keeping promises

It has been awhile since I stood here. Too long, really. In fact, it has been so long that the last time I stood here I was wearing short sleeves and a pair of skimpy nylon shorts; today I stand here at the spot where the woods part clad in wind pants, a long sleeve shirt, and a windproof vest. The windproof vest is very necessary; today, the wind howls through the trees, down between the shale walls of the valley.

The wind has brought changes not only to the way I dress to go out for a run, but to the very look of my trail. I normally run my trail so frequently that the eternal transformations of the seasons happen gradually and, accordingly, are not very noticeable. But now, having been away for awhile because work and darkness has forced me to run other routes, the metamorphosis from fall to winter on my trail is especially stark and startling — the last time I stood here the leaves on the trees formed a crimson and gold canopy above me and the gentle wind brought the sweet scent of mud, shale, and that distinctly earthy odor that perfumes the autumn air up from the river. The last time I was here, red and orange and yellow leaves formed a thick carpet beneath my feet as I crunched and shuffled my way through them. And when I finished my last run here on that day that now seems a lifetime away, I watched a red leaf lazily floating through the autumn air, almost ethereal, teased by the wind. Today, all that is gone and the wind is not warm and inviting and teasing — instead, the wind means business and has a very sharp winter bite. It has long since stripped the leaves, so instead of decked out in their autumnal finery, the trees stand as silent brown sentinels, branches reaching into a gray cold, drab sky. They have the look of just trying to endure the cold and wind of a Cleveland winter.

Even the birds are different. Gone are the tiny multi-colored warblers, carried on impossibly small and fragile wings to impossibly distant places. Only the cheery chirp of the scarlet cardinal and the happy laughter of the hardy nuthatch greet my ears this morning. It is otherwise quiet; the parking lot is empty and I probably won’t see another living soul on my run, except for the birds and the deer and the squirrels who spend their entire lives here.

This is one of those days you would rather not be running, the type of day you look for an excuse to stay in a warm bed under warm blankets. Rain threatens; the wind carries the unmistakable and indescribable smell of it and I know that I am not fast enough to beat it. From the movement of the clouds and from years of experience weather watching (every runner is a weather watcher), I figure the rain should strike at about the half-way point of my run. And when the rain begins to fall, it will not be pleasant. When mixed with the driving wind, the rain is going to be icy cold and perhaps even physically painful; cold rain driven by a strong wind has the feeling of a thousand needles biting into your flesh. I know full well that when I finish my run I’m probably going to resemble a drowned water rat. Yes, today is one of those days you’d probably rather not run.

So you may ask why am I here? The reason I am here, priming to run, is because of promises I made. No one will know if I break it, for it is a promise to myself. But I will not break it. So long as feel well enough to run and it is safe to run, I run. Cold wind and rain are unpleasant, but not unsafe. And, so, today I will run. Rain or no rain. Wind or no wind.

I’ve delayed long enough and I’m becoming cold standing here — I am dressed for a run, not for standing still — so with one final check of the laces of my Mizunos, I straighten up, ease into the effortless trot of the distance runner, and head down the muddy brown ribbon into the trees. After about a tenth of a mile the trail reaches the banks of the Rocky River and takes a quick turn to the right, where it then stretches, winding through stands of trees and underneath two bridges for three miles to the turnaround point.

As I run underneath the trees that mercifully block the wind, I can’t help but wonder — do other runners have a place like this? A special place where they can retreat and go to think or, if they prefer, not think? I hope so. A place like this is so special, it deserves to be shared.

Here, on this trail, I’ve found running is great for both thinking and not thinking. Although I run in many places, this is my special place, the one place I can come to think or not think. I used to run here much more frequently; I now return as a more occasional visitor. But I always return. Years ago, when enjoying a college student’s schedule I ran here nearly every day, I wrote papers in my head for my undergraduate classes on this trail. It was on this trail that I decided to go to law school, and where I studied for the bar exam when I finished. It may seem strange to think of studying for the bar exam while clipping along through the woods, but somehow it worked. Even today, on the rare days I can come here for a run, I still write my briefs and puzzle over how to attack and dismantle an opponent’s argument in the mental chess that is the practice of law. I don’t know what makes running conducive to figuring out problems — I suppose it is the increased blood circulating through the body that makes the brain sharper, more creative, more logical while running.

