run this amazing day

For some reason, it makes people laugh to hear that I went swimming the morning I had surgery. First of all, have you met me?  I didn't have to be at the hospital until 6:30am and the pool opens at 5:00am so in my head, the math was simple.  I was in the water at 5:04 and swam every last little second until I had to get out.  I ripped through the shower and showed up to check in with my hair still dripping and uncombed, my swimsuit clipped to my bag and a monster set of goggle eyes.  It is good that some things will never change. Swimming - triathlon - is not about the obsession.  None of sport is for me, that is not my why .  It's not about burning calories, or getting faster, or selfies, or being able to flash an asshole number of watts on the Strava.  (Maybe a little bit, on the selfies).  It is an honest and deep passion for the art of movement.  Swimming is my meditation, it is a safe space, where I work out angst and anger and sorrow and joy.  The dive into the water

I don't even know how to talk about everything that has happened.  But I've got about thirty-six more hours on this planet with the use of both hands (just for a while, I'm not donating anything to science), so if I'm going to get a story out, it's going to be now. When you lose something you love, whatever it is, there is grief.  We know that, it's a fact in the world. And I, an ENTJ with absolutely zero patience for stupidity, adore cold hard facts.   There are facts about what I've been through in the last six months, straightforward well-documented medical information.  In July, I was diagnosed with two herniated discs, scapular dyskenisis, and a whole bunch of torn shit in my shoulder.  BOOYAH, here we go.  I was already rocking a dozen stitches up the poonanny thanks to the nod from a year of bicycle chaos and then while continuing a long trend of doing what I was told , I ended up with a calcaneal stress fracture.  So I finally decided to shut it

Writing all of this down has been circling in my head for the last few months.  To be honest, I was waiting for the point when I would climb up out of hell, and then I could casually talk about it in the past tense through a veil of optimism & strength, oh yeah, sure, it was hard but I got through  because I'd be beyond it, finally spit out the other side.  But, without being melodramatic, I'm not sure if or when that is going to happen, and spouting my overly-wordy crap in this space is one of the few coping mechanisms I have left. It didn't start, as many injuries do, with a thunderclap.  It was more like a splinter, so small I barely noticed it. Then another piece cracked, then another, and then one day I woke up and everything had fallen apart.  It began in April.  I noticed in the pool that the back of my shoulder felt a little bit tight and that the last two fingers of my hand were going numb.  I chalked it up to the fact that 99% of my swim training for the las

It's been nearly two years since I stomped a marathon in Boulder. I haven't set foot on the vast majority of the run course since.  Maybe (probably) I'm overly superstitious, but it's been easy to avoid.  There are squillions of places to run in Colorado where I don't have to face my ghosts.  Because that's truly how it has felt since then.  Haunted, by grief and failure both. The month after Santa Rosa brought another one of those little stormy seasons in training, the kind that only lasts a few weeks but when you're in it, feels eternal.  The crick in my neck flared out angrily in every direction until I ended up parked in bed with my laptop, working between muscle relaxers and people diagnosing me with too much stress.  I am fortunate to not have had too many of these train-screeching-to-a-halt injuries in the last six years but this one came all too soon on the heels of a rough 2016.  It took a while to sort out the root cause, then a few more days