Past and present runners help IU cross country coach through illness, back into NCAA meet

BLOOMINGTON – The maxims were familiar.

Don't feel sorry for yourself.

Suffer in silence with dignity.

For more than 40 years, that's what Ron Helmer has been telling runners he coached. Now, they were telling him the same thing. Through kidney failure, dialysis, chemotherapy, stem cell transplant and, finally, depression, he endured extraordinary lows.

Then the extraordinary happened.

Those runners called and texted from around the country. They traveled from California and Georgia to sit in his hospital room. When he didn't care whether he lived, they were "telling me they did care," said Helmer, 66, head coach of Indiana University men's and women's track and cross-country.

He continued to coach, to plan workouts, to embrace challenges. Maybe he's never been better at it. He has led men's and women's cross-country teams to the NCAA Championships, which will be run Saturday at Terre Haute.

On Nov. 3, the Hoosiers won their first Big Ten men's title in 33 years, ending Wisconsin's 14-year reign. In a race of eight kilometers, at no point in the first seven did it appear Indiana could win. Then the Hoosiers advanced as if fueled by an unseen force.

"If it was a movie, you'd think it was too corny to be true," IU athletic director Fred Glass said.

Helmer had been preparing those young runners for such a moment, but he couldn't have forecast they would seize it as they did. Never in a championship race, he said, had one of his teams executed so perfectly.

"I don't know why that happened. I really don't," he said. "I just know that it did."

Onset of illness

Helmer grew up on a wheat farm in Lyons, Kan., understanding what labor meant. He graduated from Southwestern College in Winfield, Kan., before becoming a high school teacher and coach in Kansas and Virginia.

What worked there also worked at Georgetown University. He coached there from 1986 to 2007, developing multiple Big East champions and teams that consistently finished in the nation's top 10.

In May 2007, a month before his 60th birthday, he was announced as coach at Indiana. Success followed, as it always had. Among his achievements was a Big Ten men's indoor track title in 2012, the Hoosiers' first in 20 years. Glass called him a "master coach" who is respected not only by athletes, but by other IU coaches.

"He's got that Zen, Phil Jackson, Yoda thing going on," Glass said. "He doesn't say a whole lot. But when he does, people listen."

It was about a year ago that Helmer began to feel tired. Ah, he thought, he was getting old. Maybe this is how it was. He ignored it.

He had always been healthy and energetic. His wife of 38 years, Mary, estimated that he had taken all of 10 pills in his life.

In mid-March, upon returning from the NCAA Indoor Championships at Fayetteville, Ark., Helmer went to the doctor for prescribed blood work. He didn't have a sinus infection, as he speculated. His kidneys "had pretty much shut down," he said.

He was diagnosed with light chain disease, a rare blood cell disease. Days later, lab tests revealed he also had multiple myeloma, a cancer of plasma cells.

He was hospitalized at IU's Simon Cancer Center in Indianapolis to undergo chemotherapy. He began chemo twice a week, plus 4½ hours of dialysis three times a week.

He continued to come into the office and to coach, although he skipped an April trip to the Penn Relays. Glass said Helmer was "up-front" about what was happening, leaving it up the coach to decide what he could handle. Other dialysis patients were too sick to drive, Helmer said, and were shocked that he continued working.

"Sometimes I'd feel good," Helmer said, "sometimes I wouldn't."

He traveled to regional and national meets at Greensboro, N.C., and Eugene, Ore., where he made appointments at dialysis centers. Eventually, he shifted to peritoneal dialysis, in which fluid through a permanent tube in his abdomen flushes out waste. Now he hooks himself up to a machine that cleans his blood overnight for 7½ hours while he sleeps.

Without a kidney transplant, he must continue treatment for the rest of his life.

For his cancer to go into remission, Helmer learned he would have to undergo a stem cell transplant. That happened July 3, and he was hospitalized for 18 days. It was every bit as debilitating as he had been warned it would be. He lost strength, appetite, 20 pounds and his white hair.

"Yet I'd gotten through it," Helmer said.

But the worst was not over. It was starting.

He felt low, and it wasn't the blues. It was, in many ways, worse than the cancer.

Things he used to care about — gardening and landscaping, recruiting and training — he didn't care about. He delegated more to assistant coaches. He stayed in bed.

It was behavior unrecognizable to his wife, herself a breast cancer survivor. She said Helmer is naturally upbeat. Helmer didn't understand it, either.

"I didn't care about anything," he said. "I didn't care if I got well."

