Still Here For A Reason

Tom Rothenberger’s Journey from Cardiac Arrest to Coaching Again

A Story by Dave Devine of DyeStat
Photos by Trisha Leavy and Trasie Humble

 

“[M]ore and more over the years I have become absorbed and amazed at the heart itself, the wet engine of us all, and how it works and doesn’t work, and what it means, and how we use it so easily and casually as a metaphor for the extraordinary loves and agonies that course through us like muscular, raging rivers.”

— Brian Doyle, The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad, Wild Miracle of the Heart

 

*     *     *

 

There were small signs, early in the day, of impending calamity. 

Something wasn’t quite right. A lingering weariness that might have otherwise been discounted. A disinterest in pressing matters. Difficulty tracking conversations. 

An uncharacteristic distractibility.

Longtime Jesuit High (Portland) coach Tom Rothenberger had returned the previous night from the Summit Invitational in Bend, Oregon — a long, Saturday night bus ride that saw the team arriving to the Portland campus late that evening.

Rothenberger slept nearly the entire way.

Unusual, but not alarming.

The next morning, Sunday, April 22nd, he met Trisha Leavy, one of his assistant coaches, at a local nature park for a 7-mile run. The pace was typical, comfortable, leaving neither of them winded or challenged by the effort.

Afterward, they met at a Starbucks to discuss plans for the upcoming Nike Jesuit Twilight Relays, set for the following weekend. Leavy was departing Monday for a short trip and wanted to ensure that her pieces were finalized before leaving.

Coffees in hand, they sat down to cover meet logistics, but Leavy found Rothenberger strangely disinterested. He was more focused on a book he’d brought along than planning the massive invitational for which he was the director.

When Leavy opened a spreadsheet of entries on her laptop to finalize fields for the Elite Mile races — which she needed to upload to the Athletic.net meet management site — Rothenberger was finally engaged, but made little sense in explaining how he wanted the lists configured.

“He went through this huge gyration,” Leavey recalls. “Take the number, divide it by 2, multiply it by 4…you know, just this weird thing. I looked at him, and I go, ‘What the heck are you talking about?’”

Another assistant coach, patched in from Leavy’s cell phone, was equally confounded by the head coach’s instructions. Needing to get on with her morning, Leavy decided to ignore Rothenberger and simply enter the fields in the way that seemed most logical. 

“It’s not like he was groggy,” she says now, “or half asleep, he just wasn’t tracking. He really wasn’t making any sense.”

When Rothenberger again implored his friend to sit and simply enjoy the coffee, conveying no hint of urgency about the meet, she became exasperated and decided to leave.

“I said, ‘Tom, I’ve got to go,’” she remembers. “And then I basically left. I’d completed nothing that we were supposed to be talking about, so it was really frustrating.”

For his part, the only sliver of that morning Rothenberger recalls is the open spreadsheet.

He has no memory of the morning run.

No recollection of the bewildering formula he offered for the meet entries.

Nothing about the book or the coffee or his original plan, which he conveyed to Leavy, to skip a family party later that day, where the family members in attendance would save his life.

Everything else about that morning, and the two days subsequent, would be conveyed to the 57-year-old coach — gently, gradually, repeatedly — by friends and family after he woke up in the hospital.

 

*     *     *

 

As with most people, if you want to understand Tom Rothenberger, if you hope to comprehend the forces that delivered him to the heights of high school coaching, the influences that helped draw him from the brink of death, you need to know something of his childhood.

The experiences and people that shaped him.

“I wasn’t the smartest guy at my high school or college,” he says, settling into an office chair in a brightly lit conference room at Jesuit. “I wasn’t the fastest kid or the strongest, but what I did have — what I was — was the son of a cement plant worker.”

Rothenberger’s father, Joseph, worked long days at a cement factory along the Willamette River in Lake Oswego, south of Portland. 

He left for work before dawn, returned in the evening covered in gray dust.

