Oregon State Track runner and nurse student interview: Maddie Fuhrman
MADDIE FUHRMAN ran track and cross country at Oregon State. She graduated with her bachelor’s degree in Public Health and minors in toxicology and medical humanities in 2021. She is currently studying at Johns Hopkins and enrolled in a couple of certificates in the Bloomberg School of Public Health. Maddie has a passion for equity and access to healthcare.
In this podcast, we will be talking about transferring schools, handling setbacks, and how to deal with feeling like you left your sport not feeling done yet.
Below I have written most of what we talked about but you can listen to the full podcast on Anchor / Spotify or on Apple Podcasts.
Q: When did you start playing sports?
A: I didn’t really do all of the youth sports that a lot of people did. I did swimming every once in awhile in the summer and gymnastics. I never did soccer. The first time I did organized sports was in sixth grade doing cross country.
Q: Deciding to transfer schools was a tough decision for you. You mentioned that you felt like you might be letting people down by transferring. It ended up being the best decision for you. When talking to young athletes about getting recruited, what advice do you give them on choosing a school?
A: That is something that I’ve thought about after transferring.
The advice that some people gave me when choosing a school was to think about where I would be happy living, building a community, putting roots down, studying, and if I wasn’t involved in athletics.
I thought of course I would be happy in Hawaii.
But the advice I have is to really think about what your priorities are throughout your 4-5 years in college.
Whether that’s athletics, team, or academics. Understand how those will all play into your experience. The team aspect is so big.
If you’re on an official or unofficial visit, however you can communicate with the team, try to get some level of understanding about what the culture is like.
Find out what their relationship is like with the coaches and what kind of resources they have.
You can’t really know until you’re there.
If you can get on campus and get with the team, go for a run with them, I think that is really helpful to understand you would fit in there and if you would be happy.
When I was deciding to leave Hawaii, I had a long conversation with my high school coach who was very important to me and really helpful in my growth of running and getting to the higher level.
The thing that he said that sticks with me the most is to “go with what you’re drawn to, not running away from something that you don’t want to be a part of”.
I think that’s great advice for lots of aspects of life. Especially after being in college for two years I felt like I could identify what was missing.
I wanted to be a part of a high level, dedicated, positive team that had goals that supported each other.
Oregon State also had the academic aspect that I felt like I was lacking in certain ways. Oregon State had that.
I talked to Coach Louie and he was so supportive and so enthusiastic and talked really highly of his team.
I knew some of the people on the team so I was able to reach out them and pick their brain a little bit.
I felt like what they said and what I heard from the coach was what I was missing.
That is what led me to Oregon State.
One thing that I will say about going to Hawaii is that was such a big move for me at 18 years old.
I feel like if I hadn’t done that, I might have been more scared to move to Baltimore on the other side of the country. So it did help me have the courage to move far away.
I grew up in Silverton, Oregon. When I was a senior in high school, I was having a really great year athletically.
All throughout high school I was MVP of the teams I was on and I felt like I had a lot of support from my community, like my family and friends teammates and all that.
I was definitely in my head thinking that I was letting people down. I felt like people were so proud of me for signing for a division 1 college, getting a scholarship and moving far away.
I felt like I did it, you know? I got out of Silverton, I was really making a name for myself.
I was scared that going back home was me giving up on all of the support and encouragement that people have given me over the years.
Of course if people knew the full story they would want the best for me and they would see that transferring was exactly that.
Q: You mentioned to me before that you couldn’t get both the true high level athletic experience and the nursing degree at the same time. Do you feel like you would have done a different undergrad degree if you weren’t a student-athlete?
A: When I was getting recruiting and looking at colleges, I kind of had nursing as one of the options on what I was interested in.
I remember talking to the coach at Portland which has a big nursing program and he said it’s really hard.
He doesn’t encourage people to do it because you miss a lot of clinical’s, you miss practice and meets, etc. Now that I’m a nursing student, I can totally see how those two would be very difficult to do at the same time.
That’s a really hard question because I couldn’t imagine my undergrad experience if I wasn’t a student athlete.
I also wanted to go to a bigger state school and there’s not a ton of state schools in Oregon that have nursing as an option.
That’s a hard question because in nursing school I wonder what would this look like if I had done nursing before.
I probably would have still done public health but I would have switched to nursing a little bit earlier.
Q: How did your setbacks like your stress fractures and getting covid affect you in sport?
A: Most of my undergraduate career running-wise was actually not running or in the process of getting back to running.
My freshman year I had a stress fracture in my foot, I had a few more stress fractures in my feet over the next year. I was in a cast for awhile.
I had femoral stress fractures. Injuries all up and down my legs basically.
The feet injuries were in Hawaii, the femoral stress fracture was the winter after I transferred from Hawaii.
I think that was kind of residual from my lifestyle in Hawaii with under-fueling and everything that caught up to me.
I got covid in January of 2021 which was a huge bummer because that was going into the first season we were going to have in almost a year at that point.
Looking back on my career, I don’t really think of the setbacks.
There were a lot of them and stress fractures take awhile to get over with the bones healing, letting your body recover, getting back into shape. It definitely taught me a lot of resilience.
