These Masters athletes find solace in competition

TWO SIMPLE WORDS: They inspire. Fact is, each issue of this magazine teems with stories of athletes who inspire. Dozens of them. Over the course of a year, hundreds.

Start with those who are candidates for the GeezerJock of the Year. Or Comeback Masters Athlete of the Year. Throw in all the others who are featured in assorted stories in these pages.

For this story, we went looking for a few Masters athletes who have escaped our notice in the past but most definitely inspire by their deeds and their actions, their attitudes and their approach to life and the varied and difficult challenges (from illness and age to the loss of a child and the loss of a leg) it dishes out.

Here are their stories.

DEATH OF A SON
EDIE HEIDEMAN
Triathlete

The degenerative joint disease, the severe arthritis in her feet and the foot surgeries make running and training more and more painful for Edie Heideman, 57, these days. She has no interest in calling it quits. "I'm going until I can't do it anymore," said the resident of Palo Alto, Calif. "It might be next year, it might be five years, and I might get lucky and they come up with something to repair my foot. They currently do not have a joint replacement for it."

She loves the fitness angle of working out and has a reputation as one of the most fierce competitors around. But it's more than that. Much more.

Triathlons are a way to help Heideman stay connected to her late son, Adrian. One of her cherished memories is of Adrian, shortly before his death, boasting about his mom, the triathlete.

"He had gone off to college and had come home for the weekend of my last race of the season at the end of September in 2000," Edie said. "He was kind of bragging to his friends about his mom, and I guess his friends thought for a mother I wasn't bad looking, or looked good in my bicycle shorts, I guess."

A week later, at about 7 a.m. on the morning of Saturday, Oct. 7, the doorbell rang at the Heideman home. "I immediately thought something had happened to Adrian," Edie said.

She raced downstairs and two police officers were at the door, heads bowed. "The cruel thing was that he had already defeated death once," Heideman said.

Adrian had been diagnosed with cancer at 4 years old and survived. He did not survive a college frat party.

"He was hazed to death," Heideman said. "Ultimately, they forced him to drink a bottle of blackberry brandy after he turned down a pitcher of beer because he said he didn't like it.

Ten minutes after he finished the brandy, they took him down the stairs and into the basement where they left him in a dark and dingy small room, the furthest away from any actual human being. They left him there while he was vomiting. They said they left him on his side and of course he rolled onto his back. . . . He was blue and rigid when they found him."

Edie travels the country speaking at high schools and colleges about Adrian's story and hazing, suggesting alternatives to parties with alcohol and talking about ways to recognize alcohol poisoning.

After his death, she focused even more on her training and competing in triathlons. Late in May, she's doing a half ironman in Hawaii and then will hustle to her fifth straight world championships in Vancouver, B.C., Canada.

"The way I was able to go on living after Adrian died was, I developed this passion for the sport," Heideman said. "I'm glad to say I still have the passion and the love for it."

Gradually, she got away from bringing a photograph of Adrian with her and leaving it in her transition area between events.

"I used to say I raced with passion and fury," she said. "Now I use the word fury guardedly. It used to be the fury was anger at my son's death. Now I say I race with passion and joy. I remember I went to a race once and called a friend a said, 'I can't race. I forgot Adrian's picture.' She said, 'It's OK, you have Adrian in your heart."

UPHILL BATTLES.
GEORGE ETZWEILER
Mountain Runner

Larry Etzweiler, 62, is a bit of a Pied Piper of the Peaks himself. But you've got to meet his father.

In June, Larry's father, George, will compete in the grueling 7.6-mile Mt. Washington Road Race -- event organizers like to use the motto, "It's Only One Hill" -- in New Hampshire for the fourth consecutive year.

Etzweiler the elder is 88.

A retired Penn State professor in electrical engineering, Etzweiler
is bringing one 40-something State College, Pa., friend with him.

Larry, who has dragged members of his running team north from New Jersey in the past, will run the race again. Some years, George has been part of a three-generational attack on the mountain with his grandchildren in the field. George does his mountain running and recruiting close to home as well.

Last year he helped put together a team for a 50-mile relay race challenge in the Pennsylvania hills. "There were seven of us, all over 65," George said. "We had two kids who were 65, some were in their upper 70s and I was 87. It was great. It was a fun day. We're trying to put together two teams this year. There are enough over 65 runners around here."

The Pennsylvania race, to be honest, was not uphill enough for George Etzweiler. "A good many people don't like to run uphill," he said. "But it's easier on my knees. I worry more about downhill. Uphill, I get a good workout without my knees hurting much. Mt. Washington really does that."

The scenery on the mountain is gorgeous, and having his daughter hand him an orange juice and granola bar as he crosses the finish line is perhaps the highlight of the event.

But the end is usually not a pretty sight, Etzweiler said. "They have pictures of me coming over the top up there," he said. "I'm not swinging my arms. I'm pushing my knees trying to get one leg to move ahead of the other. There's a real steep little hump where the cars bottom out and by that time I'm so tired I can barely get one leg to move in front of the other."

None of which stops him from coming back. He took 30 minutes off the old 85-and-over mark when he finished in two hours and 33 minutes the year he turned 85.

George grew up on a farm and never ran a whole mile until he was 49 and a colleague at Penn State introduced him to Kenneth Cooper's 1968 book, "Aerobics."

He's made up for lost time since and figures he's got a few more age-division targets ahead of him. He'd like to keep running Mt. Washington for a while yet. "I want to do it until the year I'm 101 and finish and then drop dead," he said with a chuckle.

