As an elite race walker competing for a spot on the U.S. Olympic team, Al Heppner had a body that was endlessly scrutinized and tested and tuned.

If there had been a slightly pulled muscle or a small rip in a tendon or a minuscule amount of a prohibited steroid, you just know somebody would have made it their business to find out.

Find out before that same body ended up at the bottom of a deep gorge outside San Diego last month.

Heppner, a 1997 graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, appears to have committed suicide by jumping from the Pine Valley Bridge in the Cleveland National Forest. As is often the case, those who were closest to him were caught off guard.

Heppner's mother, Evelyn, lives in Maryland, where Al grew up. But she was at the Olympic trials in Chula Vista, Calif., where her son had competed in the 50-kilometer race walk a few days earlier. He ended up a disappointing fifth.

"I am really glad I was out there," she said. "I was debating whether to go or not. If I had not gone, I would be wondering if there had been something I could have done if I had been there."

As it was, she said, nobody "had any idea that he was going to do this."

They had planned to have dinner with a relative the evening it happened.

"Nobody can understand it," she said. "Everybody is saying, 'Not Al.' "

Debbi Lawrence, the three-time Olympic race walker from Kenosha, has a different perspective - one from the inside.

"Everybody," said Lawrence, "is vulnerable."

More vulnerable, she suggests, than most think.

The first time Lawrence made the Olympics in 1992, she finished 26th in the 20-kilometer - a spectacular achievement. And still, she said, she felt herself slip into a depression.

Something similar, in fact, seems to have happened to Heppner himself when he failed to make the 2000 team.

"After the 2000 trials, he was kind of holed up in his room and would (also) be gone for a day or two," said Mike DeWitt, his college coach.

He also, however, had the ability to rebound. On the bathroom mirror of the condo he bought near the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista, he'd posted a sign.

"Nobody," it said, "wants Athens more than I do."

That may have been true.

DeWitt, at the same time, resists any inference that Heppner had no other interests or outlets. Al was outgoing, said the coach, and their frequent conversations were usually about topics other than race walking. Moreover, he still had a shot at making the 2004 Olympics.

"What happened for him," Lawrence guesses, "was I think this whirlwind was all around him and then the (Olympic) trial was over and he went into depression."

There is a sports psychologist on staff in Chula Vista who was periodically in contact with Heppner.

It is usually up to an individual athlete's discretion, however, whether he receives help. And Lawrence - who is now training for her fourth Olympics - suggests that with all the focus on the body, there is one part of an elite athlete that is too easily overlooked.

"The mind is real fragile," she said. "It is as fragile as a muscle."

People never think of it that way.

E-mail Mike Nichols at mnichols@journalsentinel.com or call him at (262) 376-4374.

Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on March 20, 2004

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