Feeling No Pain
EHS cross country freshman Lance Sadler fights back from injury, fills varsity role
Michael Ashford
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
At first the pain seemed like nothing more than a muscle sprain.
It was during drumline practice this past summer when Emporia High’s Lance Sadler first noticed the twinge in his chest, and he figured the uncomfortable sensation to be from the strain of lugging around a bass drum for a couple hours.
“I figured I had just pulled a muscle,” Sadler said. “I tried stretching it out, thinking it would go away.”
But the pain did not stop, and when Sadler went in for a routine physical prior to the start of his first cross country season, he figured it wouldn’t hurt to tell the doctor about the feeling on the right side of his chest.
A few deep breaths and the cold touch of the doctor’s stethoscope revealed an abnormality that set off some alarms.
“He listened to my lungs and told me that there was some crackling in my lungs,” Sadler said, “so he took a couple X-rays.”
As the doctor feared, the X-rays showed something far more debilitating than a muscle sprain. Five percent of Sadler’s right lung was collapsed, and what was worse, the doctors couldn’t figure out why.
“It’s one of those things that the doctor never really could say why it happened,” said Bob Wallace, Sadler’s stepfather. “The doctor was really surprised he wasn’t having a lot more pain.”
Sadler was taken to Stormont-Vail Regional Medical Center in Topeka to see a specialist. During his three-day stay at the hospital, it was determined that Sadler’s lung had originally collapsed by 10 percent about a week before he started feeling the pain, possibly because of a birth defect that had finally reared its ugly head.
But what baffled the staff at Stormont-Vail even more was that Sadler’s lung had already started to heal.
“The doctors were really surprised,” Wallace said. “He was already starting to heal and the lung was beginning to inflate on its own.”
During his time at Stormont-Vail, Sadler’s mind drifted to the cross country season.
He had already missed the start of practices, and with a lung injury, is was impossible to predict if Sadler would be able to run again, let alone compete for Emporia High, which is annually one of the top-ranked teams in the state. Being that he was just a freshman, Sadler’s chances of making varsity seemed even more slim when coupled with his injury.
Nevertheless, he went about figuring out how to get back to running.
“I was just thinking, ‘What are we going to do? Can we get this fixed?,” Sadler said. “I was wondering if I was going to be out of practice and if I’d still be able to go to school.”
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EHS cross country coach Mark Stanbrough had never had a freshman run on his varsity squad — until this season.
That honor belongs to Sadler.
To say the comeback Sadler made since his return from his collapsed lung has baffled Stanbrough wouldn’t do it justice.
“Especially for a runner, the lungs are so important in terms of oxygen and getting oxygen to the muscles to be able to perform,” Stanbrough said. “That’s a big injury for a runner.”
After being released from the hospital, the doctors told Sadler he could do little more than jog at first. After missing the first three weeks of practice, he also missed Emporia’s first meet of the season at Manhattan.
When he finally could start training with the team, Sadler still wasn’t able to do the workouts that the rest of the team was doing because his stamina was not up to his teammates’ level.
Still, Sadler pushed on.
“I don’t think Lance is a super talented athlete,” Stanbrough said, “but I think he’s a determined, focused athlete. One good thing was that he ran this summer ... and got a good base in. He probably missed half the season in terms of workouts that the other athletes have done, but that just makes it (his comeback) even more amazing.”
By the time the Spartans’ second meet of the season rolled around, Sadler was ready to give racing a try. At the Spartans’ home meet, he ran with the JV squad and finished seventh in a time of 18 minutes, 23 seconds.
“I was really eager about getting back in and running,” Sadler said. “That race really got my confidence back up.”
While he ran with no complications, the fear that his lung would relapse was a weight on the minds of Wallace and Sadler’s mother, Danielle.
“The doctors said that once it happens, there’s a 33-50-percent chance that it could happen again, but it would be a lot worse the second time,” Wallace said. “But they said that it’s just one of those things that you never know about, and he enjoys running. He wanted to go back.
“Of course it was in the back of our minds, but as the season went on, he got stronger and really improved. It doesn’t bother us as much as it did before.”
At the next meet in Joplin, Mo., Sadler ran with the varsity squad for the first time as the seventh man, finishing 114th in a time of 18:24. He has run with the varsity team ever since.
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As expected with a freshman, Sadler had butterflies in his stomach a few days prior to this past Saturday’s Regional cross country meet in Topeka.
It took a lot for Sadler to force all the outside factors out of his mind and concentrate on the challenge Stanbrough had delivered to him earlier in the week — “We put the pressure on Lance, saying we wanted five people in the top 10, hoping that would encourage him to run with our pack of runners in the top four,” Stanbrough said.
It didn’t help that the weather on Saturday was cold and rainy — downright miserable — which made the course in places a giant mud-slick.
“I really tried not to think about people cheering or what the weather was like or if it was muddy and I was slipping or not or any other runners,” Sadler said. “I just went out there and had my mind on what was ahead of me and tried not to focus on anything else.”
But the fact that the only thing going through Sadler’s mind on Saturday were thoughts of the weather and how he’d perform in such a large meet with such large implications — the Spartan boys were vying for their fifth straight Regional title — is quite amazing,considering the circumstances he faced to even get back on the course this season.
Sadler finished ninth in a time of 17:29 to help Emporia High achieve the five-peat, turning in a breakthrough race by finishing as the Spartans’ fourth runner after spending much of the race as Emporia’s second runner.
Sadler has been pain free in every race this season, and said he doesn’t think about his injury anymore. Instead, his sole focus is helping the Emporia boys win a State title this Saturday at Rim Rock Farm in Lawrence.
“I haven’t had any pain or anything bothering me, except for being tired after the races,” Sadler said. “I don’t even think about it unless someone asks me about it after a race. Really, I just go out and have my mind set on the race. I’m just trying to help the team.”
After watching Sadler come back from such a serious injury to run again, Stanbrough said he has an even deeper appreciation for what Sadler has accomplished this season.
“Several things are amazing about Lance,” Stanbrough said. “I’ve never had a freshman that has run varsity, let alone a guy that has missed the first third of the season with an injury. And then, when he came out of the hospital, we didn’t even know if he was even going to be able to run the rest of the season or not.
“For him to come back and make the varsity team and be one of our top-5 runners at Regionals and come close to being our second runner, it’s just amazing.”