He said he was originally shooting for 100, but his wife is a year younger and he thought it might not be fair to her to leave her stranded at 99.

SETBACK AFTER SETBACK
SHERYL "SCOTTY" SCOTT
Swimmer

Sheryl Scott's return to competitive swimming a couple of years ago did not go well. That was just one of the factors that made last summer's open water Cable Swim at Lake Placid quite satisfying.

Scott, who is 45 and lives in Pelham, N.H., won her age group for the two-mile race that is made up of eight circuits around buoys extended from a cable six feet under water.

"It was kind of a sweet day, too, because it was two years to the day from when I had my mastectomy," Scott said. "That was a little icing on the cake for me. I figured, 'I guess I'm back in shape.'"

The problem with her reintroduction to racing was her expectations were a little out of whack. That she was seven days removed from her most recent surgery and was coming off a flu shot and went to the meet without her buddies didn't help, either. "I was still thinking of myself as a 17-year-old with a 17-year-old's times," Scott said. "I didn't think of myself as 40-something going into a pool with a body not as fast. I hadn't competed in many, many years."

After that weekend, back in November of 2006, she didn't plan on competing again. "She was absolutely devastated," said Tracy Grilli, who runs the office of Masters Swimming and swims with Scott with the Granite State Penguins. "I told her she's in good shape and a good swimmer but her expectations were way too high, especially with what her body had been through."

Soon Scott was right back at it, racing and coaching and training.

"She inspires me to keep going," Grilli said. "She's right on my butt in training. I can't slough off. . . . She won the open water swim at Lake Placid and is an All American. That's a huge deal."

She and Grilli then swam on a relay team -- Scott coordinated the relays and put the foursome together -- that set a New England record at a meet at Harvard University in March and helped collect points for the Penguins, who won the medium-sized division. Scott swims most every day in one of three pools in the area. She's aquatics director and coaches at the Salem (N.H.) Athletic Club, which is where she got back into the pool in 2000.

Seventy-five percent of the athletes in her swimming group there are triathletes. "You're doing the same with them as with regular swimmers," she said. "It's all technique, using body position, hand entry, breathing, how they move their arms through the water. Triathletes aren't necessarily trying to be super fast. They're trying to save energy and get to the bike where they can pick up time."

Don't expect to see Scott in a lot of triathlons, though. A hip replacement at the age of 39 hasn't done much for her running.

But neither that, the mastectomy, the non-Hodgkins lymphoma cancer she dealt with in the '90s, other assorted ailments or her rough return to swim racing has done much to slow her overall.

"I'm definitely getting faster at my swimming now," Scott said. "I'm not as fast as I was in high school and I wasn't that great in high school. But my body's not the same as it was at 17. I have a lot more replacement parts."

'CAN I STILL RUN?'
MONTE MEIER
Skier

As a young kid, Monte Meier, who is now 37, always liked speed. Loved racing around. "I took a lot of pride in going fast in foot races," he said. "I'd challenge anybody to a foot race."

Losing his right leg at age 8 in an accident involving a garden tiller wasn't about to change his need for speed.

"My mom and Dad told me I had one leg in the hospital and I remember that I lifted my head up and looked down at where my legs would be under the blanket and saw the outline of one leg," Meier said. "I thought, 'That's kind of weird.' I lay back down and I was still kind of groggy and they said, 'Did you hear what we said? How do you feel about that? It kind of kicked in and I said, 'Can I still run?' Even at 8 you can tell when they don't know how to answer the question. When they said that was OK, I said, 'What's the problem, then?'"

There hasn't been much of one.

Meier had never skied before he lost his leg. The accident happened in the spring and by the fall he had made connections with a disabled skiing program in his home state of Minnesota and he and his mother learned the sport. Before long he was going fast and he's been skiing and racing --at the highest levels -- ever since. He was the captain of his wrestling team in high school. He's a golfer and fisherman and bow hunter and bikes and hikes and gets into the mountains any chance he gets.

Meier's been on the USA Ski Team for nearly two decades and has been to the Paralympic Games four times and has won gold, silver and bronze medals. He planned to retire after the 2002 Games, but things were going well and he stayed with it. Now he's taking aim at Vancouver and one more shot at gold.

"I'm psyched for 2010," said Meier, who has lived in Park City, Utah, since 2001. "I plan to give it everything I have and try to go out with a bang."

Meier and his teammates were at Arapahoe Basin in Colorado in early May to train. They will be at Mount Hood in Oregon for more training in both June and July. "If you had told me when I was 20 that I'd still be on the team when I was 37, I'd have said, 'Yeah, whatever,'" Meier said. "I count my blessings every day that I can actually call this my job."

He's not sure what's next. "That's the big question," Meier said. "I have a degree in finance, so I may do something along those lines. Or I may go back to school. But I'd definitely like to stay in the sport some way, whether coaching or helping out a program on the weekends. I'd like to try to help others have the opportunities I've had."

A year ago, he and the team worked on videos -- demonstrating their drills and training techniques -- that have been distributed to disabled programs around the country. Last December, Meier was part of a "Ski Spectacular" mentoring program that matched United States team members with athletes.

"We were teaching them how to race, giving them pointers," Meier said. "It was a real neat program. I want to do more of that in the future, anything I can do to help these kids. Most of them have their head on straight. You really have two choices in these situations: You can give up on life or you can keep living the way you did before and just go about it a little differently. Kids are pretty resilient."

Like a certain 8-year-old from Minnesota.