Living with Chronic Illness

“To become chronically ill is not only to have a disease that you have to manage, but to have a new story about yourself, a story that many people refuse to hear — because it is deeply unsatisfying, full of fits and starts, anger, resentment, chasms of unruly need. My own illness story has no destination.” (Pg. 270)

That was the author speaking about her own experience with chronic illness but it could just as easily have been written by me. It would be so nice if one could simply say, “okay you’ve got a chronic illness so accept it, move on and deal with it”. If only it were so easy. The acceptance is actually the easiest part once the diagnosis is confirmed. Moving on and dealing with it not so much. Especially when it is incurable. 

One of the hardest things for me as I’ve spoken about before is how quickly I lost the ability to do more than try to walk fast in a race situation. Finding myself at the back of the pack knowing that DFL (dead fucking last) is most likely going to be the new norm. A lot of people can’t understand why I don’t just stop “racing” especially when I can’t even train. The simple answer is because I still have goals. 

A tradition that Smitty and I share is doing a race on Labor Day for some reason the race we’ve done Eugene Brews Cruise wasn’t on the calendar this year so we found another race sponsored by the Oregon Track Club on Thursday after Labor Day. It was an evening race and I spent the majority of the day in bed not sure I would be able to do it until four o’clock just two hours before the start. 

I was glad that I showed up and did it. It was my 339th race since turning 60 and 88th since turning 70. Sadly there are no more quality races but I still hope to at least reach 350 and 100 in addition to still wanting to get 50 states. 🤷‍♂️