But strangely, running is also good for not thinking. Here, I’ve also discovered that I can simply lose myself in the cathartic primal act of running with its steady timeless rhythms — the continuous beating of the heart, the soft recurring sound of footfalls, even the whisper of the wind whistling past my ears. In the early days of my running career, I rarely felt the need to lose myself in running; my brain was always fluttering through something, bounding sometimes erratically from topic to topic, like how one of the kingfisher birds that live here rarely spend much time stopped any single place. In those early days of my running career, if I had nothing to think about, I would invent mind games, like counting cars when I ran on the road or counting down from ten-thousand. Always my mind was moving.

But after being diagnosed with cancer at age 26, running took on a new meaning and I learned to love running for its uncanny ability to let me forget things, to escape from a world that seemed to be spinning out of control at a dizzying pace. I’ve always liked to be in control of things, and law school only made that not so always positive aspect of my personality much worse. For a person who likes to be in control, cancer is an absolute nightmare. Cancer is the ultimate loss of control; it becomes clear that even your body is no longer yours. Instead your body belongs to doctors who decide what drugs to poison you with and what tests and indignities you need to endure. I was diagnosed with cancer at an advanced stage; fortunately, it was a kind that responds well to chemotherapy and remains curable even when caught very late. But the chemotherapy was not easy. There were all the side effects you can conjure up as defining chemo — hair loss, nausea, fatigue. I imagine someday people will look back in abject horror at oncology at the beginning of the 21st century with its burn and poison and cut approach just as well look back in abject horror on the idea of bleeding patients in the 18th and 19th centuries. At least I really hope someday people look back that way — it will mean we have found something better and without the horrific side effects.

A runner for years before diagnosis, during treatment for cancer my runs became a respite — forty-five minute intervals carved out of each day when I could escape from the reality and indignities of tests and the endless rounds of chemotherapy to a place where I was in control and free. Although I’ve always loved running, running used to be just something among many somethings that I did; after being diagnosed with cancer, running became far more than just a something. In a lot of ways, running became everything — the one element of my past self that endured through the indignity, the loss of control, the onslaught of drugs. During these runs, I found I did not want to think at all, or even play the mind games. Instead, all I wanted to do was lose myself in the quiet solicitude that marks the life of a long distance runner. All I wanted was the quiet. I relied upon it as I relied upon food and water.

That’s why it seemed particularly and terribly unfair that I was struck with lung problems from my chemotherapy, just when I needed running the most. Not everyone who is given the drugs I received develops pulmonary complications, but I fell in the unlucky group that did. The entire cancer experience seemed grossly unfair — I mean, seriously, a 26-year old runner with cancer??? — but this …. this was beyond unjust. This was just plain cruel. Stubborn, I refused to quit running. Every day at the appointed time I would show up and try to run, to try and carry on like usual, just because that just seemed like what was right. But instead of a reprieve from cancer, my runs became a daily struggle of will and a constant reminder that I was sick. I coughed up blood, I gasped for breath on the side of the trail, I was forced to walk. Every day I felt like I lost the battle, and was ultimately losing the war. I became your protypical runner deprived of her endorphins times ten — moody, gloomy, and irritable. There was nothing glorious or heroic about these runs — like the trees, I was just trying to endure the only way I knew how. But how terrible a struggle it was until one day, things just started to improve. By the end of treatment, my lungs had mostly healed from the chemo, though they still trouble me from time to time. Today, for example, I am feeling the dull ache in the right side of my chest and my breathing is ragged.

I try not to dwell on the pain. All runners know that running is about managing discomfort and sometimes even outright pain, and so recognizing from experience that this pain is not a harbinger of something disastrous, I use my mind to overcome it, to ignore it, to push it down and away. All the while I keep running, gliding silently beneath the trees, reaching the turn around point, slapping the tree with my right hand (tradition), and turning back on the three mile trek to the car. At this point, the rain begins, and as anticipated, it comes from the side, stinging my legs and exposed face, soaking my hat. I can feel the cold droplets falling down my back. The droplets soak the already soggy trail forming puddles and I am soon splashing through the cold mud.

