Bend, Don't Break (eBook)

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2024 | 1. Auflage
288 Seiten
The O'Brien Press (Verlag)
978-1-78849-505-9 (ISBN)

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Bend, Don't Break -  Frank O'Mara
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'Victory is a life well lived or a day enjoyed.' Limerick man Frank O'Mara had the athletics career most only dream of, competing for Ireland in three Olympic Games and breaking Irish and world records. After his retirement from running, he settled in the US with his family and made his way to the top of the telecoms industry.    Then at age forty-eight, his life changed forever when he was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's disease. The progression was rapid, causing severe muscle cramps, tremors, and eventually the inability to walk and at times even speak. In this inspiring memoir, Frank recounts his battle with Parkinson's. At first in denial, he eventually found the strength that made him successful as an athlete and in business - using determination, and humour to weather the worst phases of the disease. He learned to face each hurdle as he came to it: to bend, but not break. One man's life-affirming story of facing adversity with grace and courage.
'Victory is a life well lived or a day enjoyed.'Limerick man Frank O'Mara had the athletics career most only dream of, competing for Ireland in three Olympic Games and breaking Irish and world records. After his retirement from running, he settled in the US with his family and made his way to the top of the telecoms industry. Then at age forty-eight, his life changed forever when he was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's disease. The progression was rapid, causing severe muscle cramps, tremors, and eventually the inability to walk and at times even speak. In this inspiring memoir, Frank recounts his battle with Parkinson's. At first in denial, he eventually found the strength that made him successful as an athlete and in business using determination, and humour to weather the worst phases of the disease. He learned to face each hurdle as he came to it: to bend, but not break. One man's life-affirming story of facing adversity with grace and courage.

Such is the all-consuming nature of this odious disease that it tries to define your life. Today, I am first and foremost a Parkinson’s warrior. My everyday schedule consists of one task above all others: do battle with the disease and slow its progression.

Before PD, I’d have described myself in the simplest terms as an athlete and a businessman, with a wonderful wife, three beloved sons – Jack, Colin and Harry – and friends all over the world.

After showing some mettle as a schoolboy runner in Limerick, Ireland, I earned a track and field scholarship to the University of Arkansas in 1978, part of a wave of Irish runners recruited by schools in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. I took full advantage of the opportunity. My college track coach was a fellow Irishman, John McDonnell. John’s teams won forty-two National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) team titles, and he became the winningest coach in NCAA history. Back in 1979, he had yet to have a top-ten finish, but I can assure you that he was no less determined then than he was during the subsequent halcyon years. The expectation is that scholarship athletes perform at a superior level, but I took some time to hit my stride. I suffered from the oppressive heat when I arrived in Arkansas. That fall I ran straight into my first Indian summer.

Three weeks after our arrival in Fayetteville, fellow freshman Dave Taylor and I were especially struggling. It was boiling hot that afternoon and we were trailing home, a long way behind the others. We had been dripping wet, but strangely our skin began to dry up; we had learned over the last few weeks that dehydration meant trouble. By now we were walking, close to staggering, when suddenly we saw a sign for Malkowski Beverages. We were convinced it was a mirage, so we approached in disbelief. It turned out to be real. We could hear muffled voices and the hum of a forklift truck. There was activity – good. We stuck our heads through the open loading doors and were approached by a puzzled foreman. They found our accents difficult, and with slurry speech from dehydration, we were especially hard to follow. Fortunately, our body language said it all, and he rushed off to fetch us a cold drink.

Apparently, water could not be found; he returned instead with two cans of beer. We were in a beverage company alright, an alcoholic beverage company. What choice did we have? We happily drank the beer. It was liquid, and it was cold. Employees gathered around these two foreigners in nylon running shorts, shirts long ago discarded, allegedly speaking English. We must have been quite a sight. After a short rest and two empty cans, we began a slow, laborious slog back to campus. We may not have been inebriated, but we were close, and I have no doubt we appeared that way. Anyone who saw us in the last mile should have pulled over and checked on us. But runners were not a regular sight in Fayetteville in the seventies, let alone two semi-clad drunken runners.

Eventually, we appeared back in the locker room totally spent. Our teammates, showered and dressed, laughed and guffawed as we staggered straight into cold showers. We took our shoes off, but that was all.

I continued to struggle to establish momentum in my college athletics career for the first year, but I ultimately became the first University of Arkansas athlete to win an NCAA outdoor title during Coach McDonnell’s era and second ever after Clyde Scott, who won the 110-metre hurdles way back in 1948. I don’t know exactly why it was such a battle at first, other than that I was overworked the first few years and more than a little overwhelmed. But I kept plugging away and never lost my conviction.

My friends like to say I ‘retired’ from Arkansas in 1994, after eleven years in the classroom, with degrees in engineering, business and law. In my defence, I was a professional athlete; I had time on my hands.

