Marathons and Cancers: Post #1
Today I am grateful for enjoyable family time last evening, including a game of Phase 10. I am also grateful for the anticipation of our next marathon.
This year's marathon week is here. Next Sunday morning, Darcy and I will be heading to the starting line of another 26.2 journey. That in itself is a deep blessing.
Cancer has been on my mind a lot lately, and during many of the previous marathons I have run. As I focus my blog posts this week on the marathon experience, several are inexorably woven with the cancer that has impacted my family and I head on.
Our first marathon was the Chicago Marathon in 2004. I have told the story often of my niece Katie and her husband Danny getting the ball rolling on the idea of running Chicago. It was their anniversary celebration plan. It was a lifelong dream of mine, still unrealized.
Things fell into place. Katie and Danny, their friend Kate, Darcy and I, and my sisters Ruth and Zita were making plans and starting training that spring. I was 38, feeling good about life, and ready to push my body in new ways.
But in April, Zita was diagnosed with breast cancer. The first such diagnosis among my sisters and I.
Unfortunately, it was just the start. Zita had surgery, chemo treatments, and then radiation. She wasn't able to run, and was just finishing up her active treatment and rounds of radiation by marathon date.
I will always remember the comment her doctor made to her though as she was going through chemotherapy and the myriad symptoms and challenges that come with it. The doctor said "it is like your body is running a marathon on the inside."
Zita couldn't run the marathon that year, but we could run it for her and for everyone else facing health and other difficulties. Her and her husband Randy were able to join us in Chicago though, and they helped watch our son Sam. He was just a few months shy of turning 3 at the time.
It was an unforgettable experience for me. Running the streets and neighborhoods of the Windy City and making it to each mile marker. The supportive crowds and the quiet stretches of pavement. The amazing feeling of pursuing a dream, a new goal stride by stride, mile by mile. The physical exhaustion and the emotional highs and lows that accompanied the later miles.
I thought about Zita and the fear of cancer. There are some things you can't run from.
And yet, there are things you can always run for and to. I run for my health--physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. I run to find unceasing gratitude for my mobility and for what running brings. It may take effort, calories, time. But it brings so very much more.
I will never, never forget seeing the marker for Mile 26 in Chicago and then rounding the corner and having the finish line come into view. The emotions of the moment have etched the memory, one of my lifetime favorites, forever in my mind and heart.
And I will also never forget the phone call from Zita earlier that year, sharing her diagnosis with me.
The shock and fear gripped me, and in ways they have never let go.
Each of those moments, those memories, galvanized my motivation to keep running.
This year's marathon week is here. Next Sunday morning, Darcy and I will be heading to the starting line of another 26.2 journey. That in itself is a deep blessing.
Cancer has been on my mind a lot lately, and during many of the previous marathons I have run. As I focus my blog posts this week on the marathon experience, several are inexorably woven with the cancer that has impacted my family and I head on.
Our first marathon was the Chicago Marathon in 2004. I have told the story often of my niece Katie and her husband Danny getting the ball rolling on the idea of running Chicago. It was their anniversary celebration plan. It was a lifelong dream of mine, still unrealized.
Things fell into place. Katie and Danny, their friend Kate, Darcy and I, and my sisters Ruth and Zita were making plans and starting training that spring. I was 38, feeling good about life, and ready to push my body in new ways.
But in April, Zita was diagnosed with breast cancer. The first such diagnosis among my sisters and I.
Unfortunately, it was just the start. Zita had surgery, chemo treatments, and then radiation. She wasn't able to run, and was just finishing up her active treatment and rounds of radiation by marathon date.
I will always remember the comment her doctor made to her though as she was going through chemotherapy and the myriad symptoms and challenges that come with it. The doctor said "it is like your body is running a marathon on the inside."
Zita couldn't run the marathon that year, but we could run it for her and for everyone else facing health and other difficulties. Her and her husband Randy were able to join us in Chicago though, and they helped watch our son Sam. He was just a few months shy of turning 3 at the time.
It was an unforgettable experience for me. Running the streets and neighborhoods of the Windy City and making it to each mile marker. The supportive crowds and the quiet stretches of pavement. The amazing feeling of pursuing a dream, a new goal stride by stride, mile by mile. The physical exhaustion and the emotional highs and lows that accompanied the later miles.
I thought about Zita and the fear of cancer. There are some things you can't run from.
And yet, there are things you can always run for and to. I run for my health--physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. I run to find unceasing gratitude for my mobility and for what running brings. It may take effort, calories, time. But it brings so very much more.
I will never, never forget seeing the marker for Mile 26 in Chicago and then rounding the corner and having the finish line come into view. The emotions of the moment have etched the memory, one of my lifetime favorites, forever in my mind and heart.
And I will also never forget the phone call from Zita earlier that year, sharing her diagnosis with me.
The shock and fear gripped me, and in ways they have never let go.
Each of those moments, those memories, galvanized my motivation to keep running.
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