The family lived modestly, scraping by on the salary of a blue-collar worker. Their house, with nine children, lacked indoor plumbing until Tom was 8 years old.

“Watching my dad,” Rothenberger says, “what I grew up around was the idea that you just get up every day and go to work. You don’t complain about it, you just go to work each day.”

When he was 10 years old, Tom received a set of barbells as a gift. He approached the weights the way his father approached the cement plant.

“It was like, ‘Okay, every day I’m going to go out and use these.’”

Some of his brothers’ friends mocked the skinny youngster, deriding his ambitious fitness regime. It only lit Tom’s fire.

The local junior high in Lake Oswego had a bulletin board with fitness records posted, including the record for most push-ups by a middle schooler.

“I said, ‘I’m gonna break that,’ and they laughed at me,” Rothenberger recalls. “That’s all it took. Two years later, as a seventh grader, at 12 years of age, I did 300 push-ups, continuously. Because — well, ‘I’m gonna show these guys.’”

That same year, however, Tom’s father passed away. His mother, Betty, was left to raise a houseful of children alone. 

Rothenberger leans forward in the conference room chair. 

“But that’s still who I was in high school: I’m gonna get up earlier, I’m going to do the extra workouts, I’m going to do what you have to do.”

When he discovered distance running at Lakeridge High School, his coach pointed out that success on the track offered options beyond Lake Oswego and the cement plant.

He was the only boy in his family to go away to college.

At Boise State University, Rothenberger ran for three different coaches in four years, eventually finding his footing as a senior, right before graduation. What he’d lacked in consistency from his mentors, he gained in exposure to disparate coaching philosophies.

The diversity of influences served him well when he took a job at Jesuit as a 21-year old in 1982, when it was still an all-boys school.

It would be nine years until a Rothenberger-led team qualified for a state meet, but eventually the kid from Lake Oswego would go on to become one of the most successful high school coaches in Oregon prep history. He’s had a hand in 27 state titles in cross country and track and field. He has sent multiple teams to Nike Cross Nationals, including a girls squad that placed fourth in 2010.

In some ways, he says, all that success came about because he never stopped being the cement worker’s son.

“Point being, when I got to Jesuit, it was ingrained in me: You just show up every day.”

He can appreciate, especially now, that there are positives and downsides to that nose-to-the-grindstone approach.

Many days in the last 37 years, he would arrive at Jesuit at 5:30 in the morning to complete his own workout, facilitate his team’s morning practice, teach all day, coach in the afternoon, and then complete paperwork in his office after practice. 

Some nights he’d be at school until 7 or 7:30.

“You start tallying those 15-, 16-hour days,” he says, “which is all you know, and you begin to equate that maybe that’s why you’re having success.”

He settles into the chair again.

“Maybe…maybe not…but maybe, right?”

TOM ROTHENBERGER COACH TO COACH INTERVIEW

 

*     *     *

 

It has become, out of necessity perhaps, the Event.

Or the Experience. My Incident.

That Day in April.

All of it shorthand. Abridgment. A concise way to capture the sprawl of many chaotic days.

Euphemism for the enormity of what transpired.

For the way a birthday celebration for Rothenberger’s 87-year-old mother at a Chinese buffet ended with sirens and paramedics.

When the coach had shared the party plans with his assistant, Leavy, on their run that morning, he’d informed her that he likely wouldn’t attend.

Even though all eight of his siblings would be there. Even though it was his mother’s big day. He wasn’t a big fan of Chinese buffet, and the prospect of deep-fried, sodium-rich fare didn’t align with his typically healthy diet. He was worried, in particular, about one of his brothers, who’d had a heart attack a year earlier. 

Leavy was in disbelief. “I said, ‘It’s your mom's birthday! Why wouldn’t you go to her party?’”

She chided him gently, encouraged him to attend, suggested teasingly that he could fill his plate with vegetables and rice.

Rothenberger, who says he’s typically gregarious when he meets up with siblings — “the sort to enter a room with an energetic, ‘How’s everybody doing?’” — was informed later that he arrived at the restaurant “without his usual vim and vigor.”

