KAYSVILLE — Friday at the 4A-1A state track and field championships at Davis High School, the weather was normal for a Utah spring.

It started cool and cloudy, switching to sunny and rainy, then breezy, then sprinkling as thunder rumbled up above.

It changed by the hour, similar to many things including livelihoods of people who have vertigo, people like Ogden High senior Ashlen White.

For a few months now, she’s had typical vertigo symptoms including nausea, dizziness and the horrible feeling that everything is spinning. They’ve shown up once a month for about week at a time, taking her out of school and track and field practice.

The symptoms showed up again last week at the wrong time: a couple days before the Region 10 track and field championships. White was set to run the 100 meter finals.

“Before the race I was laying down, I felt too sick, then as soon as I started warming up it started to subside a little bit, and I felt it again as soon as I was warming up for the race, and then as soon as I was done with the race it just hit me again,” White said. “I had to go home, I was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore.'”

And she won. White clocked a time of 12.88 seconds to win the Region 10 championship, which qualified her for this weekend’s state meet. White promptly went home right after the race.

“I was honestly very shocked when I got done, I was like ‘Wow, did that just happen?'” she said. “I honestly went into it thinking that I wouldn’t be able to win region, but it all worked out I guess.”

This track season has been all about hurdles for the Ogden sprinter. There’s the vertigo, and there’s also been a tight hamstring she aggravated last month. White has pushed through it all.

“I had already been through so much my junior year, had so many issues I was like, ‘No, this is not going to affect me,’ I just had to push through it,” White said of getting vertigo right before the 100 meters at the region championships.

Vertigo wasn’t the start of her troubles. In the summer of 2019, when White went in for a routine physical before her junior girls soccer season, she said nurses discovered she had high blood pressure, hypertension and that her left ventricle in her heart was enlarged.

That put a stop to soccer season before it started, and also necessitated sitting out some of her junior basketball season.

“It’s under control now for sure, (but) it still affects me. I’ll get super dizzy and lightheaded. I have to keep up on my water or else I’ll get super sick,” White said of the heart issues.

She said she’s undergone every test imaginable, goes in for bloodwork regularly and doctors are in the dark about why she’s had to deal with this. It’s the same story with her vertigo.

White joked that she’s a “total mystery” for the doctors, but things have been under control this year enough for her to play soccer, basketball and then run track, where she ran the 100 meters, the 200, and the 4×100 and 4×200 relays for the Tigers.

Friday in the 100 meter trials at Davis, the temperature was in the 60s and much cooler than the sunny 70s and 80s the Wasatch Front had seen the past couple weeks.

White couldn’t get her hamstring loose and clocked a time of 13.17 seconds into a stiff headwind. She missed qualifying for Saturday’s 100 meter final by 0.03 seconds, but she wasn’t too bothered about missing the finals.

“Honestly at this point, I just feel very lucky just because we caught all my problems so soon and I didn’t get to run last year, so I’m not taking anything for granted,” she said. “I’m just super proud of the season that I’ve had and it’s been amazing. It’s been fun.”