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Journey to Grandma’s: Returning to the Marathon

My first marathon was in April of 2000 – Glass City in Toledo, OH. I was in grad school, and trained all throughout the fall and winter with three dear friends. All of us were long-time runners, with Kristi and Erica being highly-accomplished collegiate athletes in undergrad. I don’t remember exactly when that fall we decided to run a marathon, but I’m guessing it happened over ice cream at UDF. None of us had ran that far before, and we thought it’d be a good distraction from the grind of school. Training with those women remains the highlight of the year I spent at Miami University. Three of us made it to the start line healthy and finished the race, with Sarah taken down by injury a few months prior. I finished in 4:02, and would spend the next decade trying to break the four-hour barrier.

Sarah, Kristi, Erica, and me, ~Dec. 1999
Glass City Marathon, April 2000

Through the aughts I ran nine more mediocre marathons, never figuring out how my body wanted to train. They were all a grind, with my times getting slower and slower. In early 2010, I registered for Green Bay in May. A bad sinus infection put me out most of the month of February, and I almost bailed on the race. But I decided to run anyway since I was already registered and had a hotel (along with my sister, we’d be making a weekend of it), and would just train to build fitness, letting go of any goals for the race. I started running five days/week that spring, and surprised myself with a 4:03 in Green Bay, the closest I’d come to my PR in the ten years since my first race. Thinking I might be on to something, I just focused on mileage that summer. I included two progression runs/week for quality, and just ran as many miles as I could. I think I topped out around 50-55 mpw, which felt like A LOT at the time. The miles ended up being the missing link, for in Oct. of 2010 at Lakefront Marathon in Milwaukee I ran a huge, unexpected PR (3:45) and even managed to qualify for Boston. Accomplishing a goal I thought to be years down the road. And that’s when it started getting fun.

With my sister Erin after Green Bay, May 2010

The more miles I ran, the faster I got. By 2012, I took another 14 minutes off of my PR-landing at 3:31, dropping 31 minutes in two-and-a-half years. Not much compares to the satisfaction of spending a decade trying to figure something out (how to run a decent marathon), and then finally having it click. Which gets at the heart of what captivates me about the distance…there is no one way to train for or race a marathon. It’s a journey that every runner has to take for themselves. Some people get lucky, and hit on the right mix of training right out of the gate. Some people battle as I did, which while frustrating, made it all the more gratifying when I finally cracked it. I ran several marathons/year through the spring of 2015, some I raced, some I ran for fun, most of them shared with friends. All told, I’ve finished over 30 marathons and a handful of trail ultras. But not one has been since April of 2015.

Team Chocolate Mile – Fun Size, Mixed Ultra champions, Reach the Beach 2013

My health challenges of the last several years are well-documented in this space. The funkiness began in the fall of 2014, and continued to escalate for the next several years. Eventually I was unable to sustain my normal training levels, or any training at all for stretches of time. I raced shorter distances through the summer of 2015, but only very sporadically since then. I haven’t been able to stay healthy enough for long enough to get back to it. I started to think that chapter of my life might be behind me.

Earlier this summer, I started to dream again about what might be possible. The lifestyle changes of late 2018-early 2019 bore ripe fruit and I felt better than I had in years. Unfortunately, that was short-lived as the puppies coming home in early June unleashed some sort of chaos in my body that took the entire summer to recover from. The puppies themselves didn’t have anything to do with what happened, rather I think they were the catalyst that released what had been brewing in my body following the loss of my dad from pancreatic cancer in March and our old-lady dog Abby unexpectedly in May. But still, running dreams were once again caught up in the forest fire of my ongoing health issues.

After taking much of August off from running per doctor’s orders, I eased back into training right before Labor Day. Starting over for what felt like the thousandth time, I didn’t have expectations for where it might go, but it felt really, really good to be running again. Not running doesn’t really work for me, as running is about the only thing that keeps the cacophony of voices in my head down to a dull roar. It’s how I sort shit and make sense of the world. So even absence of races and training goals, running is the fabric that holds my days together. But for as terrible as the summer was, September was GOOD. I ran six days/week and started to see paces dropping. I’m still quite slow compared to “before”, but it is wonderful seeing some fitness start to return. This time felt different, even in the context of a horrendous summer.

