sport, and the USADA investigation had only confirmed that. “This wasn’t even on my radar,’’ I said. “There’s no family history. I don’t even know where my thyroid is.’’ Kevin was concerned but thought that Urgent Care wasn’t the most reliable source, and he suggested I get a second opinion.
Ryan and I found a family practice that was reputable and, more important, could get me in immediately. The next day, I was ushered into an exam room. A nurse practitioner walked in. I was righteously indignant.
“They called me yesterday and said I had a thyroid problem, and I want to get a real opinion, not Urgent Care.”
“Urgent Care called you?’’ she said, sounding surprised. “They don’t call anybody unless it’s an emergency. Do you have your bloodwork? I’ll go check and see what’s going on.”
She wasn’t gone for long. Her face was lined with concern when she came back.
“You need to get on meds yesterday,’’ she said. “I’ll send in the prescription for 75 micrograms of Synthroid.” She paused, looked at me, and adjusted. “I’m going to write it for 125.”
The prescription was for synthetic thyroid hormone, an irony that struck me with almost palpable force. The brand name, Synthroid, rang out like a four-letter word. In my mind, thyroid medication was a shortcut drug, something athletes had sought out or been instructed to take with no true medical need. I felt a flash of fear, subsumed swiftly by anger.
“No way,’’ I said. “Not doing that.”
The nurse practitioner regarded me with a mixture of compassion and exasperation.
“You’re welcome to seek another opinion from an endocrinologist, but your body’s thyroid hormone levels are so low that if you don’t start taking the medication now, you’ll be in a coma, or dead, before you can get an appointment,’’ she said. “Your muscles are breaking down, your liver is being damaged, there’s a good chance your cholesterol is high. Your body is prioritizing the essentials, and everything else is shutting down. That’s why you’re sleeping so much. I’ll send the prescription in. You must feel horrible.’’
“I can’t just take whatever,’’ I said. “I get drug-tested. I need a therapeutic-use exemption.’’ I was flailing, and I was wrong. Thyroid medications didn’t require a TUE—that was likely why they had become so popular in sports.
“Do whatever you need to,’’ she said. “I’ll fill out whatever paperwork you need. You have to get on this now, or you’re going to die. You don’t have time to get to a specialist before this becomes serious.’’
I still wasn’t buying it. How many years had I been pushing my limits? I would get through this. I always had. Bones knit back together. Bodies recovered.
Wasn’t it possible I just needed more rest? I couldn’t remember the last time I’d taken as much as an ibuprofen. Now I was being told I’d have to be on medication for the rest of my life, by people who had known me for all of one day. This medication, with all its baggage? Wouldn’t people think I was a hypocrite?
Nothing much had made sense to me recently in my constant state of depletion, this least of all. How could I be dying when I had as much endurance as any athlete in the world? I went to bed still resisting the notion and sank immediately into my usual deep-water sleep. Until the middle of the night, when my survival instinct kicked in, and I surfaced, gasping for air.
I started taking the medication the next morning and waited to see what would happen. It took about a week before I noticed any change. Sensation—heat and the slow pulse of bloodflow—returned to my hands and my face. Slowly, I got stronger. The day I walked upstairs without feeling winded was cause for celebration, but also signaled the total rebuild that lay ahead.
I was still fragile and flattened when the World Championships started in August in London, and dozed on and off for most of the women’s marathon coverage. But I watched the last six miles fully tuned in as my old friend Amy Hastings Cragg hung tough in a lead group of four. Emotions rolled through me with the force of actual waves as I rooted for her to hunt down that dream we’d both wanted forever. The women who had finished one-two in Boston switched places, as Rose Chelimo eventually outkicked Edna Kiplagat for the win. Amy sprinted for third, finally rewarded with a medal for all those years of hard work—some of which we’d done together. It was validating to see her compete with the best in the world. It brought back that bold, youthful take we had on our shared long runs: Why not us? Why not me? I was thrilled, yet found the excitement exhausting and slept for the rest of the day.
I had to reconcile the fact that I wasn’t bulletproof, that I needed to get well, that taking medicine didn’t confer an advantage in the sense I had always thought of as cheating. It would simply treat very real and serious symptoms. The realization was humbling and illuminating. My diagnosis made me take responsibility for my health.
I read more about hypothyroidism and learned that if I’d gone untreated much longer, my body’s vital systems would have continued to decay, leading to a severely altered mental state and even unconsciousness, clinically known as myxedema coma.
