What's Possible

I vividly remember a conversation that I had last year with my radiation oncologist. I was about to undergo total body irradiation (TBI) and as a runner, I was very concerned about the permanent effects on my heart and lungs.

“Will I still be able to run?”

“You will still be able to run. Maybe you won’t race in the Olympics, maybe you won’t run fast, but you’ll run.”

 “What’s not fast?” I asked, visions of white-haired retirees loping past me on the trails.

“Well, you could probably run a four hour marathon.”

My heart sank. I had already run a sub-four hour marathon, while feverish and on antibiotics (admittedly, that was a bad call). In my world, with my peers, four hours was not fast at all.

Would I ever be able to be the person I once was? Was it possible to be even better?

I began this year with a happiness project, which has been a bit of a bumpy ride. But as part of that happiness project, I’ve decided to see what’s possible for me. How fit can I be, after surviving leukemia? Can I really be as fast as I once was? Can I be even faster? Go even farther? I know this sounds suspiciously like my type-A overachiever self coming back, but the difference here is the stress. I don’t find athletic training stressful at all. I absolutely love it. Some people hate exercise but I love pushing my body and seeing what it can do. The other difference is that in this process of getting fitter, I’m trying to see my body as an asset instead of a liability. After such a betrayal with blood cancer and chromosome deletion, I’m trying to learn to trust my body again.

It has always been a dream of mine to run an adventure race – the kind that takes days to complete and traverses over mountain ranges. I always saw it as a distant dream that I would probably never fulfill. I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to do it. I don’t know where, when, or which one, but I’m going to do it. If I don’t start now, then when?

What’s possible?

I’ll tell you what seems impossible. My friend and teammate Jenny Hopkins was the first person with MS to ever complete an Ironman triathlon. She is my hero (and she’s also a little bit nuts – I say that with great love). So if she can do that, who’s to say what’s possible for me?

Step one: start racing again. This summer I will re-join my racing team and hope that I can at least keep up with the warm-up (seriously). I am going to run some 5ks and some trail races, and then in the fall I’m running a half-marathon. Next year I plan to run a full marathon, and I really hope to run it faster than I ran my doomed first one. After that, sometime down the road, I want to complete an Xterra off-road triathlon. (First I need to learn to mountain bike. Well, first I need to have a mountain bike – small detail). But why not? I was sick for too long and watched more TV last year than I ever thought possible (10 seasons of Friends, anyone?). Now I want to squeeze every precious bit out of the life that I have, because you never know when it might turn again. And for me, that means being outside and being active. Who knows, maybe an Ironman is in my (distant) future. Who’s to say?

You may ask why. You may ask: why push a body that has suffered so much?

Because it’s about hope. It’s about showing other survivors that anything is possible. It’s about proving that you can survive cancer and thrive. That you can survive leukemia and have a bone marrow transplant and still run. Fast.

When I was in the hospital I read articles and watched videos about leukemia survivors who ran marathons, and I felt hopeful. I felt like I would survive, and that it was possible that I would be me again. If other people could do it, why couldn’t I?

Today, I heard a story of a woman who completed an Ironman one year after she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. That is one of the most fatal cancers (most people don’t survive six months past diagnosis), and she trained through chemo and radiation. There is a portable chemo dispenser that they sometimes give you, a baby bottle-sized tube that you stick under your clothes for a week, and she would tuck this into her cycling jersey and go for a ride. No kidding. How she did that, I do not know. But that story gives me hope. It should give us all hope. (At the very least, it should get us off the couch.)

So now, if I’m lucky, my story will give someone else hope. Someone else who is sitting in a hospital bed right now wondering if she’ll ever run again.

My husband and I have always said that once I can break twenty minutes in a 5k again, then I’ll know that I’m back to where I once was. I hope I get there someday (next summer, to be more specific). In fact, I hope I run even faster. Because I want to prove that oncologist wrong.

So tell me, what’s possible for you?