Indiana University Athletics
The Olympic Spirit: Heidenreich’s Life Shaped By Competition
6/27/2016 11:00:00 AM | Cross Country, Track and Field
By: Sam Beishuizen, IUHoosiers.com
Steve Heidenreich can't recall anything about March 16, 1976—the day a near-fatal training accident changed the rest of his life. He only knows what people have told him and the long, demanding road back to living a normal life.
Heidenreich was a co-captain of Indiana's track team, ran the outdoor mile in 3:58.4 and had sights set on the 1976 Montreal Olympics when he left his apartment for a 5-mile run around Bloomington that night. It was nothing out of the ordinary.
As he neared the end of his run, Heidenreich was just north of the intersection of Indiana and Kinser Pike when a vehicle struck him from behind and hurried away. He landed on his head and fractured both his skull and his jaw in an incident that left him lying motionless on the road.
As circumstance would have it, a graduate student who served in the United States Army as an Emergency Medical Technician noticed Heidenreich from his pickup truck and stopped to help. The fellow student treated Heidenreich for shock, waved down another student and told him to go call 911 from the nearest hotel two blocks down the road as nearly 10 minutes passed.
"You need to hurry," the EMT said. "This soldier has been seriously injured."
In a split second, Heidenreich's Olympic dreams became an afterthought. He wasn't in a 1-mile sprint any longer. He was in the starting blocks of a new race in life with challenges unlike any he'd faced before as an athlete.
Heidenreich's marathon life was beginning and his Olympic career was over before ever running in the games.
But the mindset of an Olympian never left him.
***
Local police initially responded to the call as a fatality.
Critically injured and fighting for his life, Heidenreich was rushed to a Bloomington hospital where he lapsed into a coma. The last thing people recalled him doing before being rushed into emergency surgery was grab Dr. Richard Rak by the shirt and say, "Help me. Please help me."
"And then I went out," Heidenreich said during one of his many return trips to Bloomington. "Way out."
Dr. Rak removed part of Heidenreich's skull to allow his brain to swell. Blood clots were taken out and bleeding veins were attended to in a time period where brain surgery was far less sophisticated than it is today.
Dr. Rak gave Heidenreich a five percent chance of living. If he lived, he would most likely be vegetated and left unable to run, return to school or live anything close to the life he was used to.
"That's what they expected," Heidenreich said. "They expected nothing."
Two weeks later, Heidenreich came out of his coma. A week later, he returned home to Watertown, South Dakota to recover with the help of his mother, who quit her job as a special education instructor to become her son's primary caregiver, teacher and full-time mother again.
Heidenreich, who friends affectionately called "Heidi," was alive, but the brain injury had taken its toll. Mentally, he had the capacity of a two-year-old when he left for home and needed to relearn all of life's basics all over again.
Doctors told his family he was lucky to be alive. Everything that happened next should be considered extra.
But Heidenreich didn't want to settle for just being alive. That wasn't the Olympic way.
"I still had goals," he said. "Number one is, I was going to graduate from college. Number two is, I was going to compete again. And no one was going to stop me. They did not understand the internal drive I had to be a successful athlete and a successful student before the accident."
Heidenreich recalled the early days of going on walks with his mother where he'd point at things and ask, "Mom, what's that?"
"That's a tree, Steve," his mother would calmly respond.
"Oh, well then what's that?" He'd ask, pointing at something else.
"Steve, that's a jacket," she'd say.
Heidenreich suffered from Aphasia and was slowly piecing life together. The majority of the world around him was brand new. He's still unclear why some things came to him right away while others needed constant reminding.
"But as the brain started healing, I was growing mental years in weeks," Heidenreich said. "So I left the hospital at two years old in April. By August, now I'm 13 again. Thirteen years old!"
And as a 13-year-old boy again, Heidenreich had one thing on his mind despite what any doctor would say.
"I've got to leave town," he told his mother. "I know everything I need to know.
"I'm going back to college."
***
When Heidenreich returned to Bloomington for his senior year, four became his "magic number."
His mental capacity was still that of a 13-year-old and his head was still recovering, but he set personal goals for the semester of finishing with a 4.0 GPA and running a 4-minute mile again. He knew neither would come easy, if at all, but he didn't want to settle for anything less.
So he returned to classes at the business school and suddenly realized he was in over his head. The senior-level courses he was taking on accounting, finance, marketing and economics were full of words and theories he had absolutely no recollection of.
He called Dr. Rak again, who sent him to the school psychologist for an IQ test. His poor score revealed just how much work he was in for.
