Emma told her mom, Lorraine, about Maddy collapsing at the finish line. Emma thought it was unusual, considering how strong her friend usually was in finishing races, but she wasn’t tremendously concerned. Madison herself seemed to be downplaying the moment, before pivoting to other matters. But as Emma and Lorraine talked more, really deconstructed what collapsing might mean to Maddy, Lorraine mentioned that of all Emma’s friends, Maddy was the least likely to brush off something like this.
Was the collapse only physical? Maddy must be exhausted, but by what, exactly? These questions flashed through Emma’s mind, then quickly evaporated. Running was hard. College was hard. Madison would figure it out, just as Emma was trying to do at Boston College. And, anyway, the collapse could be easily explained: hot weather, too little water, too long a distance.
Of course, what remained hard to understand was the effect this would have on Madison’s psyche. She had never handled failure, even the garden-variety kind, well. During high school, Madison once finished fourth in the 400 hurdles at a county meet—much worse than expected. She started crying and asked to leave the event, even before cooling down. “She had a tremendous work ethic, and she worked hard at everything she did,” Stacy said. “But she just put so much pressure on herself.”
In high school, Madison won constantly, and that steady stream of victories strengthened her fragile psyche. But once she was at Penn, Jim and Stacy, along with her older sister Carli, began to notice the erosion of Madison’s confidence. When Jim saw her at a meet in October, he told her, “I want to see you in the NCAAs in June.”
Madison responded: “Do you really think I’m going to get there?”
Jim didn’t miss a beat. “Of course,” he said.
“It started to feel like she didn’t see herself as a champion anymore,” Stacy said. “And she wasn’t okay with being good—ever. Good was not good enough.”
“I don’t think she realized how great she was,” Carli said. “Unless she was getting a medal, and then maybe, in that singular moment, she felt it. I would say something like, ‘When you’re rich and famous, don’t forget the little people. I’ll be your assistant.’” And Madison would look at her, actually surprised, and say, “What do you mean?” She didn’t see what everyone else saw. She was too busy fighting for more, for the next victory, in whatever shape it might come—as small as counting the exact number of steps in a flight of stairs, as big as getting into the Ivy League. For a moment, sometimes longer, these victories slowed the treadmill on which her mind churned, the one that made her feel she could never keep up.
When Maddy was in middle school, she would walk to school in the mornings with kids in the neighborhood. As the year went on, she started timing how long the walk took. Once she had that specific number, she needed the next day to be faster, and the day after that, faster still. By the end of the year, she was speed-walking, occasionally breaking into a jog, to beat the previous day’s time. There was something satisfying, calming almost, about controlling time and output in this way. She had created these little tests for herself, ones that she was fairly certain she could pass. That felt good, reassuring: no, nothing was out of her control.
Maddy was addicted to progress, to the idea that her life would move in one vector—always forward, always improving—as opposed to the hills and valleys, the sideways and backward and upside down, that adults eventually learn to accept as more closely resembling reality. Maddy was not unique in feeling this way. Much of young adulthood is presented as a ladder, each rung closer to success, or whatever our society has defined as success. Perhaps climbing the ladder is tiring, but it is not confusing. You are never left wondering if you’ve made the wrong choice, or expended energy in the wrong direction, because there is only the one rung above you. Get good grades. Get better at your sport. Take the SAT. Do volunteer work. Apply to colleges. Choose a college. But then you get to college, and suddenly you’re out of rungs and that ladder has turned into a massive tree with hundreds of sprawling limbs, and progress is no longer a thing you can easily measure, because there are now thousands of paths to millions of destinations. And none are linear.
From second through eighth grade, Kobus Reyneke coached Maddy in soccer. The team practiced three times a week for six years. After a while, he could read her body language, the way her shoulders would sag and her head drop after an imperfect pass or shot. Not necessarily a mistake, just a moment that could have been crisper—the flatness of it often imperceptible to others. When she came over to the sideline, Kobus would stop her, and she would say, “I’m not good.”
“Are you crazy?” he would respond. “You’re the best on the team!” But no matter how adamantly he reassured her, how vehemently he praised her, this interaction, or some variation thereof, played on a loop for all six years he coached the Americans.
Getting Maddy out of her own head was difficult. She was shy; everyone knew that. But there was a depth to her shyness and the wall she built around herself. She had trouble making eye contact with the parents of her friends. They noticed this when she got into their cars after a practice or a game. The other kids would yank open the door, calling everyone Mr. and Mrs.—all kinetic energy. But Maddy would often keep her head down, her answers monosyllabic. During car rides, she almost always spent the time studying, disconnected from the group. Her friends rarely did homework in the car, but whenever seating became crowded, Madison usually pulled out her books. Not always, of course: sometimes a popular song would come on the radio and she’d start singing and bouncing around just like the rest of them. She liked to smile and laugh, but she also possessed an introspective nature unlike that of the other kids.
At Penn, the chipping away at her confidence wasn’t happening only on the track; it was also happening in the classroom. In many of her courses, Maddy was being graded on a curve. She had no experience with curves. She was used to studying for a test, getting most of the answers correct, then seeing a high grade that showed her exactly how she was doing. At Penn, she could study for days, get half the answers correct, and have no clue where that score ranked among those of her classmates. And if she knew only half the answers, wasn’t she probably failing?