Kathleen Baker’s road to gold had unique challenges.
When Kathleen Baker was 13, she Googled “Olympic swimmers with Crohn’s disease” and came up short. There wasn’t anyone—no one for her to read about or model her path after. She wondered if her dreams were over.
Crohn’s disease, which causes inflammation in the digestive tract and can lead to extreme stomach pain, left Baker exhausted. She would find herself too fatigued to finish a swim practice—even having broken state records just months before. How could she ever make it to the Olympics with a chronic illness weighing her down?Baker did become an Olympian, winning gold and silver medals at the 2016 Rio Olympics, and it would be tempting to wrap her story up neatly in that bow.
The logic of athletics can be straightforward. The thinking goes, “If I train more, I’ll be faster, I’ll be better, I’ll win more medals,” Baker says. But her condition complicates it. “To have a chronic disease that literally prevents me from doing that was really hard for me to conceptualize as a teenager.”When she was first diagnosed, Baker had difficulty reading her body’s cues for when she was approaching her limits.
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