Elite Runner Keri Shaw Learns Determination Isn’t Always Enough
Ever since Keri Shaw was a kid she had an uncanny, fierce all or nothing personality. She remembers when she had lost several teeth in a row like you do when you’re seven or eight. Her dad had made steak and told Keri this steak is so amazing you have to try it.
KERI SHAW: I was on a booster chair and I remember trying to gum through the steak and I was like, I'm not getting through it, but I sat there for probably 45 minutes and gumming the steak. And finally, my dad was like, ‘what are you doing?’ I took it out and it looked like a thin piece of paper because I couldn't, I just couldn't break it down enough, but it was like ‘by gosh, I'm going to do this thing.’
That’s Keri. But this is a story about what happens when determination simply isn’t enough. This is a story about acceptance.
This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.
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When Keri Shaw was in elementary school she sort of stumbled into a love for running. She remembers the day her class had to participate in a fundraising event--one of those jog-a-thons to raise money for cancer research.
KERI SHAW: We had to run around the soccer fields and we'd get Popsicle sticks every time we passed go. And I remember having to go in the morning before school to do it. And my friends were kinda like, oh, we don't like this. And I remember loving, running along the wet dewy grass, getting my tennis shoes wet and all the grass sticking to the bottom of my legs. And I kept getting all these Popsicle sticks and I was like, I love this.
SOUND OF LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE THEME
Keri says she felt like Laura Ingalls Wilder from “Little House on the Prairie” who’d always run away when she couldn’t handle something.
KERI SHAW: ...because if something would happen and that's, I would just take out off, out the door, get my running shoes and run.
She says it was like an addiction...running gave her this rush, this feeling she needed to chase after...
KERI SHAW: Running also cleared my head and it made me feel like I was okay...I would always say, but I ran. So if I do nothing else today, I've done something right.
Keri found herself gravitating towards other things that would give her a rush...she was only 8 years old when she tried alcohol for the first time. She remembers she was at a dinner party. Everyone had finished.
KERI SHAW: And I remember looking down the table, it was a long table. And I looked at all of their desserts and they all had like melted ice cream and liquor. And I started drinking, probably using the spoon. And I remember cream to was one of them and then Grand Marnier and then Bailey's. And I went down every single seat and finished everyone's like bowls of leftover dessert...it was all or none from day one.
So this pattern began to form. She’d drink at night, run in the day. In high school it wasn’t typical teenage experimental drinking, with the occasional drunk night. Keri would drink to get drunk, every time. She’d run for that escape, every time.
In college, far from her family, things only got worse…
KERI SHAW: We would get up and we would run on Saturday morning after a big night out. And, um, I would go back to bed and I would be in my running clothes and I'd go back to bed and I'd wake up at 10 or 11 in the morning. And I would call out to her and I'd say, Hey, did we run this morning? And she's like, yeah, we, we nailed it. I would just look at my clothes and be like, I think we ran. LAUREL MORALES: It sounds like you were a blackout runner...KERI SHAW: Oh, blackout drinker blackout runner. Yeah, absolutely.
Even if she didn’t pass out she wouldn’t remember the night before. And most people didn’t know. She kept it hidden. So no one was calling her on it. In 1999 she moved to Austin, Texas, and she ran her first marathon..
KERI SHAW: I looked over at a sign and it said you're at 18 miles. And I was like, oh, I've already hit 18 miles. I honestly didn't even know how long a marathon was. I just kind of went into it. The longest I'd ever run was 16 miles. And I said to whoever was beside me on the course, oh, we're at 18 miles I was this bubbly, like, oh my goodness. And he just looked at me like shut up.
When she finished, someone who later became her coach told her she’d qualified for the Boston Marathon. She wasn’t even trying for that. That’s when she started to pay attention to her time and got a bit more competitive.
After Boston she trained with a group of Austin runners for the local marathon. Her goal was to beat her last time. She was in the last leg of the race, the finish line in sight and her coach was cheering her on.
KERI SHAW: You've got it, you've got 800 meters more. And I'm like, am I going forward or backwards? I couldn't even tell what I was doing. He said, just go.
She ran that race in three hours and three minutes and placed fourth among all females. Then she went on to run a 3:01 at the Chicago marathon chasing the sub three.
That’s just under seven minutes a mile. Just for context, 2:29 is the Olympic qualifying time for women. So she’s pretty damn fast.