But it wasn’t displeasure with the menu that dampened his mood.

Something was off.

He doesn’t remember this, of course.

He doesn’t remember the restaurant at all.

He was told, later, that he entered quietly, subdued, and sat down off to the side. He turned in his chair, as if to say something, then placed his hand alongside his face, palm touching his cheek, fingertips at his temple.

Oh no, he said.

Then slid from the chair onto the restaurant floor.

 

*     *     *

 

The younger of Tom Rothenberger’s two sons, Lucas, was 80 miles away in Corvallis, Ore., when he received a call from his mother.

A 2008 Jesuit graduate, where he’d run cross country and track for his father, Lucas had competed collegiately at Gonzaga University before returning to his alma mater as an assistant. After helping lead the Crusaders to a sweep of the boys and girls titles at the 2017 OSAA Cross Country Championships, he’d accepted a volunteer assistant position with coach Louie Quintana at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

Lucas was mid-shift at the running store where he worked to make ends meet when his phone lit up with his mom’s number. It was unusual to hear from her on a Sunday afternoon, because that was the day Rosa typically worked at the Cedar Mills Library.

He let the call go to voicemail.

Then she called again.

“That was really weird,” he acknowledges, “because she always either leaves a voicemail or — she just never calls repeatedly like that.”

When Lucas answered, his mother told him that something terrible had happened to his dad, she didn’t know a lot, wasn’t with him when it happened. He asked if he needed to come home, and she made it clear that he did. 

Time was of the essence.

“I just hopped in my car and drove straight back,” Lucas says. “Your mind is racing at that point.”

He didn’t return to his apartment, even though he understood, somewhere in the back of his mind, that he wouldn’t be returning to Corvallis for some time. 

“I just needed to get up there and then figure it out.”

He called Quintana before he reached Interstate 5, telling him that he’d probably need to take a leave from coaching at OSU. That it was likely he’d have to step in at Jesuit.

The 90-minute drive north gave him time to consider that possibility.

“I’d already processed enough to know my dad probably wouldn’t be coaching for the rest of the season,” Lucas recalls. “I knew I needed to step into that role, assuming Jesuit would allow me to.”

It made sense — he already knew the runners on the team. They respected him, trusted him, knew he could continue the upward trajectory they’d begun in the fall.

But as the traffic slowed outside Wilsonville, a familiar bottleneck for frequent I-5 travelers, Lucas found his thoughts turning, beyond his father’s plight, to the parts of this trip north that made no sense at all.

The reality of stepping into the job at Jesuit clashed against the realities of his current life: a volunteer assistant for a college team; a second job at a running store; an apartment he could barely afford, and likely wouldn’t be living in for weeks. 

“I was hemorrhaging money,” he says. “Running through my savings account with my parents supporting me, as I tried to pursue this coaching passion…”

His thoughts spun.

And then circled back to his dad.

His dad: unconscious, down with a “cardiac incident,” rushed to a hospital that Lucas couldn’t reach fast enough.

 

*     *     *

 

When Rothenberger slumped to the floor of that Chinese restaurant, his siblings and other gathered family members initially thought he was playing a prank.

They quickly realized he wasn’t. 

His brother-in-law, Joe Folsom, and niece, Rachel, immediately began performing CPR.

“They kept me going until the paramedics came,” Rothenberger says matter-of-factly, “and then the paramedics worked on me. They wouldn’t transport me until they got a rhythm back. That was twenty-plus minutes.”

The library where Rosa was working is a short drive from Providence St. Vincent Medical Center. She reached the emergency room before her husband.

“She was at the hospital within five minutes,” Rothenberger notes, “so the hardest part for her was waiting.”

When Lucas reached Beaverton after racing up I-5, he found his brother, Nathan, and his mom gathered with a Jesuit priest and family friend, Fr. Pat Conroy. When the group was ushered back to see Rothenberger, they found him sedated and unconscious.