In remission, running has taken on a different importance. For one, it has become the measure, the yardstick of how I am doing at any given time. I gauge my health by the numbers on my watch. I know that it is dangerous to treat running this way; all runners have bad runs, and what you dismiss as just a bad run sends my mind to places I would prefer it not to go and conjures up demons that bite at my heels. A bad run is a hideous, haunting reminder of the gravity of the disease I have been diagnosed with, a stark and terrible demon that gnaws at my psyche. It fuels the fires of my deepest and darkest fears. A bad run makes me wonder is it back? Only with time and a series of negative scans, I’ve learned bad runs are sometimes just that — a random occurrence, an inevitability when you run every day.

On the more positive side, running usually keeps the demons at bay. It silences them — runs the life out of them. I think every cancer survivor lives with demons — every person who is in remission worries about whether it could come back. Sometimes, usually in the quiet darkness at night, those demons keep me awake. It is those days I long most for morning and for my opportunity to escape to the quiet emptiness of the roads. For in running I find my solace; the cold grip of fear no longer dominates my thoughts; it is scrubbed away and released, dissipating in the heavy morning air. When I’m bothered by demons, I run fast — for I am stronger than the demons that have been plaguing me. They can’t keep up. They try to match strides with me, but I am too strong for them. They fall back, farther and farther until they are left sucking air on the roadside while I run along free.

It may sound a bit melodramatic, but I do truly think running saved my life by teaching me to endure and be disciplined — do you know those runs on days you don’t want to do it? Hopefully you’ll never have to find out the way I did, but the truth is they teach you to persevere in ways you never dreamed imaginable. And do you know those runs where you don’t know if you can get through because the miles are going by so slow? They teach you to take things one step at a time, if necessary. When the enormity of my cancer overwhelms me, when I feel like crawling under my bed to hide, I call on the discipline and perseverance ingrained and earned by many miles spent pounding the road.

In many ways cancer is the ultimate destroyer of life — it strips you of even your hope. I think if cancer has an opposite, it must be running. Running injects hope because it is the ultimate activity of life — nowhere do I feel more alive than I do running. When I run, I feel like I could live forever, and yet at the same time I feel vulnerable. So perhaps it is not so curious that cancer with its terrible devastating force actually made me love running all the more. I don’t think I ever knew what it really was to love running until I found myself lying in bed on a beautiful spring weekend morning, lingering in the hazy cloud of fuzzy sickness that followed each round of chemo, merely yearning to engage in the simple act of lacing up my shoes, to feel the dirt underneath my feet, to run under that impossibly blue sky, to just run, not for time or because I have to, but because I wanted to run. I promised myself then if I made it through to the other side, I would run many, many miles before it was time for my last sleep.

Hope is such an extraordinary, dear thing. Sometimes I find my hope would flicker like a candle, teased by the wind, and I worry that it will be snuffed out altogether. Other times, like today, I find the flame burning bright and strong. And so that is why I am here, putting six more of miles underneath my heels this Christmas morning. Not even the cold rain that has begun to fall hard can rob me of my hope, can put out the flame. Hope, and running, are both gifts — and so even if it means running in the cold rain under a slate-gray sky through drab woods, I will not waste the opportunity and the moment — I will not waste this gift of cherished time to keep promises and run many more miles before I sleep.

Hope in my heart has placed wings on my heels as I finish my run. I’m glad I kept my promise today. Run long, run strong.

into the collective

I am standing on one foot, in the dark and cold on my front porch, using the bluish-light of my headlamp to see as I slip on my running shoes. Underneath the blue light, I kneel down to tie them. Shoes secured, I crunch my way down the stairs. Due to the ice lining the sidewalks, I’ve added sheet metal screws to my shoes for traction – a runner’s trick to hopefully stay upright on slick sidewalks and roads. But on dry pavement or my concrete steps, the screws make a crunching sound.

This run begins where most of my runs begin – at the foot of the driveway. I click the start button on my Garmin and slip off into the darkness. It has been dark now during my morning runs for months now, but at least the eternal tug of war between dark and light is starting to turn in my favor. I don’t mind running in the dark that much, but I worry about sleepy drivers and the footing. Hence why I undertook the precautions this morning – a headlamp, some reflectors, the screw shoes.

I see few runners on these morning runs now that it is cold and dark. I see even fewer walkers. Some days, the bone chilling cold chases me inside, but mostly I prefer the wild and cold darkness to the heat and sterility of the treadmill, though, so it is outside for me today.

