Choose your own Adventure.

Winter is a difficult month for me. If I were a bear, I'd be hibernating like a boss, sleeping in and through the day, living off my own fat stores.

But I'm not one of those lucky hibernating mammals. Just like you, I am oh, so human. And right now, I find myself mired in what has become an annual struggle - my health is mediocre, my motivation levels are low, and sometimes, forward progress seems more than a few steps a head of me, backsliding on an icy sidewalk.

On Thursday night, I attended a panel presentation by five women - strong women leading the way in various aspects of the outdoor industry. A theme emerged: know your truths, and live your adventure. Georgina Miranda, the CEO and Founder of SheVentures, spoke about her truths and it was all I could do to keep from crying because nobody ever has it easy, but some people push through their barriers and radiate this immense confidence and self-assurance that I wish I could harness. I left the event with a new hat and a profound sense of discomfort in my own fear of pursuing true adventure.

Adventure means different things to different people. For me, it means taking a chance on a situation or circumstance without knowing what might happen. For the past few years, I have been adventure-averse. I am certainly not complacent in my life, but I have let fear of the unknown dictate my existence.

Now, finally, I have Zero interest in continuing to live this way. I am still fighting my fear of change, of taking chances, but I am not living my truth, which might be the worst way to live. My Truth - embracing the unknown; pushing myself to my physical limits; finding joy in the small beauties surrounding everything. Caring for myself. Spending as much time as possible out of doors. Loving more than I knew I could! And running; always running. (this is sort of, kind of, technically still a running blog, right?)

In this heart of winter darkness, I am committing to a change. I am choosing adventure - choosing to keep moving forward. If you want to help me, I am looking for inspiration and maybe a training buddy or two. I'm going to build up my physical strength and my endurance. I want to be able to literally haul myself over a 5-ft tall fence, which I couldn't do last summer (Spartan Race = humbled). I want to run a 15-mile trail race in June and spend the rest of the summer enjoying the high-alpine trails I've never explored.

For some reason, I'm still here, still kicking and screaming my way through this life. The past few years haven't been wasted, but they haven't been particularly fulfilling, either. With everything going on in our world, now, why not take this opportunity to define some dreams and then go after them?


End of page. To choose a life lived fully, turn to page 95. {shuffles through to page 95...}

A long time coming

I have halfheartedly sat down to write an update on here a number of times over the past few months. Something always comes up to keep me from finishing more than a paragraph. I'm braindead after work; The Voice is back on; the sheer bulk of thoughts and experiences I want to share is overwhelming. How on earth will I condense everything into one post when there's so much I need to get out onto the Internet? But for the sake of my sanity and hopefully to help someone else out there, I am committing to starting to write again. I realize that not every post needs to reveal some epic, thought-provoking "Come to Jesus" moment, though I am certainly working through plenty of those. In writing for a public forum though, I think the most important part is to stay focused and stay true to your purpose. For a long time, I had an easily defined purpose - to share my cancer journey. My cancer journey is no longer the focal point of my life (thank goodness), but my experiences as a survivor, I think, constitute a decent reason to keep writing publicly.

Here's my plan, and here's why: I'm going to keep writing, and I am going to keep writing about my survival. I hereby dedicate my blog to writing about running and hiking and living as much of my life outdoors as I can, despite the fact that my body is close to the edge of wrecked. We have all survived something, and the most thrilling part about it is that we continue to survive and get to enjoy this phenomenal world in which we live!

Cancer destroyed my body's secondary immune system. My blood can no longer produce a specific type of b-cells, immunoglobulins. Various doctors and specialists ranging from immunologists to gastroenterologists to the naturopath I'm currently seeing have all tested my blood extensively to determine the extent of my deficiency. They all agree: I don't make any immuoglobulins. Diagnosis? Hypogammaglobulinemia. Gezundheit. This, they agree on, once each has run the exact same test and seen the exact same results. After which point, their agreement ends. It's pretty amazing and strangely universal in Western medicine - medical tunnel vision. "I specialize in this one thing and so will treat the symptoms you are experiencing for this one thing." So, the immunologist monitors the immunoglobulin replacement therapy I receive at home, monthly. And the GI guy monitors the steroids he prescribed for "nonspecific inflammation" of the intestinal system. And my new naturopath is at least looking at my entire system and trying to figure out why my liver enzymes are elevated while my blood glucose levels are totally normal and my cortisol levels are off the charts and in the meantime, I just desperately want to stop pooping everything out of me that I put into me. More than that, I want to run a full trail marathon in Moab in November, and I'm genuinely not sure my body can pull it off. 

With all of that on my mind, I'm going to write for other people to read about it! In case you've ever wondered what it's like to dive into the GAPS diet and try to consume little to few carbohydrates while training for a summer's worth of backpacking with a potential trail marathon cherry on top, this is the spot for you! There's no way I'll be able to write daily, but I commit to a bit more regularity. How's that for just vague enough?

