How an OCD Diagnosis Changed the Life—and Career—of One Elite Runner

Cali Werner, LCSW, shares her experiences as a young person with OCD and a student athlete.

Werner shares personal insights on what it’s like to compete in high school and college sports while experiencing a mental health condition. She also talks about how her past experiences inform her current career.

Werner is a mental health clinician and researcher with expertise in OCD and related anxiety disorders and their impact on competitive athletes. She is also a highly successful distance runner and mental health advocate.

As a Division I athlete at Rice University, Cali won nine conference championships and was named an honorable mention all-American in the 10K. She credits her own OCD diagnosis with leading her to a career in providing evidence-based care.

Growing Up With OCD

Werner talks about the origins of her symptoms.

“My OCD showed up in my life from age three onward, but it didn’t really latch onto sport performance until I started getting noticed in cross country and track in high school. And that’s where a lot of my OCD symptoms came around,” Werner shares.

“Right before race time, the week before, I’d always have this peak of compulsions that I would engage in, and then after the race, they would go back down. [Eventually], the switch flipped, and I wasn’t able to have that waxing and waning anymore. I really needed treatment.”

She explains how people around her reacted to, and even reinforced, these behaviors.

“Because when I was younger, it would wax and wane so much, I think we had gotten into this mindset of, ‘Okay, just leave Cali alone until after the race. She’ll be back to herself, right? Cali’s quirky, Cali’s weird leading up to a race,’” she explains.

“I was in a smaller town, and was the only runner that was having that much success in my running career at the time. And so, everybody just thought, ‘Oh, that must be what it takes,’ including myself. So, we just disregarded it at that point. And even my teammates, my best friends, would say, ‘All right, it’s race day. We got to leave Cali alone. We’ll have fun again after the race.’”

Recognizing OCD and Getting Help

“Looking back at high school now, I would say these challenges definitely impacted my mental health in more than just my sport. The compulsions weren’t as consistent, but what I mean by that is I was able to hide them a lot better. When I didn’t have a race coming up, I was also doing compulsions in other areas of my life, like asking my boyfriend for reassurance or double-checking, triple-checking answers, doors, or locks—things like that would come up as well.”

“It wasn’t until my sophomore year of college that it got to a place where I couldn’t turn it off. It was consistent and I couldn’t hide it anymore. It got really debilitating, and I was having a lot of panic attacks. And other people knew that there was an issue that we had to get addressed because I couldn’t live my life and sustain it as this secret, like I had been doing before.”

It wasn’t until she went home on a Christmas break that she was able to connect with a provider who specializes in OCD and was able to identify this diagnosis.

“I was diagnosing myself as someone that was, because of these intrusive thoughts, suicidal and a murderer, and likely to harm people. So, when I got the diagnosis, I thought, ‘Oh, this is OCD, I’m not actually those things,’ and it did give me some relief.”

Turning Adversity Into Resilience

Werner’s experiences as both an athlete and an individual with OCD led to her current career as a mental health clinician, one who works with athletes.

She offers these words on one way we can support student athlete mental health: “As a society today, we tend to want to immediately relieve any signs of distress, and a big part of building that resilience in college is facing certain stressors. … We’re constantly sending these messages to our brains that, ‘Oh, I can’t tolerate distress,’ when we actually should be sending the opposite. And athletes do that in sport.”

“When you run or sprint for a ball, sometimes it hurts a little and you have to push through that pain. But I think we’re not all doing that in our everyday lives. As parents, it’s important to be able to take a step back at times when you need to and understand that your athlete is going to struggle, especially in those years when our brains are still developing,” Werner explains.

“We have to take some risks to be able to learn from them. If we take that risk away from the athlete, how are they going to learn at all? How are they going to build any coping skills or distress tolerance skills?”

“So, there’s a time to step in and there’s a time not to, and when I say not to, it doesn’t mean you can’t support your athlete. Talk to them about it, get them to open up, but do that in a way that’s not fixing it for them.”

Talking about her own journey to health, Werner says, “My favorite motto is that you can be great at your sport and enjoy your sport, too. They can exist together.”

“I thought it took engaging in all of these compulsions to be so great at my sport and that’s what I had to do. But I realize now that I ran my best time ever in a marathon this past December without engaging in any compulsions and by taking the risk and leaning into [the idea that compulsions] might not be what it takes. And I gained so much freedom from that.”