Sometimes when I think about the runner I used to be, she seems like another person. Even though it’s only been four years since my autoimmune disease first went off the rails, enough has changed since then that it feels like someone else’s life. And not just because we lived in Colorado when all of this started.
When this all began, I was on quite a hot streak. I’d had several outstanding years of training and racing…I dropped my marathon PR by 31 minutes, qualified for (and ran) Boston five times, ran several ultramarathons, and decreased my PR in most every other distance at some point along the way. I was getting in 60-70 miles per week on the regular and having more fun than I’d had in the previous 25 years of running.
In early 2014, I started to notice a decrease in my training tolerance. Recovery was slower, race times were increasing, weekly mileage slowly declined, and my body weight increased. My job was incredibly stressful and I assumed the falloff in performance was simply a stress hangover, and the weight gain a result of decreased training. And at first it probably was. But the stress was chronic and getting worse. I still raced as usual, but results were crap. The exception being Boston, which I ran with several girlfriends. It was the best way to heal from the bombing of 2013, which I experienced first-hand on the street as I walked back to my hotel after finishing the race. I’ll never forget the sounds of the bombs, the smell in the air, the panic on the streets, but running with my friends helped provide perspective on a scary, unforgettable day.
But by fall, I knew something more was going on. My endocrinologist in Colorado thought everything was fine, so I found a naturopath who specialized in working with athletes. He discovered some nutritional deficiencies that we were able to correct with diet tweaks and supplements, but he also noticed that my autoimmunity was increasing. Because he was a naturopath and not a MD, he couldn’t adjust my medication, but we talked extensively about my stress level as he thought this was the root cause of the change in my autoimmune condition, which until this point had been fairly stable for ~15 years. Running performance continued to drop off. I ran a relay with friends and a crappy marathon to close out the season.
Early 2015 brought a move back home, one that I thought would solve the chronic stress situation (not why we moved back to Illinois, but definitely a checkmark in the positive column). I couldn’t have been more wrong. My new job was a nightmare and my dad was diagnosed with a serious illness. I raced a few times in the first half of the year, including an awesomely fun trail race in Moab in February and an incredibly miserable Boston in April (notably my last marathon and this is the longest break between marathons since running my first one in 2000). But by the second half of the year, my exercise tolerance took another big nose dive and my weight continued to creep up. My endocrinologist at home, who I’d seen since my diagnosis at age 25, was unconcerned by the weight gain and exercise intolerance.
So I found a new doc. In particular, I looked for a functional-medicine-trained M.D. I saw her for the first time in January 2016. By this time, I weighed the most I ever have, a full 25 lbs over my normal training weight. Beyond the weight gain, I had crippling brain fog-the best way I can describe it is it’s as if the circuits in the brain have been mis-wired, extreme fatigue, and my running tolerance fell off another cliff. I felt like a shell of my former self, at 40 years old.
Dr. Z turned out to be a tremendous blessing. She has Hashi’s as well, so I didn’t need to spend any time convincing her of what I’d experienced. She immediately changed my medication and put me on a mileage restriction, even though I was training very little at this point. Her goal was to get me healthy enough to qualify for Boston again. Because even running a marathon-let along qualifying for Boston-seemed so far outside the realm of possibility, my goal was just to go through a week without wanting to sleep all of the time. And maybe to fit into my old pants.
Things slowly got better. By this time, I’d left the horrible job and was working part time which I really enjoyed. The part-time schedule suited the situation much better and I felt myself recovering. I started to run a bit more even though I really didn’t race much that year beyond two half marathons for fun-both 20-25 minutes slower than normal, a summer 5k hosted by my work, and the relay in the fall. In late fall 2016, I got a bit ahead of myself and took a new full-time job with the local health department. The work was exactly what I wanted to do and I thought I had recovered enough to handle the full-time schedule and responsibility of a leadership position. I really enjoyed my new colleagues and staff.
