Stress fracture: two words no runner ever wants to hear.

For Andrea Toppin, those words meant more than just sitting out her fall 2014 cross-country season and following indoor and outdoor track and field seasons. Her doctor told her to start centering her goals around her career after college and that it would be rare for the fracture to heal on its own and ever allow her to compete again collegiately.

Entering the 2014 fall cross-country season, Toppin had her sights set on contributing to another successful cross-country season for the Cyclones. The previous year, she finished as the team’s seventh runner at the 2013 NCAA Cross-Country Championships and helped the Cyclones to a 13th-place performance at the meet.

The summer leading up to the 2014 season, Toppin knew she would have to work as hard as ever to be one of the top-seven runners on a continuously improving team.

“I would go hard every run,” she said. “I was coming off an injury that previous spring, so I thought that I had to hammer every run to get back up with the group, and really that was quite the opposite. I wasn’t letting my body recover after easy recovery days. I was just hammering every run.”

The strain she put on her body day in and day out came at a cost the following fall.

“I had a really good summer of training, I was really fit, I was ready to go,” she said.

It turned out she wasn’t ready to go, and within that first week of school, she started experiencing pain in her knee.

She said the pain started in the front of her knee, and everyone thought it was a bad case of tendinitis. The pain then moved to the back of her knee, causing them to believe her popliteus muscle was inflamed.

“And then it moved to the front of my knee again, but lower, kind of right on my tibia, so that was a little scary,” she said. “I think I took a week off, cross-trained a lot.”

Toppin’s trainers had her run again the next week because her knee was feeling better.

The goal was for Toppin to make it through an easy four-mile run, but she could barely get through two miles.

“I remember going out one mile, turning around and feeling like my leg was going to break in half,” she said. “It just felt like someone was stabbing my leg. It was the most awful feeling ever.”

The trainers didn’t think the injury was a stress fracture at first. Toppin tried using a HydroWorks treadmill, which is an underwater treadmill. She used the most secure level, where the water was up to her shoulders near her neck, causing little impact on her body.

When she got off the treadmill she started limping, and her trainer suggested having an MRI. Toppin found out she had a stress fracture high up in the back of her tibia, which was rare because stress fractures are “most common in the weight-bearing bones of the lower leg and and foot,” according to the Mayo Clinic’s website. 

“The doctor told me that I probably wouldn’t be able to compete again because it’s just a really rare stress fracture,” Toppin said. “I remember holding back tears the whole appointment. When he told me I would never really be able to compete again, the floodgates just opened.

“So I listened to my body, did what coach told me to do, but I knew I wasn’t done yet. I just took all the precautions I could. I listened to my trainers, I did every little thing I could do to get back to where I was.”

Toppin hasn’t been alone in dealing with injuries. Redshirt senior Christina Hillman, senior Alyssa Gonzalez and sophomore Abby Caldwell are three other athletes on the track and field team who have experienced injuries and health issues recently, all varying in severity.

Hillman’s back gave out on her while doing the technique of a front-squat wrong two summers ago.

“I felt my back kind of crunch in a way,” Hillman said. “It completely gave out on me. I ended up getting two bulged disks and a herniation.”

She battled back in the 2015 indoor season to finish first in the shot put at the Big 12 Championships and fourth at the NCAA Championships.

Caldwell had a successful cross-country season in the fall of 2015, but found out she had a kidney stone when she returned to Iowa State after Winter Break.

She said she was still able to do all of the mileage, but just didn’t feel that great, and the races didn’t go as planned.

“I’ve definitely had some successes, but I think my setbacks and failures have helped me a lot,” Caldwell said. “At the time, they’re really frustrating, especially this past indoor season wasn’t a season anybody wanted, but I think what I learned from it is going to determine whether it was a failure or learning experience.”

Gonzalez had her own run-in with injury during the 2015 indoor season. She strained her hamstring in January and was forced to miss the remainder of her final indoor season as a Cyclone.

“I’ve never been injured before, so it was definitely the hardest thing I’ve had to go through,” Gonzalez said. “Mentality wise, it was probably the toughest having to come to practice every day and see my teammates do what I wanted to do.

“But it taught me a lot; it helped me grow. I think I’m a lot stronger now and I’m a lot more ready to compete than I was beforehand.”

Athletes learn a lot about themselves and how much their respective sports mean to them after suffering a serious injury, and that was no different for Toppin.

As difficult as it was to hear that she had a stress fracture and that the remainder of her collegiate running career was in limbo, Toppin now says the injury was a blessing in disguise.

