Olympic Marathon Runner Breaks Leg and Continues
Michael Roeger lost four litres of blood in one Paralympics campaign, while Tokyo ended in stress fractures and heartbreak again. So last week he went out and set a new world record, writes JACOB KURIYPE.
With 20km to go in the most important marathon of his life, Michael Roeger knew the dream was over.
Five weeks earlier the T46 (single arm amputation) world-record holder had been diagnosed with a stress fracture in his fibula that should have stopped him training for weeks. Instead, he had rested for 12 days before adopting a lightened training routine in a desperate attempt to be ready for the Tokyo Paralympics.
Underdone, Roeger cooked under the Japanese sun. His left leg ached from the injury, his right hurt from carrying the load of the limp. Everything hurt, but the pre-race favourite simply had to cross the finish line. Competing in his fourth Games, he refused to have a second 'Did Not Finish' put next to his name.
Eight years earlier he had suffered a DNF, falling to the track midway through the 800 metre heats. The night before the race he had fainted and the morning of he had vomited a tar-like substance that resembled coffee grinds. Those grinds were dried up blood.
He was bleeding from the inside.
Five months on from a Tokyo ordeal that left him questioning whether he wanted to continue racing at all, Roeger has set his sights on Paris 2024, reinvigorated by the latest world record run in a remarkable career that started in a country town with a population of fewer than 500.
A bloody run for home
Nowadays, Roeger is based out of Canberra with the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), but home will always be Langhorne Creek – a small country town an hour south-east of Adelaide.
On the family hobby farm, he and twin brother Chris played every sport they could find a ball for and the ever-so-slightly junior of the pair was put on a path to greatness.
"I just felt free as a kid running," Roeger says, days after breaking the 5000m T46 world record with a time of 13:52.05 at the Adelaide Invitational.
When he first started making state and national teams as a junior, it was the town that made it possible for him to tour, passing the hat around to fund his trips.
It's the local footy club and the people of Langhorne Creek that have always driven Roeger to the inhumane limits he pushes himself to. It was them he was thinking of in 2021 when he dragged his broken body through 42km, and it was them he thought of when he took to the track at London 2012 in a race he knew he should have sat out.
"Before the race I remember I woke up in the middle of the night and then I fainted. I thought what's going on? Was it just nerves?
"I spewed up this coffee grind looking spew. That's meant to be what your body turns blood into when you've got internal bleeding."
Likely caused by too many anti-inflammatories he was taking to treat a niggling injury, Roeger was suffering a gastro-intestinal bleed. His stomach had been ripped apart.
"The morning of [the race] I knew I shouldn't have been there. I got out there because I knew my whole town, community, Langhorne Creek, were going to be watching me at the football club. I wanted to make sure I toed the start line for them so they could see their boy on TV. I wouldn't change a thing. I'd do it again."
Halfway through the 800m race, he was picking himself up off the track and needed to be put on a drip. Roeger spent the next four days in hospital and needed transfusions after losing four litres of blood.
With the help of new coach Philo Saunders, he started the next chapter of his career. A transition to the 1500m in Rio would see him take bronze and by Tokyo he was a fully-fledged distance runner.
Blessing and a curse
"I find as I've got older and stepped up a bit I really like that fight within yourself and being able to try and push through that pain barrier," Roeger says of his state of mind during long runs.
"When you're racing those longer events, it's survival of the fittest or who can sustain that pain for the longest. I like to have a bit of pain in the body and just push through and see where the limits are."
It's that drive that has pushed Roeger to the top of his field. He may not have the medals to show for it, but he is among Australia's greatest ever. We're talking about the current world record-holder for the 1500m, 5000m and marathon in his classification.
It's arguably that drive that has also cost Roeger the Paralympic medals his career deserves. Those within Roeger's inner circle have seen both sides of what that ambition can do.
"Even for us runners it is hard to comprehend the place he takes himself to in a session," Jaryd Clifford, Roeger's training partner for close to five years, says.
"He can just hurt more than anyone I have ever met. Sometimes that's to his detriment. Sometimes he pushes himself so hard that his body just breaks. That's what happened before Tokyo. He almost wanted that gold medal too much."
Saunders is less certain Roeger's relentlessness is what broke him going into Tokyo, but says finding the sweet spot between focussed drive and needless self-flagellation has always been a conundrum for the runner.
"It's been a 10-year journey for me and Michael and I still don't think we've found the perfect balance of harnessing that drive and that motivation and that ability to hurt himself and doing it at the right times," Saunders reflects.
"It's finding that balance that he can harness his best form when he wants it most. You can't just drive yourself into the ground day-in, day-out… Michael's been better. He's learning all the time."
A marathon on a broken leg
On July 27, Roeger's path to Tokyo gold hit an insurmountable hurdle. What they had hoped was a nerve issue turned out to be a stress fracture in his fibula.
He didn't wallow for too long. He still had a race to run.
After just 12 days' rest, Roeger resumed his pursuit of Paralympic gold. He and his team did everything they could to be ready for the big day. There wasn't a treatment in the book they didn't try right up until the morning of the race.
"The hardest thing was the four weeks before that I was in a hotel room in Cairns not running, trying to run, in pain, knowing that I have got the biggest race of my life coming," Roeger says.
"It was devastating."
Clifford was with Roeger in Cairns at the time as they looked to acclimatise to the expected humidity in Tokyo. He remains in awe of what the veteran pulled off.
"It was pretty heartbreaking in the weeks leading up, knowing what he was going through," Clifford says. "The fact that he finished that marathon in Tokyo with what is essentially a broken leg just shows the kind of athlete he is."