I was wrong again. Within a month I started getting sick frequently and was having issues with my asthma that were unlike anything I’d previously experienced. I was sick so often that I made a calendar to share with my doc. Fatigue became a central issue again and I went weeks at a time without running. I felt myself sliding backwards, wiping clean all of the progress I’d made in 2016. By late spring 2017, my weight had crept back up and I was back at square one. M had encouraged me to take some time away from work when this all started several years before, and now I felt that to be my only shot at getting well again. And meeting a few women at WILDER who were on the cusp of taking sabbaticals themselves made it seem not so weird. So at the end of June I left the health department, even though it was the last thing I wanted to do.
The remainder of 2017 passed by uneventfully. In the fall I started volunteering with my girlfriend’s political campaign and I trained enough to run the relay with my friends again in September-although we had to drop mid-race due to injury, but never really felt that I made much progress with running. By this point, I can’t even run a mile at my old marathon pace and my body still feels as though it belongs to somebody else. I start to wonder if this is it, if this is as good as it’s going to get.
The new year comes and I’m excited for the clean slate the turn of the calendar provides. I just know this year is going to be better…I’ve made big sacrifices to get healthy, and surely that will pay off. Two weeks into the year I come down with a bad head cold that lasts a week. On the heels of the cold I get a sinus infection. All told I’m down for three weeks. This ends up being the last straw. In mid December-early January, I’d been able to string together several decent weeks of training and built some momentum. Getting so sick for so long smothered the progress. Again. I spent most of February thinking that maybe I needed a break from running. Like a real break. As in not being a runner anymore. I’ve been running since I was 11 and the only long breaks I’ve taken have been due to injury. Some years I raced more than others, ran more miles than others, but I was always running, always training. I wondered if I needed to set it aside for a while. For four years it’s been all downhill. Losing fitness, getting slower. Weight fluctuating, but always 15-25 lbs over my usual training weight. I didn’t know if I was up for much more disappointment.
Over the last few years, I went from thinking of racing marathons again, to thinking of just running them, to hoping I might be able to race halfs again, to wondering if I’ll just be able to run one again, to hoping I could just run a 5k at my old marathon pace, to wanting to simply run a mile at that pace. It’s been a constant adjustment, modifying and reducing expectations.
But after thinking about it rather obsessively for a month, I’m not ready to let it go. I still have things I want to accomplish, races I want to run. My marathon PR is 3:31, sooooo close to that sub-3:30. Before I got sick, I felt like it was *right there*. I want to run Boston again. I want to run the Quad Rock 50-mile in Fort Collins, which is on many of the trails I frequented when we lived there. I want to run trail races in places I’ve never been. I want my soft 5k PR to be not so soft, which is what happens when you only run them as part of a marathon training cycle. I don’t know if any of these things are possible. In fact there’s probably a good chance they aren’t, but I still get excited when I think about them. Triathlons, CrossFit, swimming, etc., none of that stuff excites me, or even interests me remotely. I don’t want to do something else.
So I will train. And I will force myself to race again, even though my eyes bleed at the times on my watch. For the last 18 months or so, I thought I would start racing again “when I regained some fitness”, whatever that means. But it’s becoming clearer to me that perhaps I regain fitness by racing. I’ve considered tracking new PRs, without forgetting my old ones, to reduce the comparisons with where I used to be as I crawl out of a massive hole. Call them post-flare PRs, if you will. I want to look forward, not back. I think the bridge from here to there is littered with bibs and start lines. I don’t have an official schedule determined, but I’m registered for Seattle’s Tenacious Ten in April with some of my WILDER sisters, plan to run the Steamboat 4-mile in June and several local 5ks throughout the spring and summer. And of course the relay again in September. While shorter races usually aren’t my jam, I think it’s the quickest and healthiest way to get an idea of how much speed I can get back and to learn what might be possible at some of the longer distances. I love, love, love racing marathons and am crossing all of my fingers and toes that I can race them again. But for now, considering how little fitness I have and how much speed I’ve lost, shorter is better. I’ll get reacquainted with suffering and see what happens.
And if it doesn’t work out, I’ll at least know I tried. Running slow is so much better than not running at all. At the end of the day, I’m grateful that I can still put in some miles considering everything that’s happened in the last few years. Even if the speed doesn’t come back, there are trail races to run, adventures to be had. As long as running continues to be fun, something I look forward to, I’m going to stick with it. 30 years isn’t enough.
Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going. ~Mary Oliver