Running for her life
After an eating disorder threatened to derail her athletics career, Kiwi runner Hannah Miller got things back on track, with a little help from her friends. Marc Hinton reports.
For a brief few weeks in Hannah Miller’s burgeoning athletics career the sport she loves, that she had traversed the globe to pursue, was taken away from her. She was removed from a race, barred from the training track. The message was simple: sort her life out – the running could wait.
It is no wonder that now, a halfdozen years on from that seminal moment, Miller finds herself heading down a pathway littered with challenges, where pain goes hand in hand with gain, where perseverance and tenacity is a prerequisite, and mental strength as vital as physical condition.
Miller, now 24, and back in New Zealand after spending the last six years in the American collegiate system, has made somewhat of a sporting shift. After a lifetime running the longer distances on the track, she’s now heading down the marathon route. She’s young to step up to the 42.195km distance (or 26.2 miles, as she thinks of it), but adamant it’s a challenge she can master.
To put her money where her mouth is, Miller, who grew up the eldest of three girls on the family farm in Eastern Southland, and ran her way on to a college scholarship at prestigious Southern Methodist University in Dallas, has not only entered next Sunday’s New Zealand marathon championship in Tai Tapu, south of Christchurch, but set aworld championship qualifying time as her goal.
That’s ambitious, given Miller has run only one marathon in her life (a 2hr 38min 30sec solo effort at a windy Woodlands event in Texas in March) and will have to shave nine minutes off that time (2:29:30) to make it to Oregon in July. But the now Wellington-based athlete is not without hope – the course is reputed to be flat and fast – and is taking a ‘‘give-it-a-rip’’ attitude into the event.
‘‘I like to set big goals,’’ she tells
during a rare pause in her busy week mixing a new career as a policy officerwith the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the near 200km in training she tucks away. ‘‘We have this opportunity, and I feel like, ‘why not just go for it?’ I’d rather shoot for it and know realistically where I am. It’s the same qualifying time as the Olympic standard, so a good indicator for future goals.’’
Miller has gravitated rapidly to the gut-busting marathon after a collegiate career spent mostly running 5000m and 10,000m races, because ‘‘I’ve found the longer I go, the better I tend to be’’.
She did a half-marathon in January in Houston, and ‘‘absolutely loved it’’ (her 1:12:41 was the swiftest by a Kiwi woman in eight years), and after that figured ‘‘why not give the marathon a shake’’?
It’s a long way from that pivotal moment in her first year at SMU when she was forced to confront an eating disorder – a mix of anorexia and bulimia – that manifested between ending her time at school (she was a border at Southland Girls’ High) and heading to Texas to start her scholarship.
‘‘I was quite scared I wouldn’t be good enough when I got over there, I didn’t have anything to occupy my mind and that’s when my head really clicked into counting calories and calculating all these things I really didn’t need to be calculating. Then the spiral started.’’
Miller estimates her disorder had amajor effect on her entire first year at SMU, and was something she was wrestling with even three to four years later. ‘‘There are moments even now where I fall into that pattern of thinking ... but I have the support system around me and can recognise I’m going in that direction and pull myself back out of it.’’
A type-A personality, she was ‘‘very cognizant’’ ofwhat she was doing, and believes it was fuelled mostly by the quest for an advantage in her sport, but also partly by body image.
‘‘I was very lucky a team member at SMU was brave enough and strong enough to pull me aside and say, ‘I know what’s happening’. She went to the coach, and that was a rough couple of weeks. I was removed from a race, wasn’t allowed to run ... it felt like everyone was againstme. Looking back, I’m extremely grateful for them intervening when they did.’’
The Kiwi was essentially marched directly to a doctor, and forced to see a nutritionist. ‘‘I didn’t think I needed help. There was a good 2-3 months ofworking on it every day ... I learnt that running was going to be there to support me, and instead of gaining happiness from success, it was from the gratitude of being able to go for a run. Once I started recovering and was fuelling, my results got better because I was looking aftermyself.’’
Miller was fortunate that around this time the issue of eating disorders became more public. Kiwi athlete Rosa Flanagan, someone she had looked up to, had spoken out about her own issues. ‘‘I admired her, I had screen shots of her on my phone ... then I read her story and thought, ‘it’s not just me’. Athletes sharing their stories can only make the sport amore wholesome and holistic culture.’’
If she has advice for anyone going through something similar, it’s this: ‘‘Reach out and seek support – just tap it out or talk to someone you trust. It’s not easy, but just know it’s so worth it when you’re on the other side of it.’’
Her story, as mentioned, is one of perseverance. Miller’s passion for athletics started via sports days at her rural primary school (she grew up on the family sheep and beef farm just out of Gore), and was ignited at Southland Girls’ when she came under the ‘‘inspirational’’ coaching guidance of Lance Smith.
‘‘I didn’t do anything amazing in high school, and didn’t medal (silver in the 1500m) until my senior year at New Zealand secondary schools. But Lance had this way of instilling confidence that your dreams could be achieved if you kept working towards them. He was a strong believer in the Lydiard principles, and would constantly remind us we don’t want be peaking at 16 or 17.’’
She’s proud of her journey from rural Southland to a scholarship at
SMU, where she would tick off bachelor degrees in political science and journalism, as well as continue to advance her development as a runner, and then go on to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque to add amasters in public policy.
She soaked up her experiences. In Dallas she witnessed great wealth – ‘‘SMU is a private university, and George Bush’s presidential museum is on campus. I met him a couple of times’’ – and in Albuquerque ‘‘it was pretty much the opposite ... a lot of poverty, homelessness, but great people’’.
She never set the world on fire as a collegiate runner, but enjoyed the team environment and kept improving her PBs over all distances from 1000m to 10,000m.
Now, still coached by her New Mexico mentor Laura Bowerman, she is combining her running with a career that has its own demands. She trains for two hours each morning around 5am, and again for an hour in the evening, and tells herself it’s all for a noble cause.
Her ultimate goal is to run the marathon at the Paris Olympics in 2024, Oregon this year would be ‘‘dream come true’’, Kimberley Smith’s national record of 2:25.21 is the holy grail and she’s also eyeing the world half-marathon championships at year-end.
She considers the marathon as much amental challenge as a physical one.
‘‘It’s so big, the only way to get through it is to break it down into small chunks. I mentally click off mile by mile, and assess as I go. You can’t get anxious about the whole event if you’re only thinking mile by mile.’’
As for next weekend, she’s nervous, but calm. ‘‘What’s the worst that can happen?’’ she says. ‘‘You DNF. The next day you wake up and it’s still another day. I’m going to lay it all out there and if it doesn’t come to fruition it’s back to the drawing board and try again.’’
Healthy perspectives are something this young athlete has come to terms with.
‘‘I didn’t have anything to occupy my mind and that’s when my head really clicked into counting calories and calculating all these things I really didn’t need to be calculating.’’ Hannah Miller on her eating disorder