As a current student-athlete, running stairs for cardio and a leg workout is something I'm not a stranger to.

In fact, my very first week of working with my team was composed of the coach having us all run up and down the Franciscan steps at the front of the school. After running up and down the stairs five times and making our way back to the gym, I took my coach aside.

"It's not the cardio that's bothering me, I can run these kinds of things in my sleep. The problem is, I have Climacophobia."

"What's that?" He asked.

"It's the fear of going up or down stairs."

We continued to run the steps another two times that pre-season, and we've run many more stairs since then. I've been doing those stairs right with them.

Except no one else hears the screaming in their ear drums.
No one else sees the ground sway and collapse beneath each footstep.
No one else watches as their vision spontaneously clouds to black.
No one else feels their head on a spindle as the world shakes and rattles and shrieks around them.

So I guess it doesn't seem that bad.

I can't pinpoint an exact point or event that set this off for me, it was just something that I figured everyone was accustomed to. I figured that the reason why there were guard rails was because people like to be stabilized as they make their way up or down.

I figured that I'd never seen anyone go down the stairs without holding onto the rails. I didn't realize that I was different at all. Let me explain exactly how it works:

I can walk up stairs, run up stairs, even jump up stairs without any issues. If I'm unfamiliar with the stairs in any way, it's a little bit tougher. I need to get to know them and where my feet need to go at every step before I can go up them at full speed.

Going down the stairs is a completely different story.

Going down any flight of stairs requires the use of the railing at the side. The wider and larger the stairs are, the more panicked I get.

If there is not a railing and I am 1) unfamiliar with the stairs 2) going any faster than a stair per second 3) any other factor you could think of that has to do with stairs, then I go into a panic attack.

This is also accompanied by a feeling like I'm leaning forward as if I'm making my way towards falling down the stairs. With each step, I feel more and more panicked. And it's not like I'm afraid of heights, I've stood on the edges of cliffs and canyons and even dangled my legs off of them. It's something about the stairs that makes me go into an attack.

As my coach counts out the time it's taking us to run up and down the stairs, I'm dangling behind by a couple flights because I can't handle running down the stairs. I could be right beside the other girls as we're going up, but they don't understand that I'm going slower on the way down because it feels like my head is going to explode.

It has really put a wall between my teammates, coaches, and I. It's really unsettling how much it affects the way they think of me. While they're focused on their own ascent, they don't see me busting my butt to be right beside them -- they only see that I'm always the last one and it looks as if I'm struggling.

They're only counting how many more seconds it took me to make it versus how long it took them. They don't think I'm working hard enough, and I get blamed for it a lot.

I hate the cheering and the coaxing they have to do when they know I'm the last one coming down and they think I need encouragement. Other times I passively get told that I need to work harder when I'm working as hard -- no, harder -- than they're working. I have worked on extra conditioning, extra workouts, and extra stairs to get me to be at the point I am now.

The attacks used to be so crippling that my legs would buckle beneath me and I would fall down the stairs. But I've done so much to get myself to where I am now; they have no idea.

I've told my teammates before that I have this fear, and they think I'm talking about going up the stairs and they immediately think that I'm making it up because I want to get babied for being slower. This is not what I need from my team. This is not what I need from my coaches.

This is not what I need at all.

All I really need is some railing.