At the same time she was excelling in her career as a pharmaceutical sales rep. On the outside she looked like the picture of success. But on the inside she was struggling. She was still drinking but few knew to what extent. She was married and divorced three times -- twice to men and once to a woman named Alissa.
KERI SHAW: She would always say to me, I just wish you would let someone love you. I'm here to love you. And I didn't believe that I could be loved and I kept, I kept her closed and every time I'd let her in, I would get that feeling of love and then I'd push her away because it scared me.
Keri was adopted. While her parents never gave her any reason to doubt their love, she always had this lingering pain she says many adopted kids feel from not being wanted by her birth parents.
Her feelings of inadequacy extended to her own parenting. Keri had two daughters with her second husband.
KERI SHAW: I think every night I lay down and I go to bed and I actually asked myself this question, how did I fuck my kids up today? ...it was a list of not did I, what did I do? It was a flogging self flogging.
Still… she never stopped running. No matter how hungover, no matter how bad the despair was when she woke up in the morning, she would put on her shoes and get out the door.
KERI SHAW: I think I would have died probably a few times over running somehow managed my drinking. It put some guard rails on. I always thought if I can get up and run and meet my group at 5:30 in the morning, or get up and run for a long run, then I'm still doing okay.
This pattern -- no matter how unhealthy -- seemed to work for her. She never got caught drinking and driving, never lost a job, had a decent bank account, a mortgage.
KERI SHAW: So I presented well, but internally, ever since I was a child, I never felt like I was okay...I specifically remember going to bed and thinking, I don't really care if I get up because I think my kids would be better off without me.
One night three years ago she was drinking wine at dinner with her then partner Alissa. She got a call from her daughter who was at her dad’s house. She had a migraine and wanted to come home. So Keri drove over to get her and brought her home. When they got back Keri blew off dinner and went to bed.
KERI SHAW: And the next morning I could barely remember picking her up.
It scared her so much she got online and looked up the next Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
KERI SHAW:The next thing I knew I was driving my car there and I got really, really like shaky in the parking lot and walked in and everything that needed to happen happened…It was a dingy gross, ugly couch, and normally be very uncomfortable, but I just felt like I sat there and I sunk into this couch. And as scared as I was on the flip side, I was like home.
She went to a meeting everyday, sometimes two meetings a day. She wasn’t a day drinker. She didn’t need detox. She just didn’t know how to do life without the escape that drinking gave her.
KERI SHAW: I felt like my nerve endings were exposed to the world and everything good or bad. I felt that, you know, a thousand times more than normal. Um, and so every time I sat myself down in a chair or in a meeting, all I knew is I had that one hour and I was safe there. And so my meetings became my new addiction zero to 60 again. MORALES: Would you say the impetus was your girls? SHAW: It was the girls because I didn't care enough about myself. I just kept saying I was going to meetings to be a better parent … I don't have this constant ick feeling about myself, of hiding that I hate myself, you know, I'm still learning to love myself, but I don't hate myself. Like I did.
AA had given her concrete steps that helped quiet the negative self talk and start over with her kids. Through the steps and slogans she could persevere through each difficult moment. But just as she found a way to work through one challenge, the universe threw her another… that no amount of determination could “fix.”
She was still running. Then when she turned 43, something strange happened…
KERI SHAW: I couldn't pick up my legs very well. And I really started shuffling and I had nothing to push off my calf muscles, neither of them would contract.
She made an appointment with a neurologist.
KERI SHAW: Because I'm in good shape, I was pushed off by the neurologist because in their waiting room, there's a lot of real sick people. And I come walking in and I'm like, oh, I can't run 10 miles very well anymore. Well, how far can you run? I can run five you're okay. We'll see you later. And I actually had one neurologist that said, you're going to have to get sicker before we figure this out.
Keri refused to settle for this answer. Both her parents had died of cancer and both could have had a different outcome had they been diagnosed earlier. She knew she had to advocate for herself.
KERI SHAW: ... I didn't know what was wrong. I just knew something was wrong. Cause I kept losing more and more ability. And then it turned from my lower legs to my left side, feeling weak.
As a pharmaceutical sales rep she had connections. Keri finally found a doctor who took her seriously. She ran a bunch of tests and narrowed it down to a few possibilities. Keri didn’t have typical symptoms for Parkinson’s but the doctor gave her medication for it anyway.
