Caitlin Falk hurdles over mental health
EAU CLAIRE, Wis. (BVM) — University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire track and field athlete, Caitlin Falk, opened up about mental health and how it has affected her life and sport.
Falk, a junior at the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire (UWEC), is from Mayville, Wis.
Falk is studying kinesiology with an emphasis in exercise science, while also minoring in coaching. She wants to be a college track and field coach at the University of California – San Diego or San Diego State University.
“I love the sport and I couldn’t imagine a day in my life not being at a practice,” Falk said.
Falk is interested in these schools because she fell in love with San Diego after visiting her brother who lived there.
Falk participated in softball growing up, as well as cross country, volleyball, basketball, and track and field in high school.
“I’ve been running track since seventh grade,” Falk said.
Her junior and senior year of high school, Falk was a dual sport athlete in the fall running on the varsity cross country team and playing on the volleyball team.
“I usually woke up and did my running workouts at 5 a.m. before school started,” Falk said. “Then I would go to volleyball practice after school. On days when we had meets the same days as games, I would go run at the cross country meet and my parents would drive me to wherever the volleyball game was that night. Needless to say I was very busy during the fall.”
Falk feels her greatest accomplishments from high school are holding the Mayville High School and conference record in the women’s 300 meter hurdles and another school record in the 1600 meter relay. She also placed third in the 300 meter hurdles at the state meet her senior year.
Falk was at the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point until she transferred to UWEC the middle of her junior year.
To others it would have seemed Falk was doing well at school, but they would not know that over the past few years she has been struggling with depression, as well as anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).
“I’ve dealt with anxiety and OCD my whole life, but never knew it was wrong, or a real illness until college when I had those things explained to me in Psych 101,” Falk said.
It also was not until college that depression started to affect Falk’s day-to-day life.
“I finally started recognizing I needed help when I started getting frequent heart palpitations due to the high level of anxiety I had during the spring of 2018,” Falk said. “I went into the student health center on campus and got prescribed antidepressants at a high dosage.”
In the winter 2019 indoor track and field season, Falk ran very well and felt confident as an athlete, but soon experienced mental and physical burnout ahead of the outdoor season.
“I had a terrible outdoor season,” Falk said. “This was a huge blow to my confidence and I felt as though if I couldn’t do the one thing I was supposed to do, I didn’t want to do anything at all.”
The summer of 2019, Falk went off her medication without consulting her doctor and started to obsess over death and suicide.
“I obsessed over how I was going to end my life,” Falk said.
Falk had planned to end her life on her birthday, but the day after writing letters to friends and family, she received a birthday card from a close friend.
“After reading everything she wrote to me I realized what I had been planning to do wasn’t what I wanted,” Falk said.
Within a week of those events, Falk, with her mom’s help, found a place to start therapy.
Come November 2019 , Falk’s mental health still was not great, despite trying several medications and spending a lot of time with psychologists and therapists.
During this time, Falk made the decision to transfer to UWEC.
“I believed that the coaching for track would be better for me there, and I would enjoy the area more itself,” Falk said. “I had, and still have a lot of great friends in Point and that’s what made the decision a hard one for me to make.”
Following the finalization of her paperwork, Falk sat down with friends to have some tough conversations about her decision.
“It was extremely scary seeing some of my closest friends be so angry with me for leaving them, and seeing some be sad about the choice I made,” Falk said.
Falk said she struggles with upsetting and disappointing the people she cherishes most.
“I tend to take it out on myself in quite harsh ways,” Falk said. “In the past I had looked to self harm as a way to make myself hurt the way I had made others hurt at my hand.”
Later that evening after the conversations with her friends, Falk went to get some space in the locker rooms on campus.
“I was having a hard time dealing with what I had just put onto some of my best friends by deciding to leave UWSP,” Falk said.
While in the shower, Falk had considered cutting herself, but remembered she just received a refill of her antidepressants.
“After I got out of the shower, I sat on the floor of the locker room with the bottle of pills sitting in front of me,” Falk said.
Falk called her brother and texted the people she was close to that she loved them, then proceeded to take 20 of her pills.
“All I could do was sit there and sob, and know that I deserved what I was doing because of the way I just hurt the other people around me,” Falk said. “All that I cared about was hurting myself to make up for what I had just done to others around me.”
Soon Falk realized she had made the wrong choice. She tried to expel what she ingested, but couldn’t. She then called her friends who immediately came running to help her.
“One of the scariest things I remember is seeing the look on their face when they came in and saw me,” Falk said. “It made me realize that there were people who cared about me enough to be sad if I had ended up dead on the locker room floor that night.”
Falk was taken to the emergency room and stayed in the hospital for several days. One of her best friends brought her home for Thanksgiving days later.
“Putting on a brave face for all of my family and friends that had come to my house that day to celebrate was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” Falk said. “None of them even knew what I had done or where I had been the three days prior to them coming over that night.”
As an athlete, Falk’s mental health has caused her to experience performance anxiety.
“I get extremely nervous before a race to the point where my body goes into a kind of fight or flight mode,” Falk said. “When it gets really bad, I start to have an anxiety attack directly before I start a race. I can get to the point of tears, I start shaking, and hyperventilation starts at this point for me. Dealing with all of those feelings when I’m in the blocks at the starting line is difficult because it takes a lot out of me physically, and I know I’m not at 100% going into a race.”
Falk’s depression also makes it difficult for her to train on her own.
“There are a lot of days where I can’t get myself out of bed to go and train,” Falk said. “It’s not that I don’t want to go and get better, I love my sport, but depression convinces me that I’m not worthy of getting better at what I do.”
OCD also affects Falk’s daily life and makes tasks more difficult than normal.
“I take more time to do things the ‘right way’ to satisfy my OCD,” Falk said.
To manage her mental health, Falk is still going to therapy one to two times a month. She also decided, with her doctor, to stop taking any medication.
“Medication is very finicky when it comes to mental illness’ because it isn’t some kind of a ‘one cures all’ type of deal,” Falk said. “Some people go through dozens of medications before they find the one that works best for them. I decided after I tried a few different ones that I would rather know that what I’m feeling is true to me, and not because of any wonky side effects from a medication.”
More than track itself, Falk’s teammates have been the biggest difference and motivation in her life.
“Going to practices and being around my friends is the one thing I look forward to everyday,” Falk said. “Those people, as cheesy as it sounds, light up my life and make everyday worth living. I always have something to look forward to with them… I’ve met some of my best friends through sports. There’s just some very specific camaraderie in track because you all show up everyday and do the workouts no one else would want to do.”
This season, Falk is looking forward to competing for UWEC and will be trying the pentathlon and heptathlon events.
Through all her struggles, Falk has accomplished quite a bit in her track career. She medaled in the 400 meter hurdles at the outdoor conference meet her freshman year and medaled in the open 400 at the indoor conference meet her sophomore year.
“Another accomplishment I am proud of is getting to run at Drake Relays, even though we didn’t run our best while we were there,” Falk said. “It’s an amazing meet to be a part of as a college athlete.”
While Falk was accomplishing all of this, no one would know what she had been going through. She said it best. “That goes to show that you really don’t know what someone else is going through.”
