Jacki Munzel is 50 years old and she's no household name. The mother of three has neither Shaun White's global notoriety, nor Lolo Jones' marketing appeal.
But she's beaten a debilitating eating disorder, Superstorm Sandy and an injury at the worst possible time to compete against athletes decades younger than her for a spot on the United States Olympic Team this winter.
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Munzel may well be the most inspiring Olympic hopeful you've never heard of.
Jacki Munzel, Facebook
Our story starts back in the early 1980s, with Munzel in her late teens. Thousands of hours of practice and lessons have made her a world-class figure skater. After serving as an alternate on the American squad at the World Figure Skating Championships, she has a very real shot at making the U.S. team for the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo.
But Munzel never gets that chance.
Just months away from the Games, Munzel (age 20 then), trains for up to 10 hours each day but subsists on a diet of just 700 calories per day. She has an image to maintain — both on the ice and in her own mind.
One day, Munzel gets in her car to drive to practice. She's just taken 50 laxative pills, so she wraps a towel around herself to create a makeshift diaper. Her 5'7" frame carries only 110 pounds. She takes dozens of laxatives three times per week. She forces herself to vomit multiple times each day.
"This was embarrassing to talk about for so long, but now it's OK," she tells Mashable today.
So Munzel's driving to practice that day, wrapped in her towel-turned-diaper, and she loses it completely. She's so dehydrated that her entire corpus seizes up. Her body becomes one giant cramp. She momentarily goes blind. She loses control of the car.
Luckily her sister, riding shotgun, pushes Munzel against the driver's-side window, climbs over from the passenger seat, jams a foot on the brake and guides the car to the road's shoulder. Munzel topples out, convulsing on the ground as fluids come out "literally every end possible," she says.
Figure skating takes a back seat. The '84 Olympics are out. There are more important things now.
Munzel begins to recover, but it's a one-step-forward, two-steps-back type of progress. She relapses, then relapses again, repeating that process over and over.
Finally, at age 32, shortly after the second of her three children is born, doctors detect a heart murmur in Munzel. It's likely brought on by her self-induced vomiting, they tell her. She enters addiction programs, finds strength and success. Today she calls herself "clean and sober for 18 years."
Life moves on over those 18 years, in its pleasantly monotonous way. She loves her husband and her kids and that simple truth seems satisfying enough. Competitive skating fades from her mind. Then, more than a decade later, a conversation with her daughter relights the flame.
Jacki Munzel, Facebook
The 2010 Winter Olympics flicker on the TV screen of Munzel's Long Beach, N.Y., home, supplying background noise as Munzel and her daughter have a deep conversation. They discuss effort and reward, the importance of truly giving one's all to everything one does. Daughter asks mother if she's done that.
"I said I didn't give everything I had to a gift that God gave me, which was skating," Munzel recalls.
"So you're really going to go before God and say you didn't give it your all?" her daughter asks.
It's a painful reckoning, but what can Munzel do? Pushing 50, figure skating is out of the question and that's all she's known. Mother and daughter fall silent.
On the TV in front of them, Olympians from around the world whiz around a frozen oval on metal blades.
What about speed skating? her daughter asks.
"This amazing feeling came over me," Munzel recalls. "That's the only way to describe it — amazing — and that's what I've been following ever since."
So Munzel takes up speed skating at age 46. The agility required for figure skating has left her body, but she has power, speed and endurance. She gets a coach and starts training seriously.
The nearest proper indoor facility for an aspiring Olympic speed skater is 900 miles away in Milwaukee. But no matter. A slide board, stationary bike and beach runs keep her in shape. She becomes a very good speed skater.
You can do this, her coach tells her. You can have a real shot at the 2014 Olympics if you stick with this.
I can do this, Munzel thinks. I can — maybe, just maybe — go to the Olympics and redeem that heartbreak of 1984. At least, I can try.
Then in October of 2013 — just 14 months before the speed skating trials that will determine the U.S. team for 2014 — Superstorm Sandy hits Long Beach.
It hits with a fury, devastating Munzel's little town and her own will to compete beyond repair.
Almost.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
When Sandy hits, Munzel and her family don't evacuate. They ride out the storm inside their Long Beach home. Their ground floor floods. There's sewage in the water and the family dog and cat drink the sewage water and it kills them. Outside, Munzel hears explosions as transformers around the neighborhood blow up one by one. It feels as if the entire house is rocking.
Her husband and teenage son run from room to room trying to save prized possessions in the dark. Her son notices the floor sparkling for some odd reason. They flick on a flashlight. The floor is littered with jellyfish.
The next day, after the worst has passed, Munzel walks outside her house to find a scene she describes as "a really bad B movie."
Munzel and her family are displaced for more than two months. Eventually her coach calls. He tries to motivate her for a beach run, but she scoffs at the idea.
"I'm like, 'For what?'" she says. "I don't have a home. Long Beach is destroyed. You're kidding me. This is the real world I'm living in. That other thing chasing after a clock was just a fantasy."
Her competitive desire may be squelched, but Munzel pitches in around town, helping neighbors sign up for assistance and clean out their walloped homes. There are two kinds of people in Long Beach after Sandy, she notices — those who give up and those who fight on.
I can't stop, she realizes.
"I realized if Long Beach can rebuild and move forward, then I can too," she says today. "I still have a chance at this."
On Munzel's first long run following the storm, she jogs past a refrigerator freezer, then a grounded jet ski on the beach. But she texts her coach afterward.
It's official: She's back.
Doug Pensinger/Getty Images
This spring, Munzel's brisk race times improbably qualify her for the Olympic trials, which begin Dec. 27 in Salt Lake City. The Olympics — her dream decades deferred — are just one more step away.
But on Oct. 6, the day before she temporarily leaves her family to go train in Salt Lake City and prepare for the trials, Munzel falls off her bicycle. The doctor tells her she's cracked a few ribs and sustained a concussion. The ribs heal quickly, but the head injury's lingering effects, which damage her equilibrium, make training difficult. In Utah, she finds her performance on the ice significantly hampered.
"When you're skating 30 miles per hour on a blade thinner than a pencil line, it's pretty important to have good balance," she says.
Nonetheless, Munzel's in Salt Lake City today, training, preparing and taking a temporary leave from her job back in Long Beach as a skating instructor. A crowdfunding campaign she started on the site GoFundMe.com has raised more than $2,600 from friends and Internet strangers to help with costs. She's hoping to reach $10,000, but grateful for any generosity.
"It's not even so much the money they've donated," she says. "I've gotten all these encouraging emails and texts, and that is worth so much to me too. I want to bring everything I learn here back into teaching. I'm going to be paying it forward when this is all over."
The excitement of Salt Lake City is tinged with melancholy, though. Munzel's October concussion has forced her to "recalibrate" her expectations for the trials. On top of competing against skaters in their 30s, 20s and even late teens, she says it's just too much. Instead of trying to set personal records and maybe even make the team, now simply being there to compete against America's best is reward enough.
"This is my Olympics now," she says from Salt Lake City.
On Feb. 7 the 2014 Winter Olympics will begin in Sochi, Russia. Barring a miracle of epic proportions, Munzel won't be there. Familiar faces will become famous again, and new global stars will be born.
But, sometimes, the athletes who never medal are the ones that deserve our admiration most.
Homepage image: Jacki Munzel, Facebook