This will be exciting. Hopefully, it will be cathartic. Even more hopefully, at the end of this grand experiment, my gut will have healed more and my True Health will be back and here to stay. Thanks in advance for your support and for your patronage!!

And... I'm back again

On a grey, unsettled, chilly January day in Denver, I have retreated to an eclectic coffeeshop with the students, the self-employed, the unemployed, the musicians, the artists.  And me, falling somewhere in the middle of it all.  I remain undefined while consuming some of the best tomato/spinach soup I have ever had, all creamy and tomato-y and cheesy without having any actual cheese in it.  I am scalding my tongue and the roof of my mouth, thanks to a nice barista who seems to be chronically undercharging me.  Maybe I already look destitute, in my mismatched pink and navy flannel shirt and fleecy purple plaid scarf and jeans ripped clear across the knee.  I'm pretty sure no one ever has paid only $8.35 for soup, a large almond milk chai, and a giant chocolate chip cookie (Giant).  The price is still boggling my mind.  Don't worry, I tipped my newfound best friend.

As of January 10, I am fully and so weirdly unemployed.  In the middle of November, my boyfriend and I took a week-long trip to Virginia to visit family, and I decided I couldn't come back to Denver and continue working at Starbucks.  I was done; it was time.  The Philadelphia Marathon came and went, and it didn't include me.  I spent September and October fighting a sickness I couldn't shake until finally, a week before the Marathon, I crumbled, called in the antibiotics, and called off this marathon I was supposed to have been training for.  Who knows if there's a correlation, but my training started suffering and my health started failing right around the time I started opening at Starbucks consistently.  Opening, for me, meant falling out of bed around 4 a.m. to bike 3 miles to work by 5 a.m., including a few sub-zero mornings.  School, caffeine, fatigue, constant coughing or sniffling or "coming down with something..." I couldn't do it.  My body paid a wicked price, and I wasn't able to join my friend in her very first, amazing marathon.  My boyfriend and I are still dealing with the after-effects of the prednisone the doctors put me on for a second time this year.

So here I am, sitting in a coffee shop, worrying about health care come February 1, sipping chai, not yet doing anything to find employment.  I have skiied a lot and all over since leaving the Bucks - Copper Mountain, Winter Park, Berthoud Pass, A-Basin, Steamboat Springs, an impromtu, ridiculous weekend trip to Jackson Hole this past weekend.  Needless to say, I'm ripped, now.  (Sort of kidding, but no, not really kidding.)  Skiing is a whole lot different from running, especially the slow, long runs I'm used to.  Skiing is short, intense, and quad-thrashing.  Ski in powder, and it becomes all of those things amplified plus the sensation of floating down the mountain in silence.  There were a few runs I found myself alone in trees, snow sparkles drifting all around while the lower sun illuminated my life, and the lactic acid disappeared, and the heavy powder disappeared, and the wrench in my knee disappeared, and it was just me, floating in a forest of crystals and sun beams.

I have learned and believe that nothing lasts and everything changes.  Life, changes, and you can help it change how you'd like it to; you can adapt to the changes; or you can drift along and watch everything shift and grow and die around you and remain encapsulated in whatever bubble you've created of fear and comfort.  I've been doing the latter for over 4 years, although I started tearing down my bubble and finding my footing when I moved to Denver on a whim and a prayer.  Now, it's time to kickstart my life, to jump in and make my own changes.  To finally embrace everything I am and the person I am growing into.  I am so many things, and while I was a barista for a while, I want to be so much more.  2013 sucked pretty badly in my world.  So, okay, time to make a giant change.  Time to ski and run and sip chai and eat delicious, gluten-y cookies and heal.  It is time to Live.  Here we go!

Turkey...

Bacon!  Surprisingly or not, turkey bacon just isn't as good as regular bacon.  Oh well; I have both in my fridge.  Things could be worse.  November 24 and I am sitting on my veranda in a tank top.  Listening to classical music and eating barbecue chicken pizza, I can't help but marvel at where I am and how I got here.  Most importantly, I am alive.  This time of year, late November/early December, is typically a strange and introspective time for me.  Five years ago at this time, I was pretty much dying, and then two weeks later I was diagnosed with cancer.  I was a sophomore in college, and I was so deluded.  Depressed and sick, I honestly thought I was living the good life because I was working 40 hours a week and going to school.  Independent!  It still bothers me a little when I consider just how naive I was.

