Training for FURTHER (not weekly at all dispatch #7)

Two weeks to go until FURTHER. Catching up on Weeks 10-13 of training.

The last few weeks have been interesting. And by interesting, I mean complicated and not easy. I haven’t really wanted to write because when I write I tend to be more transparent than I am on a platform like Instagram. Someone recently commented on one of my posts, when I said something about wanting to have an authentic experience at FURTHER, “you are always authentic”. This may be true but authentic and transparent or vulnerable or sharing everything aren’t the same. If I have learned anything as I have gotten older and my audience has gone from a small bunch of fellow weirdos (that’s you ultra runners) to a wider group, it is that not everyone gets to know everything about me. I use to feel like what I wrote was grounded in the fact that most of my readers actually knew me and thus it was contextualized with real life experiences of me. But now, what I write or what I put on the internet is sometimes all people know about me. Over the last couple of years, I have been backing away from barring my soul on the internet. Instead, I have tried to, more often than not, share my experience in service of others. I share what I share because I want people to feel seen. I want there invisible parts to become visible. I want my experience to connect with other’s experience. I have moved away from trying to find support, approval or even kudos on the internet because that is looking for love in all the wrong places.

One other thing that has worked its way into my brain and caused me to hold my fingers above the keys but not type many times is the phrase, “stop complaining”. In the last two weeks, I had someone say this to me when I was pointing out an occasion of overt racism. I had confronted a large group of people about something many had witnessed, yet had not been acknowledged. I was told by one person in the group to “stop complaining”. This is a very triggering phrase for me as someone who has experienced almost unbearable pain, trauma and illness. All of which I have tolerated with little to no complaint. I learned at a very young age that stating a problem (aka complaining) was not helpful, so I kept that stuff to myself. Didn’t work out great for me if you look back on my life. I have been trying to ask for help over the past few years, I have been trying to share my experiences with my health, especially over the last two years, not to complain, but to connect. But I was told repeatedly, when being vulnerable about my illnesses, to “stop complaining”. And so I decided that my health was something I would share less about except when asked. Thus, over the past month, I have been inclined to keep my business to myself.

One of the things that I have repeatedly shut myself down on sharing is the fact that I was diagnosed with skin cancer on my face and immediately after FURTHER will have to have surgery to remove it. Every time I was about to share it, I thought about the crowd of people who last year liked to tell me when I mentioned anything Lupus related that “at least you don’t have cancer”. I imagine that same group of people now telling me, “that cancer isn’t a big deal”. And sure enough, Basal Cell Carcinoma is the most common type of cancer there is! It is also highly treatable, woot! It also means that my risk of other cancers goes up exponentially and given the medications I have been on that also increase my risk of cancer, I now am at extremely high risk of other types of cancers. I’ve been calling this “my starter cancer”. I haven’t wanted to share this because I can just imagine the ways that people might make me feel bad about it. What people should do is just say, “that sucks, I am here to support you”. Yes, I’ll be fine, we caught the sloth cancer (the other thing I call it because it moves very slowly) early but I still have to deal with it (and worse deal with insurance). Yes, I’ll be fine, but I still have to have a stranger dig something out of the side of my face. I feel pretty ok with the diagnosis and the prognosis, what makes me feel bad is that I feel like I have to keep it to myself as not to “complain”.

The other thing that happened that I haven’t shared is that I accidentally got kicked in the chest by my horse. No one did anything wrong, neither person nor animal, it was just a freak collision of factors while out doing ground work on the trails with Nathan, the mini donkey and Tater, my horse. It was very scary, probably more for Nathan who watched it happen, to have a horse kick me in the chest while I was running downhill, which caused me to spin around and hit the ground hard. The brunt of my force going into my hand. I am still not convinced that my hand is ok despite the fact the doctor recently dismissed that one of my fingers might be broken. It is fine, I don’t need feeling in my finger right? My chest was bruised but fine. Unfortunately, the accident caused my entire body’s rotation to become compromised and a niggly knee turned into a completely collapsed kinetic chain on the left side. It took an immense amount of work, including flying to San Francisco to see my PT, to get it sorted so that I once again had a functioning leg. It was crazy making since I couldn’t even describe the problem, I just couldn’t run normally. What hurts? Sometimes nothing, I just could not run normally. Before I saw my PT, I would make gains through certain exercises or through bodywork, but nothing truly unraveled the problem. I had good enough days and bad days. I had to work incredibly hard to stay the course and not lose hope or focus because I knew that I was the only one who had the power to make this better. I am not fully on the other side, but I have a functioning leg and my body is back in alignment. That’s a partial sigh of relief as we are two weeks out from FURTHER.

I didn’t expect that this training block would go perfectly. I expected hurdles and now I have had many. I do feel like I have put my everything into this race and I hope that when it begins I am feeling healthy and at peace with all I have been able to put into it. If there is one thing I know, it is that running for 6 days straight will be hard. I know I will cry and struggle and grit my teeth, but I will not complain and I will not quit. I’ve come to far and worked too hard for that.