“I was kind of running down a path that I was going to end up getting hurt regardless,” Toppin said. “I was kind of running myself into a hole.”

The weeks of running 75 to 80 miles, even up to 90 miles when Corey Ihmels was coaching the women’s cross-country team before Andrea Grove-McDonough arrived in 2013, were in the past.

The road to recovery wouldn’t be easy for the seasoned long-distance runner, whose whole world seemed to revolve around running.

“You go stir crazy,” Toppin said. “I think everyone does.”

Toppin was initially told she couldn’t exercise at all for six weeks. She had to use crutches and couldn’t wear a boot because the stress fracture was too high up in the back of her tibia.

Her doctor, however, gave her the OK on pool running in the deep end for 60 minutes, three times a week.

After eight weeks, Toppin had another MRI taken, which showed that she still had a stress reaction, but the fracture was healed. She was given permission to bike.

“I remember previous to this, I hated biking,” she said. “It was around Christmas time [when I found out I could bike], and I was like, this is like a Christmas present. It was awesome. I was actually excited to do something besides just being in water.”

Four weeks later, Toppin found out her stress fracture was clear and everything was healed. The recovery process lasted about nine months. She started running again in late March, early April of 2015.

“It was a long haul, but it really taught me patience and perseverance and to never give up,” she said. “It taught me how to be more of a positive person, because to be a true athlete, to be a really good athlete, you have to have a really good positive attitude and a lot of perseverance to get through anything.”

Toppin credits her recovery to her faith, the support system around her and her ability to transfer negative energy into positive energy.

“I’d just think of the little girl — seventh, eighth grade, high school — who always had a dream of running Division I cross-country and track and field,” Toppin said. “I would always think, ‘what would she do in this situation?’ She would kill to be in this situation, so don’t let her down.”

Toppin returned to the cross-country course Sept. 4, 2015, for the Hawkeye Early Bird Invitational in Iowa City, where she placed fourth in the meet and completed a 1-2-3-4 sweep for the Cyclones.

“It was weird, but it was good to be competitive again and be in that type of area again,” she said. “It was awesome. I was like, I can’t believe I’m out here.”

Toppin had been gaining confidence leading up to the meet ever since the team’s first cross-country workout.

She started off in the back, but said she felt better each half mile and kept working her way up in the pack.

“I did really well in that workout, so that’s where I saw where I was at,” she said. “It gave me a good confidence boost because I was working out with the top girls, and coach was like, ‘what have you been doing this summer? Where have you been?’

“So going into my first meet I had that, OK, this is where I’m at. I’ve gotten back that confidence, that fitness that I lost over the past year.”

Toppin said during the cross-country season that she had just hoped she would make the travel squad for the team.

Her breakout performance came at the NCAA Midwest Regional on Nov. 13 in Lawrence, Kan.

She finished as the team’s third runner and 18th overall in the race.

“At the beginning of the year, I never would have thought I would be All-Region in cross-country, and that was just a race I never gave up,” she said. “It was a very hard race. I remember our third runner, Abby [Caldwell], was really struggling during that race. I just thought back to my workouts, coach trusted me, my workouts had been really good. There’s no reason I can’t be up here helping Abby, so I just remember that whole race, even if I was tired, I wanted to step off or pass out or drop back, I just thought, no, I have to help my teammates out here.

“Every [1,000 kilometers] of that race I got stronger, mentally and physically. That was just an awesome race because it was like finally everything that I’ve worked for these past four or five years is paying off.”

Toppin finished as the team’s third runner again at the NCAA Championships a week later and helped the Cyclones finish in the top 25.

“[Toppin] had that senior leadership that we really needed and were looking for and was always consistent, stepping up when other people kind of weren’t having their best day,” said ISU volunteer assistant coach Matt Valeriani. 

Toppin experienced a setback during the winter when her achilles flared up, forcing her to miss the entire indoor track season.

She returned to the track Friday to compete in her first 3,000-meter steeplechase in two years at the Jim Duncan Invitational, where she finished second overall behind ISU freshman Kelly Naumann.

Toppin said she is focusing on getting a chance to run the 3,000-meter steeplechase at the Big 12 Championships.

Once her season ends, she plans on moving to Minneapolis and work as a physical therapy technician and apply to physical therapy school. She said she will probably run casually, but hasn’t thought about running post-collegiately yet.

“I’m going to miss running,” she said. “I’m going to miss competing like crazy. I know whenever my last race is, it’s going to be really hard, but I have to move on at some point, and I’m proud of what I’ve done and how I’ve represented Iowa State.”