10-Year Gut Checks
Decade birthdays are gut checks. They are prompts, if we choose to see them that way, to look at where we have come from as well as the path are on and ask ourselves Mary Oliver’s question that Diana Nyad quotes in her memoir and in the recently released film, Nyad, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
When I was 38, I felt a dream inside of me start to express itself, and approached my friend, Stacie, and said, “You know, the way I see it is that when people turn 40 they either put up crepe paper and signs saying ‘Lordy, Lordy, look who’s forty’ or they race their bikes across America. What do you think?” She was in. And like that we decided to race our bikes across America, recruited Anne Marie and Ryanne to join our 4-woman team, leading to the beginning of Team PHenomenal Hope. We believed in the potential to inspire others when ordinary people strive to do extraordinary things. We raced in partnership with the PH community, trained and did all sorts of events leading up to the big race to raise awareness and funds, and we created a movement. Choosing to race RAAM 2014, planning and taking the steps to create Team PHenomenal Hope and race across the country changed my life in a myriad ways.
In terms of my personal health, I got into the best shape of my life. As an athlete I trained rigorously. In addition to my work as an academic physician at UPMC, I rode hours upon hours of zone 2 efforts on weekends, learned about the benefits of giving up sugary foods (“No sugar, no grains!”), fat adaptation and training my metabolism for ultra endurance events, and just loved the bike. I rehabilitated a vestibular concussion from a crash during a bike race, raced across the USA with an incredible team and crew (in 7 days 7 hours and 15 minutes), worked through a significant post-RAAM depression, and went on to race in many ultra races from Race Across Ohio and Race Across Florida to Race across the West in 2015 and Paris-Brest-Paris and Silver State 508 in 2017. I raced in honor of my PHriend, Ornah, who lived with PH, in our Let Me Be Your Lungs program. I took on new challenges in mountain biking, traveling to New Zealand with my teammate, Hap and riding in The Pioneer New Zealand… twice! I loved to push my body and mind to the limits. And wow, did I feel strong!
My life working with the PH community blossomed in new directions. Team PHenomenal Hope continued to expand and serve the PH community in new and more tangible ways (funding research, putting on support groups, starting a patient unmet needs fund). My exposure to the West in RAAM, and my desire to expand beyond my current career limitations in Pittsburgh and build something big opened my eyes to a possibility of living in a different part of the country, ultimately moving to Denver to take my dream job (which it still is). The lessons I learned as an athlete about the impact of reducing sugar on improving my own metabolic fitness, as well as reading about the role of nutrition to reverse Type 2 diabetes and prediabetes, helped foster new questions and now funded research into the role of therapeutic nutrition in pulmonary hypertension, and help people take back their lives and breathe better.
All of this came from deciding that when I turned 40 I would race my bike across America.
So what about now?
Knowing that the reader can do this math, you will observe I am again on the precipice of another decade year. A decade reminder. A decade gut check. And for a reason I don’t yet understand, I’ve been a little more “in the feels” about this one. I started thinking that over the past few years (2019-this summer) I was a little off track from where I thought I would be. And right at this time of rumination, I was reintroduced to Diana Nyad’s story. Years ago I had read her autobiography, Find a Way, and on November 3 it was brought to Netflix with Annette Bening playing Nyad and Jodie Foster playing her best friend, Bonnie. I loved the movie and I also really loved the November 3rd Washington Post article by Sally Jenkins, in which she writes:
“Every now and then a cultural moment comes along that exposes how severely and artificially we continue to limit the conceptual range of female ideals, and the cannonball biceps of these actresses in their 60s [Bening and Foster] constitute a significant one. Sun-scorched, straw-haired, scored with tendons, they are glorious.”
I watched the movie, internalized Mary Oliver’s quote and decided that rather than putting up crepe paper and cheesy signs that say “Nifty, nifty! Look who’s fifty!” I just know that I have something bigger inside me. It is time to really train again, and, as Jenkins writes, to commit “to demonstrating the metamorphosing possibilities of strenuous athleticism.” I cannot help but to keep rereading this article and think to myself, what will it look like at this time next year after I have made this commitment? What will it look like in 6 months? In 3 months? In 3 weeks? What does it look like today? And I realize that rather than being off course as I was thinking, I am exactly where I am supposed to be. In the movie, Nyad (played by Bening) tells Bonnie (played by Foster), “I’m not done, and neither are you.”
As next year begins to take shape, I already know that 2024 is going to be one heck of a year. I’m returning to training with definitive intention. I am again embracing to using movement to build a movement. And as I launch the next decade now with purpose, commitment, discipline, adventure and destiny, I am definitely not done.
