In today’s day and age, sports crave the newest and youngest talent, often at the expense of the wise veteran.
In the case of Erin Donohue, she has experienced both the role of the up and comer and the savvy expert.
The only difference for the Haddonfield product is that she didn’t get the opportunity to experience everything in between.
She qualified at age 25 for the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing as her career looked to be taking off. Little did she know the next Olympics that she would be competing in would not be until 2016.
Donohue suffered a heel injury that seemed to be nothing more than a slight setback that would require a minor surgery.
The injury was triggered from chronic tightness in her calves that seemed to plague Donohue since her early days.
This is something that Donohue admitted to approaching with somewhat of a haphazard attitude since she was younger.
“With a better stretching and maintenance program I may have been able to prevent it if I constantly worked on flexibility but I didn’t,” Donohue said. “Half of my job is training hard and the other half is the maintenance and recovery aspect, and I didn’t pay enough attention to that half because I could get away with it when I was younger.”
Tight calves, hamstrings and hips are a common problem in runners of her magnitude, but in 2011 it really started to become a problem for her, impacting her training.
At the age of 28, after 15 years of training mileage, running upward of 80 to 100 miles per week, this was something that she put her body at risk for by being on such a strenuous training regimen.
“If you run long enough, everyone has something,” Donohue said. “If you push yourself hard enough, the weak link in your body will eventually show up.”
What was originally a heel spur was eventually diagnosed as Haglund’s Syndrome, a deformity that arises when the bony section of one’s heel, where the Achilles tendon is located, becomes enlarged.
The bursitis she was initially diagnosed with was an inflammation of the fluid-filled sac that separates the tendon from the bone. When the heel became inflamed, it led to the calcification of her heel bone, causing the pain to become even more prominent and painful.
“It wasn’t this giant debilitating injury that required a wheel chair like you see a lot in sport these days. It was relatively small, but it’s a bone and tendons and muscles that have a big impact on a runner. Two-thirds of my body weight came down on that one point every time I ran,” Donohue said.
Not long after she was diagnosed, she found herself in surgery in hopes of getting her ailment fixed and getting back on the track as soon as she possibly could.
The surgery consisted of sawing off a little piece of the bone, which was obviously going to cause major swelling and scar tissue to the area.
However, after about six months went by, Donohue had seen three or four different doctors and the heel was not showing any real progress.
After a follow up x-ray, it was decided that she would have to go under the knife once again.
“The second surgery complicated things a lot,” Donohue said.
A minor injury that was supposed to cause a setback of a few weeks was now carrying out into multiple years.
“Dealing with that for the past three to four years has been difficult, especially when my instinct is to really train hard, I’m very competitive so I had to kind of dial that back a bit and that was tough,” Donohue said.
Donohue acknowledged that she didn’t really follow the sport for a couple years because it would drive her crazy.
“Honestly I almost didn’t even watch the track and field portion because it would frustrate me and there was nothing I could do. It would make me push myself and I couldn’t,” Donohue said.
As time went by, the immobile runner admitted to contemplating calling it quits but she attributed the doctor’s optimism as a big factor that helped carry her through.
So after years of basically falling off the map in her sport, she looks to make a grand reemergence at next summer’s Olympics.
After a minor setback with her calf earlier in the summer she is now back in her groove training like a maniac, focusing on getting her health to 100 percent and building a solid base while running a few races indoors along the way.
Her main goal is like everyone else’s, to make the team of three that competes in the games.
Instead of dwelling on the time that she missed, Donohue is excited for this new chapter in which she will lean on her experience to carry her.
“When I first went, I walked into the big stadium and it was pretty overwhelming,” Donohue said. “This time I will look to keep my head while competing after having experienced this already before.”
Though at 32 years old Donohue will be one of the older runners competing, she is optimistic about what is ahead.
“I have become better mentally, and on the maintenance end, I’m getting older to the point where I can’t just do what I want to but I’m smarter and more experienced so I train smarter,” she said.
As far as the future goes, she does not see her body breaking down in her mid 30s and will be taking her running career one year at a time — a career that started many years ago at Haddonfield Memorial High School where she fell in love with the sport.
“Running was what I did. My dad was a runner, and I enjoyed competing, playing soccer and basketball, but running at the end of the day was pure competition. There are no referees, no coaches calling timeouts, no substitutions and not a lot of rules. Just line up on the line and get to the other line faster than everybody else.”
