She remembers the big moments: the dash to the finish, the crowds roaring, that blessed moment when lungs and legs finally relax, when she looks up from a thin bicycle tire and knows, knows, that she is the best.
She remembers the small ones, too: the youngsters astride two wheels, fine-tuning skills they learned from mom or dad. How they smile at her! How they dash to the finish, knowing, knowing, that Olympic glory awaits.
These days, Jackie Crowell balances those memories, the large and small, and considers herself blessed. The onetime Olympian cycling hopeful is competing against the cruelest of opponents, brain cancer. She appears to be in the lead: her oncologist recently detected no trace of a tumor discovered and removed last year.
Crowell has decided to do something even more reckless than cycling in a pack at 40 mph. She’s embraced hope.
“I have a chance,” she said last week in the kitchen of her Kirkwood home. “I’m going into the holidays not thinking this is my last Christmas.”
She took it a step further.
“I would love to turn 30,” said Crowell, who is 26. “It would be a blessing to turn 30.”
Blessings, like cycling victories, are to be savored. Crowell is familiar with both.
Panic, fear
She’s the daughter of a lawyer and a telecommunications consultant. Don Crowell and Nanci Adler encouraged their daughters, Jackie and Lizzie, to ride bikes. The kids hardly had a choice: Don and Nanci routinely rode from their home in Maitland, in the flat reaches of central Florida. Each year, Jackie graduated to a better bike.
When she was 12 her parents surprised their firstborn with a Fuji racer. She ran her hand over the Christmas present's red-and-black frame, admired its pencil-thin tires. This, she knew, was a serious bike. She got serious, too. Florida's heartland became her training ground. By the time she entered the University of Florida, in 2006, Jackie Crowell had a cyclist's melon thighs and mental toughness. She rode competitively for the university, taking a year off to race on the pro circuit. In 2011, she graduated with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering.
She turned her full attention to cycling, joining Exergy Twenty16, a squad of professional female racers. She was an "all-arounder;" the baseball equivalent is utility fielder, someone capable of playing many positions. In one weekend race, she won $6,000. Crowell also got a glimpse of true glory: two of her teammates made the squad that competed in the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
The next year, the UnitedHealthCare Pro Women's Cycling Team picked her up. This was big stuff. The women who wore UHC's royal blue warm-ups were considered the best. Crowell, eyeing the Rio 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, headed to Colorado Springs to train with her new team. She was 25 and indestructible.
But a tingling in her right side, which had appeared a few months earlier, wouldn’t go away. Crowell shrugged it off —some lingering nerve damage, perhaps, from a spill in which she’d suffered spinal compression fractures.
“It scared me a little bit. But you can’t be scared and be a bike racer going around curves at 35 mph.”
The tingling turned into twitches that rippled along the right side of her body. Trainers in Colorado Springs told her to go home, immediately, and get an MRI.
“I didn’t have a doctor,” she said. “I’d never been sick. When you’re 25, you don’t think it’s brain cancer.”
She had the MRI in Alpharetta, where she’d recently moved from Florida. On Oct. 3, 2013, she visited a sports-medicine clinic in Atlanta, where the MRI results had been delivered. Crowell watched as a doctor pointed out the image on his computer screen. It was largely dark; she could discern shapes that were brain tissue. But there? That white circle near the left corner?
That, the doctor said, is a tumor.
She went through the motions of driving as she headed home. Maybe that's why Crowell took the wrong fork where Interstates 75 and 85 part ways. Instead of staying on 85, she headed up 75. She didn't realize the goof until she neared Marietta. She called her boyfriend, Daniel Holt. I'm lost, and I have a tumor. Crowell exited the highway to get her bearings. Her cell phone battery died. Crowell wanted to scream.
Then something happened; she couldn’t move her right side from the neck down without pain or tingling. Thinking she was about to die, Crowell opened her door, stepped onto the roadway and flagged down a motorist. Another stopped, then a third. Someone called 911. An ambulance arrived in the height of rush hour. Attendants hustled her into the back. The truck crept into snarled traffic.
Crowell noticed something amiss. “Why aren’t the (emergency) lights on?” she asked an attendant.
“I don’t know,” he replied.
“Does it cost extra for the lights?”
“No.”
"Then turn them on!"
Red lights flashing, the ambulance headed to WellStar Kennestone Hospital, where physicians told her the tumor had hemorrhaged. Three days later, they removed it. Four days after that, she walked, unsteadily, out of the hospital.
‘Tough’ patient
She has glioblastoma. It is extremely rare — rarer still, in young adults. It is as vicious disease, hard to eradicate. After her operation, Crowell underwent seven weeks of radiation. She followed that with 12 cycles of chemotherapy. Crowell's been treated at WellStar and the the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke University in Durham, N.C.
The dark, thick hair atop her head fell out, leaving a bald crown. She wore a ski cap, and, in March, shaved off the rest so it could grow back uniformly.
These days, she wears it close. “It once was long,” she said, “but it keeps getting shorter and shorter and shorter.”
Crowell won’t quit, said Dr. Carmen Klass, the WellStar oncologist who’s treating the cyclist.
“Oh my God, she’s amazing, amazing in every way,” said Klass, whose examination on Dec. 2 showed no evidence of a tumor in Crowell’s brain. “She’s tough.”
Once, Klass recalled, Crowell arrived early for an appointment. She killed time by running up the stairs at the hospital’s parking deck.
“She’s disciplined. It shows in her career.”
It shows in Morgan Patton’s career, too. A fellow cyclist, Patton considers Crowell her best friend. Crowell critiques Patton’s performances.
“That’s not always easy to hear,” said Patton. “But it’s made me a better racer.”
Patton also offered what may be the highest praise one 26-year-old can bestow on another: “She’s totally bad-ass.”
Totally committed to staying on two wheels, too. She’s ridden in a couple of local races, but plans on picking up the pace now that she’s off chemo.
She's equally committed to sharing her knowledge with another generation, too. Crowell recently wrapped up several months of volunteer work training young cyclists at the Dick Lane Velodrome in East Point. The concrete track, built for the 1996 Olympics, is a popular cycling spot.
“She’s provided so much support,” said Isabelle Poore, 15, an aspiring collegiate cyclist who’s a sophomore at the Paideia School. “And she pushes us to the limit.”
That brings Crowell to another memory. The race had been hard and fast. The 10-year-old boy had given it everything he had — in truth, he gave more than he thought possible. The kid pulled his bike off the pavement, leaned over the machine and vomited. Crowell ran to him.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m OK,” the boy gasped.
The kid kept riding, not ready to quit. Crowell, pleased with his determination, takes that memory with her.
She’s also planning on making new memories. That boyfriend? Now he’s her fiance. When she learned the good news last week at her latest check-up, Crowell and Holt lit a fire in the backyard, popped a bottle of champagne and raised their glasses to the future.
A future with some more finish lines, perhaps, and memories waiting to be made.
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