Five months on from the race, Clifford and Saunders remain certain a fit Roegers would have been uncatchable in Tokyo. If the marathon had been in July, Clifford says Roeger: "would have been able to walk it and win, that's how fit he was."
Saunders points to his world record run at the qualifying marathon in Sydney's far west in April for any doubters.
"He was probably at worst seven minutes better than the next runner," Saunders says. "We knew if he did things right he was going to walk away with a gold medal and his lifelong dream.
"We did everything possible to get him on the start line with a chance but his body just didn't respond [to treatment]. Obviously, the marathon will find any deficiencies and at halfway he was a broken man."
'The wheels started to come off'
Through it all, Roeger never stopped dreaming. Right to the moment he began the race, he thought the gold medal could be his.
"I still believed at the start line of that marathon that I could win," he says. "I don't know whether I was just kidding myself."
Looking to set a manageable pace, Roeger established an early lead. By the 30km mark he was sitting fourth, little more than a minute behind the lead. Long before that point though he knew his race was run.
"I was dealing with the pain down the side of my leg and that was probably the main issue."
The pain forced Roeger to adjust his gait and things unravelled from there. First his hips were sore, then his uninjured right leg from carrying the load. Short on preparation, the humidity took its toll.
"I knew around 17km my body was just starting to shut down and that leg was getting really sore. The tape I had on there was flapping around. The wheels started to come off. From 27k it was a battle.
"I had to put pride aside. I had guys that were way slower than me overtaking me. It was brutal."
Memories of London came back to push him on.
"I told myself, 'Don't go to four Paralympic Games and have two DNFs next to your name.' It's not who I am. I told myself, 'Even if you have to walk or crawl, just get to the finish line.'"
The last 7km of the race were completed in a daze. What he does remember is the people of Japan willing him through the final stretch.
"Just after the 40k drinks table there was a small incline and I stopped at the bottom of it. The crowd was so loud. When I stopped they went dead quiet," he recalls.
"Then it was just like a blur, they pulled me on and said keep going and somehow I finished.
"It was really difficult to deal with 20km of a race knowing your dream is over. It still hurts today talking about it a bit."
Exhausted, on oxygen and a drip, Roeger took solace from one thing: "I didn't have to get up the next day to try and run with a stress fracture in my leg.
"It's really inhumane what I put my body through in those last five weeks. We do it because we're very motivated and driven people."
Conversations with a 'corpse'
The night after the race, Clifford and Roeger were up in their room and the veteran of four Paralympics put on the bravest of faces.
Clifford had finished his campaign with one bronze and two silvers, the last coming in the T12 (vision impaired) marathon. Roeger, for the third time in four Games, went without. In that room in Tokyo, they told each other they would both be there together at Paris 2024.
"His body was broken, he was emotionally drained, it was almost like he was a corpse laid out on the bed," Clifford says. "He was so disappointed and yet he still had the ability to tell me how proud he was that I'd come away with three medals.
"We said to each other we are going to be there in Paris and we are both going to tick that box of winning a gold medal. We knew that this wasn't the end of the road."
Whether Roeger actually believed it then is questionable. In the weeks to follow, it seemed Tokyo may really have been the end of competing for Roeger.
"It's been more a mental battle than a physical battle," he says. "I wondered if I would ever get back to my best or will I enjoy running again? I gave myself a long time to heal and to not run and not think about running."
Kicking a good man when he was down, the International Paralympic Committee announced in November it was scrapping the T46 marathon from the Paris 2024 event. Roeger simply didn't care. He had nothing left to give.
"I didn't have any fight left in me. I was just like, 'It is what it is.' I was still so deep in the disappointment from Tokyo that initially I didn't care which was really weird to me."
'I'm a better human being'
It took a long time for Roeger to find his spark again. As is so often the case, talking about the experience rather than bottling things up has been key to processing Tokyo.
He now has his eyes set on a fifth Paralympic appearance in Paris, his spirits lifted by smashing his own world record for the T46 5000m by eight seconds at the Adelaide Invitational.
The perfect run in the perfect place, just an hour away from where the journey began.
"It was special. It meant a lot because it was in front of my home crowd, my family and friends," Roeger says. "I think a few people doubted me after [Tokyo] and to be honest I doubted myself, whether I could get back into top shape again or even if I wanted to.
"That run on Saturday has really made me feel like I can get back to my best over any distance I want."
With the T46 marathon no longer planned for Paris 2024, Roeger has set his sights on the 1500m. He won bronze in the event in 2016 and his PB of 3:46.51 from 2017 remains the world record.
He wants that gold medal badly, but also knows it is not the be all and end all of everything. After Tokyo, he has a different and more rounded outlook.
"As time goes on I look back and I'm proud of myself that I actually finished," he says of Tokyo. "My twin brother Christopher said to me that afternoon of the race: 'you'll never ever go through a harder marathon in your life, so the next one you do or when a race gets tough, just draw on those experiences that happened this morning in Tokyo and you are going to get through anything'.
"He's right. I believe I'll never have a more difficult race than that in my life. And I'm a better human being, a better athlete and a better person for going through that experience and those hardships.
"Leading into Tokyo I thought a gold medal was everything. I'm really comfortable now sitting here today thinking, 'If I never win a Paralympic gold I'm going to be alright'. It's taken a while to get to this point.
"In saying that the dream is still there to be the best and win a gold in Paris."
Of course it is.
Source: https://www.codesports.com.au/olympics-paralympics/how-a-paralympic-marathon-on-a-broken-leg-made-michael-roeger-a-better-person-and-athlete/news-story/f032368546744477b5a139e3cc586ef0
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