On October 9, the Brave Like Gabe Foundation posted on their Instagram about having charity bibs available for Grandma’s Marathon in June. The post caught my eye. I hadn’t even considered running a marathon in 2020, but this sparked my interest. What if a return to the marathon had nothing to do with Boston or seeing if I could still run fast, but was to celebrate a woman who’s story meant to much to so many, including my dad? I’ve long admired my many friends who’ve raced for charity, but was deeply intimidated about doing it myself. However after enduring all of the Terrible Things the last few years, putting myself out there didn’t seem quite so scary. And running to raise funds to support Gabe’s foundation makes it not about me, but about helping others. If I was going to get over myself and reconnect with my favorite distance, the one that captivated my attention for 15 years of my running career, this seemed like a healthy way to approach it. So what if I end up out on the course for five hours? If I can raise some money that will do good in the world, it will be worth it. Ghosts of the past be damned.

I didn’t have this blog when I was healthy, and training and racing like a fiend. So for the first time, I’m going to document the journey to the start line. I don’t know what to expect from training, I don’t know how my body will respond. I do know I’m incredibly grateful to have the better part of nine months to develop fitness and get my body prepared to run 26.2. I’m going to need every single day. Currently I’m running about 35 miles/week with a long run of around ten miles. In September, I ran 112 miles, my first triple-digit month of the year. Knowing that historically my body likes mileage, I hope I can get back up to around 60 mpw by May. We’ll see.

Last Friday I posted on Instagram and Facebook that I would be running Grandma’s for Brave Like Gabe, and so many of you sat me flat on my ass with your generosity. You all far exceeded any thoughts about what I might raise by June, let alone in the first few days. THANK YOU. Thank you specifically to: Jill, Ghost, Mirjam, Robyn, Troy, Bridget & Dhuey, Ron & Cass, Amy, Bob, John, Prairie Runner, Dave & Liz, Becca, Petra, Nikki, and Judy. I am humbled and so grateful for your support of my campaign for Brave Like Gabe. I’ll be raising funds all of the way until the race in June, and will be training buoyed by your support, a good reminder that this race isn’t about me at all.

What I want most, outside of raising funds for Brave Like Gabe, is to immerse myself in training again. I miss building training programs and then ignoring them, the exhaustion of a long run, the frustration of niggle-management, second breakfast, a pile of worn-down shoes in the basement, the chronically dead legs that are the hallmark of the taper, packing lists for race weekend. I crave the whole brutiful mess of it. Dreaming again feels risky, a little dangerous even. But my heart is ready to take some risks and chase a few goals.

Redwoods outside San Francisco, February 2019

I love the silent hour of night,
For blissful dreams may then arise,
Revealing to my charmed sight
What may not bless my waking eyes.
~Anne Brontë

F*ck Rules or Waving the white flag

It was late June. The last few weeks had been total hell, but as I looked in the mirror, I liked what I saw. My waist was slimmer than it’d been in months, and I felt confident running in just a shorts and sports bra, even though I’d been running that way since May when the weather turned warm. I decided, at the ripe old age of 43, to dress for the weather while training, regardless of how I felt about my body, and this still felt like a radical act even as the pounds that I lost made me more comfortable with how things looked. Never mind that the six to seven pounds disappeared while not eating for five days as I endured some sort of gastric distress related to a flare earlier in the month. My waist was trim and I liked it. 

As the summer wore on and after effects of the acute flare I endured in early June became more apparent, I struggled to maintain the little amount of running I’d been doing. My heat tolerance, which was terrible under the best of circumstances (thank you heat injury in high school softball), was noticeably worse. My mental focus was not much better. My head, which was typically full of hundreds of different thoughts all racing at differing speeds and in different directions, a familiar kind of organized chaos like the airplanes coming and going at O’Hare airport, was suddenly like an LA expressway during rush hour. Lots of thoughts sitting still, baking in the heat. But those that were getting through seemed like they were from someone else’s brain. Can I just say how weird it is to have thoughts you don’t recognize as your own? And I was tired. Oh so tired. Whatever was happening felt familiar, similar to the other flares I’ve endured over the last few years, but in a lot of ways different. It would be the end of July before I’d get to see my doc, as coincidence would have it she abruptly left her old practice and opened a new one the same week as my flare. Because of course. 