“He was really, really pale,” Lucas recalls. “He was white and his face looked droopy.”

They learned that he was about to go through an induced hyperthermia protocol, a deliberate reduction of his core body temperature to preserve brain function. There were serious concerns about how long Rothenberger had been deprived of oxygen, and whether that deprivation would impact his intellectual capabilities.

A doctor who updated the family said the team had run a battery of tests, but were unable to determine what, specifically, had gone wrong.

“They basically said, ‘We don’t know what happened,’” Lucas recalls. “It was, ‘We just know his heart went into an unstable rhythm, we were able to shock him back, it took a couple of tries, but we don’t know why this happened.’”

Rothenberger hadn’t suffered a heart attack — there were no blockages or obstructions, no onset of sharp chest pains or tightness. He had experienced a form of cardiac arrest called ventricular arrhythmia, in which the heart starts beating irregularly fast, depriving body and brain of essential oxygen.

It’s typically fatal for 90 percent of individuals who experience it outside of a hospital.

The chance of survival with intact neurological function is even lower.  

As the family gathered around the hospital bed, they knew Rothenberger was alive. It would be several days before they could be certain about the rest.

“The hardest part for the family,” Rothenberger says now, “was the question: ‘If he does wake up, who’s going to wake up? Is it going to be him?’”

By Tuesday, he was beginning to emerge from the hypothermic state, stirring for brief moments before drifting off again. Each time he surfaced from the induced slumber, he’d glance at his hands, swollen from fluid retention, and loudly curse the food from the Chinese buffet.

Mistakenly believing his limbs were bloated from the sodium.

“When they heard the profanity and heard me fixated on that,” Rothenberger says, “they figured those were two good things. That’s Tom coming back.” 

When he fully emerged on Wednesday, he awoke to excruciating pain from ribs that had been fractured during the frantic CPR efforts. He was also running a fever. He couldn’t prevent his still-warming body from shivering, but he reeled with pain every time he shook.

“Coming out of deep freeze,” he says, “when they warm you up, that’s not pleasant. That was pretty rough, what I remember of it.”

Rothenberger had known since the age of 40 that he had a common, minor heart murmur, called a mitral valve prolapse.

“Some people live their entire lives with it,” he says.

Whether a result of the cardiac arrest or the passage of time, Rothenberger’s valve had deteriorated to the point that the St. Vincent team decided he would need open-heart surgery to either repair or replace the valve. In the same operation, doctors planned to install an internal defibrillator, meant to shock his heart back to normal rhythm if he ever again experienced the arrhythmia that led to his April incident.

He was told he’d need time to recover and strengthen, so the surgery was scheduled one month out, on May 30th.

“I was on a five-week path of recovery,” he says grimly, “just so I could have open-heart surgery.”

He was released from the hospital on a Monday, eight days after arriving, required to wear “a life vest, which is really a defibrillator vest,” continuously until the surgery.

“You can only take it off when you take a shower,” Rothenberger says. “I was scared every time I took a shower.”

There were other things that gave him pause, struck him with a similar measure of fear, including his responsibilities at Jesuit. 

“I had some decisions to make, from the standpoint of — I’m alive, I’m still the coach, what do I do?”

 

*     *     *

 

During the week Rothenberger was hospitalized, as a team of medical professionals scrambled to save his life, another team was mobilizing to ensure that one of his biggest projects somehow proceeded without him.

Leavy learned about Rothenberger’s cardiac arrest from Jesuit’s athletic director on Monday, shortly before she was due to leave on her planned trip. While the balance of the call was about Tom’s health, another concern swirled just beneath the surface.

The massive track meet the school was scheduled to host that Friday.

The Nike Jesuit Twilight Relays would welcome 2,500 athletes, host 600 coaches, utilize more than 350 volunteers.

And it was in four days.

Leavy immediately cancelled her trip and began tackling meet logistics and event preparation. She considered it a blessing in disguise that she’d been scheduled to leave town during the middle of the week.

