No Tears Necessary : Vassar Runner Has a Disorder That Keeps Her From Sweating or Crying, but She Competes Among Division III’s Best

They asked Tracy Nichols to stand up as they told her story to a crowd of 1,200 at a dinner in a plush banquet hall at Anaheim Thursday night.

And so she did, all 110 pounds of her, staring into a bank of bright lights and a sea of strange faces, while feeling as if she were standing at the edge of the world. Which, basically, she was.

No more than a couple of dozen people at the event had any idea of Tracy Nichols’ story. To most, she was simply another honoree on a night of honorees, somebody to be applauded for accomplishments in athletics and forgotten in the hustle and bustle of other things in a week or so.

But as Merrily Baker of the NCAA got further and further into Nichols’ story, a hush came over the crowd. Soon, people in tuxedos and cocktail dresses were leaning forward in their chairs. Near the end, there was not a dry eye in the place, except for those of Tracy Nichols.

“I can’t cry,” she said later. “I haven’t been able to cry for 11 years. That’s just one of the things with me that doesn’t work. People who know me well know when I want to cry. They say my bottom lip quivers.”

When Baker finished, the standing ovation was spontaneous. The attendees, many of them hardened by years of similar dinners and rituals of praise, had been literally lifted off their chairs by the story of Tracy Nichols. They rose as one, in both emotion and amazement.

Later, at this Honda Awards Night that is held each year in conjunction with the NCAA convention and has, for the last 15 years, honored the top female collegiate athletes in the country, the main award, the Honda-Broderick Cup, was given to basketball player Dawn Staley of Virginia. Besides the basketball achievements reached by Staley, her story included a situation last summer in which she and her coach talked a potential suicide victim off a ledge.

But even that story paled by comparison to Nichols’, who was given the evening’s Inspiration Award. Perhaps, never has an award been more aptly named.

Nichols, 22, was a cross-country runner at Vassar College, a Division III school. She won the 1990 Eastern College Athletic Conference meet in her senior season, despite being knocked down in the middle of the race. Then she finished 19th in the NCAA meet later in the fall of 1990, a finish that, without later complications, would have given her automatic Division III All-American status.

Which is all very nice and all worthy of

recognition, except that, the bigger story is, medically and reasonably, she couldn’t do any of that.

As an 11-year-old, she had a virus that doctors later concluded had caused a permanent nerve disorder. That disorder, called pandysautonomia, keeps her from sweating, crying or being able to see well on sunny days because of permanently dilated pupils. According to Nichols, there are only 12 other recorded cases of pandysautonomia in the world.

In distance running, the body’s thermostat regulates temperature with sweat. If there is no such regulation, a runner eventually suffers heat stroke, which can lead to loss of control of the limbs and even severe brain damage. The most memorable incident of this was during the 1984 Olympics, when Swiss runner Gabriel Andersen-Schiess, suffering from severe heat stroke at the end of the women’s marathon, stumbled and struggled grotesquely to the finish line in the Coliseum and quickly was hospitalized. She recovered, but few who watched that day will ever forget it.

That sort of thing has happened to Nichols twice, with at least half a dozen other close calls that fell barely shy of heat stroke. When she was in high school in Perry, Ohio, a small farming community on Lake Erie, she was only allowed to be a sprinter because of the school’s fear of heat stroke.

But Nichols is a very determined young woman, and when she went to Vassar and expressed a desire to compete at longer distances, the coach, Ron Stonitsch, found a way. When Nichols ran in races for Vassar, both Stonitsch and members of the Vassar men’s cross-country team would run to various spots on the course and, every half mile or so, dump cups and even buckets of cold water on her.

“It was my coach’s idea,” Nichols said. “He is a very creative man.”

He was also an oft-criticized man by other teams and spectators who, not knowing the story, would be appalled by this man dumping cold water on one of his runners on many chilly fall days in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and the surrounding area where Vassar competes.

“If it was in the 20s or 30s when we ran, I was OK,” Nichols said. “But I needed help when the temperature was in the 40s. I didn’t mind having cold water dumped on me then.”

Despite the innovative cooling system, Nichols collapsed because of a heat stroke twice in major races. In one of those, in a qualifying race for the NCAA meet, she overheated in the last 400 yards and lost 10 places and a sure qualifying spot.

Did she finish the race?

“I always finish,” she said.

