Kim Gallagher, area's best middle-distance runner ever, remembered 10 years after her death

The afternoon of October 20, 1981, was sunny and breezy, 60 degrees at Montgomery County Community College. The teenager out there running was a future two-time Olympic 800-meter medalist - the best middle-distance runner this area has ever produced. This 17-year-old had a resting heart rate that day of 62. Her left foot hurt her sometimes in the front "near the toes," but only when she walked, not running. (Could it have been her Adidas LA trainers?)

This teenage girl ran eight miles preparing for the Suburban League cross-country championship meet two days later. She would go the next day to Temple Sports Medicine to see a doctor who diagnosed her with bursitis.

We know all this because this teenager's teenage brother wrote it all down.

The story of Kim Gallagher, who died 10 years ago last month, is incomplete without the story of her brother. Bart Gallagher was always there - occasionally hiding behind a tree to make sure his sister did her full workout through the woods. Part coach, part statistician extraordinaire, part cheerleader. Also, part bodyguard, in the very real sense of the word.

Bart knew when Kim woke up with swollen glands on Sept. 17. He noticed "her arm swing was terrific" on Oct. 15, and how her form looked "absolutely fantastic" during a workout on Villanova's track on Oct. 26, although she was "not on her toes as much as she should be" during the last 100 meters of her splits. Her usual weight: 101-102 pounds. Bart recorded it all; occasionally, even his sister's menstrual cycle.

And maybe Bart was ahead of his years in realizing: Life can be short, and gifts aren't to be wasted.

Her gift was obvious from the start. As a slight 7-year-old, Kim Gallagher tagged along with her brother to practice with the Ambler Olympic Track club; she tugged at the pants of the coach, Larry Wilson, asking to run with the girls. He sent her out with teenagers, told the older girls to be careful, not to lose the little one in the woods.

"She came running out of the woods all alone," Wilson said.

Where, he asked, were the older girls?

"I left them in the woods," the little one said.

Before her signature international achievements - her 1984 Olympic silver medal and 1988 Olympic bronze medal in the 800 meters - Kim Gallagher already was the greatest women's middle-distance runner this area has ever seen.

"I think it was both body and mind," Jack Fuery, her Upper Dublin head coach, said of Gallagher's gifts.

She set a national high school 800-meter record - 2 minutes, 0.07 seconds - that still stands three decades later and two other national individual records. She ran the fastest mile ever by a high school-age girl anywhere in the world at the time after being invited to run with the world's best at New York's Fifth Avenue Mile. Gallagher dominated the Pennsylvania record book running cross-country and track for Upper Dublin High; won 12 PIAA championships; and anchored an Upper Dublin 4x800 relay that set another national mark, while anchoring a state-title 4x400 team the same day.

"I don't think there was ever a time that I saw her run that I didn't get goose bumps," said her Upper Dublin teammate Diane Friel.

That was a different time, the first decade after Title IX legislation that called for equal opportunities for women. Upper Dublin had a girls' track team for only a few years. The track was cinder, the weight equipment was one Nautilus machine. The uniforms, "a very heavy polyester," Fuery said.

None of that mattered.

"I remember a photo from the paper, from a cross-country race, where everyone was bunched together at the start - there's everybody, and there's Kim, already 10 or 15 yards ahead," said Upper Dublin teammate Beth Good DiFrangia.

"It was very humbling," said teammate Wendy Crowell Willette of the "ah-ha moment" that came for all who ran against Gallagher for the first time. Remembering her first time vs. Gallagher, Willette said: "She just took off. Her body was still but her legs were like a hand-mixer. She just went. That moment, I knew - this was a superstar."

Bart wasn't a gifted runner. Their mother, Barbara Gallagher, laughs when she recalls going to a cross-country race, seeing her son sprint out, flying as fast as he could into the woods. Most of the field would come back out of the woods. "Where's Bart?" she remembers asking.

His gifts were not in his legs.

"He was a genius at his age," Barbara Gallagher said. "If it wasn't for him, I'm not sure [Kim] would have gotten where she was."

Others question that, since Kim Gallagher's gifts were overpowering. However, practice wasn't always first on Kim's mind. Barbara Gallagher remembers Kim diving into a swimming pool and staying at the bottom as long as she could when she saw Wilson come to pick her up for track practice.

Did a teenage Kim resent Bart's constant presence, keeping the detailed training diaries?

"He bribed her," their mother said. "He wrote for the Ambler Gazette. . . . He did all the [track] stats for the boys and girls. The check went right to Kim. He never saw a penny. She would go to the mall. Kim loved to shop."

Before treasure troves of data were available online, Bart would call around the country getting times of top rivals. Kim would never be surprised by what she would face in a race.

Once they went to Puerto Rico on vacation, and Bart borrowed a device used to measure distances and took it with them on the plane.

"She couldn't even get a break on vacation," Barbara Gallagher said. "I didn't know what that thing was Bart was carrying on the plane."

