Wild at heart
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The racer’s mind locked up.
The pedals on her bike were still hammering, and her heart was still pounding, but inside her head, the mental hard drive had completely frozen.
How could I be this far behind? Am I kidding myself, thinking I can compete at this level? Maybe I’m not ready to be a pro. How did I get here?
The negative ruminations kept slamming around in Lisa Isom’s brain. She couldn’t see what was in front of her because she was too fixated on what was behind her. She was cruising on the bike now, halfway through her first Xterra triathlon as a professional and finished with the dreaded 1-kilometer swim.
Inside, though, she was still back in the frigid water, fighting to keep herself from falling too far behind the pack.
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Fighting to stay alive.
Don’t do this. Don’t do this. Focus. Just stay focused.
It was hopeless. The icy water of the James River in Richmond, Virginia, was swallowing her, clogging her thoughts. She clutched the handlebars of her mountain bike with all her strength, but she was no longer in command. The bike, the water, the race, they were all controlling her, pulling her toward disaster.
The racer slammed into a tree at full force. When she picked herself off the ground and surveyed the crash site, she realized that her race — her first pro race, dammit — was finished. The bike and her spirit were too damaged. Her shoulder felt like it had been smacked with a steel beam, and her appendages were torn and bruised.
Lisa Isom started to cry. She cried all the way back to the racer’s pit. She was still crying when she called her husband, Innes, to tell him what happened. She cried and she cried until the tears wouldn’t come anymore — and still then, she tried to force more out.
Prologue
This is not how Lisa Isom’s story begins. It’s not how it ends, either. It’s merely one vignette in the long, intriguing movie that is her life.
It’s an important scene, perfect for showing our heroine at her lowest depths, her most fragile, so that when we get to more uplifting scenes — such as Isom finishing fourth at the Xterra Central Championship in Keystone in July, or possibly this Sunday if she grabs a top-10 pro finish at the Xterra World Championships in Maui, Hawaii — we can appreciate the apex that much more.
To skip past the low points would be to sell short the high points of her life — the gratifying successes of being a mother and a wife, the bulleted list of noteworthy professional accomplishments.
But where to begin? Where to start, to not leave important clips out? Do we pick up the script of Isom’s life once she returned to the Vail Valley in 1994, following a so-so college athletic career to rediscover her future husband, Innes, and stumble into a two-part professional life where she stars as both Cordillera recreation director and local professional triathlete?
Or what about the college career? What about the up-and-down ride in which Isom discovered defeat and self-doubt as an athlete at Hastings College in Nebraska, only to quit her scholarship sport in volleyball to find solace and reward in cross country?
No, the story can’t start there. It has to start in northeastern Arizona on a dingy Navajo Indian Reservation. It has to start with the doddling Lisa, the definition of tomboy, finding her competitive roots among the rough-and-tumble Navajo boys on the Res who lived in the dormitory that her parents oversaw at the Immanuel Mission School. It has to start before Lisa came into the world.
Born to run
“She was an extremely active child, even before she was born,” says Lisa’s mother, June Deane. “She was kicking and pushing and wanting to get going.”
As a toddler, the young Lisa, maiden name Dyck, refused to hold hands because she couldn’t stand to be anchored down. She skipped learning to walk and went straight to running. She also refused to be like her two older sisters, Anna, and Carrie, who were more withdrawn, more constrained. At 3, the young Lisa demanded that she wanted her first two-piece bathing suit.
“She’s always been strong-willed,” June says. “She’s always known what she wanted to do. We were out there at the mission, in such a conservative environment, but even as a 3-year-old, she insisted on wanting a two-piece bathing suit.”
Lisa spent her first seven years on the Res, all that time continuing to run with the boys, learning how to hit a baseball and shoot marbles and lean for the line in a foot race. She made sure that she was good enough to get picked when it came time to choose teams. Her dreams weren’t jaded at that point by the hard realities of the world — realities like how girls don’t grow up to be professional baseball players, or how girls can’t play on every boys team.
Lisa was going to prove everyone wrong, just like she had proved to her playmates that she was worthy of being one of the guys.
“I told my mom I was going to be the first girl to play in the major leagues,” Isom says, laughing. “She shot me down pretty hard on that.”
Scene two
Lisa is 11 now. Her family has moved twice since living in Arizona, first to Cedaredge for a year, then to Gypsum. She’s right on course to be the first female big-leaguer, too, as she’s made the boys all-star baseball team. Her parents have suggested softball a couple of times, but Lisa doesn’t want to play with the other girls. Why should she, if she can hang with the boys? She’s an all-star for Christ sake!
When the team travels to Grand Junction for the regional, Lisa has the loudest cheering section. Even moms from the other teams are pulling for her. As a middle child with two older sisters and two younger brothers, who at times feels lost in the shuffle, the 11-year-old likes this attention. Actually, not likes, but loves this attention. She is a star and nothing can stop her.
Nothing at all.
