LYNNWOOD – Debbie Dahm had only one thought when her daughter mentioned that she’d be taking up the pole vault.
“Are you nuts?” she thought but did not say.
She didn’t know the half of it.
Less than a year after recovering from a broken back, Lynnwood High School’s Kim Dahm was back at it again, reaching nearly 10 feet above the cruel earth.
Bones heal, right?
For a while, no one was quite sure.
Dahm, now a senior, began feeling some back pain during track season of her freshman year. It jolted her every time she dug her pole into the runway and twisted her body over the pole vault bar. It pinched her while she ran around on the soccer field. She knew something was wrong, especially when the pain worsened over the next year. One spring day during her sophomore year, she’d had enough. With tears in her eyes, she pulled herself from contention during a meet.
After nearly a year of steadily building discomfort, a bone scan revealed a stress fracture of her L-5 vertebra. Though no one is 100 percent certain how the injury occurred, Dahm, who also plays club soccer in the spring, says she “definitely initially hurt it pole vaulting.”
Though many might want to cease hurling their bodies through space at that point, the news she received was even more painful than the stress fracture.
“The doctor told me I’d definitely never be able to pole vault again,” said Dahm, whose career-best vault is 9 feet, 6 inches. “In my mind, I was going to pole vault again and it didn’t really matter.”
If a year of participating in athletics with a broken back is tough, nearly four months in a Boston brace is torture. Dahm wore the cumbersome brace – which fits tightly from the top of the rib cage down to the hips – 23 hours a day for an entire summer.
Her time in the brace included a family vacation to Hawaii that could not be canceled. For Dahm, the equation was simple. Paradise + brace = pure hell.
When Debbie Dahm was asked how long the family spent in Hawaii, she chuckled, “Two weeks too long.”
“She’s a boogie board fanatic,” she added. “So that was really tough.”
The experience may have altered her future. Dahm, who has a 3.8 grade point average, plans to attend the University of Hawaii with an eye on a career in sports medicine.
Two years of sports medicine class at Lynnwood and two weeks of a brace in Hawaii, she figures, give her a jump on a degree.
The brace finally came off in August of 2002. She suffered significant muscle atrophy and was barely able to sit up on her own. She traveled to Redmond twice a week for physical therapy and exercised daily to get her body as ready as she could for the fall soccer season.
With the bone healed and the muscles rebuilt, Dahm became determined to resume her pole vaulting career. It took some time to convince school officials and her doctors, but she eventually was cleared to vault in 2003.
Duane Lewis, the head track coach at Lynnwood was not surprised that one of his “favorites” returned. He wondered how she would perform given that the pole vault is arguably the most mentally challenging event in track and field. Would the injury linger in her mind? Then he remembered that pole vaulters are often a little bit different than the rest of society.
“Pole vaulting is mental,” said Lewis, who has coached track for 38 years. “You’ve got to be a little crazy to rely on the pole.”
Though the back seems fully healed, her senior season has not resembled paradise, either. Dahm missed the first month of this season when mononucleosis turned into pneumonia.
“She’s really a hard luck kid,” Lewis said.
You won’t hear Dahm complaining. She keeps trying to reach new heights no matter what obstacles come her way.
“She’s a one-track mind type of girl,” said Kim Plumis, Dahm’s soccer coach at Lynnwood. “She gets her heart set and her mind set and just does it. I really admire her courage.”
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
