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Senior gymnast Kristen Maloney has returned to competition this season after two injury-filled ye

While a beating heart is buried within us all, senior gymnast Kristen Maloney’s is beating a little stronger, very nearly bursting out of her chest.

“She is an amazingly talented gymnast with the heart of a lion,” UCLA coach Valorie Kondos Field said. “She’s this little waif of a thing, and she is so incredibly talented.”

Toughness isn’t measured in feet or inches, but is often related to how much heart an athlete has.

“She can take a lot of pain – a lot more than the average person, a lot more than a lot of athletes,” her mother, Linda Maloney, said.

Over the past two years, Maloney’s heart and toughness have been put to the test by an injury fittingly small for the diminutive athlete.

The trouble started in 1998, when Maloney developed a stress fracture in her right shin, a wear-and-tear injury common to gymnastics. She took time off to let it heal, but to no avail. Bearing the pain was a no-brainer for the talented Pen Argyl, Pennsylvania, native who competed in the 1999 World Championships for the U.S. team.

After the World Championships, Maloney had surgery to insert a titanium rod into her shin, stabilizing the stress fracture and allowing her to compete free of pain.

She recovered in time to represent the United States in the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, but by the time 2001 rolled around, Maloney was again feeling pain in her shin.

Much to her mother’s chagrin, Maloney blocked out the throbbing in her lower leg and decided to compete, helping the Bruins win the 2001 NCAA championship. The team sported shirts throughout the competition that read “We Win With Our Hearts.”

“By then I had pretty much had it and wanted her to quit doing gymnastics,” Linda Maloney said. “After going through everything she had gone though, I just couldn’t understand why she would still want to go through that to compete. I was worried about her health. There is a life after gymnastics – you need to be able to walk without pain.”

But Kristen had decided to follow her heart.

“I don’t think it was a bad decision, because I wanted to compete and I would have been unhappy if I didn’t,” she said.

Little did the Maloneys know that Kristen was merely at the beginning of a lengthy injury saga.

A second surgery was performed after the team’s national championship, removing the old rod and placing a thicker one in the injured shin. But the second rod was placed too high, putting excruciating stress on Maloney’s right knee.

This led to her third surgery during the summer of 2001, forcing her to take a medical redshirt for the 2002 season, wherein she did no athletic activity.

The year proved especially trying on the Maloney family, as Kristen’s father, Richard, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Keeping a sense of humor through it, he would joke with his daughter on the phone.

“I’m not the one who is supposed to be in a hospital bed, that’s your job,” he would say.

Soon enough, both father and daughter would be in hospital beds in Pennsylvania.

The summer after her sophomore year, Maloney headed back to Pennsylvania, where she had a new rod placed in her shin at the urging of Dr. Gerald Finerman, head doctor of UCLA Athletics.

Back for her junior year with the surgery seemingly successful, Maloney was primed to return to the sport she loves.

Until she woke up one morning and could not walk.

As a precaution, doctors decided to take another X-ray of the leg. The following day, a UCLA team doctor sat Maloney down and told her she may have a potentially career-ending bone infection.

“I bawled my eyes out,” Maloney said. “So I saw (Dr. Finerman) the next day and he told me that it was an infection and he was really worried about it, and I needed to have surgery right away.”

Doctors took the rod out of her shin, cleaning out the infected area in the process. After five days in the hospital, she was released.

For two weeks, Maloney moved around on crutches, taking her antibiotics twice daily. Then around Thanksgiving, the gymnast broke out with a fever and hives over her entire body because of an allergic reaction to the antibiotics.

“She’s like Goldilocks,” Kondos Field said. “The first rod was too small, the second rod was too big, the third rod was just right but then, oops, we get an infection that’s eating away 80 percent of her bone, so the rod has to come out.”

“I didn’t think I was going to do gymnastics again, honestly,” Maloney said.

Though Maloney’s brain was telling her that she would never compete again, her heart telling her she wasn’t done. Maloney eventually made her way back to the gym, gradually regaining the abilities that had made her a world-class athlete.

It marked the end to the longest stretch away from the gym Maloney had ever endured.

“You don’t get breaks in gymnastics,” Maloney said. “It’s a year-round sport. If you’re out of it for a long time, you lose strength, endurance and skills.”

“Everyone, the doctors, the trainers, the coaches, the staff … everyone just said it will be a miracle if she is able to come back and do this,” Kondos Field said.

Even now, ranked third in the nation on beam and 10th on vault, Maloney has a long way to go.

“I’m still not at full strength,” she said.

For Maloney, her coach and her mom, there are three vastly different opinions of when the recovery process will be complete.

“When she graduates,” Linda Maloney said.

“When she can compete all-around at Nationals,” Kondos Field said.

“When I am able to compete all-around and be able to walk the next day,” Kristen laughs. “I’m almost there.”

But one area that never needed recovery time is her heart.