Remy on Empty

At first, Erin Remy thought she had a bad cold.

Then it kept getting worse.

“I felt like I had the flu for months,” Remy said. “I had trouble breathing, and then when it got really bad I thought it was my heart because I was having palpitations.”

For nearly two years her troubles continued. She was often dizzy, disoriented and couldn’t sleep.

“There were times when I’d get in the car and start to go somewhere, it was like I had Alzheimer’s and couldn’t remember where I was going,” Remy said. “It was like I was in a fog all the time. I couldn’t think.”

And there was the constant debilitating fatigue.

Remy, a Cal State Fullerton distance runner trained to push herself, was suddenly running on empty.

“It was like I was standing by the ocean being hit by waves, and the next one was always bigger than the last,” Remy said.

It took eight months before Remy knew her condition: chronic fatigue syndrome.

The illness, for which there is no apparent cure, is still largely a medical enigma. There is no proven cause, although it has been linked in the past to Epstein-Barr virus.

For an athlete, it can be particularly devastating emotionally.

Remy believes she finally has it under control. It has been nearly three months since she has felt ill. She is back running for the Titan track team and doing well.

But she knows she can’t push herself too far too fast; the fear of a relapse stalks her like a monster in a nightmare.

“I’m taking everything slowly, but I’m running about 55 to 60 miles a week again, which is great. But I don’t push myself as hard now,” she said.

Remy ran a personal-best 4 minutes 45.8 seconds in the 1,500 meters early in the season, and then turned in the best times of her career in the 10,000 meters (37:06.36) and in the 3,000 (10:07.8).

She will compete in what probably is her best event, the 5,000 meters, for the first time this season in today’s Mt. San Antonio College Relays. .

Remy is concerned about more than her life as a student and athlete. A single mother, she has a 3-year-old daughter, Eden, to care for.

“Eden is my first priority,” Remy said. “She can’t have a sick mom. When I was sick, I couldn’t do much more than take care of her, and go to school.”

Although she had day care for her daughter during the week, and the child’s father took care of her frequently on weekends, it was still a struggle, even when she wasn’t trying to compete in cross-country and track.

“My parents don’t live close, so they weren’t able to help that much, but they were very supportive,” Remy said. “But I didn’t have to work. And it wasn’t that I was strapped in bed, deathly ill. There were good days and bad days. I did have some bad insomnia, and that caused me anxiety too. But I pushed myself to go to class. It was 12 hours, three classes, but I felt like I had to do it.”

Remy, 31, didn’t begin competing in cross-country and track until she enrolled at Orange Coast College at age 27.

She had started jogging to keep in shape a few months earlier and won a weekend 5K race in her hometown of South Pasadena. Remy, who did not compete in high school, did well from the start at OCC. Part of that first season at Orange Coast, she was pregnant with Eden.

Remy enrolled at Fullerton in the fall of 1995 and quickly became the top female runner on the Titan cross-country team. She finished ninth in the Big West Conference meet and was 33rd in the NCAA regional in Portland, the second-best finish by a Big West runner.

Coach John Elders recalls that she wasn’t in good health for either meet. Remy believes she was suffering from the Epstein-Barr virus at that time, but it wasn’t until the next spring her physical and emotional meltdown really began.

“That spring I’d run three miles and I would be exhausted,” Remy said. “The harder I worked, the worse it got. I seemed to do better during the summer, but then it came back in the fall of 1996, and I redshirted that cross-country season. Then in the spring of 1997, it came back again. And that turned out to be a lost season for me too. At that point, I didn’t think I was going to be able to overcome it.

“I just knew I didn’t want it to beat me because I’m a fighter, but when it got a grip on me, it really got to me. The more I pushed, the sicker I got.”

A teammate, Sarah MacDougall, says she became especially concerned when Remy started having dizzy spells.

“I think all of her teammates were concerned,” MacDougall said. “I think she tried to hide it from people, and she seemed determined to try to push through it. But I was afraid she was going to fall off the track sometime.”

When Remy told MacDougall she thought she had chronic fatigue syndrome, MacDougall offered to find information about it on the Internet. “I just wanted to try to be helpful to her as a friend if I could,” MacDougall said.

The information she found included testimony before Congress by Michelle Akers, a world class soccer player, about her battle with the illness. Akers, who played on the gold medal-winning U.S. team in the Atlanta Olympics, has dealt with the illness since 1993, but has managed to play through it.

“As soon as I read her testimony, I knew it was what I had,” Remy said. “And Michelle Akers is the same Type-A personality that I am.”

But Remy still found it difficult to get help.

No specific diagnostic tests have been developed for chronic fatigue syndrome, but the majority of diagnosed U.S. cases have occurred in women 25 to 45, according to statistics at the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The number of Americans affected is unknown, but the first three years of an ongoing study in four cities estimates a minimum rate of between four and 10 cases in each 100,000 adults.

Dr. William C. Reeves of the Center for Disease Control says the illness often affects those with what he describes as “an aggressive lifestyle” that is goal-oriented, but there are no figures available on how many cases involve athletes.

“One of the problems is that it’s hard to separate the symptoms from an athlete over-training and the symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome,” he said.

Remy said two doctors diagnosed her illness as chronic fatigue syndrome. She also believes an acupuncturist, Liping Jiao, helped her considerably in her recovery.

Jiao, however, remembers how exhausted Remy seemed in her first visit. “Her energy flow was stagnant, but acupuncture can help unblock it,” Jiao said.

Reeves says no studies have been reported to his agency on the success rate of treatment of the illness through acupuncture. “But what works for one person might be not work for another,” he said.

Said Jiao: “Western medicine mostly believes that chronic fatigue syndrome is caused by a virus, but Oriental medicine believes it is more a matter of stress and diet.”

Remy says she immediately set out to change her diet. “I must have drank a ton of carrot juice and beet juice,” she said, smiling. “You name the vegetable and I juiced it.”

“The big thing is that your whole life has to change,” Remy said.

She thinks getting more rest and developing better eating habits also were big factors in her recovery.

“She apparently had pushed her body over the edge, and it took a long time for her body to recover,” Elders said. “We try to be careful now. When she looks tired, we try not to push her.”

Elders believes the demands of being an athlete, a mother and a student had drained her physically.

Elders, however, says he doubts distance runners are more susceptible to illnesses than any other athlete despite the demands of their training.

“Erin’s very competitive--she’s probably one of the most tenacious runners I’ve ever coached,” Elders said. “We’ve talked about not putting her in situations that she might find too demanding. But we’ve also talked about the fact that even if you set goals and don’t realize them, it doesn’t mean there’s a failure. I think she’s getting a much better perspective on that.”

Elders and Remy are encouraged about what Remy already has accomplished in her comeback.

“I’ve always felt she had a great deal of talent,” Elders said. “Unfortunately because of her illnesses she hasn’t been able to always demonstrate that. I’m excited about the prospects for her.”

Remy says she’s happy to be running again, and feeling good physically when she does.

“My goal now is just to be healthy, to run and to have fun,” she said. “My body went through hell. I don’t want to have to go through it again.”