run this amazing day

Last year I climbed a mountain on Christmas Day. It's one of my favorite hidden backcountry wanders in Colorado. When I tell anyone about it, I say, I'm taking you to the top of the world.  I packed the car the night before and crept out well before dawn, snowshoes and pb&js, carols on the car stereo and coffee in Evergreen. I was parked at the rundown mine shaft by 6:30 and heading up the trail just as the sun started to rise. The first two miles are pretty flat but then it pitches upwards and the final push is about a quarter-mile which, depending on how deep the snow is, can take an hour or more. It's a slog. As the saying goes, they take pictures of mountain climbers at the top, not along the way, because who wants to remember the rest of it? The relentless climb, the searing burn in your lungs as the air thins, heart pounding wild and primitive while you trudge upwards, thick and slow. No one takes pictures of that, no one wants to remember the suffering once it...

When I was eleven or twelve years old, I won a talent competition at church. ( I've actually talked about this before, but any excuse to post this photo.) It was the first time in my life that I felt like  I had done something well. I was never going to be an opera star, or a rock star, or any kind of star, because to be truly excellent and rise to the absolute top, you need to have about seventeen different kinds of hammers in the toolbox you carry around inside your chest and I had only one.  I still have it, it sleeps quietly inside me, snoring softly, and I only ever really let it out to play when I'm alone in my car or the stairwell or a really excellent empty locker room. It's not the ability to really dig in and rip it, although any karaoke night anywhere will try and teach you otherwise. It's being able to blow the goddamn doors off the sucker, but almost never doing so. It's the other end of the continuum, the softness, the sensual gentleness that come...

There is no way to brace for this impact: I lost the baby. I've had to find ways to write it, to say it out loud again and again. It's impossible to sugarcoat it. I can't put a positive spin on it; even me, the eternal optimist, is unable to find some shining way through. There's a really good reason that no one ever talks about this, and that's because it's fucking unbearable. How do you grieve a life that never was, how do you mourn the loss of not only that life, but of hope? Why do we say it this way, my child has been lost , when I think it's actually my own soul that will forever roam, invisible and misplaced at sea, when it's me who has vanished into a violent squall of heartbreak? It is my body that feels quiet and desolate, hushed in unfamiliar stillness. I am the one that can't breathe, that has been blown apart, that is not surviving. A week or so after it happened, I was chatting briefly with a friend, and he said something that resonate...

And now we've come full circle. I'm a storyteller. I said it last fall, in a post weaved through the crappy Snow Patrol song that is somehow marking time around the beginning of it all. I may not do it well, or properly, but it's never so much about the story as it is about the telling, the things I learn about myself as I pour words onto a blank page. Hoping for nothing more than to dig through the tumbling waterfall of adverbs and commas and murk in order to unearth the mirror I'd like to hold up to my soul.   I've learned over the last few months, maybe in the hardest possible ways, that sharing my story is what creates forward motion. It's how I grow, and to hell with anyone who judges me for what I have to say or how I choose to say it. I'm not going to stop being who I am. And who I am is ready, now, to weave an intricate thread through this particular story, of how I've arrived into my stunning and startling destiny, to tell the tale that the univ...

There is something I have been dying to tell you...

I will either win or learn from this experience.  That's one of the mantras I carted around with me when I raced ironman. If memory serves correctly, Nelson Mandela said it first, before triathletes imported it for their own abuse. I used to flippantly comment that it meant I was ready to make a whole slew of brand-new mistakes on race day, none of those old tired mistakes would do. For instance (I've been writing too many papers), in my second ironman, I thought that it was a terrific idea to eat about twelve nut-and-date-bars on the bike. I tried to run with a belly full of fiber and ended up doing the bow-legged porta-potty shuffle until a friend threw some Imodium in a puddle on the ground up ahead for me to pick up without an outside assistance penalty (ah, the glamour, I miss it so). I didn't win that day, but I never tried to fuel another marathon with 6000g of natural laxatives, either. I've got endless 'look how hilariously stupid I was' stories from a ...

In 2017, I was in the pool one early April morning when something tweaked deep inside my shoulder. I was accustomed to little weird bites of pain popping up, it's normal when you're haul-ass up to your eyeballs in ironman training. I was working more and harder than ever, seeing numbers, times, watts and paces that I had never seen, so niggles were to be expected. We roll through them as athletes, we add some crap we should be doing anyway like foam rolling TLC and it calms down. But this niggle didn't shake. A few days later, I woke up and couldn't turn my head to the right. That's happened a few times, old age is a monstrous bitch, and a quick check-in with one of the ridiculously smart bodywork people in my village usually sorts me right out. I was racing that weekend so I had a session already lined up with a magician and I still remember his voice as he dug through layer after layer of the spasming muscles that connect my neck to my right eyeball. This is real...