She described that experience vividly. She called her visual image of runners passing her as she experienced “rainbow legs.” And she described her first such experience, when she was a “gangling 14-year-old,” as finishing a race, then starting to hallucinate, then feeling herself “get younger and younger, until they put cold packs on me and took me away.”

Overheating was not the only thing to be overcome in her distance running.

In the 1990 NCAA cross-country meet at Grinnell, Iowa, on a bright, sunny day, she finished 19th to gain her Division III All-American status. But as she sat with family, friends and Stonitsch at the post-meet awards banquet, it was learned that she had been disqualified and her All-American status denied. During the race, because the sun was so bright and her vision impaired, she had been forced to follow various packs of runners. One pack she followed had run on a boundary line for about 15 yards, and an official had seen it and disqualified all involved.

“I was crushed,” Nichols said.

Her mother, Sandy Hoefflinger, said: “It was so bad, I just had to take her out of the gym area and away from it all. We had reached the highest high, and then gone to the lowest low, all within a couple of hours.”

The NCAA has refused to reverse itself and accord Nichols All-American status, although the National Coaches Assn., when hearing the story, awarded her a certificate of All-American recognition. Interestingly, in the otherwise excellent introduction at the Honda ceremony, the NCAA disqualification issue wasn’t brought up by Baker, a member of the NCAA staff.

“We’ve tried everything to get a reversal of the ruling,” Nichols said. “We’ve written letters, called people, everything. It was the first time any women had ever been disqualified in that NCAA meet, and five of us were. But the NCAA bureaucracy is such that they won’t change.”

But even a major setback such as this is not insurmountable for Nichols. Despite her handicaps, she sees nothing as insurmountable.

Case in point, the Virginia Beach, Va., marathon last spring.

“My hero is Joan Benoit, so I knew I wanted to run a marathon,” Nichols said. “I asked Valerie (Cushman, Vassar’s associate athletic director), and she said no. But I guess I like to live intensely. Running a marathon was a stupid idea. I should have chosen my goal more realistically.”

All that said, Nichols ran the Virginia Beach marathon. She had decided to do so only six weeks before the event, so with only that amount of training, and with all her inherent physical problems, she finished in 3 hours 21 minutes, a time that would thrill most marathoners.

And her physical problems?

“I sprained my foot in the last six miles, and I should have probably quit,” Nichols said.

As might be expected, the story of Tracy Nichols does not end with the completion of a heroic college athletic career.

Since September, Nichols has lived in St. Petersburg, Russia. She will be in the city, known as Leningrad before it took its original name back during the recent dissolution of the Soviet Union, until May as part of a fellowship program of the America Council of Teachers of Russia.

She speaks fluent Russian, lives with a Russian family in their small apartment and exists at the same close-to-poverty level they do.

“It was so strange, being here in California, with all this wealth and abundance, when I was just in St. Petersburg three days ago,” she said. “I’d never been here before, and when I got here, it occurred to me that if ever there was a place the exact opposite of where I lived now, I was in it.

“In the United States, we live like we are an island. We need to realize the world is international.”

Nichols will spend two weeks with her family in Ohio before going back to her second family in Russia. In that two weeks, she said, she will try to gather whatever fruits and vegetables she can take, and then she will scrape together all the money she can and purchase the most important thing she can take back.

A chain saw.

“If I can get one, that will make my (Russian) family like rich people,” she said. “We live off the land, and every day, to be able to go out and cut wood that easily, well, you just have no idea what a help that will be. My family wants to clear land and build a house, and with a chain saw, they can do that, and so can all their friends.”

Normally, at the Honda Awards dinner, the only awardee who is asked to speak is the cup winner. But when Nichols’ story had been told, directly and eloquently by Baker, and when the crowd had responded so emotionally, the master of ceremonies for the evening, NBC-TV’s Gayle Gardner, called Nichols to the podium.

Nichols spoke softly, squinting in the direction of the audience through the bank of bright lights. She said the award meant a great deal to her but what meant more was simply being on the same dais and in the company of so many world-class athletes. Later, she said that her lifelong dream had always been to compete in the Olympics, and to sit right there with so many young women who probably will do exactly that in Barcelona in seven months left her overwhelmed.

“I was just in awe all night,” she said.

Because the bright lights were in her eyes and because she had been asked, without any preparation, to speak in front of 1,200 people, Tracy Nichols didn’t notice that, as she spoke, most of the world-class athletes in the seats in front of her were crying.

They were the ones in awe.