When my doc and I finally connected and debriefed about what happened in early June, she saw some lasting effects in my blood work and put the kibosh on what little running I was doing. Just a few weeks out from my family’s annual trip to Cape San Blas, this was particularly devastating, as I’d had “run at the beach” as a goal for the previous 9-10 months. I wasn’t able to run there the year prior due to some persistent and stubborn gut issues, but having done a ton of work on my diet and healing my body, I held running at the beach this year as one of the clearest signs that the past was the past. Not being able to run there again this year, in what happened to be our first year there without my dad, was brutal. With my head still stuck in a foreign fog, I struggled with how I was going to climb out of yet another hole, recover from yet another setback. It seemed pretty fucking hopeless. 

But then I remembered that I didn’t have to do this alone. I messaged with Claire, the dietitian who’s program I’ve participated in since late last September, and brainstormed how best to move forward. I struggled to “get back to” (my god I hate that phrase) the more restrictive diet I followed through the winter and wondered if there was another way forward. We discussed my connecting with the other members of her team – Isabel also a dietitian and Sophie a mental health coach, to see what insight they might have. I recognized this to be a great idea, as if there was ever an all-hands-on-deck situation, this was it. Around this same time, I decide to resume running. Running didn’t have anything to do with the acute flare in June, nor was it making things worse. I’ve been running long enough that I’m comfortable looking after myself and considering that running is how I sort all of the shit in my head, I likely was better off running than not running at this point, even if I did end up paying a bit of a price physically.  

By now it’s late August, and I first connected with Sophie, who made some incredibly astute observations on our phone call that didn’t even last an hour. We talked about what she perceived to be a disconnect between my mind and body, and how that might have contributed to what happened in June. The first half of this year was filled with SO MUCH loss between my dad and our dog Abby (we lost Abby rather unexpectedly in late May). I think I’ve always been a “just plow forward” kind of person and these losses amplified that. She offered some incredible suggestions on how to rebuild a connection with myself, with starting a mediation practice and reading Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living to guide that practice being the most impactful. I’ve experimented with a regular meditation practice off-and-on over the last year or so, but she thought that resuming the practice with the guidance provided in the book would be transformational. And she was so right.

The following week, I talked with Isabel. I rehashed my journey over the last few years, and in particular the progress I made with my health since starting to work with Claire last fall. I shared my current frustration at the difficulty I’m experiencing when trying to resume the more restrictive diet that had been so helpful earlier in the year, and how when it really comes down to it, I hate all of the rules that this approach requires. Isabel encourages me to forget all of the labels (Whole30, AIP, low histamine, paleo, etc) and to ask myself what eating like Kim looks like. I don’t say it aloud, but in my head I think, well she’s most definitely eating sandwiches. We explored what feedback I can glean from my body (beyond body weight) about what foods are working for me and which ones aren’t. She encouraged me to get curious and to feel comfortable experimenting a bit. We talked about how rules can make things easier in some ways, but how many more possibilities lie outside of those rules. Rather than getting off of the call with a recommitment to my low-histamine, AIP diet as I expected, I am instead liberated from the notion of how I “should” eat as someone living with a chronic autoimmune condition, and with a charge to figure out what eating like Kim looks like. Task #1 – find some decent gluten-free bread for making sandwiches. 

