Katie Compton has been the dominant force in American cyclo-cross for more than a decade, but faces her hardest challenge yet to obtain her record 12th straight USA Cycling Cyclo-cross National Championship title. After a summer battling health issues that left her mentally at rock bottom, she is confident she now has the fix for all of her problems and is back on track, hoping her form will be good enough to win on Sunday.
Despite her winning record, Compton has always battled one devastating health issue or another. Early in her international racing career in 2008, she battled mysterious leg pains that she attributed to travel. A few years later, she learned she had low thyroid function. More recently it's been allergies and asthma, making it difficult to breathe while racing, and an antibiotic resistant infection that required powerful drugs to treat.
For an athlete who is accustomed to winning big races, struggling to 27th place in the World Championships last year was tough, but with her health further declining after she returned home, she began to get desperate for answers.
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"This summer was the hardest summer emotionally and physically," Compton told Cyclingnews. "After Worlds I felt bad, but then I kept feeling worse. It wasn't getting better and I was getting depressed. I didn't have energy and just going for a walk was a struggle. I got so frustrated and scared, because I'm used to being a healthy person, and then I couldn't even go for a walk and be able to breathe. I kind of hit rock bottom, and that's why I wanted to figure out the underlying cause - it can't just be diet or nutrition or my asthma getting worse."
Compton thinks she figured out the problem when listening to a podcast that described symptoms which closely matched her ailments. After bringing up the possibility with her endocrinologist, she was tested and confirmed to have a genetic mutation that could inhibit conversion of an essential vitamin, folic acid, into a useable form.
"I felt really tired and slow, and being on two strong antibiotics the last two seasons because of a MRSA infection, it kind of just did me in. It was a cascading effect from the small things I was dealing with. The leg pain, breathing and asthma were all linked to this mutation."
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