Running in the winter in Cleveland takes some special skills. For example, even with traction devices, you have to exercise caution in running over the slick patches when you see them. You shorten your stride, adjust your center of gravity, and take smaller steps. Sometimes you high step and almost prance over the ice. If you do slip, your best bet is a controlled slide. On the worst icy days, it is usually best to live to fight another day by resorting to running inside.

Today’s run through the cold and dark is uneventful. I run my loop and return to the house. As I return, the faintest red light is just beginning over the southeastern horizon. I crunch my way up the concrete steps and slip the gloves off my hands to undo my shoelaces. I carefully slip them off and fumble through my pockets for my key. Slipping it into the lock and turning the knob, I return to the warmth of the indoor, carrying my snow encrusted shoes in my left hand. This is not a memorable run – instead it is the type of run that will blend in with all the others as part of the collective experience and be forgotten as just another run in the winter of 2009-2010 in Cleveland, Ohio.

Not the smartest thing to do.

After my last race in May, I had some grand plans for the fall.  They fell apart over the summer when it became readily apparent that my body can’t follow a training schedule.  Maybe it will be able to again someday, but that day isn’t here yet.  I’m like Jekyll and Hyde.  One morning I may wake up ready to bust a fifteen miler in two hours and have it feel like nothing, the next day I may struggle to just run around the block because my lungs act up.  It is extremely frustrating and doesn’t follow any sort of rhyme or reason.

After throwing away my plans (aka “delusions of grandeur”), my only planned “race” for the fall was to do a solo, celebratory 50K on the Gettysburg battlefield — to celebrate being two years in remission from cancer.  That mission was accomplished.    And, that was supposed to be it.  But then I started to feel sort of bad about not doing the hospital’s annual charity 5K, so I figured why not … then of course, on Thursday I woke up with a sore throat.  By Sunday morning I had a cough and couldn’t talk.  Basically blossomed into a full blown sinus infection — I seem to have these problems every fall.

Still, it was good running weather — 50 degrees, wind maybe around 15 mph (headwind out, tail coming back) and it is a flat, fast course.  I wanted to hit around 22 minutes, maybe break 21, outside shot at maybe going under 21:45.

In honor of Bob (who was being good despite my trying to get him to come out and “jog” the course), I ran in a blue singlet.  I was a handful of runners dressed that way — most seemed incredibly overdressed (I mean, it was 50, not 30…)

As usual I lined up totally wrong.  I try to get up towards the front, and people line up ahead of me anyway.  So I spent the first half mile trying to just find some room to run.  The first two miles were fine, the third mile started to feel hard, and I started to kick way too early — probably a good 4/10ths of a mile out, but I sustained it.  Ended up with a burning lung and an aching chest and I was pretty sure I was going to cough up my lung or my heart or both, but fortunately, they all stayed put. I really finished running hard — feeling more like I was running the 400 in high school again then finishing a 5K.  Blew by a group of guys I’d been trailing for a long time, tried to keep ahead of them.  Hit the line and of course, I forgot to stop my garmin.  haha.  I knew I was under 21 minutes, but didn’t know if I hit the 21:45 goal.

I was able to figure out from looking at my run in Sports Tracks that my splits ended up as 7:14, 7:08, 6:48, 0:35  (rold you I was flying at the end!) for an official time of 21:44.8. 

So, I just slipped underneath my goal time — talk about cutting it close.  And it is a post-cancer PR.    Last year I ran the same race without a cold in 22:55.

Is my body healed from cancer and the attendent treatment?  No.  But is it getting better?  Well, the differences in times from the end of September 2007 (27:02) and now (21:44) seem to tell the tale.  I still find racing frustrating from the standpoint I don’t know if I’ll get Jekyll or Hyde, so I have no idea if I’ll keep racing in the future or basically “hang ‘em” up from racing.  I do like running hard …

follow the leader

September is here.  (Did you know September is leukemia and lymphoma awareness month?)  You can see it in the angle of the sun and in the flowers blooming along the trail; the summer wildflowers have been replaced by the orange and yellow tiny touch-me-nots.  You can see it in the birds — the fledglings are flying strong and sure now, and some of the early migraters like the tiny blue Indigo buntings have already departed south.  And you can see it in the rapidly dwindling amount of daylight.

I love September; I love the cool nights that set up beautiful mornings for running, with pink and red and orange sunrises.  I love the warm days and the brightness of an impossibly blue sky.

