Heart surgeries or not, Adigun will run at the Olympics

After strenuous training or live races, when runners have given all they have, they fall – collapse really – and close their eyes.

They go to a dark place, answering the body’s demand that it deactivate to rejuvenate. Shutdown to reboot.

Seun Adigun never has gone to this magical place of physical restoration. And she won’t when she competes in the 100-meter hurdles at the London Olympics.

She has long been afraid. Of dying.

“It got to the point where I was so scared sometimes on the track … because I was afraid that if I closed my eyes I’d pass out, and if I passed out, I might not get up,” said the former University of Houston standout who has had two procedures to remove excess tissue from around her heart.

“I’ll just walk, and walk, and walk. And it would hurt, it would hurt to walk. Your legs are burning, your chest is pounding and your body wants you to sit down, but I would just walk and walk and walk.”

Healthier now than she has ever been – well, she has a “pretty nice crack” through the tibia in her left leg, but what’s a stress fracture to someone who has had so much work on her heart? – Adigun still prefers to walk it off instead of turn it off.

Plans are for the next time to be after the final of the women’s 100-meter hurdles. Perhaps even after a medal run.

The odds are against her, but Adigun, an assistant track coach at the University of Houston who will compete for Nigeria at the Games, has always defied the odds.

Put a hurdle in front of Seun (pronounced “Shay-oon”), and she clears it, or knocks it down, and keeps going. Fast.

“She is an amazing person, an unbelievable competitor and great athlete,” UH head track and field coach Leroy Burrell said of Adigun, who arrived at UH as a promising freshman in 2005. “She has accomplished some really tremendous things, despite what she has gone through.”

Adigun, 25, suffered from tachycardia, which caused frequent “episodes” of an acute rapid heartbeat. She had a procedure done when she was 13, but the symptoms returned soon after.

In 2008, the fall of her senior year at UH, Adigun had the procedure done again. She had breezed through it nine years earlier as a wide-eyed teen, but became worried the second time when doctors talked about the possibility of complications with the procedure. Odds were she would be fine, but …

“I couldn’t sleep the night before because of those numbers running through my head,” said Adigun, who also suffers from asthma and severe allergies. “And I thought, ‘I have too many things I have to do, so dying? I can’t do that. What are y’all talking about?’ ”

That is a common response to medical issues from Adigun, who grew up in Chicago, the daughter of parents who were born and raised in Nigeria . (She is a distant cousin of former Houston Rockets superstar Hakeem Olajuwon. Her grandfather is Olajuwon’s father’s first cousin.)

Adigun, who graduated from UH with an undergraduate degree in kinesiology and a master’s degree in exercise science and motor behavior, speaks English, Spanish and Yoruba and reads Arabic.

But somehow she failed to translate what her body (and occasionally family and friends) were saying when they told her to quit. She tried, but the quitting didn’t take.

“Running is what I love to do. It is where my passion lies,” she said. “If I had stopped running, just hung it up, I knew that for the rest of my life I’d always have that void that I could have been one of the best of the best and just decided not to.”

The heart problem, including a particularly frightening episode at the May 2008 NCAA regional meet in Nebraska when she left the field on a gurney with her heart beating at up to 220 beats per minute and not slowing down, hasn’t been a concern of late.

She has had to deal only with “minor issues” like a ruptured cyst in her ovaries that led to internal bleeding less than a week before the World Indoor Track and Field Championships in March. She got on the plane to Istanbul anyway and made the final. She was a little woozy after the race. Yeah, she was still bleeding.

Last week, Burrell told her she had to limit her preparation for the Olympics to training in a pool because the stress fracture could be a problem.

“She looked at me like, ‘What are you talking about?’ ” Burrell said. Doctors recommended she take about four months off. She offered them four days. Burrell has her up to two weeks.

Nothing is going to stop her pursuit of the Olympics.

As is the case for a number of U.S. athletes, Adigun will compete for her parents’ home country, but unlike many others, this isn’t a backdoor route into the Games.

Adigun, an All-American and school record-holder, posted the fastest 100 hurdles time at the NCAAs outdoor meet in 2009, so if she chose to run professionally full time, making the U.S. Olympic team wasn’t a pipe dream, if not this year then in 2016.

Representing Nigeria at the Games is something the two-time African champion has wanted to do for some time.

“Often when you hear people talk about Nigeria , it is something bad, some type of corruption, something negative. Until the Olympics,” she said. “I saw how much hope we had as a country watching the 2008 Olympics, because of the Olympians. I wanted to be part of something that helped uplift the country in some small way.”

For Adigun, the goal at the Games is to advance to the final, which might require her matching or topping her personal best of 12.8 seconds.

Regardless of what happens in London , the Olympics are the culmination of an incredible journey.

“All that I’ve gone through to run in the Olympics … it’s so worth it. For 12 seconds of my life, it’s all worth it.”

- Culled from Chron.com