A Body's Rebellion

As I sit in a coffee shop, a map beside me, open in front of me a spreadsheet filled with trail names, vertical gain and distance estimations for South Mountain Park and Preserve in Phoenix, I realize for the first time just how many trails are actually on this mountain. I don’t know why this surprised me, but while planning my Every Trail on South Mountain fundraiser project for The Cairn Project, it strikes me that more of this mountain remains unexplored by me than I realized. This brings more excitement to the project, though, because I am not interested in only exploring familiar trails; I am looking for new paths.

This project comes on the heels of 5.5 years of failed attempts at forcing this body to get stronger, move faster, and recover. It is only in the last 4 months that I have been able to tolerate a lot more exercise. Is it crazy to take on a project like this so soon after? Perhaps, but if I’ve learned one thing from this long illness and from the work I do in healthcare, it is that our health and mobility are never guaranteed. Today I am ready to see where this new body can take me and the trails of my favorite park are as good a place as any to start, even if there are more of them than I’d realized.

The last time I planned and successfully completed a personal project was my 2019 adventure across the Grand Canyon. Cresting the top of the Bright Angel Trail after a breathtaking and physically challenging 24 miles is something I will never forget. Exhausted after my biggest physical adventure ever, I was simultaneously desperate to sit down and so excited to see my family cheering me on at the top. Looking behind me, I couldn’t even tell where we had begun our journey eleven hours earlier, but the aching in my calves reminded me of each step I had taken.

Traversing Rim to Rim at the Grand Canyon is not for the faint of heart nor the unprepared. While the mosaic of red rocks and stunning vistas beckon visitors below the daunting edges of the rim, there is a price to be paid upon reaching their destination. A relentless climb back to the top, often in brutal heat, greets every canyon adventurer, the penance and the blessing for daring to enter one of the country’s most unbelievable natural features. Some of us pay our penance with tears, all of us with labored breaths, and for some others, with their lives.

The summer of 2019, following my grand trip across the canyon, was filled with endless adventures with new friends I had met at the Aravaipa Running weekly run club. A ragtag group of novice runners from different backgrounds, different parts of the country and with different running abilities, we found common ground on the dusty trails of the Arizona landscape. Rising often at four in the morning to beat the heat, we would emerge hours later to a mostly empty parking lot covered in sweat, laughter and plans to do it all again later in the week.

That summer was truly the best of my adult life. It sounds pathetic to say that, but here I am, pushing back against every natural instinct to obscure this part of myself. When I first came across the Trailblazer program at The Cairn Project, it was not just the prospect of a physical adventure that I was drawn to; it was the platform to share my story—the good, the bad and most importantly for my larger goals of healing, that which I have long deemed shameful.

That summer, for the first time in my adult life, I felt a part of something. I sensed the beginning of something or maybe more accurately, I sensed the end of something. Although I never had trouble making friends, I have always struggled with feeling separate, distant even from the people around me. I have always watched and observed, drawing conclusions as one does when they are young, as to how a girl, a woman, a human even, is supposed to exist in order to earn the right to cast their net into the ocean of life’s possibilities. The standards felt high and out of reach.

For reasons I have yet to uncover fully, for as long as I can remember, I have lived with this sense of waiting, of not yet, of perhaps never. I have mastered the art of masking, of carefully curating my persona and controlling my interactions to obscure the “not-yetness” of my life, of my self. But in the summer of 2019, I felt like the universe had finally granted me permission to claim an identity that brought some joy to my life and stoked the hope that maybe she felt that I had waited long enough.

What followed that summer of fun, though, was a relentless decline in my health, slow at first and then all at once. It started with Shingles. Yep, I was a thirty-two-year-old with Shingles, on her face no less. I didn’t even know one could have Shingles on their face, but it turns out…you can. Luckily, I responded to treatment fairly quickly and the stinging nerve pain abated without much of a fight. But things were never quite the same.

It’s common knowledge that stress can weaken your immune system or, in the case of Shingles, reawaken it. Between fun and fulfilling trail runs, hikes and outings with my new friends, I was struggling immensely with personal stress. I was frequently traveling out of the state and helping friends and loved ones celebrate huge milestones in their lives. I wore heavily, the contradictory experience of feeling so happy for people I love and yet feeling a deep grief that my own personal life was still stuck at a standstill despite years of deep personal work and the types of effort that many smart and influential people promised would fix my life.

After a decade of concerted efforts to bust through a lifetime of thoughts, feelings and behaviors that had kept me stuck and powerless, I did what I always do. I put a smile on my face while in public and turned my attention towards something else. In this case, that something else was an uphill 50k trail race in the high desert of Arizona—The Crown King Scramble. What is the reward for climbing mostly uphill for 30-something miles, you might ask? It’s a cup. Just a cup. But it’s a tin cup, and that damn thing was going to fix my life. If years of therapy couldn’t do it, might as well try ultra trail running, right?

As training ramped up for Crown King, my first 50k ever, I never felt like I fully shook the effects of being sick with Shingles. I was waking up sore, feeling more inflamed and tired all the time. Now, to be fair, I had been struggling with vague symptoms like this even before my Shingles diagnosis, but everything started to ramp up afterwards. Eventually, I was waking up every morning feeling like I had a head cold or a sinus infection, often with a headache. I tried different remedies and saw a couple of doctors to explore the underlying cause, but mostly I just ignored it all and pushed on. 

Things were looking great in terms of my training. Despite not feeling all that well, I was getting stronger and faster and for the first time in my life, I felt really proud of my physical capabilities. It was so rewarding to see my hard work pay off and to share so many of those miles with friends. One day, though, after participating in a local 12k race where I had run some of the fastest miles of my life, I reached the end of an Aravaipa Wednesday night group run barely able to walk.

At first, it felt like a quad strain. It could make sense, except it wasn’t healing like a quad strain and after a few weeks of running on it, pretending it would get better on its own, the wiser part of me finally sought out some imaging.

Femoral Neck Stress Fracture. Boo.

Crown King Scramble was no more. Just a few weeks before I was set to toe the line with all of my friends, I would be left waiting at the finish line. Except the race was set to happen on the 28th of March, and we all know what happened in the middle of March 2020, the United States shut down. Turns out, even if I had made it to the start line healthy, there wouldn’t ever be a start line, not that year, and for me, not since then.

What happened instead was seven weeks on crutches, physical therapy exercises and just before I was set to begin my return-to-run program in the middle of June, I got sick. And I just didn’t get better. In fact, things would get much worse over the next eight months and to this day, five years later, I am still fighting my way back.