Luke’s Legacy: Muckerheide to finish cross-country career on his terms

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By Steve Heath

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GREENFIELD — Luke Muckerheide’s Greenfield-Central cross-country story didn’t go as planned.

With circumstances that were out of his control, a long-distance running career that appeared to have high possibilities of being a county, conference or even sectional champion didn’t materialize.

Instead, the account of Muckerheide’s prep cross-country career will tell the tale of a champion of another kind, a champion of overcoming adversity.

He was the No. 3 runner as a sophomore behind two standouts, Parker Niemeier and Conner Kinnaman. By the end of his sophomore season he had broken the 17-minute mark for the 5K races and, with Niemeier graduating, was all set to give the Cougars a solid one-two punch the following year with he and Kinnaman.

“We thought for a sophomore he was a smart runner. He was figuring things out,” Greenfield-Central coach Aaron Smith said of Muckerheide. “We thought the next year it was going to be Conner and him. I don’t think he ever beat Conner. He had a couple really close races. We thought that next year he and Conner would be tight for that No. 1 spot.”

He had already proven that he could make great strides throughout a season. Smith recalled Muckerheide as a freshman, who couldn’t get through the season’s initial workout to a runner that finished the season as a regional qualifier.

During his sophomore season that saw him break 17 minutes, he had started the year in the mid-18s.

“He’s such a smart runner. He knows what it takes to be successful,” Smith said.

In fact, Muckerheide wanted the coach and all of his teammates to know what it takes, too. After that sophomore season he crafted a four-page paper about running and all the intricacies, including the physical and mental aspects.

He didn’t do it for class credit. He did it because he loves cross-country.

Then, he had his love taken away.

Luke was running well, but he was running with pain. During the end of his freshman track season, he was experiencing headaches during workouts and races.

He soldiered through, but it started getting worse.

“I would describe it as a throbbing pain, which is in sync with my heart beat,” Muckerheide said of the headaches. “With every beat of my heart it feels like someone is painfully drumming in my skull.

“Interestingly, if I run fast enough for a race it doesn’t seem to bother me much at all, which is really the only way I was able to do anything my sophomore year.”

The Muckerheides looked everywhere for answer to Luke’s headaches.

Primary care doctors, ENTs, chiropractors, neurologists, acupuncturists …

“We pretty much went to any specialist you could think of. We were trying to figure out anything,” Michelle Muckerheide, Luke’s mother, said. “We went to his normal yearly appointment with his pediatrician to see if they had any recommendation. They never had any pediatric patients that had exercise-induced headaches.”

Finally, the Muckerheide’s decided to see a cardiologist. After multiple tests it was discovered Luke had a heart defect.

It was found that he had an anomalous origin of the right coronary artery. He was going to have to have heart surgery.

Without surgery he could die exercising.

“I think that had I not found the issue, then there was a pretty good chance I might have died or at least had cardiac arrest on one of the cross-country meets my junior or senior year.” Luke said. “I was really looking to get under 16 minutes. That was my end goal. I knew I had to push myself pretty hard for that. If running hard and strenuous activity is what makes it dangerous, then it could have very well killed me to run one of those races, had we not found it.”

Along with needing the surgery, doctors also said they didn’t think there was any correlation with the defect to the headaches.

In other words, if not for the bad headaches, Luke’s heart problem would most likely gone undetected.

“All opinions were there was no correlation,” Michelle said. It just happened that through the process of trying to find the answer for the headaches, we found the heart defect. Just sort of a lucky thing we found.”

Luke had his surgery in July of 2019, so he had to miss his junior year. He was cleared to run track this past spring, but the coronavirus pandemic put an end to that plan, too.

His heart is fixed, but the headaches are still there. Luke said he’s able to manage them but they can still be very painful.

Headaches were not going to stop him from his senior season of cross-country.

“Because of the headaches I had actually not planned on running my senior year at all,” Luke said. “I was thinking about cutting it short after my junior year because I was tired of running through the pain. After the surgery I felt like I wanted to overcome it. For me, that was getting back into running and I wanted to have a last year of running.”

His senior season has been a gradual climb up the Cougars’ charts.

Without running as a junior, he was a little behind, plus G-C has had a couple of freshmen show promise and move up the lineup.

He has worked his way back to be the No. 5 and final scoring runner for the Cougars during the postseason.

He ran his best time of the year in last week’s Rushville Regional. He was 23rd overall with a time of 17:28. He said he’s just a few seconds off from the time he had at regional during his sophomore year.

The goal is to get under 17 minutes one last time and that will be the goal Saturday when the Cougars compete at the Shelbyville Semistate.

“I really respect him and admire him for choosing to come out when I know it hurts him to run, even though he’s not quite where he wanted to be,” Smith said. “He’s being a team player. He’s coming out and giving his best.”

It goes back to that paper he wrote as a sophomore and his continuing to chart his running. Luke feels that his details from his charting has helped him adapt to his return to running and still having to run in pain.

“I feel it is really accurate and it’s something that has helped me along since I was used to dealing with pain with the headaches,” Luke said. “It allowed me to push through the physical pain of just soreness and muscles being tired during the race better than most people could.

“I believe I’ve now developed a response to pain while running. Instead of slowing down like most people do, I view it as a challenge, so I speed up, plus it gets me done faster, too.”

Smith said Luke’s paper will continue to be part of his program, though his senior’s competitive career may end on Saturday.

“Basically, anything I wanted to talk about running, he pretty much wrote it in that paper,” Smith said. “He’ll definitely be a part of our team after he leaves.”

Muckerheide’s script changed.

He won’t leave with the victories that looked certain to be in his future after his sophomore season, but he will leave as a champion of overcoming something most will never have to deal with, and words future runners can live by.