Even when Kim went off to the University of Arizona, Bart went out there, too. There was an understanding that he could help in her coaching. When that didn't prove to be true, sister and brother both left for California.

"I feel I'm as qualified as any college coach in the country," Bart told The Inquirer at the time. "Other coaches may outnumber me in age and years experience, but if you show results, age is a ridiculous consideration."

The big issue was philosophical. Was Kim training for a four-year NCAA career, or the 1984 Olympics? The Gallaghers believed the Olympics had to be the priority.

Two years out of high school, at age 20, Kim improved her high school mark in the 800 meters by just over a second and won her first Olympic medal.

Wilson, her Ambler coach, believes that making the Olympics for the first time, winning at the U.S. Olympic Trials in 1984, actually meant more to Gallagher than the medals she later won. That had been Kim's goal for as long as he could remember, Wilson said: to be an Olympian.

The other highlights of her career, Wilson believes, were the records she broke in high school. In addition to her personal dominance, she got to share her gifts with Upper Dublin teammates, who had the talent to hand her a baton in position to make history.

An adverse reaction to a drug administered to treat that bursitis in her left heel kept her from qualifying for the state meet in individual events her senior year - she had set national federation records in the 800 (as a sophomore) and 1,600 (as a junior) at the PIAA meet - but nobody reported her being despondent about only running the two relays.

State records fell in both events. A national record fell in the 3,200-meter relay, when Upper Dublin ran 8:58.29. Kim had to come from behind against a great sprinter from Chester High in her 400-meter leg of the 1,600. In the 3,200, she only had to chase history since Upper Dublin already was in first.

"People were like, 'There they are,' when they get out on the track," said Bill Rose, who had been in charge of Upper Dublin's field sports when Gallagher ran, giving him a front-row seat to study the phenom. "They knew something special was going to happen. . . ."

They all waited for that skinny girl with braces to get the baton.

When Kim left Arizona, moving to Santa Monica, Calif., to train, it was her Tiger Woods leaving Earl Woods moment, the Williams sisters leaving their father, Richard. The phenom leaving the nest, taking the last step to stardom.

"Mom, I can't listen to Bart," she told her mother.

She began working with Chuck DeBus and his Puma Energizer Club.

"Bart got in touch with Chuck DeBus," Barbara Gallagher said. "He was a good coach, but we know his background [now]. But he was a good coach."

The background she referred to included DeBus' later being banned for life by USA Track and Field for giving steroids and other banned substances to his athletes. Kim Gallagher insisted she'd never taken any steroids, but accusations flew at everyone, including her.

"She said, 'Mommy, I was offered. There's no way. My body is already screwed up from anemia and all this,' " Barbara Gallagher said. "She cried sometimes. She was this little young girl. It was so unfair for her. When she was running in the Olympics, this tiny little girl, she went in the ladies' room, she thought she was in the men's room."

The innocence drains away when your sport becomes your job. Gallagher had her ups and downs and more physical ailments after that. Her bronze at the Seoul Olympics cemented her place as a great American middle-distance runner. Her time of 1:56.91 was one-hundredth of a second off Mary Decker's American record.

Bouts with anemia had slowed her at various times. She had surgery for polycystic ovaries in 1983. She later suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome and a relapse of the infection in her fallopian tubes.

"Who knows how fast she could have run if she could have trained like a normal person," DeBus once told the Los Angeles Times.

Gallagher tried to make a comeback for the Barcelona Olympics, but it was not to be. Her brother kept encouraging her.

"He was looking at her to run a little longer," their mother said. "She said, 'No, Bart, that's it.' "

Kim, who later married and had a daughter, was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1995, when she was 31 years old. The disease weakened her for years before she died of a stroke on Nov. 18, 2002.

Her only brother had died two years earlier. There had been a blockage in his gallbladder.

His mother recalled that Bart was heading off to train another athlete. "He wasn't sick a day," she said. "He was on his way to California. I was ready to drive him to the airport. . . . He had these sharp pains. They said they didn't know how he even walked into the emergency room. He didn't have a pulse when he walked in."

The unforgettable days for both Kim and Bart may have been decades earlier, days recorded in those training diaries.

Rose, the former Upper Dublin assistant, kept one of the diaries and said he uses it sometimes when he gives goal-oriented workshops for middle school students.

"We talk about, 'What did you do today to get where you want to go?' " Rose said. " 'What didn't you do - to destroy your dreams.' You're talking to kids who don't know how to plan for that future. . . . Very few people have it planned out, a five-year plan, a two-year plan. Here, you see the process, and then realize these were two teenagers doing this."

"Kim looked absolutely awesome today, totally in command and control," Bart, then a freshman at Villanova, wrote in the training diary on Jan. 2, 1982. "It wasn't that she was running fast [although she was running at a good little pace . . .] but how she looked. Her stride was so smooth and arm carry was great. . . . Today I realized how grown-up Kim is, in her running and overall. She said she felt very good, too! Seemed confident [extra . . .] today. Rest tomorrow. Good week."