The Addiction

After the 1982 Boston Dick Beardsly had a number of injuries that limited his running career. He tor his Achilles tendon and had to have surgery twice. This severely hurt his running career and he was never the same runner after that and couldn't go to the Olympic trials because of his injury and surgery. He got all healed up and he ran the Napa Valley Marathon in 1987 to qualify for the 1988 Olympic trials but he didn't make the team. After the trials he had a number of accidents and one of them was a farm accident that required weeks in the hospital and over four months of rehabilitation and physical therapy. During this time he was on narcotics for pain relief. After all his physical therapy he started running again. He was hit by a car and had to have back surgery and again he was on narcotics. About a year later he was in a car accident which hospitalized him again and he got narcotics again. By this time he was an undiagnosed narcotic addict. Everything went down hill from there until he hit rock bottom when he was caught foraging persciptions. He went into therapy for that and he was taken off his normal type of drug but was put on a new one that was even harder to get off of. Eventually he was taken off but it was a really hard first week for him. After the first week of being off narcotics it started getting better and he has be sober since February 12th 1997.