"Steven, this is going to be painful," the psychologist told him. "You are going to suffer. This is going to be the hardest thing you ever have to do. But you can do it."
The final line was all Heidenreich needed to hear.
"I could do it. He actually said I could do it," he said. "And that's all I needed. All I needed was to know I could do it."
Heidenreich started tailoring everything he used to use in his Olympic training for his academics. He was no longer on scholarship with the track team, but he trained with the team whenever he could because he still had a four-minute mile to run and needed to take the stress off.
The majority of his days were spent at the McNutt cafeteria with athletics' tutors the university still allowed him access to. He'd do his homework three times: once before lecture, one after lecture and once right before the test to thoroughly take in all the information in as many ways possible.
"It was hard for me to learn, so to make up for it, I worked harder," Heidenreich said. "That's the only way I could do it. I had to work harder because I knew I was mentally challenged. But it didn't mean I couldn't still be successful."
Heidenreich finished his senior year with the best grades of his academic career, somewhere around a 3.5, he said. By the time the semester was over, wearing an Indiana Running Club track uniform, he ran the mile around the university track in 4:22.
It wasn't quite 4.0 and four minutes flat, but Heidenreich came closer to his goal than most people ever imagined.
"It was—special. It was special," he said. "And it was fun. To do something you're not supposed to do, it's fun."
Having successfully graduated and in need of new plans, Heidenreich set out for another seemingly improbable task:
He was going to graduate school.
***
"Steven, your test scores are terrible," then-Dean Schuyler F. Otteson said to Heidenreich when his application reached the Dean's office.
Heidenreich had done rather poorly on the Graduate Management Admission Test that assessed how well a student would do in graduate school. There was no way his learning technique of doing his homework three times over and studying excessively could help him on a standardized exam, and it showed in his results.
"But I'm going to give you a special deal," Otteson said. "On my terms."
But the Dean was willing to make an exception after a spot had opened up with another student opting to attend a different university instead. Heidenreich would be allowed into the graduate school on academic probation. If his grades slipped below a B, he would be kicked out of the school. No questions asked.
"I shook his hand and said, 'Thank you very much, sir. I will take that deal," Heidenreich said, smiling.
Heidenreich never broke the Dean's deal. He finished his first semester with a 3.9 GPA and graduated in three years with a 3.66 GPA and an MBA in Finance.
During his spare time, he became one of the athletic department's tutors and began working with athletes himself. A man who had suffered traumatizing brain damage just three years before was actually giving lessons to college students.
"It was a reversal of roles, kind of," Heidenreich said. "Teaching actually made me become a better student. And it showed I could do it, too. Nothing that happened mattered. I could help other people learn just the same."
***
These days, Heidenreich is doing more teaching than ever.
He travels the country sharing his story with kids, young adults and athletes. Just last summer, he was in Colorado explaining to future Olympians what it takes to be a world-class athlete. A few weeks later, he was sharing his story with high school students.
He said there's not a crowd he won't talk to because there's not a person who can't learn from the Olympic spirit.
"If you set your goals, in anything you do, you can do them," Heidenreich said. "If you're determined to do something, you can do it. It doesn't matter who you are. If you have drive and determination, nobody, and I mean nobody, can stop you."
Heidenreich said he has a "special place in his heart" for special education students, just like his mother did. He said he's helped a young girl who had trouble with math graduate from college and eventually go to culinary school. Now she's the executive chef at a restaurant.
He also owns a yoga studio called Blue Lotus Yoga Studios in Breckenridge, Colorado, where he himself teaches lessons. He said he used to use yoga when teaching special education students to calm them down after learning about it himself as a competitive runner before his accident.
"Yoga has tremendous values that are important for anyone, athlete or not," he said. "It's a teaching tool like anything else."
***
The last thing Heidenreich wants to hear from someone is that they can't do something.
It's just not true, he says.
With an Olympic-like drive and passion, Heidenreich insists that all goals are obtainable. It's what he tries to stress in his public speaking engagements and what he uses to keep himself motivated every day.
"What I talk to everyone about is using the traits of the Olympians," he said. "And if you use those traits in whatever you have passion for—whether it's debate, dance, athletics, academics—you can't help but be successful."
Heidenreich would know. He lived it himself from a March night on a hospital bed to his present day of touring the country helping anyone he can.
A car accident ended his Olympic dreams; it never crushed his Olympic spirit.
And that, Heidenreich said, gave him new life.
"If I hadn't used those things I learned from being a high-level athlete, I would've never graduated from college," Heidenreich said. "If I didn't use that drive and determination, I wouldn't be here. But I was determined to graduate college and run again. And nobody was going to stop me. That's the bottom line.