Later that first week in September, the same week I talk with Isabel, Full Catastrophe Living arrives, all 600+ pages of it. Because of my work in cardiac rehabilitation early in my career, I’m familiar with the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction program the book outlines. But while I was familiar with it, I really didn’t know any details. So I dove into the book with a healthy amount of curiosity while at the same time being very overwhelmed by the 600 pages. But then, in the very first section about certain perspectives that must be in place for a mindfulness practice to be fruitful, Kabat-Zinn spends about a page talking about acceptance, one of those needed perspectives. He writes:

“Acceptance means seeing things as they actually are in the present. If you have a headache, accept that you have a headache. If you are overweight, why not accept it as a description of your body at this time? Sooner or later we have to come to terms with things as they are and accept them, …often acceptance is reached only after we have gone through very emotion-filled periods of denial then anger. These stages are a natural progression in the process of coming to terms with what is. They are all part of the healing process. In fact, my working definition of healing is coming to terms with things as they are. (Emphasis by Kabat-Zinn)

…In the course of our daily lives, we often waste a lot of energy denying and resisting what is already fact. When we do that, we are basically trying to force situations to be the way we would like them to be, which only makes for more tension. This actually prevents positive change from occurring. We may be so busy denying and forcing and struggling that we have little energy left for healing and growing, and what little we have may be dissipated by our lack of awareness and intentionality. 

If you are overweight and feel bad about your body, it’s no good to wait until you are the weight you think you should be before you start liking your body and yourself. At a certain point, if you don’t want to remain stuck in a frustrating vicious cycle, you might realize that it’s all right to love yourself at the weight you are now because this is the only time you can love yourself. Remember, now is the only time you have for anything. (Emphasis mine.) You have to accept yourself as you are before you can really change. Your choosing to do so becomes an act of self-compassion and intelligence. 

Acceptance does not mean that you have to like everything or that you have to take a passive attitude toward everything and abandon your principles and values. It does not mean that you are satisfied with things as they are or that you are resigned to tolerating things as they “have to be”. It does not mean that you should stop trying to break free of your self-destructive habits or to give up your desire to change and grow, or that you should tolerate injustice, for instance, or avoid getting involved in changing the world around you because it is the way it is and therefore hopeless. It has nothing to do with passive resignation. Acceptance as we are speaking of it simply means that sooner or later, you have come around to a willingness to see things as they are. This attitude sets the stage for acting appropriately in your life, no matter what is happening. You are much more likely to know what to do and have the inner conviction to act when you have a clear picture of what is happening versus when your vision is clouded by your mind’s self-serving judgments and desires, or its fears and prejudices.”

I read that section no less than five times. And I all could think about was the difference between knowing something and accepting it. I wondered how much I knew about what happened the last few years versus whether I accepted it. By this time, I’d gained back those seven or so pounds I lost in June, with an extra two or three just for good measure. Which I had been very frustrated about. I was frustrated about the flare in June, frustrated about not being able to follow the right diet, frustrated about my body not looking like I wanted it to, frustrated about my brain being a hot mess most of the summer. But in reading that passage on acceptance, it occurred to me that I could choose to not worry about any of it. I could decide that my body is just fine right now, exactly as it is. I could realize that it is really fucked up to prefer the body of an acutely sick self versus a healthier one. I could decide that those food rules that work so well for so many others don’t work for me at all. I could decide that running makes me really, really happy and it helps more than it hurts. I remembered that for 15 years I lived with this autoimmune condition, breaking all of the rules the entire time because I didn’t know they existed. I just took my meds and trusted myself to make the right decisions. And that approach remains a choice I can make. 

So here I sit I early October. I had the best month of running this calendar year in September. October’s training is off to a great start. I’m getting faster, running more miles. I’ve eaten sandwiches nearly every day for lunch the past three weeks and could not be happier about it. I made granola for the first time in years. I made my favorite Bolognese sauce (from Run Fast Eat Slow, you all should try it) that tastes amazing with Banza pasta. I’ve continued to work through Full Catastrophe Living, even trying the impossibly long 45-minute body scan meditation a few times. I check in with myself several times a day to see what I’m feeling. My digestive system is a bit more disrupted than I’d like, telling me that I haven’t found the sweet-spot with my diet yet, but I will. The next blood draw later this fall will provide important feedback, but it’s not the only feedback.  

