Marathoner Regains Footing : Milewski Sheds Bunions, Pain in Run for ’88 Olympics

Bunions don’t exactly conjure up images of major medical afflictions. Heart attacks and spinal injuries are serious. Bunions? If you tell 10 people that you’ve got a bunion, seven will make a joke about Paul or Babe the blue ox.

But mention bunions to a person who has had bunions and watch the face become distorted in anguished memory of the pain. Want an idea of what severe bunions feel like? Buy a pair of shoes three sizes too small, then into each shoe put a cup of broken glass. Now, jam your feet into them, lace ‘em up nice and tight and run as fast as you can down your driveway.

Or, as Beth Milewski put it: “I couldn’t even have sheets on my feet at night. Just the weight of the tiny little sheet was enough to cause pain.”

A bunion is a genetic bone deformity. It forces the first metatarsal (the bone of the big toe) to grow inward, toward the other toes. As it progresses, it causes the other, smaller bones at the base of the big toe to also become deformed. The pain is caused from the outside edge of the first metatarsal being worn away by shoes. In more severe cases, the cartilage in the joint also begins to wear away. It is a very severe pain.

People who have bunions find ways to alleviate the pain. Watching TV 18 hours a day seems to help. So does staying in bed. Walking is painful. Trying to run, even a few steps to keep the poodle from dashing out the door, is excruciating.

Milewski, of Canoga Park, had a somewhat unique problem. She was a marathoner with bunions. Now, to put a bunion-plagued marathon runner in perspective, let’s offer some comparisons. How about a boxer with perpetually broken knuckles? Or a handball player with torn ligaments in his wrists? Perhaps a pitcher with a permanently dislocated shoulder? Playing goalie for the Montreal Canadiens without clothes on wouldn’t seem much more ridiculous than running in a marathon with bunions.

But run Milewski did. And despite pain so severe that she learned to run pigeon-toed, with the outside edges of her feet absorbing the shock, she did remarkably well. In the 1984 Olympic Trials, Milewski hammered out the 26 miles and 385 yards in 2 hours, 48 minutes. She finished 96th in a field of 286 women.

“The pain got real severe in 1982,” she said. “It was like putting your foot in a vise-grip and then turning the handle tighter and tighter. It was a terrible, crushing feeling. I was in a lot of pain, all of the time. Running just made it that much worse.”

Doctors gave Milewski two options. Quit running or have corrective surgery on both feet. But while the surgery might alleviate the pain, they warned, it might also signal the end of her running career.

For a few more years, Milewski continued to run. The bones in her feet continued to wear. And she continued to grimace. But in 1986, she could stand the pain no longer. Told of a new bunion procedure perfected by doctors Alan Selner and Ivar Roth of the MedStar Center For Reconstructive Foot and Ankle Surgery in North Hollywood, Milewski consented to surgery. On Feb. 25, she entered the American Medical International Medical Center of North Hollywood. Selner and Roth cut the first metatarsal in each foot and repositioned them, forcing the big toes back into correct alignment. Cartilage was returned to the places where it had been worn away by the years of bone-on-bone chafing.

Finally, the bones and cartilage were reassembled and held together by tiny metal screws. That was the new and critical element in making such operations successful. Before the introduction of screws in bunion surgery in about 1984, the realigned bones had been held in place either by use of just a plaster cast, or by metal pins inserted through the bones, with a cast then securing the new and old parts in place. But in both cases, some slippage of the broken and realigned bones occurred. Failure was common.

“Even with the pin, the bones could rotate as they healed,” said Selner, who has worked with Olympians Bill Toomey and Jim Ryun. “The screw gave us, for the first time, the key element of compression, of being able to firmly hold the bones in place as they healed. And because there was no slippage or rotation of the bones during the healing process, there is also virtually no pain.”

Milewski entered the medical center for the operation in the morning, the familiar pain making each step across the parking lot seem like someone was backing over her feet with a station wagon. One hour after the surgery was completed, she walked out. She walked out slowly, but she walked out.

“The difference was astonishing,” she said. “There was no pain.”

Within a week, Milewski was back at her full-time position as a dental assistant and her part-time position as a fitness instructor at the Mid-Valley Athletic Club in Reseda. She began swimming and riding a bike four weeks later and went back onto a track to test her new feet just two months after the surgery.

“She called me and said she was ready to run just six weeks after the operation,” said her coach, Rick O’Bryan of Santa Monica. “I told her it was too soon, to give it another couple of weeks. Exactly two weeks later she called again. I got the feeling she was going to run with or without me.”

O’Bryan, who began working with Milewski before the 1984 Olympic Trials, said the bunions caused Milewski as much emotional strain as physical pain.

“When athletes train hard and the results don’t come, they get tentative and they get a mental block in their training,” he said. “They get emotional and moody. They see a lot of very hard work going down the drain. Beth was at that point.

“But now, she knows the problem is behind her and that she can only look forward. I see a great sense of relief and abandon in her running now that wasn’t there before. She’s been lifted up. She knows now that whatever she achieves, it will be because of her ability and her hard work. Beth wants to rise or fall on her own merits, not have her career dictated by injuries.”

Her career didn’t start until her senior year at Port Hueneme High, when she and a girlfriend pushed for the formation of a girl’s track team. By the end of that year, she was the school’s top distance runner.

“I only wanted to lose weight,” she said. “I was 4-11 and weighed 135 pounds. I lost weight, and then I found out that I really liked to run.”

She became the top distance runner at Ventura College and was the top distance runner at Cal State Northridge in 1982 and 1983. She received her degree in health science in 1984, and now, her two jobs allow her much more freedom to train than she had as a student.

“I’m pleased with what I accomplished while I was juggling a job and CSUN and training,” she said. “But now I can devote so much more to running.”

The next stop for her bunionless feet, she hopes, will be the 1988 Olympics. She won the Long Beach Marathon earlier this month but missed the Olympic Trials qualifying time of 2:50 by 2 minutes, 37 seconds. She said she won’t run in another marathon until the fall, opting instead to work with O’Bryan on speed training.

“Now, with no pain to deal with, I realistically feel I can get to the Olympics,” she said.

The women’s world record for the marathon is 2:21:06, held by Ingrid Kristiansen of Norway. O’Bryan said that mark might be out of sight, but running in the Olympics is not an unreasonable goal for the 29-year-old Milewski.

“I think she really has the ability now to run in the Olympics,” her coach said. “She’s so much faster than she was in ’84. She ran 2:48 in the trials with all that foot pain, and she’s in so much better shape now that it’s a joke. Right now she’s in shape to run a 2:41 marathon, and she can very shortly be among the top 10 women marathoners in the country.

“There are only five or six or seven women in the world who can consistently run in the 2:20s. Maybe another 40 in the world can consistently be in the 2:30s. Beth is moving into that group. I think she’ll be there by 1988 Olympic Trials.”

It would truly be a bunionesque performance.