Truth is, while I loved being an athlete and enjoyed a fair share of athletic success, I also faced an equal measure of disappointment. When I look back on my athletic career, I often think of the regrets, all the ‘could haves’ and ‘would haves’ that torment me. If I had only stayed closer to the leader at the Europeans in Stuttgart or if I had taken the lead from John Ngugi at the World Championships in Rome.

My fellow countrywoman and good friend, Sonia O’Sullivan, has asserted that it takes balance to be good, but you need to be unbalanced to be great. I think she means that your entire life must be devoted to sport. To be the best ever, you need a crazed application, a ‘nothing else matters’ approach. I spent much of my athletic prime in the classroom. I didn’t feel at the time I was hedging my bets, but in hindsight it likely demonstrates that I wasn’t one hundred per cent committed. That would have required every waking hour to be dedicated to athletics. That wasn’t the case with me; I had exams to take and papers to write. Sonia asserts that the imbalance in her life made her the force she became. She reached the pinnacle of achievement and stayed there for the best part of a decade. I worked really hard and sacrificed more than most, but I knew there was a ton of living after athletics was over. I guess I had balance.

In my case, that dream was racing around a track anti-clockwise for four laps as quickly as possible. I had some great results over my career. I ran a mile in 3:51.06 in 1986 and I won two World Championships. But any sense of achievement was tarnished by the failures, many caused by injury.

In a sport measured absolutely by time, mine began to run out. Like many high-level athletes, in the end it was injuries – and all the wear and tear on the body – that gave me no choice but to retire.

So, I turned toward a career in long pants.

Fortunately, I was prepared, not only with a master’s in business administration (MBA) and a Juris Doctor (JD) degree in law, but also with an appetite for commercial enterprise. Business was in my DNA.

My father had been a serial entrepreneur who owned many small businesses. His last venture was a successful soft-drinks business, which he owned and operated in my hometown in the southwest of Ireland. I was brought up working holidays and weekends in the bottling plant. Initially, I fed the massive glass-bottle washing machine, a particularly arduous task. I graduated to driving the forklift, which I found easier than standing in front of the giant mouth of a washer as it ingested a dozen bottles at a time and disgorged steam at skin-sizzling temperatures. Eventually, I made sales calls in a pickup truck. On occasion, I made collections calls as well. I became well-versed in the vagaries of business.

In January of 1997, I joined Alltel, a wireline company founded in 1946 as Allied Telephone Company in Little Rock, Arkansas. My tenure began when the wireless industry was in its infancy. Over the next decade, Alltel became one of the largest wireless, or mobile network, carriers in the United States, with nearly fourteen million customers and $10 billion in annual revenue. In two years, I was a corporate officer leading the human resources team. Eventually, I found myself in charge of the customer service, sales, and marketing teams.

The wireless mobile network industry in the 2000s turned out to be a great outlet for someone hoping to keep his competitive juices flowing. I was soon swept up in a dogfight as Alltel took on the emerging players in the field. We drove hard to acquire new customers, launch new devices, and lower our customer churn rate. Every day, there were deadlines and sales quotas to meet, network parameters to account for, new technologies to review and select. It was a constant battle, with our successes and failures publicly reported quarterly to the markets. A poor result would rile analysts and shareholders and could have devastating consequences for share prices, much more catastrophic than losing a race.

6 May 2006. Ringing the Opening Bell on the NYSE to celebrate Alltel’s new logo.

I enjoyed seeing our team ranked against the other players in the field, much like rankings in sports. I especially loved that Alltel wasn’t afraid to tussle with its bigger rivals, and that I wasn’t, either. When I’m honest about my athletics career, there were a couple of times when I may have shied away from challenging the biggest dogs. Not so in my business career.

And then, at the height of our success in the wireless industry, my life – the life I’d wanted, for the most part, and the life I’d made for myself – suddenly came under attack.

I’d like to tell you that I immediately identified my new challenge and faced it head on. That’s not what happened. Mine was a slow turning, a reluctant capitulation to reality.

My new life really began when I took that first dose of artificial dopamine, Sinemet. Even then, my Parkinson’s journey remained full of disbelief and distrust as I grasped at alternate theories, looking for an escape hatch. At times, I shut off common sense, wilfully ignored conventional wisdom, and disregarded the competence of others. Against hard...

Erscheint lt. Verlag 19.2.2024
Verlagsort London
Sprache englisch
Themenwelt Literatur Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
Literatur Romane / Erzählungen
Sachbuch/Ratgeber Sport
Schlagworte Athlete • chronic illness • Disability • Frank O'Mara • Memoir • Parkinsons Disease • Running
ISBN-10 1-78849-505-5 / 1788495055
ISBN-13 978-1-78849-505-9 / 9781788495059
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