For as bleak as the summer was, the last six weeks have brought nothing but hope. Hope and joy. So much joy. Joy in a diet that isn’t full of someone else’s rules, joy at running in the midst of a cool fall morning. Joy in embracing my imperfect body, because it’s the only one I’ve got…perhaps I should be a bit gentler towards it? Joy at getting out of my own head long enough to reconnect with the important people in my life, most especially M. I can see now how the last several years have been nothing but a battle. Me battling against my body and with how someone with my condition is “supposed” to conduct herself. (She follows AIP for months, maybe even years, and certainly is not a runner. Running another marathon is not a consideration for her.) Reminding myself that I make the rules, that in reality there are no rules, and that I can trust myself to take care of me has made this rebel’s dark, moody heart so happy. I’m waving the white flag in this war with myself. Even with as tough as the last few years have been, the lessons learned and tools I’ve acquired, most especially these last few months, will help me be more prepared than ever to navigate what life has in store, including the uncertainty that comes with living with chronic disease. Especially a chronic disease like mine that can be heavily impacted by lifestyle choices. I can opt out of the shame and guilt for not doing it the “right” way and just live life, trusting myself to course correct as needed. The difference between knowing and acceptance is living life according to someone else’s rules versus living life guided by my own.

Celebration of (a) Life

From the moment we’re born, our identities are tethered to our parents. They are the anchors, the roots from which we grow. And while I’ve experienced a lot of weird, unexpected things in my 43 years on this planet, events or decisions that reframed how I saw myself, nothing has so shifted the ground beneath my feet as losing my dad.

My family is close. Even when my sisters and I were young and spent most of our time driving each other crazy – or rather Megan spent most of her time driving Erin and I crazy – we were always around each other. My sisters and I are far enough apart in age (four years for each of us) that we didn’t share friend groups, but in many cases we were friends with siblings. As we got older, we realized that perhaps maybe we did actually like one another, and in what my 13-year-old self would call nothing short of a miracle, my sisters have become some of my closest friends. As I’ve gotten older and fully inhabited my introvertedness, my sisters and their husbands, along with my parents, form the inner ring of my social circle. Before my dad got sick, I’d tag along with he and my mom on their Friday night Chipotle dates on the weeks M was flying. My sisters and I took weekend shopping trips to Chicago a few times a year (note to Meg and Erin – we need to resume these). Between my sisters, our husbands, and my nieces/nephews, there are no shortage of birthdays to celebrate. Mom makes brunch and we stuff ourselves silly, just for fun. Toss in holidays and our annual pilgrimage to Cape San Blas, and my family is the common thread weaving the years together.

Cape San Blas, FL
August 2017

Because my family has always been so present in my day-to-day life, my favorite memories of my dad aren’t so much of these grand, seminal moments, but of regular life-stuff. They’re of going to work with him on Saturdays when I was a kid. He’d work on the Monte Carlo he was restoring, and I’d help him sand for a while and then spend the rest of the time wheeling myself around on his creeper. Eventually, those Saturdays evolved in to actual work for him, and I’d file repair orders while he toiled in his office. They’re of riding along on my bike while he’d run, which when I was 11 turned into us dropping my bike off mid-run so I could run too for a few miles, which then evolved into just going out for runs together. We ran around Abingdon, we ran with my Uncle Bill at the beach, we even ran a half marathon together in 2002. We ran the Indy Mini-marathon, because of course it was the incentive of running on the track at Indianapolis Motor Speedway that got my dad to run a half even as his back was protesting. More recently, they’re of the time he built a ramp for my old-lady dog who couldn’t climb stairs when we stayed with them for a few months upon moving back from Colorado. They’re of lunches at Red Robin where we’d enjoy cheeseburgers – his always cooked with lots of pink, topped only with American cheese, and open-faced – with diet cokes and talk about nothing.