Runs tend to blend together after awhile; a few are memorable (some for all the right reasons and some, unfortunately, for all the wrong ones), but most sort of fade into a collective experience.  There are runs that stick with you, though.  I think today was one of those runs.

It wasn’t particularly memorable because it was such a great run; I’d consider it a decent run, a little slower than normal pace, comfortable, and finished at a decent clip.  No, what made this run memorable is what I saw.

Despite the slightly slower pace, the miles were clipping by at a steady rate.  It is funny how some days it feels like the miles go by so slowly that time stands still, whereas other days the miles clip by like today as though time has warped forward.  In the grayish light that marks the twilight right before dawn, I turned into the valley and down onto the dirt bridle trail.  Half a mile into the bridle trail stretch, coming around a bend through the woods, I spotted him.

A buck.  Not the partly white “ghost deer” buck that is seen infrequently, but rather a healthy, stout brown buck, with black hooves and white tufts above them.  He sported a set of formidable antlers.  He stared at me with a sort of intense curiosity — not really afraid, yet also ready to run if necessary.

He was a handsome buck, one of the best looking bucks I have ever seen.

Deer are very common here.  Does with rapidly growing fawns tend to come up the steep hills of the valley to destroy flowers, trees, anything green and somewhat edible.  The bucks are rare, though.  They are shy, secretive, and aloof.  Seeing a buck is a treat.  What happened next was amazing.

As I approached, still clipping along at a steady pace, the buck took off and trotted down the trail.  He stopped, and looked back at me.  When I approached again, he trotted a little further down the trail, head held high and proud.  He then stopped and stared back at me once more.  For half a mile we played follow the leader, until he finally spotted something more interesting and took off crashing through the underbrush and into the dense tangle of green and brown woods.

I have run many, many miles in my lifetime, but never has the opportunity to play follow the leader with a buck presented itself.  I suppose that is part of the draw and part of what keeps me a runner — knowing no matter how many miles I run, the chance to experience something new and special and different always still exists.

Playing follow the leader with a buck.  Who would have thought.

reflections on two years in remission

Most of you know my story, so I’m sorry to repeat parts of it.  But since so many of you were a part of this chapter in my life, I wanted to share with you my reflections on being two years in remission from cancer.  I apologize for the length; when the words start flowing they tend to unleash as a torrent.  No hard feelings if its too long to read.

I can feel the warmth of the late summer sun beating on my shoulders as I kneel down and tighten and tie the laces of my running shoes.  This is not a time of day I normally run, but today the urge to do a run after work was too irresistible to try and fight, and so, shoes secure, I straighten up and almost instantly ease into a trot.  Within a tenth of a mile, I make the sharp turn to the left, and down the corridor into the cool leafy green darkness of the woods.  My trail is a fairly wide, mostly flat dirt ribbon cut through a sea of trees that meanders along underneath the cottonwoods and the maples, between the tall ancient shale banks of the Rocky River.  Some days the River is a raging brown torrent, swollen from recent rains, but today, the water moves sluggishly and the depth is low enough that the many namesake rocks poking up from below the water’s surface are clearly visible, providing an occasional good perching spot for a great blue heron.  It is definitely a hot day and the humidity hangs so thick you almost expect to be able to see the individual molecules hanging suspended in the still air.  Although it is still hot and the summer sun blazes down with a fierce intensity, the angle foretells that autumn will be here soon and my trail will be decked out in its best reds and golds.  But for now its still warm and humid and the trees are decked out in vivid greens and tall flowering wing stem lines the banks of the riverbed.

This time about three years ago, I was struggling to understand what was happening to my body.  You see I have been a runner for almost as long as I can remember, and I always have felt in tune with my body.  I couldn’t understand why the previous fall I had developed a lingering dry cough that wouldn’t go away or why the left side of my abdomen felt so much firmer than the right.  I also couldn’t figure out why the right side of my chest itched so deeply and so incessantly that I would scratch at it absentmindedly until it literally bled.  What bothered me most is something that continues to hound me to some extent to this very day — the sudden attacks of nauseating, aching nerve pain radiating down from my right shoulder into my elbow that would stop me cold and leave me doubled over in pain.  I fought that pain all through the summer and fall of 2006, on into the dark, cold days as the calendar flipped over to 2007.  Finally the pain became too much and I went to the doctor.  CT scans revealed that I had a fourteen centimeter mass in my left abdomen and what were ominously described as “shadows” in my chest.  The shadows turned out to be masses that took up most of my chest and were pushing upwards into the right side of my neck, displacing veins and arteries.  My right arm didn’t hurt because of a pinched nerve; it hurt because the nerves and blood vessels were being strangled to death.