People grow and change over the course of five years; it is normal.  I just can't believe how much my life has changed since I was 20.  Honestly, how much my life has changed over the past year.  It is the strangest thing, too: I have a public record of my feelings and thoughts each year for the past five years.  I kept a cancer-blog pretty much from my date of diagnosis until earlier this year, and my posts from around Thanksgiving are eerie to reread.  Last year, my writings reflect a serious discontent with my life.  I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing; I was still so lost and so uncertain about everything.  Yet, somehow I powered through that depression and even more strangely, somehow I ended up in Denver, Colorado.  One year ago, I had no idea I would be here right now, sitting outside wearing a tank top on Thanksgiving, watching people come home from a day skiing or snowboarding in the mountains.  Literally: A lady just walked into my apartment building carrying her snowboard and a six pack of Fat Tire.  I love Colorado.

True gratitude: this moment, right now.  I am beyond thankful for this, for where my life has magically delivered me.  Certainly, everything is still difficult; I'm still not working in a job I want to be, and it would be nice to be with my family today.  But there are glimpses!  Last night, I photographed my first concert in Denver for HeyReverb, the Denver Post's music website.  I wasn't paid for it, but shoot, I am published and on the contributor's list for a Denver Post affiliate!  My heart was a bit broken a week ago, but even since then, I can feel it healing, and I am grateful for what will one day be a solid friendship.  Grateful to my family who, even if they didn't quite believe I'd be able to make it out here on my own working as a barista, have never stopped supporting me.  I have lived here nearly seven months, and I am not going anywhere.  Five years after my cancer diagnosis, I can say honestly and with no delusions that I am Healthy, capital "H."  The cancer nonsense still isn't over; in fact, it's going to be a part of my life for a few more years than I expected (thanks, FaceTumor!).  But it is no longer holding me back health-wise.  I actually did Two pull-ups yesterday in addition to some halfhearted intervals.  Thankfully, today is a rest day.

A strange thought occurred to me the other night as I was lying in bed, contemplating my next steps and whether or not anyone will ever actually want to date me...  I realized that this is life: this is what it feels like to grow up and have experiences that normal people have, unrelated to cancer and fast-forwarded maturity.  Having a cold and then it going completely away after a week; dating someone then it not working out; struggling to figure out how to pay all my bills without completely giving up delicious cheese.  I hope I never grow up, but I am starting to feel more "adult," and I am okay with that.  I have entered into the second half of my twenties, and I am pretty sure they are going to be a lot better than the first half.  I am grateful and amazed to be alive to see and experience everything that comes my way.  I am probably still pretty naive.  There are a lot of things I know nothing about and many different types of pain I have yet to work through.  But just because I look young (am young...) doesn't mean I don't know a thing or two about life, and it certainly doesn't mean I don't have a different perspective and my own survival techniques.  I am grateful for that perspective.  I am grateful for what the past five years have brought me, where they have led me to, where my life continues to go.  In particular, the people who have come into my life and brought me more joy than I could have imagined.  Friends are the best thing.  Laughing, smiling, enjoying This Moment, Right Now.  Thank you all for spending some time reading this, if you have.  Thank you for humoring my ramblings.  I hope you are enjoying your Thanksgiving, or finding something to enjoy about your Thanksgiving, even if it's only that tomorrow, it will be finished.  Thank you, thank you thank you!!  Fill your hearts with gratitude for what you've been given today.  Mine is practically bursting with everything I've been given, filled with the knowledge that life is difficult and will always be in some way or another, but I am Alive to greet it all and continue to grow and most of all, continue to love.

Love from me, today.

The thing about pain

There are so many different types of it.  A friend of mine has been in an absurd amount of pain this week because her wisdom teeth are giving her too much grief.  She is on some heavy duty painkillers that are causing their own difficulties, particularly the side effects.  Sadly, there isn't much she can do about it until she has the teeth pulled, in two weeks.  Yesterday, I went for a run for the first time in 13 days, and I felt great.  I ran 3.5 miles at a moderate pace, and I was amazed that my body could do such a thing after so valiantly battling the Sickness.  Yet today when I tried to run, there was the pain; there, the fatigue.  And later today, I realized my legs were super sore because I had asked them to pick right up where we left off two weeks ago.  My body may be mostly recovered from the cold, but I can't ignore that I was pretty much inactive for a decent period of time.  So much for easing back into it.

Physical pain: we feel it, acknowledge it, then do what we can to push past it.  We take the Advils and Tylenols and whatever else to reduce the inflammation and the discomfort.  We recognize that our bodies are hurting from lack of use, but we stretch it out and walk it off.  We run again tomorrow.  That stuff is easy.  There are other types of pain, less obvious, more sinister for their sneakiness.  The pain of loss; the pain of heartbreak.  I've been dealing with that pain today.  I thought I could run it away, or run away from it, but 20 minutes into my run this morning, the fact that I'm "out of shape," and hardly slept last night caught up with me.  My legs were hurting, but that discomfort did nothing to take away the numb tightness in my chest that had nothing to do with my heart rate.  What do you do with that pain?  Drugs don't do a thing for it, really.  Running may abate it for 20 or 40 or 70 minutes, but then it comes slouching back in, snuggling up where that warm fuzzy feeling used to live.

