Patti Catalano Dillon

(This piece is for my latest book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from May 1988.)

THE NEW PATTI. I first saw the new Patti Catalano two summers ago at the Asbury Park 10K. We happened to sit together during the awards program at an open-air band shell overlooking the Jersey Shore.

She’d never looked better. Gone was the gauntness of the early 1980s, when she was America’s top woman road racer.

She was called to the stage to collect a prize in her age group. The announced time, a minute per mile slower than her best, reminded Patti of the runner she had been a few years earlier.

I’m so embeerrased!” she said to her friends, drawing out the last word and giving it her richest Boston accent. She had no reason to be embarrassed. She was a bigger winner now than she ever had been in her glory years.

I didn’t yet know about the fight she was waging, and winning. I’d heard rumors of her using steroids, but drugs hadn’t been her problem.

This spring she chose to make her problem public. She admitted it in two articles by Katy Williams.

Patti had slipped into bulimia – a cycle of starving, overeating and then throwing up – in 1978. She’d binged and purged “five or six times a day” during the period when she set her national road records.

She talked about her recovery in a Running Times article. Writer Williams supplied details in Boston Magazine.

“She broke the cycle without professional help, depending largely on the same inner strength that had previously taken her to the top of women’s running.”

Patti said, “My anxieties and self-determination drove me. It was the greatest race, victory – whatever – of my life. I had hit bottom, and I chose to come out of it. Nothing can compare. Nothing.”

She is now secure enough in dealing with food to co-own (with runner Liz Miller) a market and deli in Manchester, Vermont.

Patti hasn’t entirely let go of her old dreams at age 35. “I know that I want to break 2:20 in the marathon,” she said. “And I want all my records back. I want to wear size one again.”

For now, those are just dreams. “There’s no plan” to carry them out.

Another sort of plan is taking shape. That is, wrote Katy Williams, “opening a small group home in Manchester for women recovering from bulimia. The simple things – stacking wood, caring for animals, gardening – would help rebuild self-esteem. Catalano’s own road back to health began when she forced herself to do things as ordinary as getting up each day and showering.”

And running. “For me, to run again is great,” said Patti. “To compete again is better, and to have big ambitions is better too.

“I want to see what I can do with a healthy body and through clean living. I’m not talking about a rigid life style where you don’t even drink coffee. I’m talking about good, honest living, with lots of love and giving.”

She was comfortable enough with her new self to run the Boston Marathon last month, and face its demanding media and crowds, the same month the two articles had appeared. She had dropped out at Boston in 1985 while starting to mend her life.

At 2:57 this year, Patti was slower by 30 minutes than she’d run here in 1981. But in important ways Patti is doing much better ways. She isn’t embarrassed to be seen now.

“The best thing that can happen from all this is that someone with a bulimia problem will see or hear me,” she told Katy Williams. “I want to help others recover, because they’re reaching out for something the way I was.

“I am going to run well again. And I am going to be heard.”

        

UPDATE. Patti is now married to former top-class runner Dan Dillon, and lives in Connecticut. She still speaks openly about the triumphs and trials of her racing years and beyond.

Katy Williams, whose material I borrowed liberally (with permission) for this article, now goes by her more formal married name of Katherine Cassidy. She has served in the Maine state legislature and is founding director of the Bay of Fundy Marathon.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Memory Laps. Other titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]