I was all of 26-years old and suddenly found myself sitting in waiting rooms, waiting for the local surgeons to palpate the abdominal mass and to remark upon its grotesque size.  They all shook their heads and pronounced me “a Clinic case.”  And so that’s how I found myself among the maze of cavernous buildings that make up the Main Campus of the Cleveland Clinic.  There, on a cold and gray February morning littered with a few errant white snowflakes, one of their top surgeons pronounced my mass as a rare kind of liver tumor that had metastasized through my chest.  Left hanging in the air, unspoken, was the obvious inevitable prognosis.  Only a biopsy was necessary to confirm the verdict.

The biopsy required an incision and a large needle that removed cores of the tumor.  I can still remember vividly the sound of the needle’s spring and the sort of dull ache that accompanied each of the five samples taken, as well as the discussion between the two doctors over what my mass represented.  It was almost as if it were all happening to someone else, and I was only an observer.  I ran a little afterwards, but mostly lived a listless existence, awaiting the inevitable call.  On the morning of February 14, the day following a massive snowstorm that blanketed Cleveland with two feet of snow, I found out I didn’t have liver cancer.  Instead, I had a type of cancer of the immune system known as Hodgkin’s Disease.  Hodgkin’s Disease is one of a handful of cancers that is curable even at stage four.  All I could think was I have a chance now.

Within about twenty-four hours I was sitting on a table in front of an oncologist in now very familiar exam room number seven listening to his pronouncements of how I would require eight months of chemotherapy, and how the goal was hopefully to cure me.  I don’t remember too much about the meeting — I distinctly remember of course being told I would lose all my hair — but mostly I remember being numb.  This still seemed surreal, like something that I was watching happen to someone else from a far away distance.  Every night I’d go to bed and wake up feeling fine … and then that terrible feeling would come over me like a freezing wave of icy water when I remembered that I had cancer.

Shocked and numbed and unable to think straight, I did what seemed like the logical thing at the time, but actually was probably one of the stupidest possible things I have ever done in my entire life — I decided to argue with my oncologist about everything.  After having been bounced between doctors and desperately wanting someone to give me a definitive answer, when someone finally stepped in to take firm control … That was too much.  So what if I had a 14 cm mass in my stomach and a pleural effusion and SVC syndrome was causing me to have to sleep sitting up because I otherwise felt like I was suffocating.  So what if my heart raced because I was just that anemic.  There was absolutely no way was I going to be hospitalized.  I even argued that I didn’t need a bone marrow biopsy.   Later, when I discovered that my oncologist was, in fact, a hardcore runner himself, I decided I liked him and now we get along great.  But I didn’t like his seizing control of everything at first, even though I realize in hindsight that’s what was necessary at the time.

My oncologist prevailed, and in the all too short span of a week, I went from a runner – an athlete – to a cancer patient, hospitalized, sporting an extremely annoying giant heart rate monitor and an IV line attached to the newly placed port in my chest.  I limped around because my butt hurt from the bone marrow biopsy and found that I couldn’t even think because I was dizzy and hazy from being pumped full of chemicals.

After somehow surviving an extremely rough first treatment, I managed to struggle through the first few cycles of chemo ok as the long Cleveland winter eventually softened into spring.  And I was running, of course.  First day out of the hospital after my initial chemo, I tried to run.  I think I went about twenty yards before the dizziness from the anemia stopped me in my tracks.  Things improved from there.  One neat thing about Hodgkin’s Disease is how sensitive it is to chemotherapy – within hours of my first chemotherapy session, you could actually see the huge abdominal mass started to diminish and visibly recede.  But just as things started to really improve and my spirits started to lift, the road took a sharp turn.  I started to develop a cough again.  A PET scan after the third cycle of chemo in mid-May revealed I was in remission, but also that I had some inflammation in my right lung.  Hodgkin’s Disease is commonly treated with a chemotherapy regimen called ABVD — it’s a four-drug combination given for 4 to 8 cycles (each cycle lasting approximately a month or 28-days to be precise), with two treatments in each cycle.  The “B” drug is Bleomycin — a drug particularly feared for its toxicity to the lungs and lucky me — I had developed pulmonary complications from the Bleo.