Those hours in the pool or in the bike are very tiring and so lonely. They made me so, so grateful for when I could run.
After years and years of getting hurt, I think that was my first full track season since my freshman year so basically 4 years later.
After covid I was so grateful to be at a meet, to be running, to be in those workouts with my teammates.
You can look at it positively or negatively but really if you want to have a good outcome, if you want to be happy, you have to choose to be positive and know that those times by yourself doing recovery will pay off.
I’m very thankful it did even though it wasn’t what I wanted but I was so grateful to have that.
Q: What was one of your favorite moments while competing?
A: There were so many good moments throughout the years. One of my favorites was more recent. The whole PAC12’s weekend in 2021 for track was probably my favorite overall moment.
There are two moments I clearly remember that aren’t even about my own races.
There were 3 teammates in the Friday night race. The sun was going down and it was very pretty on the track.
I was standing with 3 of my best friends who were also teammates.
We were all there together which was a big deal because we had never all been there together before. I was watching my teammate JJ who had overcome so much in her career.
We had trained together through some stress fractures together in the pool. To see her overcome that and do really well was really special. (She finished her last college race and was so happy)
Watching my best friend and teammate, Batya, who did so well and then I got to lineup with one of my best friends Kate.
All four of us got to line up together me, Audrey, Batya, and Kate for the 5k.
That whole weekend together and running through the USC campus after my last 5k and my last race and having them all with me and all of my other teammates who I love so much was so special.
Q: What was the transition out of playing competitive sports like for you? What did you do in your newfound free time?
A: I feel like I am still kind of in the middle of that transition. It’s kind of crazy seeing pictures of my old teammates doing cross country preseason and it’s like whoa I feel like I was just there.
Luckily I had grad school to look forward to.
We ended school mid June and I was moving over in the beginning of August so it was a short summer for me.
I had that big next milestone to look forward to and entering a new chapter of my life.
I know it would be a lot harder for me if I didn’t have that.
I was so exhausted from all of the covid and all of the last minute races which I was happy to have but there was always the mindset of ‘every race might be our last’. There were a lot of those in the busy schedule.
Emotionally I was like I have served my time here but I never really felt like I accomplished the goals that I had set for myself which was kind of a hard pill to swallow.
Having this new focus of my life was really helpful and I’m very passionate about becoming a nurse so I directed that passion into that.
The free time I had in undergrad is insane compared to how busy I am.
I still try to run pretty often, I ran a marathon in March and I have one in October. I’ve been trying to stay active and running while I’m in grad school.
Q: What aspect of the transition out of sports was the hardest for you? What advice can you give to athletes on what you learned from that?
A: I think the hardest thing overall for me was accepting that I was leaving a lot of things that I wanted to accomplish not done.
The times I knew I could run if I had been able to if I stayed healthy or been able to race track season in 2020 before it got canceled.
That is so hard and I think that a lot more athletes than would like to admit can relate to.
Having this huge focus of your life for all of college and usually for many many years for that and to not dot your i’s and cross your t’s and have to move on.
Being around friends and classmates that aren’t athletes they would say “that’s so cool you ran in college” and sometimes I even feel like kind of an imposter.
I have a tendency to say “I ran in college but like not that good or anything like that”.
Even though objectively I was a lot better than the average person.
It’s just like that whole accepting it for what it is, being grateful for what it gave you, taking the good moments and good lessons that came out of it.
Without holding on to bitterness or regret of the whole sport or the whole lifestyle of being a college athlete.
I did that for 5 years of undergrad that I didn’t do x, y & z that I wanted to do. I didn’t get to study abroad. There’s a whole college lifestyle that I wasn’t really a part of.
Letting go of any regret of not getting those things and holding onto the gratitude of what you did get. Sometimes the perspective of being out of it is a lot easier to recognize how special it was.
Q: Do you have anything else to add?
A: For people who are transitioning out of college athletics or if you are still in college athletics, I want to express how important those teammates and community relationships are.
You don’t always get that in other chapters in your life and that’s something that I really miss.
Investing in those and being grateful and holding on to those kind of relationships is so important.
If you missed the last podcast, our guest was dietician and personal trainer Colby Thibault. In that episode, we discussed injuries, struggles as a student athlete, and her path to her career as a culinary dietitian and personal trainer. Up next we will have softball player Alicia Peters as our guest. In that episode, we will be talking about performance anxiety, overcoming a back injury, transferring schools, and handling coaches not believing in you.
If you have any more questions for Maddie, please leave comments below or contact me. If you or someone you know is struggling, please call or text the Suicide Hotline. It’s toll free and available 24/7 at 988 or 800-273-8255.
Rose Medal’s mission is to provide resources and support for current and former athletes. Please support our mission by making a donation.
Are you or someone you know currently struggling with what happens in life after sports? Or did you already go through that transition to life after retiring competitive sports and wish you had more resources and support? Have you ever wondered, “what do athletes do after they are done playing sports? What’s next after sports?” Do you feel like you dedicated so much to your sport and you don’t know what to do now that you’re done competing? You’re not alone. Check out the site and join us in the journey. Once an athlete, always an athlete.
More blog posts you might like: