She’s Racing Against a Different Clock : Kim Gallagher, Twice an Olympic Medalist, Has Cancer at Age 31

Staring into space, she lets the question linger like twilight. She says nothing. Her eyes do not blink and she keeps staring until the silence becomes as unbearable as the pain from the disease that is eating away her insides.

“Why?” she whispers, then shakes her head slowly to say that she does not know the answer to one of life’s cruelest riddles.

She is dying.

Kim Gallagher, a lanky, plucky, two-time Olympic medalist in track and field’s 800 meters, is suffering from stomach cancer, and as she sits in her wood-floored, stucco home in Los Angeles’ Miracle Mile district, she already is in another world while contemplating one of those philosophical questions that sneak up on us at the worst of times.

She sits as still as a statue, but this spiritless state does not last. It cannot last.

“Mommy, I want some toast,” bellows a demanding 5-year-old who is all pigtails and chatter.

Gallagher, 31, turns toward her daughter as if awakened from a trance. The life that momentarily left has returned. Those zombie eyes are dancing again.

“Look at her,” Gallagher says of Jessica. “Look at those legs. She’s going to be a runner.

“Are you going to run like Mommy?” Gallagher asks her daughter.

“Yeah,” Jessica says.

*

One day last year there was stomach pain, but so what? Gallagher suffered as much as any elite athlete had. Her case history could have filled the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine.

She complained of stomach problems in 1983 and had surgery for polycystic ovaries about six months before winning the silver medal in the L.A. Olympics. She also was anemic while becoming one of the country’s best female middle-distance runners. Then came chronic fatigue syndrome and a relapse of the Fallopian tubes infection.

“I felt like I was being stabbed in the stomach,” Gallagher said in Seoul after winning a bronze medal in 1988 that celebrated another comeback. She had won the silver in the 800 at Los Angeles in ’84.

Chuck DeBus, her coach through both Olympics, said during his five years of coaching her, Gallagher was unable to complete half her workouts.

DeBus never knew how she would respond during a race. In Seoul, she was primed to contend for a medal in the 1,500 meters after the surprising third in the 800. But she finished next to last in her semifinal heat after hardly sleeping the night before.

“It was so horrible, so embarrassing, I said, ‘I’m never going to do that again,’ ” Gallagher says, still haunted by the memory.

Not even the two medals, standing side-by-side on a mantel in a spacious living room adorned with bold art pieces, can placate Gallagher. It is as if she wants just one more chance to erase her failures.

“Who knows how fast she could have run if she could have trained like a normal person?” says DeBus, now working in the film and television industry.

Normality, what’s that? The latest pain persisted.

“Day to day, it was hurting and hurting and hurting more and more,” Gallagher says.

She visited a doctor, who eventually confirmed what he initially suspected. His prognosis was that she had two to three years to live.

After much internal debate, Gallagher thought she could do better. She eschewed traditional treatments such as chemotherapy, focusing instead on diet and rest. She claims to have made dramatic improvements and thinks she can last another 15 years.

“I’m fine, I’m healthy, I’m strong,” she says.

She also is realistic. She and Jessica do not live like most mothers and daughters on their own. Gallagher’s once boundless energy has seeped out of her.

“I really can’t work a full day, I get tired,” she says, yawning.

Yet, Gallagher has accepted this debilitating state. If she were alone, it would be much easier to face. But she is afraid for Jessica’s future. Gallagher’s brother, Bart, and her mother, Barbara, who will soon move here from Pennsylvania, will take custody if necessary.

“Who are you going to live with if something happens to Mommy?” Gallagher asks Jessica.

“Grandma . . . only in this house!” Jessica answers.

Bart, who brought Kim to Southern California in 1983, helps by taking Jessica after school so Gallagher can sleep an hour in the afternoon when she returns from her job at a law firm. She and Jessica go to bed at 8 p.m.

“Sleep is the key,” Gallagher says.

Still, she is restless.

*

When the U.S. championships begin Wednesday in Sacramento, Gallagher will not be among her peers. Even those once close to her do not know she is suffering from a painful disease.

Fellow 1984 Olympian Ruth Wysocki saw Gallagher in the stands at a recent meet and recalls: “She looked good.”

Which is true. Gallagher’s youthful, healthy appearance does not reflect the turmoil she has encountered in the last year.

Instead of sharing the heart-wrenching news with the community with which she was so closely aligned, she has kept her distance because she does not want to be stigmatized as “another Lyle Alzado.”

The former Raider who died of a brain tumor in 1992 said his complications were the result of abuse of anabolic steroids and other performance-enhancing agents.

Gallagher knows many will suspect her condition also is steroid-related because she trained under DeBus, a once-controversial coach who was sanctioned by track and field officials for giving athletes drugs.

Gallagher says she never took steroids.

“They weren’t for kids,” she says. “I didn’t want to look like all those pumped up, big-looking . . . talking-weird [women]. I liked my looks too much.”

Instead, she thinks her problems might stem from the wear and tear of training hard since she was 7. Born in Ft. Washington, Pa., she attended Upper Dublin High, where she set national prep records in the 800 and 1,500.

By the time she was 16, Gallagher was beating national-class women and for a while was a promising distance runner. At 20, she won the silver medal in Los Angeles shortly after winning the 800 and 1,500 in the U.S. championships.

“In track and field, you don’t have to be young if you’re a woman,” Gallagher says. “It’s a mistake [to start at 7].”

So is stopping at 31.

Gallagher retired from serious competition after failing in the 1992 U.S. Olympic trials at New Orleans. But a sliver of hope keeps her thinking comeback. She is starting to power-walk, and as her strength increases she wants to begin jogging. From there, she sees herself running, then racing.

“I might run again, babe,” she tells Jessica.

“Why do you want to run?” Jessica asks as if running were the problem all along.

“Why do I want to run when I have my biggest prize of all? My Jessie-bell? If you support me and strengthen me, I can do it.”

From such small steps come big aspirations. Something is stirring. Attending track meets had been fun, but suddenly Gallagher realized she wanted more.

“The thing about recreational exercise, when I started walking again, I got to have it all,” she says.

She remembers trying to compete in the 1993 New York Mile after training casually. When she finished last, she knew why. It wasn’t the first time that had happened.

“I learned a huge lesson,” she says. “When I ran in the ’84 Olympics, I was going to be a star, I was going to make so much money, and I did, but it doesn’t last if you’re still not devoted to what you’re doing. I was not devoted to my running and it showed.”

If it seems a contradiction that Gallagher would consider competing when she can barely make it through the day now, so be it. Confronted with a terrible disease, she is finding faith and reason where she can.

Gallagher’s search has led to religion. She is a Catholic but is switching to the Church of Christ, much to the chagrin of her family.

The cancer, she says, “was my calling back to a higher power. The only way I could even slightly help myself was to give it to God and let Him work with it.”

That gave her a sense of peace and comfort. It was more than understandable. It was reasonable.

“I just want to go up,” she points beyond the high ceiling, toward the ethereal world.

Jessica breaks into song: “A-ma-zing Grace how sweet the sound. . . . “

“Sing it, sweet child, sing it,” Gallagher urges.

She looks up smiling, lifts Jessica off her lap and onto the floor.

She is halfway there.