Eighty-five days.

I live near the Rocky River Valley — a beautiful oasis of emerald in a sea of gray and tan concrete.  Surrounded by suburbs and the airport, bisected by several tall bridges that span its length, the river runs like a thick brown ribbon through a reservation of green laced with trails and bounded on each side by the 360 million year old brown earthen shale cliffs that rise 150 feet like silent specters.  This is my home running turf, the place I feel like I most belong in the whole wide and beautiful world.  If I’m not in my office, and I’m not at home, I’m most likely to be found here.

I was here this morning in the pre-dawn darkness, underneath a sky where the stars hung like bright white diamonds against an inky sky.  After a few days of sub par runs on grudging, tired, and reluctant legs, a long session with the Stick had yielded good results — fresh legs with more than just a hint of dash and vigor.  I moved out the door with alacrity, my energy fueled by the coolness that had followed after several days of warmth and that sort of dense summer humidity that you can almost feel pressing down on you.

There are some days when it is just a good day to be a runner.  None of the demons that often haunt me were present.  A good day to be a runner, indeed.

I was going long today, and so I was able to witness the sky gradually lighten and the stars begin to fade away.  It began to progressively lighten, first at the horizon, those stars fading first as the sky gradually became brighter and the stars faded away to be seen again tomorrow.  Gradually, the sun came up and before long it was plenty light enough to see.

A long run will often slowly but irresistibly take the steam out of your step, and so it was with me today.  The fatigue creeps in little by little, sort of like how the waves of the tide lap at and slowly and irresistibly erode the sands of a beach.   It happens so slowly you almost don’t realize it until suddenly you find yourself thinking, “man, I’m really tired.”

I live on top of the valley; I start my runs with the exuberance of a screaming downhill — slightly out of control, a little bit like a runaway freight train screaming down the tracks.  But what goes down must come back up.  And it was now time to go back up the hill.  In the long early morning shadows and underneath the tall canopy of leafy mature trees, it was still fairly dark at the bottom.  This is a long hill, the type that is too steep to go straight up, so it instead winds around like a snake, climbing all the while.  The fatigue had crept in far enough to gain a foothold, so that it felt like a really long climb to the top.

When running becomes tough, I tend to disassociate, to think about other things.  I fix my eyes straight ahead and I concentrate on taking it one step at a time if necessary. And so I started my climb up the hill and out of the Valley.  Looking for something to think about, I glanced down at my watch to check the time and noticed the date: June 29.  It is almost the end of June.  The realization then hit me that I’m stepping ever closer, day by day to the end of September and a time that it sometimes seemed like it would never, ever come …

I love summer and I would never wish it away … Except this year.  I had my last chemotherapy session on September 21, 2007.  With the kind of cancer that I had, if you can make it two years in remission (dated from the last chemotherapy session), then victory isn’t assured, but the relapse rate starts to plunge — dropping off as though off the side of a high cliff.

It was at that moment, fighting through a veil of fatigue and trying to haul myself up the hill, I suddenly appreciated how much my journey through cancer is just like running up this hill I run up nearly every day.  The darkness at the bottom, and then a slow and winding climb, with no sight of the finish line at the top.  There were the cracks of light through the trees, just as there was the occasional piece of positive news in the daze of a world that I felt I had no control of.

And then, suddenly, without even knowing it, I came around the last curve and I could see the top of the hill, the final crest, the early morning sunlight filtering through the trees, bathing the pavement in light.  For a moment I was blinded by the bright glare, but then my eyes adjusted to the scene:  A sort of proverbial yellow brick road — sparkling, bright, glittering, as though someone had dropped thousands of gold coins on a road leading up towards heaven.  Suddenly I felt the energy return.  I sprinted on newly found strength to the top.

It will be just a mere eighty-five days till I crest the biggest and toughest and gnarliest hill of my life.  From the very bottom in the cold darkness of the winter of 2006-2007 when I was diagnosed with cancer, through the up hill slog through endless months of toxic chemotherapy, through the mixture of dread, fear, and hope that constitutes the fragility of remission … The end of the precipitous climb is now within sight.  From there, the road continues for another three years towards the five year mark and hopefully the wonderful pronouncement of cure, but it is a downhill road from the two year point.  I’ve now rounded that final corner of the big hill, and I can see the bright light at the top.  It’s so dazzling — so full of hope, and promise, and days yet to come, that I still can’t look at it, still can’t quite imagine being there.  But I can taste it, almost reach out and touch it.  Eighty-five days.  I hate to wish away the summer.  But I almost can’t wait.