I tried to keep running through the summer despite the fact that my right lung was inflamed. I would drive down to my trail and try to run up and down it like I had done so many thousands of times before.  It seemed so easy then, so elementary, so natural.  My trail is flat and easy to run; its dirt surface is easy on your legs.  But now just making it to the first bridge that marked the one-mile point was a monumental struggle that left me completely out of breath.  I would stand there with my hands on my knees and gasp on the side of the trail and envy the other runners passing by me, watching them with jealous and feverish eyes.

I just couldn’t give up running.  Cancer is a horrible disease that robs you of your dignity and inflicts physical, mental, and emotional pain.  When you look at the pictures of me from the summer of 2007 you see a cancer patient: the swollen, yellowish tinge of my face, the pitiful thinness of my ponytail told the sad tale that I spent more than my fair share on the second floor in the oncology department of the cancer center.  All I had to keep me connected with the rest of the normal world was my running.  It was there I could still feel alive and free and like an athlete, not the shell of a human who was seemingly being slowly poisoned to death by chemicals.  Fortunately, my oncologist never tried to discourage me from running; when I asked him he sort of smiled and said he knew it would be futile, that I wouldn’t listen to him and would just run anyway.  For a second I thought maybe he reads minds, but then it registered that being a runner himself he figured the consequences of not running would be far worse than anything I could do to myself running.

I kept trying to run all through the summer because I just felt I had to keep running to maintain some semblance of normalcy in my life.  It was anything but easy.  I struggled to jog for just a few minutes before getting out of breath.  One particularly terrible morning, I pushed myself to run until I literally coughed up bright red streams of blood.  The very next day I sat on a bridge near the hospital and contemplated quitting chemotherapy altogether – what was the point of getting better if I could never run again anyway?  But something inside, some small piece of resolve that probably had been hardened and sharpened to a razor point by those many thousands of miles pounding the roads just wouldn’t let me call it quits.  Instead, I determined to keep running and keep doing chemotherapy.  I would keep going — or I would die trying.

Since I decided not dying was probably a good idea, I got smart.  I ran like a beginner would run, mixing walking and running until my lungs healed enough from the Bleomycin damage to allow me to start running continuously again.  Summer faded into fall and I finished chemotherapy on September 21, 2007.  The seemingly endless cycle of going for chemotherapy every other Friday and feeling poisoned for days was finally over after sixteen infusions — eight cycles — of ABVD.

Any joy I felt about being done with ABVD was soon tempered by a sobering post-treatment scan.  My post-therapy CT scan revealed I still had an almost 5 cm mass in my chest, an enlarged spleen, and most ominously a new pulmonary nodule.  My normally affable oncologist told me grimly that my case kept him up at night.  He said he would do another scan in two months, cautioning me to call him immediately if I didn’t feel well.  I felt ok; actually, I thrived.  I kept running, growing slowly stronger.  The next scan was right before Christmas and it showed the nodule was gone and the spleen was starting to shrink.  Every scan since then has been, essentially, as normal as they possibly can be.

I say that because I’m physically scarred by cancer forever.  My scans show all sorts of petrified artifacts scattered throughout my chest — scar tissue is very common with Hodgkin’s Disease and I had much more disease than most people.  My breathing has never returned to what it was before chemo — although I am now a much stronger runner than when I finished chemo, I am not quite as fast as I once was because of the scarred tissue from the Bleo. I still have a mediport in my upper left chest.  And my right arm, though it improved once the masses stopped strangling the vessels and nerves, still has a tendency to swell up, become discolored, and ache.

There are emotional scars, too.  I struggle with demons that threaten to consume me, that bite at my ankles and hold me back — the fear of relapse, the fear of having to undergo more treatment.  I honestly think I fear more treatment even more than death.

My oncologist never discussed odds with me, and I honestly was always too afraid to ask him.  At first you hear you have Hodgkin’s Disease and you think well that’s good because that’s one they can cure, but then you start to dig a little more deeply and you realize while they may cure more people than die from Hodgkin’s, a good outcome is far from assured, particularly for someone like me who had massive disease and probable liver involvement.  From my own research, I gathered that my odds of relapse given the extent of my disease were probably in the range of 50% to 60%.  I also knew full well that if Hodgkin’s Disease relapses, then it almost always tends to relapse within the first 18 to 24 months.  And so for the past two years, I’ve been living on the edge, a proverbial sword always seeming to dangle just a few precarious inches above my head, looking forward to the fall of 2009.  I’ve always been a little afraid of trying to piece too many parts of my life back together for fear of everything shattering into a million tiny shards again.  I just don’t think I could bear that.

