There are plenty of 9:45 two-milers on high school track teams around the country. There are hard-working runners fighting to hold their spots on varsity squads everywhere. All of them have stories. Here’s one you probably haven’t heard.

Listen to the way the music starts.

Ten seconds of whispery, shimmering electric guitar. A held note, and then a wall of ferocious drumbeats, the guitar accelerating to match the tempo. Then, just as abruptly, the strumming stalls and leaves only the measured tap of a percussion section and an imploring, staccato voice.

I think I’m breaking out
I’m gonna leave you now
There’s nothing for me here
It’s all the same

The words are fraught and angry, the delivery defiant. They could be crackling from an alternative radio station or booming from an edgy mall storefront staffed by kids with black t-shirts and multiple piercings, but they aren’t. They are contained, for the moment, to Andrew Schmidt’s MP3 player, pouring from his earbuds into his embattled head. He’s a senior distance runner on the track team at Eisenhower High School in Yakima, Washington, and he’s getting ready for a race. Getting ready to take another shot at the elusive 9:30 two-mile. Getting ready to put another eight laps between himself and his past.

This is his pump-up music. The soundtrack to his psych-up session.

The song is Way Away, by Yellowcard. They’re perhaps best known for Ocean Avenue, but this is the track Andrew prefers for stretching and striders. The lyrics hit home, matching the chords of his life with remarkable accuracy.

I made it this far now
And I’m not burning out
No matter what you say
I’m not afraid.

His identification with the song could be mistaken for typical teenage angst and rebellion, the familiar side-effects of being seventeen. Except this is different. Andrew Schmidt has broken out. He’s risen and fallen and risen again. He has left people and homes and last names behind. He’s burned out enough to know what that actually means—what the scrape of the bottom feels like—and how hard it can be to avoid. He’s managed to get “way away” from more than you can imagine. And running has gotten him there.

* * *

Listen to the cheers, simultaneously supportive and cloying. A crowd several deep on the approach to the finish line at the 2007 Washington 4A State Cross Country meet, offering that special brand of encouragement reserved for runners at the back of the pack.

C’mon, you can do it! You’re almost there! Just a little farther!

Photo by James Thomas

Golf claps and forced grins. And Andrew Schmidt trudging on through it, wrapping up the last cross country race of his high school career, a seventh man who should have run fifth, on an eighth-place team expected to finish in the top three. It wasn’t supposed to end like this, and the sympathy cheers only make it worse.

At the Eastern Regional meet only a week earlier, Eisenhower had run a close second to #1-ranked Mead of Spokane, and upended higher-ranked Central Valley en route to a state meet berth that left many of the “Ike” faithful hoping for a fairytale ending to a season which had seen its ups and downs. A season of big meet breakthroughs and surprising stumbles. Andrew, expected to be the third man on a squad loaded with returners, had experienced more than his share of both.

After a junior year in which he’d sat on the sidelines from late-August to mid-March with a variety of injuries, missing the entire 2006 cross country season, Andrew entered the 2007 campaign with a strong base of mileage and a sense that the fall held great things for the Eisenhower team. Summer training was going well; the first few practices witnessed a team beginning to coalesce. Running as the third man seemed well within reach for Andrew—he was nearly there in practice, hanging with the top guys, hammering with the big dogs. That nagging pain in his right shin? Probably nothing to worry about. Everybody was sore and a little bit dinged up. Everybody was ramping the miles and starting to add intervals, it was to be expected. So Andrew did what Andrew does best, he ran through the pain. Worked harder than anyone else on the team. And then one day he couldn’t put any weight on his right leg.

A bone scan confirmed his worst fears. Not one, but two stress fractures—one in each leg.

Nine more weeks on the sidelines. Two more months of grueling sessions on the stationary bike in an attempt to maintain some semblance of fitness. Doubt and despondency tempered by a desire to make it back. Not just back to running, but back to the varsity squad in time for the post-season. As unlikely as it seemed, Andrew did just that, encouraged mightily by Eisenhower volunteer assistant and mentor Erik Mickelson.

He started off at barely a jog, tendering through a few JV competitions, then racing his way into shape with times his coaches eventually couldn’t ignore. He grabbed the seventh spot late in the season, then ran 16:33 at the district meet to score as the fifth man, astonishing everyone with that performance. He repeated the effort at the Eastern Regional against the Spokane schools, again scoring as fifth man, again emerging as one of the heroes of the day.

All to get to this point.

A side-stitch and a smattering of sympathy cheers in the final 100 meters of a state meet disaster.

Crossing the line in 130th with a time of 18:30, Andrew breaks down in tears, convinced he has let down his team, his coaches, his grandparents, himself. He’ll spend the next few hours yo-yoing between deep depression and barely-managed rage, questioning everything from his commitment to his preparation to the amount of pre-race fluids he consumed. It’s the sort of reaction you might expect from anyone suffering the disappointment contained in this November afternoon, but for Andrew Schmidt the vacillation is particularly acute.

Four years ago, after being hospitalized in a children’s mental health facility for a week during his eighth grade spring break, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Nothing has been the same since.

* * *

Listen to the side effects:

Trileptal may cause mild sleepiness or fatigue; nausea, vomiting, or stomach pain; tremor; dizziness; rash; diarrhea, constipation, or decreased appetite; headache; or dry mouth. Avoid becoming overheated or dehydrated during exercise and in hot weather.

Imagine if the two things capable of saving you were almost diametrically opposed. If the medicine and means of salvation failed to match up. It’s something Andrew Schmidt deals with on a daily basis. Trileptal, the anticonvulsant prescribed as a mood stabilizer for his mental illness is largely incompatible with the very thing that gets him out of bed every morning and provides the essential balance in his life—distance running.

On Trileptal, there is the constant spectre of dizziness, fatigue, nausea, cotton mouth, the danger from too much exertion in hot weather. He must constantly monitor his fluid intake, carrying a water bottle with him to practices and meets, seeking the equilibrium between under- and over-hydrating. After practice there is the loss of appetite and the insomnia. There is weight gain in times of recovery or injury, the down times when Andrew can go from a trim 145 pounds to a husky 185 in a matter of weeks.

“During the season it’s not a problem,” he says. “When you’re running 75 miles a week you can pretty much eat whatever you want.”

But not when the running disappears from the picture, as it did when he suffered his stress fractures. Or when his parents pulled him from the Eisenhower team and forbade him to train.

Because that’s the other part of the story for Andrew Schmidt (known as Andrew Giese until a year and a half ago), the struggles with his home life. Not only was he diagnosed with bipolar disorder at a very young age, he spent the next three years in conflict with his father and stepmother, balking at their restrictions and fighting to contain an anger he was hard-pressed to explain, even after learning it was largely attributable to a chemical imbalance in his brain.

“When I was diagnosed as bipolar,” he says, “it was after years of thinking I had the hardest time controlling my anger of anyone I’d ever been around or seen. But it’s also when I knew I wasn’t like everybody else. I picked that up pretty quickly.”

Over the course of the next three years there were arguments, fights, threats of leaving the house. The police were called. Andrew was placed in a secured runaway center, only to return to an untenable home situation after being released. His parents took away the one thing in the world he most looked forward to—the Eisenhower cross country and track team. Soon after that, things reached a tipping point. Andrew Giese fled the home in which he’d grown up, literally running away, sprinting the cross-town distance to his maternal grandparents’ house and moving in with them permanently.

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