Famed jogger shows survival’s path

For years, Trisha Meili was one of the most famous anonymous people in the United States.

Her brutal assault and rape in New York City became notorious. Identified only as “the Central Park jogger” who’d gone for a routine round of exercise one pleasant spring evening in 1989, Meili lost three quarters of her blood and much of her physical and cognitive function; medical professionals considered her barely alive and she was given last rites. The story seized headlines worldwide and caused much soul-searching in New York as people contemplated “what the savagery of the attack said about our society,” Meili said.

She’s not anonymous anymore. Meili has become a celebrated motivational speaker and author of the 2003 book “I Am the Central Park Jogger,” which details her recovery and imparts some valuable lessons about surviving and thriving despite unexpected crisis.

Meili was the keynote speaker at the YWCA Clark County’s annual fundraising luncheon, held Thursday at the Hilton Vancouver Washington. “Of course, I pray that no one else suffers what I went through,” said Meili. “But each of us … may face challenges from which we doubt we can ever recover. We feel knocked off our path.”

Don’t stay knocked off, she said. Instead, you should seek and accept support, be proud of what you can accomplish, and believe in the power of the present moment.

“I was an ordinary person who experienced an extraordinary level of violence,” she said, “but I also experienced an extraordinary level of human kindness and love — support that was crucial to my recovery.”

That means cards and gifts from complete strangers delivered to her hospital room. Healing oil and holy water. A memorial in Meili’s honor was set up in Central Park — even though nobody knew her name.

“I was even sent 18 roses by Frank Sinatra,” Meili said, laughing. Then she added that she’s not certain she recalls those roses — it was during six weeks of total memory lapse after the attack — but she was told about them and holds the anecdote dear.

And in November 1989, a man ran the New York City Marathon in Meili’s honor, won a medal and sent it directly to her hospital room in Connecticut.

“This is for you as you come closer and closer to finishing your own marathon,” he wrote. Meili displayed the gold circle and ribbon to the Y luncheon and said: “I hold the medal so close to my heart.”

All that support, she said, helped her heal and also helped her get clear that she had nothing to be ashamed of.

“A common reaction among rape survivors is self-blame,” Meili writes in her book. The “internalization of that belief leads to shame, self-doubt, and silence.” But in her infamous case, she said, silence wasn’t possible.

“People didn’t ostracize me because I’d been raped,” she writes. “Rather, they opened their hearts to me. I wasn’t alone, I was assured; my fight for recovery was a national fight.”

Running uphill

When she was in rehabilitation, she said, a doctor casually invited her to join a group of Saturday morning joggers at the hospital. The very idea made Meili nervous, but since she trusted the doctor and knew he’d be there, she decided to give it a try. The quarter-mile track led through the hospital parking lot and then up the slightest of slopes, she said, but this formerly six-mile-per-day runner wasn’t sure she could make it.

That final incline “felt like Mount Everest to me,” she said. But her doctor put his hand on her shoulder and helped steer her upward and toward the finish line.

The lesson she learned from that moment, she said, is to be proud of what you can accomplish rather than focus on what you can’t. The other runners that humid August morning, she said, were someone on crutches, someone in a wheelchair and someone with spina bifida.

“If they can do this, with their challenges, so can I,” Meili thought. Later, she learned that this supposedly casual collection of folks who wanted to run together was, in fact, a carefully planned part of her treatment. “They knew just how much to push me,” she said. “It felt so good. I was taking something back that had been taken away from me.”

Nearly everything had been taken from her, she said, including her ability to walk, speak, control her hands — even to think. Early in her rehabilitation, she said, she was tasked with the difficult job of using tweezers to pull nails from holes in a wooden board and reinsert the nails in different holes. Her therapist timed her while she struggled with the job.

And also watching one time was her mother, who wondered at her patience and concentration on such apparently simple movements. “It would have driven me crazy,” her mom confessed.

But Meili said she was just focusing on the task before her. That was the third and final lesson of her talk: focus on the power of the present moment.

“I wasn’t spending time getting caught up in a past I couldn’t change,” she said. “We can feel helpless, out of control, out of options. But what I am doing right now to make the situation better?”

Later on, she said, that very tiny task bore fruit when she was able to dab on her own mascara with pleasing accuracy — without messing up her whole face.

“The process of healing and growing never stops,” she said.

In 1995, Meili ran the New York City Marathon. Perhaps the most glorious stretch of the whole race, she said, was the final few miles in Central Park itself — and the cheers and support of strangers on all sides.

“In that moment, I reclaimed my park and I knew I would finish,” she said. “I crossed the finish line in four and one-half hours with a huge smile on my face.”