KERI SHAW: ... and said, just try it and see if it helps your left side. And I took it and I remember sitting in the car a few hours later and I've always had my left hand. I always felt really nervous inside and my voice kind of quivers. And I always just thought I was just a nervous Nellie. Well, it turns out that upon taking this medication, I had this calm and I was no longer having this internal shake and I'd never felt that… And I called her and I was like, I think I have tremors inside. Cause I don't have them right now. And she said, yeah, I think you have Parkinson's.
It took a year but her neurologist in Austin solved the mystery. She went to Cleveland Clinic for a second opinion. At 46, Keri was diagnosed with Young Onset Parkinson’s Disease.
Most people know it as the “condition that makes you shake.” You might think of Michael J. Fox, or Muhammad Ali...Initially Keri thought Parkinson’s that’s not so bad.
KERI SHAW: It was to me just, okay, I'll be shaky. I'll be a little odd. Um, I've learned much more about it. It's a progressive brain disease. I mean, it affects your body. It affects all of your neuro-transmitters and you know, quite often it affects how you think, and it affects your personality and there's a lot of dementia typically associated with it. So it's really a whammy.
Stiff muscles, restless sleep, dizziness, amnesia, confusion, difficulty speaking...At some point her body will move involuntarily. Keri says as an athlete that was hard to swallow.
KERI SHAW: I'm a physical person and not being able to tell my body to move, but it's moving itself. Like it's a, it's a weird dichotomy, right? Cause it's like, I might not be able to tell my leg to move, but my leg eventually will be doing its own thing. You know, I've seen people that are far into their disease and they shake so bad that if they're sitting on a chair, they literally shake off the chair and break their bones.
Keri has read everything she could get her hands on. She’s done some research about the causes about brain surgery and how it might improve her symptoms. It used to be a last resort but now doctors are doing it sooner. She read about Michael J. Fox. She read about basketball star Brian Grant.
KERI SHAW: Big, big guy in his time. He said to me, on the first night I called him, he said, you make friends with Parkinson's, you're not going to beat it. No, one's beat it. It's just, it's, it's a progressive disease. So you make friends with it. You, you let it teach you patience.
When Keri learned she was as good as she was going to get and things would get progressively worse from here on out that stopped her in her tracks. She remembers sitting in front of the computer, staring at her prognosis, dumbstruck.
KERI SHAW: That's the heaviest thing. Because as an athlete, I've always been goal oriented. I've always worked to get something else. Um, in my career I've always worked, become better to have a better position and it's heavy. And it's a mind game to know that, no matter what I do, I'm in preservation mode.
I asked Keri to keep an audio diary.
AUDIO DIARY: I wake up in the morning I do a body scan it takes all of five seconds... I start at my little feet and just feel are they stuck in a position do I have a cramp, next legs, torso, neck, I usually have a kink in the left side of my neck every day...then my face my ego part of me my face will lose expressions my left side doesn’t move as much it doesnt have as much expression it’s like I’ve been botoxed...this is so not sexy but I will drool on the left side it’s not a lot yet...
She says if she hadn’t found a recovery program, she probably would’ve drank herself to death after the diagnosis.
KERI SHAW: I might have gotten to the point where I killed myself because I just had no ability or tools to sustain myself when shit was hard. I'm not white knuckling it, but I would be a storm, an absolute shitstorm. If I had not found recovery first, it taught me also to rely on other people, trust other people in my sober people have also been my Parkinson's support people, I can 12 step anything and I've had to 12 step Parkinson's because there's resentment. There's things that I do that I have to make amends to people.
She also still relies on exercise to keep her mobility.
KERI SHAW: My left side of my body, the best way to explain is it's called Brady kinesia, and that's a fancy term for slowness. And so I can do this with my right side. I go to kickboxing, but my left side, it's just slower. My brain is saying, go, go, go, go. It just doesn't go. I always think of my head dee dee dee. And then the left side dah dum dah dum dah dum kind of have that vision in my head.
AUDIO DIARY: Today is so hard I hit a wall I think I’ve been on automatic pilot ...I go to the gym and I dont think I’m going to make any more gains in my endurance muscle I want to sign up for some events but I don’t even know where my body will be…
She worries about what her now teenage daughters will endure.