"So get out of my way."
Steve Heidenreich can't recall anything about March 16, 1976—the day a near-fatal training accident changed the rest of his life. He only knows what people have told him and the long, demanding road back to living a normal life.
Heidenreich was a co-captain of Indiana's track team, ran the outdoor mile in 3:58.4 and had sights set on the 1976 Montreal Olympics when he left his apartment for a 5-mile run around Bloomington that night. It was nothing out of the ordinary.
As he neared the end of his run, Heidenreich was just north of the intersection of Indiana and Kinser Pike when a vehicle struck him from behind and hurried away. He landed on his head and fractured both his skull and his jaw in an incident that left him lying motionless on the road.
As circumstance would have it, a graduate student who served in the United States Army as an Emergency Medical Technician noticed Heidenreich from his pickup truck and stopped to help. The fellow student treated Heidenreich for shock, waved down another student and told him to go call 911 from the nearest hotel two blocks down the road as nearly 10 minutes passed.
"You need to hurry," the EMT said. "This soldier has been seriously injured."
In a split second, Heidenreich's Olympic dreams became an afterthought. He wasn't in a 1-mile sprint any longer. He was in the starting blocks of a new race in life with challenges unlike any he'd faced before as an athlete.
Heidenreich's marathon life was beginning and his Olympic career was over before ever running in the games.
But the mindset of an Olympian never left him.
***
Local police initially responded to the call as a fatality.
Critically injured and fighting for his life, Heidenreich was rushed to a Bloomington hospital where he lapsed into a coma. The last thing people recalled him doing before being rushed into emergency surgery was grab Dr. Richard Rak by the shirt and say, "Help me. Please help me."
"And then I went out," Heidenreich said during one of his many return trips to Bloomington. "Way out."
Dr. Rak removed part of Heidenreich's skull to allow his brain to swell. Blood clots were taken out and bleeding veins were attended to in a time period where brain surgery was far less sophisticated than it is today.
Dr. Rak gave Heidenreich a five percent chance of living. If he lived, he would most likely be vegetated and left unable to run, return to school or live anything close to the life he was used to.
"That's what they expected," Heidenreich said. "They expected nothing."
Two weeks later, Heidenreich came out of his coma. A week later, he returned home to Watertown, South Dakota to recover with the help of his mother, who quit her job as a special education instructor to become her son's primary caregiver, teacher and full-time mother again.
Heidenreich, who friends affectionately called "Heidi," was alive, but the brain injury had taken its toll. Mentally, he had the capacity of a two-year-old when he left for home and needed to relearn all of life's basics all over again.
Doctors told his family he was lucky to be alive. Everything that happened next should be considered extra.
But Heidenreich didn't want to settle for just being alive. That wasn't the Olympic way.
"I still had goals," he said. "Number one is, I was going to graduate from college. Number two is, I was going to compete again. And no one was going to stop me. They did not understand the internal drive I had to be a successful athlete and a successful student before the accident."
Heidenreich recalled the early days of going on walks with his mother where he'd point at things and ask, "Mom, what's that?"
"That's a tree, Steve," his mother would calmly respond.
"Oh, well then what's that?" He'd ask, pointing at something else.
"Steve, that's a jacket," she'd say.
Heidenreich suffered from Aphasia and was slowly piecing life together. The majority of the world around him was brand new. He's still unclear why some things came to him right away while others needed constant reminding.
"But as the brain started healing, I was growing mental years in weeks," Heidenreich said. "So I left the hospital at two years old in April. By August, now I'm 13 again. Thirteen years old!"
And as a 13-year-old boy again, Heidenreich had one thing on his mind despite what any doctor would say.
"I've got to leave town," he told his mother. "I know everything I need to know.
"I'm going back to college."
***
When Heidenreich returned to Bloomington for his senior year, four became his "magic number."
His mental capacity was still that of a 13-year-old and his head was still recovering, but he set personal goals for the semester of finishing with a 4.0 GPA and running a 4-minute mile again. He knew neither would come easy, if at all, but he didn't want to settle for anything less.
So he returned to classes at the business school and suddenly realized he was in over his head. The senior-level courses he was taking on accounting, finance, marketing and economics were full of words and theories he had absolutely no recollection of.
He called Dr. Rak again, who sent him to the school psychologist for an IQ test. His poor score revealed just how much work he was in for.
"Steven, this is going to be painful," the psychologist told him. "You are going to suffer. This is going to be the hardest thing you ever have to do. But you can do it."