Freshman flop
We’re in Nebraska now, of all places, and something has stopped Lisa — herself. Her prep athletic career was fabulous, good enough to lock up a two-sport scholarship to Hastings in track and volleyball, but things aren’t working out the way she hoped here in her first track season. Lisa is no longer the star, nor is she even average. Volleyball season in the fall wasn’t that bad, but as a sprinter in track, she is getting hammered by other girls. She’s put on the “freshman 15” and she’s dead weight when it comes to competing. She finishes last as much as she used to finish first in high school.
She tries throwing the javelin, but she’s not much good at that either. She tries pole vaulting, but again, nothing special.
She’s so down on herself that she begins to wonder if she is a failure, a small-town fluke, a phony.
When sophomore year rolls around, she pulls a necessary quick-change. She quits volleyball and takes up cross-country, mainly to get back in shape for track, but once she starts running distance she realizes her true life calling. She’s not an instant success, but she’s enjoying herself, which is the most important thing. She’s not finishing last anymore. She’s not whittling away her self-confidence anymore. And she doesn’t feel like she has to do anything she doesn’t want to do, which includes sprinting, throwing, crying.
She runs distance in track during the fall and continues to remain fulfilled. The supposed failure images are gone, forever it seems, a dark spot on what is a rewarding college athletic experience.
The images will come back to haunt Isom again, however.
Setting up the fall
We have to come back to Virginia. We have to now, here, because the script demands it. There’s so much to cover before that — too much — but it’s all got to be jammed together. A musical segue, maybe. A good transition. Something nice and clean to highlight Lisa’s nice, clean adult life before we build to the climax. Include Lisa and Innes’ rediscovering of one another after college and falling in love. She’s known him since third grade. She had a huge crush on him in middle school.
Now, after awkward adolescent romance the two are happily married and have an adorable, live-wire daughter, Wilder, who is the perfect assemblage of both of them. It’s crucial to throw in the building of the Isom family’s new dream home, up in the untouched wilderness of Tennessee Pass at 10,000 feet. Show Innes putting together the cozy log cabin with his dad and Lisa’s father Del on the 5 acres of heaven he found far away from the bustling, ballooning resort towns below. Show Wilder, running with unabated energy just like her mother used to do. Then cut to Lisa, meandering her way into a professional career as a triathlete after diving full-force into mountain biking, then swimming.
Do a nice split-screen shot, even, emphasizing Lisa’s efficiency in her two careers. Put Lisa working at her day job at Cordillera on one side, while on the other, show her moving from an amateur triathlete into the pro ranks.
Make everything seem perfect, because it seemingly is on the outside looking in. Perfect house. Perfect marriage. Perfect child. Perfect life. Then, without notice, pull the music and cut to Lisa, lying on the ground in Virginia, bruised and scarred, her bike wracked from its impact with the tree.
Why? Because life is never perfect. Not for anyone. Not for Lisa Isom.
And this isn’t a movie.
Getting back up Lisa is now sitting on a couch up at a lodge in Cordillera where she has her office. She’s a week away from getting on a plane to Maui, Hawaii, to compete in her fifth Xterra race this year as a pro — the Xterra World Championship.
If she races the race she has been envisioning, she will grab a top-10 finish, which would be a huge accomplishment for a first-year pro.
Since her fall at the Xterra East Championship in Richmond, Isom has turned in a stellar season, which includes the fourth-place finish at Keystone at the Xterra Central Championship and sixth-place finishes at the west championships and nationals.
The question lingers, then.
How did Lisa Isom get off the turf that day to come back and do what she has done? How did she not give up? Some questioned her decision to turn pro so early. How did she not fall prey to self-doubt after such a dreadful start when so many people were doubting her?
Isom smiles, and then launches into an explanation.”
I’ll admit, it was a long weekend,” she says. “I got home from that race and my husband said, ‘Look, it’s only your first race. It’s OK.’ I was beating myself up, because I had done so bad in the swimming, but it wasn’t that big of a deal.”
She continues, “Those girls in front of me are all full-time professional athletes. That crosses my mind on occasion. I was really beating myself up at nationals when I finished sixth, thinking, ‘What did I do wrong? How could I be eight minutes behind coming out of the water when I know in the pool I can swim a decent race?’ Ultimately, I had to tell myself that the top-three girls in this sport, not only are they making a living at it, but that’s all they do. They train full-time for what I’m training for a couple of hours a day. I have a marriage, I have a mortgage and I have a baby — the big things in life that are more important to me. Those are the things that help keep me keep focused.”
It’s an answer that doesn’t merit any further questions. Isom doesn’t know how much longer she can do what she does — how many more years she can balance being a mom and a career woman and a professional athlete. She doesn’t know if she will ever fully overcome her fear of the open water, the one thing she says holds her back the most when she competes.
She also doesn’t know if she will ever have enough sponsorship money to ever be able to train full-time. The resolutions to all these questions have yet to be written in the final script. At this juncture, Isom is just trying to enjoy where life has taken her and not beat herself up too much when she does fail.
“It’s not as if Wilder or Innes aren’t going to love me if I smack into a tree,” she says. “That’s the most important thing. Ultimately, I know they are proud of me regardless of what happens.”And that’s reason enough to get back up.
Staff Writer Nate Peterson can be reached at 949-0555, ext. 608, or via e-mail at npeterson@vaildaily.com.