KERI SHAW: I can handle whatever it's going to happen to me. I know I can, it's putting my kids through this because they love me and they are going to have to see me lose my abilities. They're going to see me they would say, get weird and shaky and not be able to control myself.
And they’re going to see the effects of the medication that will allow her body to move. She says it’ll be like the Tin Man who needs his oil.
KERI SHAW: Like you can't even get out of bed. People get stuck in a position in bed and they need someone to give them their medicines so they can roll over. Or you have to learn how to do MacGyver, roll out of your bed to get your medication in your mouth, to then wait for 30 minutes to move.
Parkinson’s occurs when brain cells that make dopamine, a chemical that coordinates movement, stop working or die. The dopamine she needs to take causes personality changes -- the main concern is it may cause her already addictive personality to intensify.
KERI SHAW: So I have to be careful with that. It causes like obsessive shopping, gambling, hypersexuality, um, impulsive behaviors, stuff that, and you won't know you're doing it. So that's, that's the other caveat does like. Jeez! I won't even know that I'm doing.
Initially when she told her girls, they took it well.
KERI SHAW: I might flap around and kind of funny, and I'm taking this medication right now and it might make me binge watch Netflix. And it might make me, um, have too much sex. And they all laughed at that because they're teens. And my one daughter was like, well, I'm going to lock the door when a bunch of 50 year old men show up, you know, all right. Cause that happens all the time, just knocking down my door. Um, you know, so we kind of laughed about it.
AUDIO DIARY ENTRY
Keri knew she could not go through this alone. So she has reached out to sixteen women with Young Onset Parkinsons across the country and started an online support group. They meet weekly over zoom.
KERI SHAW: My support group of the ladies that are all in the trenches with each other, we know the language.
She has reconnected with her birth parents, and has talked to her father frequently.
She still goes to AA meetings and has met a couple of people in the 12 step program with the disease. She’s glad to see them because she knows many people with Parkinson’s will try to do it on their own. They know how awkward it can be for others.
KERI SHAW: I'm an isolator by nature. I will isolate as soon as I feel crappy, I will just lock down because somehow I feel like I just need to be in my head and I'll figure it out. And, um, so as long as I keep myself surrounded with people that are going to know me enough to pull me out, I think I'm going to be okay.
Her friend Jill Welch is 14 years sober.
JILL WELCH: We have the type of relationship where we see and talk about the darkest and the dirtiest sides of whatever's going on in our life without judgment.
For several years Jill and Keri would run together until one day Keri asked if they could walk instead.
JILL WELCH: She's always been what I would call an elite runner because she's lightning fast, um, super fit. She can go out and run a ridiculous number of miles many, many times a week...and all of a sudden she started breaking down and that was, that was new and different.
Jill went with Keri to the Cleveland Clinic when she got the diagnosis. She has even helped her prepare for the end of her life when the time comes. She’s thinking about spending her final days in a state that supports “death with dignity,” that allows you more control over the way you die.
KERI SHAW: I joke with my friends, like put me on your back and get me to Oregon, California, or Canada when the time comes.
One of the first things her doctor told her was to keep moving so she and Jill signed up for the Austin half marathon. They had every intention of walking it until they got there and Keri felt the urge to run and wound up running the whole damn thing. So right now she’s training for the Chicago marathon. That means some days she goes out planning to run seven miles and her body gives up after two.
KERI SHAW: Honestly I could be the best trained person and show up to Chicago and that day's just not going to be my day. And I might walk the sucker and I will walk it. You know, I will, I will laugh. I'll crawl it or wiggle my way through it …
What she learned from endurance running has helped her stay with discomfort and push through. But she says running today isn’t what it used to be. She’s more present when she runs today. She listens to mellow music and comes up with a new chapter in her book she’s writing.
Keri’s therapist laughs and says it sucks you had to get Parkinson’s to find passion for life.
KERI SHAW: ...I remember when it got contact lenses and I was like, wow, there's leaves on the trees. They just looked like big green blobs. And then I got contact lenses a long, long time ago when I was kid. And I remember being like, oh my goodness, I can see the leaves. That's how I feel now I see things differently. There's just a different filter.
This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.
You can follow Keri on Instagram @twistintheroad. To learn more about YOPD go to the Michael J. Fox Foundation.