“If I hadn’t thought I was going out of town,” she says, “and I hadn’t gotten all of my stuff done, I could never have taken on all of Tom’s stuff.”

She asked two of her most trusted volunteers to step in four days early; they assumed her responsibilities, she took over Rothenberger’s meet director role. They set up a “command center” in one of the school’s conference rooms.

“I was pretty confident we could pull it off,” she says, “But I think Jesuit High School was worried. There was just so much to do.”

Everyone started chipping in — PE teachers, other coaches, other teams, office administrative staff, facilities and maintenance, local CYO officials — everyone asking, “What can we do?”

Lucas played a pivotal role, too, even as he sought to spend time with his father at the hospital.

“It was just a balancing act,” he recalls, “of trying to be there with your dad and having to leave that to —  not only go coach a team — but also put on a very large meet. It was tough, I’d never coached at Jesuit without him there.”

Leavy, noting the timeline for doctors to withdraw her friend from the hypothermic state, jokes that she was certain the doctors would bring Rothenberger out of the induced coma on Wednesday, he’d inquire what day it was, realize that the Twilight Relays were only two days away, “and they’d have to sedate him all over again.” 

Although hospital visitors were restricted to immediate family, Leavy did hear from her colleague shortly before the big meet.

“On Thursday, they let him call me,” she remembers, “and all he said was, ‘Thank you. I appreciate what you’re doing.’

And I said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got this.’”

 

  *     *     *

 

There were no white lights when Rothenberger collapsed.

No glowing tunnel or spectral figures. No vision, from above, of himself on the hospital gurney.

“I saw no one visit me,” Rothenberger says, quietly. “So, if people want that, I can’t give it to them.”

There was a spreadsheet at Starbucks on one end, and a hospital bed surrounded by monitors and IV stands on the other. Nothing in between.

There was his discharge, the following Monday.

A defibrillator life vest, powered by a rechargeable battery.

The 22nd of April serving as the dividing line. A form of punctuation. 

There was everything that had come before, and the possibility of what might come after.

Rothenberger gravitated, naturally, toward the only place besides his house that felt like home. Still weak, he decided to visit Jesuit on two afternoons leading up to the district meet nine days after his hospital release.

No grand entrances, no inspiring speeches; he just wanted to be seen.

Give out some hugs and fist bumps.

He wanted his young athletes to know that Coach Roth was okay.

“I think people were just happy to see him upright,” Leavy says, remembering his first tentative return to campus. “He did look frail, but every day he seemed to be getting better.”

The kids on the team, she notes, were not used to seeing their coach moving so slowly, hunched over, shuffling in the hallways. Rothenberger attempted to cover the battery-powered life vest, hoping his students wouldn’t notice.

“I was trying to conceal that a bit,” he says, “so they didn’t see it and become scared.” 

The reality, he admits, is that he was the one who was scared.

“If I’m really honest, I was terrified going to that district meet. The walk from the parking lot at Liberty High School to the bleachers — it kind of took everything within me just to do it. But I didn’t know what else to do.”

The veteran coach settled on the backstretch, the familiarity of bleachers, and tried to avoid holding court. He connected with some Jesuit kids, received well-wishers — side-hugs and fist bumps — accepted upbeat comments and pleasantries from fellow coaches and runners from rival schools.

“Of course, I didn’t realize how poorly I looked.”

As the boys 3,000-meter race was about to start, a parent of one of the Jesuit athletes ascended the bleachers and sat next to him. 

“She kind of got in my bubble,” Rothenberger recalls. “She got real close next to me, and she goes, ‘You’re going to be okay.’” His voice catches, months later, at the memory. “She said, ‘It takes about a year.’”

Only later did he learn that the parent sitting next to him had experienced her own open-heart surgery, more than once. 

“I was recently able to thank her, because she had the — ” 

His voice wavers again. There’s a long pause as he tries to assemble the words to encompass her act of kindness. The empathy she extended. 