And yet here I find myself running on this humid August 19, 2009, on my trail, underneath the canopy, into the dying late summer light, knowing for certain that I am free of cancer — the scan yesterday revealed that everything was stable.  My strides are regular, my breathing a bit raspy, but steady.  I’m at once exhausted and elated; I’m tired from a full day of work and from the stress of worrying, and I’m also a little hungry and thirsty, but freedom invigorates each stride and I feel as though there are tiny wings attached to my heels that allow me to break the ties that bind us to the earth.  There is certainly hope in my heart and wings on my heels today.

I knew that I was going down a very dark and frightening path when all this began, but if I could have seen the road that represents the past few years and how many tortuous, mountainous hills that I needed to ascend, I’m not sure I would have been brave enough to even take the first step.  Instead, I think I might have simply curled up in fear underneath that exam table in room number seven and never come out.  The road I’ve gone down has wound around and up some of the steepest, sharpest hills I’ve ever climbed.  It has tested me in ways I never thought possible, and I’m sure in many ways, I was wanting.  I’m certainly not perfect; many days went by where I felt sorry for myself.  I guess some of that is just normal, after all cancer is a path you wouldn’t wish upon anyone, and I know all too many people who are currently running along their own version, dealing with their own diagnoses.  The elation and joy I feel personally over a good result is always tinged with a feeling of guilt over how I am doing so well, when others are still suffering.

What do I credit for being alive, for being here?  Maybe I’m just supposed to be here?  Not sure about that, but I try to live my life like I’m supposed to be here.  I suppose luck has to be credited, more than anything else.  Having an excellent oncologist and excellent nurses, certainly helped too.  But then, so did a good attitude.

My attitude and approach to fighting cancer was shaped by my experiences as a runner.  As the road ahead revealed itself in all its cruelty and darkness, I went through many moments where all I wanted to do was just stop or quit, just as I have had those moments on runs that have gone bad.  I think maybe I would have indeed abandoned my journey except that running equipped me with all the strategies and tools necessary to get through the rough areas.  It was running, after all, that taught me how to climb the steep hills and to just focus on what I could do — and how to cope when the road ahead seemed too long and too arduous.  If five more miles seems too far, then focus on making it one mile.  If one mile seems too far, focus on making it just a half mile.  If that seems too far, then focus on tenths.  And so on.  Just keep moving forward, always.  So, there is no doubt about it in my mind – I’m alive because I was a runner.  Whether I would have had the inner strength to survive without running … I honestly have no idea.  I don’t really want to think about it.

Strangely, cancer has been both the best and worst experience of my life.  It has irrevocably changed me, and I will never be able to fully erase the scars it has left.  In a way, I wouldn’t want to erase the scars.  Honestly, I never knew until I had cancer how much I really loved running or how much I loved life.  Cancer gave me new eyes to look at the world and everything now is a little more crisp and in focus.  You learn what matters and what doesn’t.

Being a runner, I wondered how cancer would change my running.  I’m certainly slower than I was at my peak, but somehow, the runs are better.  I can truly say that most mornings I wake up and I ache to go for a run, to feel the wind against my body, to test my limits, to exceed them.  This love for running and life was purchased at a very dear price, with such tremendous struggle, and I would hate to ever lose it.

I finished my six-mile run just as the sun was starting its final lilac and pink descent behind the gathering thunderheads that portend storms tonight.  It was notably darker and cooler at the trailhead as I brushed the sweat from my arms.  It seemed appropriate to finish at sunset, for I’m hoping that the sun is also beginning its final descent on what is paradoxically the most terrible and meaningful experience of my life.  I feel as though I will wake up in the morning to find myself running along a new path – not one that is ominous and winding and fearsome, but rather one on which the light that blazes before me is so brilliant, so bright, that it dazzles me just to look forward into it.  That irresistible urge is calling me and so you’ll have to excuse me …  you understand, I am a runner, and I learned long ago that the siren song of a new path is too strong to try and resist … I just have to go — I’ve waited two years and just can’t stand to wait any longer to run down this new path, free.