College senior, Fulbright Scholar semi-finalist and former Emory cross-country co-captain Aileen Rivell and the Alter-G Anti-Gravity Machine have met weekly, sometimes biweekly, for the past year. Rivell straps herself into the rehabilitation treadmill’s harness — a “tutu with a zipper” as she describes it — which is attached to a box that inflates to surround her lower body. The air pressure from inside of that inflatable box reduces the impact of running on her legs. Rivell adjusts the percent of body weight force exerted to 80 percent and begins a normal 11-mile run, albeit with a slight float in her step from the reduced pressure. The Anti-Gravity Treadmill hums quietly as Rivell runs, step-by-step, foot after foot. The harness that holds her upright stabilizes her legs to prevent constant wear and tear. The requisite spandex wraps tautly against her body as she moves with the cadence she has created with her strides. The AlterG, like her limbs, moves with her motions as she continues her pace. The machine is a part of her body now.
Rivell’s back-to-back-to-back season-ending injuries force her to make the hour round-trip to the Georgia Sports Chiropractic — one of just four locations in the city of Atlanta that houses the Alter-G — in order to properly rehabilitate her litany of ailments.
But it is this very Alter-G — which helps her cut about 20 hours off of the standard 40 to 50 hour workload of a female distance runner — that has helped her, through her multitude of injuries, set two school records so far this season.
In the beginning of last season, Aileen Rivell felt a sharper than usual pain during a training session, a pain that frightened her, but a pain that was, ultimately, familiar. Rivell developed shin tendinitis during her sophomore year as a result of the compounded stress that the legs of a person who runs 45 hours a week experiences, and has endured a wide variety of complications with her shins ever since. This particular injury in her junior year, shin splints, sidelined Rivell for the remainder of her nascent season. “Without knowing that the complications with my shin was going to be a really long process, I told myself ‘okay, I’m going to get through this and then I'm going to be fine,’ " Rivell said. “If someone had told me that this injury was going to take two years to fully heal, I think that would have been a lot harder to deal with.” Rivell would be relegated to constant treatment, unable to train for two and a half months, unable to walk properly for two weeks, but she knew what she had to do to return to the track — this was her third straight season-ending injury.
Aileen Rivell had only suffered one minor running induced injury prior to her freshman year at Emory — a year that she entered with youthful optimism. Then, during one of Rivell's first practices after her freshman year’s winter break, she felt a slight pinch in her hip. She attempted to go on, but the pain worsened. Doctors discovered a stress fracture in her hip, and she was sidelined for three months before she was able to run again. Rivell's sophomore and junior seasons were, too, derailed by injuries, so as Rivell approached her senior year, she had one simple goal in mind: not to get injured. “I just hoped for not the worst, because I had the worst for so long,” Rivell said. “Anything is better than that.” Rivell hasn’t just fulfilled her season's goal for good-health — she has rocketed past them with legitimate results. She ran the indoor 5K in 17 minutes and 48 seconds at the Bob Pollock Meet on Jan. 29, placing her second in the UAA Conference, 16th in the country at the Division-III level and 6th in Emory women’s track and field history. In her very next race, Rivell broke a school record for the 3000m at the Samford Invitational on Feb. 13 with a time of 10 minutes and three seconds, breaking the previous Emory record by over four seconds. Then, two weeks later — in what was also her very next race — Rivell beat the record she had set on the 13th by four tenths of a second at the Indoor UAA Conference Championship. “Those were the fastest races I’ve ever run,” Rivell said. “They were probably the most consistent races I’ve ever run too.” Rivell has been cultivating the fortitude and mental compartmentalization needed to effectively win 3K and 5K races not only through her toughness in the face of multiple injuries, but since childhood. “I have two brothers – everything was a competition,” Rivell said. “Through a race, you know that this is going to hurt, and your job is to fight through those thoughts.” But now, Rivell’s training regimen is harder than it has ever been. While Rivell makes the trek to Georgia Sports Chiropractic once or twice a week to run on the AlterG Anti-Gravity Treadmill, she also has daily practices, frequent cross training and consistent physical therapy. “She just has gumption,” Emory Track and Field Head Coach John Curtin said. “Just about every other kid would have given up with what she has been through. Because of her injuries in her past, she has to work twice as hard as everyone else. She is incredible.”
“Just train harder and you’ll get faster,” Rivell’s younger self would have said, “but it doesn’t work like that. You also have to train smarter,” Rivell muses in the present day. At Georgia Sports Chiropractic, Rivell, with a look of ferocity, is focused intently at the task at hand. As Rivell continues to take her strides, she is focused on the rhythm of her running and not on the formerly inflamed tendon in her foot or the hip that failed her three years ago. Rivell exudes an air of resilience as she runs, a resilience that has been refined by prior setbacks, and a resilience that winces through occasional pain as she lands her feet on the treadmill. She runs through it, because running is her livelihood, and she knows just how easily that livelihood could be taken away from her. “My results justify all of the work and waiting I’ve had to do over the years because I feel like it would have been tough to go through all this training without this end result that I wanted,” Rivell said. “There were so many times I wanted to quit.” But she hasn’t, and she doesn’t plan to before the end of her college career. Rivell and, as an extension of her body, the AlterG Anti Gravity Treadmill epitomize a reality of life; it will rise and it will fall, but it will be done step by step.