His brow furrows, and then his face crumples.

When he looks up again, his eyes are red-rimmed and watery.

“When you’re in that situation, the world’s moving really fast. People around don’t see it, you’ve put on a good face. And she realized in that moment, I was hanging on for dear life.”

 

  *     *     *

 

After that district meet at Liberty, Rothenberger had another decision to make.

Would he attend the state meet?

His open-heart surgery was scheduled for 11 days after Oregon’s season-ending championship, and he’d already made significant strides in his preparation.

“I’d made the decision that I was going to approach that surgery like an athlete, and that was my Game Day. My state meet was May 30th in that operating room.”

He eventually concluded that if he went to Eugene to support his athletes in the season finale, the state meet would be about him. If he went, people would have to look out for him, attend to him, instead of attending to the performances of the athletes. 

“If I go, it’s selfish. If I go, it’s for me.”

He also realized how inadvisable it was, with major surgery looming, to expose himself to thousands of people in a crowded track stadium.

It was the first state meet Rothenberger missed in all his years of coaching.

“I mean, I was getting all the texts,” he says, laughing. “I’m on RunnerSpace watching the damn thing live…But I made the right decision for me.”

That act of skipping the state meet, and a subsequent team banquet, also caused him to accept an important, if difficult, reality.

His own replaceability.

“There was an element of, ‘They really are going to be fine without me.’ Out of all of this, one of the things that emerges is that a day will come when I’m not coaching here, and Jesuit High School is going to be fine.”

Eleven days after the state meet, when he arrived at St. Vincent’s on the morning of his surgery, Rothenberger was confronted with another of life’s inescapable truths. 

He was struck by the smallness of the world he occupies.

By how many former students he encountered. And the siblings of former students. And family members of students or fellow teachers. The medical center seemed populated with people he knew.

His physician’s assistant was the sister of one of his son’s friends.

As he was being wheeled to the operating room, he received a card from a former runner who worked in the department and had seen his name on the schedule.

Thinking about you, Coach.

Those connections, that intimacy, was something he attempted to convey in a short talk to faculty members when he returned to Jesuit a few months later.

“I told them, ‘Be good to the students you work with, because you never know when they’re going to reappear in your life.’”

And then he informed his colleagues that the first shower he was able to take after his cardiac arrest, when he could barely care for himself, was given to him by a former student from his freshman history class.

“She was very professional, she did her job,” he says, “but lo and behold, a kid I was teaching how to take notes in Freshman History, is giving me a shower.”

He chuckles now at the memory, then gets serious again.

“Look, those relationships — we’re not talking about track anymore — those bonds and relationships don’t go away. They’re still there.”

 

  *     *     *

 

When he awoke from open-heart surgery, Rothenberger had tubes hanging from his body, cumbersome monitors attached to his limbs, but the care team insisted he attempt to walk the first day.

In a Moleskin journal, he’d been keeping a training diary, “just like any runner,” and he’d placed it next to his hospital bed. He’d recorded his weight each day, what he ate, how much he exercised. Now, encouraged by the doctors to take one, short lap around the recovery ward, he flipped to a fresh page and prepared his first post-surgery notation.  

“That afternoon, I walked around the ward. Twice.”

There’s the sense, as he says this, that he wasn’t the 57-year-old man tethered to an IV stand as he took those tenuous steps, but rather the kid with the barbell set, mocked by his brother’s friends. The cement plant worker’s son, staring up at the junior high fitness records. 

One lap around the recovery ward? Let’s make it two.

He gradually increased the distance with each effort.

“The first day home was out to the mailbox and back. The next day, down to the park and back. There was trepidation. It started to wane as I got more confident, but still there...”

Even as Rothenberger drew on these deeply ingrained traits to begin his recovery, he knew he’d have to tamp down the more damaging aspects of those same tendencies. If he was going to return to Jesuit in the fall, everyone agreed it had to be on a reduced, more manageable schedule.

No more 16-hour days.

