This transcript has been edited for clarity. Click to watch Part 1 and Part 2.
Speaker: Molly Seidel is one of only three American women to medal in the Olympics in one of the most brutal of events, the marathon. Perhaps what's even more remarkable about Molly is her success in overcoming a series of mental health challenges.
Molly Seidel: People don't understand the sheer amount of daily work that goes into any of these things, whether it's running or whether it's mental health. I think a lot of people assume that I'm a lot more naturally talented than I actually am at this sport. I'm really not. It is just the consistent day in, day out work that you do. And I think that has translated exactly into my mental health — realizing like, OK, like this is never going to get easier. And that's OK.
It's OK that it's always going to be hard. It's OK that I'm going to have to work at this every day. I also have to wake up every day and brush my teeth. I'm not expecting that if I brush my teeth enough that I'm never going to have to do it again. It's the same thing with mental health. You have to consistently keep working on it. That's the key.
I think there are two kinds of runners. There are the people that are very good at it; they run, and then they can relax all day. They can just play video games. Shut the brain off. I would go absolutely nuts if I tried to do that. I need to have stuff outside that I'm working on. So for me, being able to have some sort of structured time and structured assignments is really mentally healthy.
I have a lot of time spent in the day running and doing all this other stuff. But then there are long gaps, and it's really nice being able to just plug into my accounting homework and do that. I'm actually getting my MBA right now. The United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) has a scholarship program through DeVry University and the Keller School of Management. So I started that back in the beginning of 2021, and I've just been slowly chipping away at that.
It's nice having something else outside of running to focus on. I really don't think I'm that much of an abnormality. I see so many people around me in this sport who have, maybe not to the intensity that I have it, but some degree of either OCD tendencies, or I see a lot of women who probably have undiagnosed ADHD within this sport. Because we all gravitate toward this; I don't think it's the kind of thing where it causes it.
I think people find the same sense of the repetition, the structure that running gives you, as a real benefit. And so many people at this level probably have some form of it. People tend to gravitate toward what works for them, so I think a lot of people in elite sports have something going on. It's that old joke: What are you running from? It's like, yeah, we probably are all running from something.
I think it is really a spectrum, and people can have it to varying degrees. Those degrees can change throughout your life, depending on where you're at. There are times where these things are very manageable for me, and there are other times where it takes over my entire life. It really is very situation dependent.
I operate on a very high-strung, very overstimulated level. I struggle with coming down. That's when it almost is this sense of spiraling, or I really feel wound up and I just can't stop. So being able to decompress, come down from that, use various breath techniques and various calming techniques, has been absolutely vital for me. That's something that I have to do every day, multiple times a day — really, really monitor it.
I know that's the buzzword; it's like mindfulness, mindfulness. It's very hard sometimes for people to conceptualize what that means. But for me, it's focusing on lowering the temperature in the system — lowering the breath rate, really focusing on that kind of stuff, so that I can come back to almost like a baseline level.
I'm very lucky in the sense that as a pro athlete, recovery is a huge part of my job, so I have time set aside in the middle of the day to lie down. If I'm not napping, I'm just literally lying in bed, focusing on my breathing for the better part of an hour, in order to do that. I've found that this is enormously helpful for what I do and for being able to manage not only just life, but also a higher level of training. So being able to set aside a time every day to really practice it [is important]. But it's hard. It has taken years.
This video originally appeared on WebMD on May 2, 2023
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Cite this: ADHD Patient and Olympic Medalist Molly Seidel Is Making Strides With Her Diagnosis - Medscape - May 03, 2023.
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