The final line was all Heidenreich needed to hear.
"I could do it. He actually said I could do it," he said. "And that's all I needed. All I needed was to know I could do it."
Heidenreich started tailoring everything he used to use in his Olympic training for his academics. He was no longer on scholarship with the track team, but he trained with the team whenever he could because he still had a four-minute mile to run and needed to take the stress off.
The majority of his days were spent at the McNutt cafeteria with athletics' tutors the university still allowed him access to. He'd do his homework three times: once before lecture, one after lecture and once right before the test to thoroughly take in all the information in as many ways possible.
"It was hard for me to learn, so to make up for it, I worked harder," Heidenreich said. "That's the only way I could do it. I had to work harder because I knew I was mentally challenged. But it didn't mean I couldn't still be successful."
Heidenreich finished his senior year with the best grades of his academic career, somewhere around a 3.5, he said. By the time the semester was over, wearing an Indiana Running Club track uniform, he ran the mile around the university track in 4:22.
It wasn't quite 4.0 and four minutes flat, but Heidenreich came closer to his goal than most people ever imagined.
"It was—special. It was special," he said. "And it was fun. To do something you're not supposed to do, it's fun."
Having successfully graduated and in need of new plans, Heidenreich set out for another seemingly improbable task:
He was going to graduate school.
***
"Steven, your test scores are terrible," then-Dean Schuyler F. Otteson said to Heidenreich when his application reached the Dean's office.
Heidenreich had done rather poorly on the Graduate Management Admission Test that assessed how well a student would do in graduate school. There was no way his learning technique of doing his homework three times over and studying excessively could help him on a standardized exam, and it showed in his results.
"But I'm going to give you a special deal," Otteson said. "On my terms."
But the Dean was willing to make an exception after a spot had opened up with another student opting to attend a different university instead. Heidenreich would be allowed into the graduate school on academic probation. If his grades slipped below a B, he would be kicked out of the school. No questions asked.
"I shook his hand and said, 'Thank you very much, sir. I will take that deal," Heidenreich said, smiling.
Heidenreich never broke the Dean's deal. He finished his first semester with a 3.9 GPA and graduated in three years with a 3.66 GPA and an MBA in Finance.
During his spare time, he became one of the athletic department's tutors and began working with athletes himself. A man who had suffered traumatizing brain damage just three years before was actually giving lessons to college students.
"It was a reversal of roles, kind of," Heidenreich said. "Teaching actually made me become a better student. And it showed I could do it, too. Nothing that happened mattered. I could help other people learn just the same."
***
These days, Heidenreich is doing more teaching than ever.
He travels the country sharing his story with kids, young adults and athletes. Just last summer, he was in Colorado explaining to future Olympians what it takes to be a world-class athlete. A few weeks later, he was sharing his story with high school students.
He said there's not a crowd he won't talk to because there's not a person who can't learn from the Olympic spirit.
"If you set your goals, in anything you do, you can do them," Heidenreich said. "If you're determined to do something, you can do it. It doesn't matter who you are. If you have drive and determination, nobody, and I mean nobody, can stop you."
Heidenreich said he has a "special place in his heart" for special education students, just like his mother did. He said he's helped a young girl who had trouble with math graduate from college and eventually go to culinary school. Now she's the executive chef at a restaurant.
He also owns a yoga studio called Blue Lotus Yoga Studios in Breckenridge, Colorado, where he himself teaches lessons. He said he used to use yoga when teaching special education students to calm them down after learning about it himself as a competitive runner before his accident.
"Yoga has tremendous values that are important for anyone, athlete or not," he said. "It's a teaching tool like anything else."
***
The last thing Heidenreich wants to hear from someone is that they can't do something.
It's just not true, he says.
With an Olympic-like drive and passion, Heidenreich insists that all goals are obtainable. It's what he tries to stress in his public speaking engagements and what he uses to keep himself motivated every day.
"What I talk to everyone about is using the traits of the Olympians," he said. "And if you use those traits in whatever you have passion for—whether it's debate, dance, athletics, academics—you can't help but be successful."
Heidenreich would know. He lived it himself from a March night on a hospital bed to his present day of touring the country helping anyone he can.
A car accident ended his Olympic dreams; it never crushed his Olympic spirit.
And that, Heidenreich said, gave him new life.
"If I hadn't used those things I learned from being a high-level athlete, I would've never graduated from college," Heidenreich said. "If I didn't use that drive and determination, I wouldn't be here. But I was determined to graduate college and run again. And nobody was going to stop me. That's the bottom line.
"So get out of my way."
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