I have heard that Time helps.  Eventually, feeling returns and the little pieces of yourself that you'd given away gradually heal over.  In high school, I started running as a means of avoiding my personal demons.  Those specific demons are long gone.  I run now for myself and for my health, and if I can, I run to inspire and do something for others.  Right now, it would be so easy and so much more comfortable to crawl in bed and stay there, nursing these stupid emotional wounds, filling the tiny holes in my heart with hot chocolate and refined carbohydrates.  But that would be counterproductive and beneficial to nobody, least of all First Descents and the people I have supporting my running endeavors.

The thing about pain is that you can only give in to it so much before you have to take a step back, reassess the situation, and figure out what else you can do.  If it's physical pain that you know won't go away for a while, you grin (if you can) and bear it.  You still have a life to live.  If the pain is much deeper than that and emanates from somewhere dark and private inside you, you still have a life to live.  I still have this crazy life to live and a race to run and the more I train, the stronger I become, in general.

Last night, still in shock over the sadness wrench that had just been thrown in my previously extraordinarily happy life, I asked a very good friend what on earth I am supposed to do now.  She, in her fantastic, straightforward NorCal way, replied, "No one ever knows what they are doing, and it's a miracle that any of us survive any of this kind of shit at all."  Who knows why any of us are still here, with all the small tragedies that happen every single day.  I believe everything balances out, and I have to hope that things happen for a reason.  Although I still have no idea what I'm doing, really.  I know tomorrow I'm going for a run; I know I'll still be writing about running and life and so many other things.  I know it's going to be sunny in Denver tomorrow, and I have a lovely little sockeye fillet waiting for me when I get home from work.  I know for sure that most every pain comes and goes, and this is no different.  It will just take time.  Meanwhile, the road is beckoning, calling louder than my bed and self-pity.  Although I don't know how right now, I know this, too, shall pass.

Thanks much.  Happy weekend, Please!! enjoy it. 

The Cold

Both the external and the internal cold...  The first means I wore a toque; the second that I didn't run today.  I did, however, brave both colds and go for a walk...  It was 9 a.m., 30 degrees and crisp despite a warming sun.  The highest of the mountains to the west were covered in snow and stood out in stark relief against the brightest blue sky.  I tried to run, really, I did, but after literally two minutes, I felt like my chest was going to explode and the coughing was not far behind.  I suppose it is okay though.  I would rather allow my body to heal than push myself too hard and not be able to get over this thing quickly.  Which is actually a rather novel way of thinking for me.  Historically, I have been known to ignore any and all warning signs my body issues, which has led to excessive fatigue, stress, and even cancer.  (I couldn't have stopped the cancer, necessarily, but we probably could have caught it a lot earlier.)

Last year while training for Chicago, I went for a moderately long run, 90 minutes I think, and I bonked Hard after maybe only 30.  Turns out I really hadn't been consuming enough calories for pretty much the first half of my training.  Or, if I was eating enough, they weren't the right kinds of foods.  My body finally just stopped and basically said, "I have no energy.  I cannot run nine miles, much less three.  Eat better!!"  So, I started eating more protein and more whole grains, and my energy levels changed dramatically, as did my ability to run the longer distances.  Anyway, the moral of this is that I don't feel great right now.  It's the beginning of my training; I haven't started running serious distances yet.  I am allowing myself the time to mellow, to drink tea and eat oranges and turkey chili and sleep 10 hours per night.  Soon enough, I'll be out pounding that pavement and putting the miles behind me.  Take care of yourself and you'll be amazed at what you can, in turn, ask of your body.

Solid.

Two days in a row!  Today was a treadmill day though.  Comically, I have spent the past four hours cradling my distended stomach in considerable agony following an overdose of Chicago-style hot dogs and fries.  There are trends at play in my life...

Gym tomorrow but probably no running.  Need to give my knees a break.

A wonderful friend of mine posted online earlier today that she propelled through "8.5 fantastic miles this morning."  She is amazing and has pushed her way through a lot of life's unfair realities over the past few years.  Every day I am awed by her persistence at Living, at moving on and literally running past her demons.  Yesterday I mentioned our predisposition towards comfort and safety.  Yet we are also remarkably resilient.  We can take our bodies, willingly or not, to the edge of death, wear them down to their physical breaking points, and then turn around and, with some recovery, run 8.5 or 13.1 or 26.2 miles.  We can thrive despite life's conspiring to bring us down.  A few of us push our bodies and our minds just a little bit farther because we Can, because we are still around to be able to run and bike and climb and ski.

I run and my friend runs and gradually we see our bodies heal and grow stronger.  We have visible, measurable proof of our returned health.  We cannot be stopped.