“I wasn’t going to do those kinds of hours,” he acknowledges. “Non-negotiable to me was that I was going to take care of my health.”

He’s no longer teaching history, either, taking on a role in facilities management instead. On days when school commitments might stretch into the evening, he doesn’t arrive until after 11 a.m.

He’s back coaching the cross country team, but that’s also come with changes and accommodations.

Morning practice, a Jesuit mainstay for his entire tenure, has become optional. Rothenberger ensures that willing athletes have access to facilities, but he’s no longer at the school at 5:30 a.m. to take attendance and lead drills.

“As I was sitting there recovering,” he says, “looking at my stitches, I realized that by being there every day, I was doing it for them. And that doesn’t work. So, I needed to let go, and that means some will succeed and some won’t. And that’s okay.”

This coming spring, he’ll no longer be the head boys track coach, electing instead to coach solely the distance runners. He’s at peace with the fact that carrying responsibility for more than 300 athletes and 19 assistant coaches may be too much “after the incident.”

It’s clear, as he speaks, that his time spent recovering was also time spent distilling. Narrowing down his life to the things that bring him the greatest joy. The greatest satisfaction.

The most authentic sense of connection.

“It’s easy to say the words, ‘I have a new perspective,’ but what does that really mean? What is that new perspective? I guess it’s —”

Here, he stops, runs a hand across his forehead. Starts again, multiple times. A series of half-completed sentences.

Wrestling to attach words to something almost inarticulable.

“When you really face the fact that you almost died,” he says at last. “I don’t feel like it’s a matter of ‘What are you going to do with that extra —’ Not that so much, but I think you cherish that which is important all the more. And it may clarify some of what’s important to you…why you’re doing what you’re doing.”

Another pause.

“I enjoy coaching runners. And I think I’m okay at it…I do an okay job, and so I think I can continue to do that. And the joy is in that.”

 

  *     *     *

 

On a recent autumn morning, Tom Rothenberger set out for his daily walk.

The air was crisp, the leaves in western Oregon just beginning to turn. A clear blue sky, low golden light. Cross country weather, he was thinking.

An achingly beautiful day.

“There was that coolness in the air,” he recalls. “I walked five miles, some of it with an old colleague, and…I’m alive. That’s a big part of the story — I’m still here.”

As he covered the final stretch to his house, Rothenberger noticed a text message on his phone from the parent of a former runner. A young man named Alex, now in his first year at the Purdue University, attempting to run for the Boilermakers this fall. 

The father’s note said that Alex was struggling in the early weeks. Missing home. Getting dropped in workouts. He wondered if Coach Roth might give the kid a call.

Would he mind reaching out?

“So, while I’m on my walk,” Rothenberger recounts, “I’m talking to a former athlete, and by the time we’re done talking — and I’m just sharing, letting him know, ‘Hey don’t worry about it, it’s your first year, you’re gonna get your butt kicked, you’re gonna be fine’— and by the time I’m done, he’s upbeat. He sent me two more texts, pictures of him and his buddies, and…”

Rothenberger trails off as he attempts to finish the story, perhaps mulling the impact of that brief conversation. On Alex, but also on himself.

“Here’s the thing: If you don’t see that text as an annoyance. If you see it as an opportunity, a chance for connection…”

He pauses again, struck by that word: Connection.

He settles deeper into the chair, takes one more opportunity to sit with all it.

The distracted coffee with Leavy at Starbucks. Her insistence that he attend his mother’s birthday party. The collapse in the restaurant. The CPR performed by family members. The talented team of paramedics and doctors and nurses that saved him. A constellation of family and friends rallying around. 

Hugs and fist bumps. 

A card on the way into surgery. 

A mother sliding next to him at a high school track meet. It takes about a year.

And then, during that year, a text from a concerned dad.

A short phone call to a struggling teenager.

Small acts with enormous implications.

Which means there are no small acts.

Rothenberger looks back up. 

“So, yeah,” he says, simply. “There’s a reason I’m still here.”