I also realized that my thyroid issues had been brewing probably for at least a year, maybe longer. I would get a sore throat or lose my voice out of nowhere, or feel what I thought was the flu taking hold. I’d rest, it would pass, and I’d move on without noticing the pattern. Still, I wondered how I could have seen myself in the mirror in the late stages—my swollen eyes, the missing outer third of my eyebrows, the skin on my face forming folds like a Shar-Pei’s from retaining water—and not understood how much trouble I was in. Tolerating what most people would consider intolerable is the flip side of endurance. I couldn’t wish that out of myself, but I could take the mindset and discipline I used as armor and channel them toward something more sustainable.
I needed a new template to continue progressing. I was a different person and a different athlete than I’d been two or five or ten years before. I didn’t want to go back to the workout schedule rooted in cumulative fatigue that I knew the Hansons would send me, and I didn’t want any part of their revamped team. Ryan and I loved our lives in Michigan, and we had zero desire to relocate for me to join another group. I was going to have to construct my own way forward.
Most relationships in sport don’t last forever, but I hadn’t anticipated splitting with Kevin and Keith. At a press conference just the year before, I had said, “I’m going to finish my career with these guys. I’m never going to be with a different coach. It’s worked super well. We’re always on the same page.’’ There were just too many reasons to turn that page now.
But I knew all of that would be irrelevant if I didn’t have a future in running, which seemed murky at best. I had the financial base—a long-term Brooks contract and the Boston 2018 deal locked in—but my health situation would take a while to reset. On many days, I doubted whether I had enough time or patience to get myself in top form by the third Monday in April, but I restrained the impulse to make any big decisions. I didn’t run a single purposeful step in August and September, and resolved to let my motivation and interest steer me. When I miss running, I’ll start running again. No rush. I spent long, peaceful hours kayaking and fishing, trying to define my own happiness. I kept my condition private and let the public and media think it was a mental health break.
When I started training again, I tried to keep in mind that I was rehabbing from more than a stress fracture. Getting in shape after the broken femur was straightforward, if tedious. It was a matter of putting in time and seeing the logical return on that investment. By comparison, up against something systemic and invisible such as thyroid levels, I faced a new mini-mystery every day. I didn’t know when and how I’d get knocked down. I wasn’t sure about my next steps as I tried to piece together a workout and race schedule that would get me ready to run respectably in Boston. I looked for shorter races where there would be few to no expectations freighted on me.
In November 2017 I flew east for the New York Road Runners’ 5K event that ends at the NYC Marathon finish line in Central Park, but deliberately left the city the day before the marathon. I was still too raw and disillusioned to spend much time around industry people, and the slow estrangement from the Hansons had begun to affect my all-important relationship with Brooks. I felt I was being viewed as a Hansons product, not an individual athlete, but I also sensed it was in my best interests to pretend outwardly that things were fine—or there could be consequences.
My only curiosity about the NYC marathon was how Shalane Flanagan would do, coming back from injury. She was the top U.S. woman in the race, but, as usual, given the drought that stretched back to the 1970s, she wasn’t the favorite. I had come a long way in my view of her, from competitive antipathy to admiration. Sure, she was a rival, and I badly wanted the chance to test myself against her again. But now, with more maturity, I also regarded her as a teammate—not just because we’d competed in the same colors at the Olympics but because we had pushed each other and our peers to be better, to refuse to let ourselves be haunted by past disappointments, to get to a place we might not have reached on our own. We had a mutual, well-earned respect.
I sent Shalane a good-luck text early on race morning. She was on the bus to the start and answered with a joke. She’s in a good headspace, I thought. I’d had no intention of watching, but on a hunch, I changed my mind. I sat riveted, my eyes welling up with emotion, as Shalane distanced the rest of the field and ran solo for the last three miles. I flashed back to 2009, when she hadn’t yet run a marathon and came to New York to check out the event. She and I had watched Meb Keflezighi win together from our VIP perch in the back of the press truck; now she was about to join him on the list of champions. I could see her gaining conviction and getting stronger as she closed out the race. I reached for my phone and tapped out a Tweet: In tears. Thank you @ShalaneFlanagan for giving us something to believe in. Congratulations!
Right foot, left foot, repeat. There was no other way to begin to move forward again. But now that I had chosen to go back to work, even with my newly restored faith in the world of running after Shalane’s win, I would have to redefine what progress means to me, how to make it lasting.
Adapted from CHOOSING TO RUN: A Memoir, by Des Linden with Bonnie D. Ford, to be published 4/4/2023 by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Desiree Linden.
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