Among side effects of the chemo was clinical depression. Medication helped. So did the outpouring from athletes he had coached over a span of four decades. He once told them things they didn't want to hear, and now they were delivering the same messages.

"I'm sitting there at a dialysis center, surrounded by really sick people, feeling sorry for myself," he said. "And I'd get some text from somebody, and they would remind me, 'You better not be feeling sorry for yourself.'"

He said it was difficult on his wife, a seventh-grade teacher and mother of their three adult children. Mary Helmer had no control over the cancer ravaging her husband.

"My wife rode this thing with me from beginning to end," Helmer said, "and I don't know how in the world she did it."

Back to work

IU runners reported to campus in late August. They had received workouts from assistant coach Rebecca Walter all summer, as was customary.

Helmer made a few allowances. He arrived at the office at 11:30 a.m. instead of 9:30. He left at about 5, after workouts were over, instead of staying until 7:30.

By Sept. 2, he was in full remission. He was off chemo and other medication. He pulled on his cowboy boots and was eager to drive his truck to campus.

Andrew Poore, a volunteer assistant coach whose running career has been guided by Helmer, said the coach was a little nervous soon after the diagnoses and sometimes showed the toll. More recently, normalcy returned. After Helmer's ordeal, he "doesn't have the patience to listen to people complain" about morning runs, Poore said.

As the weeks went on, Helmer's dry sense of humor was manifested in the jokes he always told. He had "the same fire for getting on people that he used to have," Poore said.

That was evident after a men's team title at Bethlehem, Pa., was followed by a 17th-place finish in a meet at Madison, Wis. What that did, Helmer said, was remind the Hoosiers that they weren't all that good individually.

"We weren't going to have team success unless they figured out how to function as a unit, function as a team, and use each other's energy to help them get through difficult races," Helmer said.

It was vintage Helmer. If there was any doubt that their coach was back, it was gone.

Jason Crist, a redshirt freshman from Franklin Central and fifth-place finisher in the Big Ten, said Helmer reminds him of his own father.

"We all love him," Crist said. "He's very straightforward and shoots from the hip. He holds us all accountable. He expects us to be great, and he expects nothing else. We try every day to give it to him."

If anything, Helmer's war against cancer has caused him to abandon smaller battles. Usually, he said, he would address multiple issues on what amounts to four teams: cross-country and track, men and women. He said he had "clarity in my thought process" because his mind was uncluttered. He planned workouts, oversaw them, spoke to runners, went home.

"It probably taught me a lesson, actually," Helmer said. "You didn't over-coach because I don't have enough energy to over-coach."

Bright future

Why not retire?

Helmer was prepared for the question.

"I could quit tomorrow, based on whether or not I was satisfied with what I'd accomplished as a coach," he said.

That was reinforced by hearing from so many former runners. If they hadn't learned of his cancer fight, his wife said, he probably would not have heard from them all.

"So why do I keep doing it? I wasn't ready to be done," Helmer said. "I love doing it, and I feel like I'm still good at it. If I wasn't good at it, I'd be done tomorrow because that would be unfair to the kids."

Helmer has agreed to a six-year contract extension. IU has stayed committed to him, and he has committed to coach as long as he finds it fulfilling.

He believes his 20th-ranked men's team can finish in the top 10 of the NCAAs. More championships could follow. Looking farther ahead, some of his runners could be in the mix to make the U.S. team for the 2016 Olympic Games.

"I look forward to this challenge every day," Helmer said. "I look forward to the interaction with the kids. I look forward, really look forward, to watching a kid who's here develop.

"I take great satisfaction in that. That probably is what continues to drive me forward."

It is a drive that sent cancer reeling backward.

Call Star reporter David Woods at (317) 444-6195 and follow him on Twitter, @DavidWoods007.

NCAA cross-country at a glance

When: Saturday, men's 10,000 meters at noon, women's 6,000 meters at 1:15 p.m.

Where: Lavern Gibson Championship Course, Terre Haute.

Local teams: Men, No. 19 Notre Dame, No. 20 Indiana. Women, No. 13 Butler, No. 23 Notre Dame, Indiana.

Local runners to watch: Men, Futsum Zienasellassie (North Central) of top-ranked Northern Arizona; John Mascari, Indiana State, Great Lakes Regional champion; Matt McClintock, Purdue, Great Lakes and Big Ten runner-up. Women, Waverly Neer (Culver), fourth in Northeast; Katie Clark, Butler, fourth in Great Lakes.