Indy Mini-Marathon
May 4, 2002

My dad’s ability to fix literally anything, and because he was essentially unflappable, meant that he received a lot of bizarre phone calls from me and my sisters over the years (to be fair, my mom receives her share of these calls too). We called him with car trouble, house trouble, after car accidents, and in my case one time when I trapped a wasp in my bathroom and didn’t know what to do about it. He’d talk us down off the ledge and help us figure out what to do next. He and mom could have wrote a book with the phone calls they’ve gotten from us over the years. I don’t think it’s so much that my sisters and I can’t figure these things out ourselves, but when you have Mike and Renee Tolle as your parents, why wouldn’t you call them when shit is hitting the fan? They’ll help you solve the problem, make you laugh, and then remind you that you’re lucky. A good blueprint for navigating any crisis, I think.

While I treasured the everydayness of my relationship with my dad, there are a few times in my adult life where a conversation between us reorganized how I saw myself or what I prioritized. The first time this happened was 15 years ago or so when I vented to him about some problem at work. I managed a medically-based wellness center and led a staff of 35. I was frustrated about a situation with a colleague, a situation that revealed a lack of integrity and laziness in my coworker. I felt irrationally irritated by it. In talking with my dad, he apologized with humor and said I got that particular brand of impatience from him. There was something comforting in being able to make sense of the frustration, to know where it came from. And when that same frustration would pop up repeatedly in the years following, I could see it and recognize it, which made it much easier to navigate. I loved knowing where it came from, that it was a trait I shared with my dad.

More recently, it happened again as he was being diagnosed in August of 2015. I was an administrator at the same hospital where his doc was and he stopped by my office after one of his appointments. My family isn’t prone to talking about stuff, so he caught me off guard when he mentioned that he regretted how much he worked while we were growing up. I was so grateful he said it though, because I could reassure him that my sisters and I had an amazing childhood. I could tell him how I never once felt like he was absent from our lives. The conversation was a short one, as we moved on to other topics fairly quickly. But it stayed with me and has factored into most of the decisions I’ve made since. At the time, I was knee deep in an autoimmune flare that was taking over my life. The job I was in was making it worse, much, much worse. Six weeks later I’d walk away from it. Until this point, I’d prioritized my career. I’ve always enjoyed my work, but when a stressful job triggered the flare in 2014, I had a hard time making the necessary sacrifices to get better. That conversation with my dad was the start of my making the changes I needed to recover my health. And work has not held the same prominence in my life since. That might mean I may never hold a job with a fancy title again, but if I can be healthy and participate in life on my own terms, it will be worth it. When I was sick, I couldn’t run like I wanted, I was too tired to ski, traveling was A LOT of work, and the brain fog made even reading a book difficult. It was a really high price to pay for an office and set of business cards, and my dad unintentionally revealed this truth, a truth I desperately needed to see.

But for almost a week now, I’ve been living in a world without this man. This quiet, stubborn, practical fellow who formed one of the two earliest anchors of my time on this planet. I’ll forever be his daughter, but I’ll miss calling or texting him with my latest house or car drama, I’ll miss sharing a cheeseburger with him at lunch on Mondays. The world will never be the same without him in it. I have moments where I think if we could just go back to a week ago, to ten days ago, then he’d still be with us. But when I remember how sick he was, how much pain he was in, I realize we have to go back further. Even last summer, the cancer was slowly staking its claim. Two years ago, things were pretty good, but he still had a devastating illness. So if we go back four years ago, he was healthy but the tumor was there, waiting to make its presence known. So now we go back six or seven years, and well it becomes obvious of how ridiculous an exercise it is. This is all we have, today. Right now. And that means making sense of a world without my dad in it. Reorienting myself and learning to live with the tremendous void left in his wake. But I won’t be doing it alone, as I’m surrounded by an army of people who miss him as much as I do. Who knew what a character he was, who understand how lucky we were to call him dad.

when your dad has cancer

My dad is dying. He is dying and there’s nothing I can do about it. No matter how hard we love him, no matter how tightly my sisters and I circle the wagons around he and my mom, we cannot prevent this tragedy.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about death the last few decades. Right out of undergrad, I worked in cardiac rehab and quickly learned that death is random, unpredictable, and sometimes harsh. I lost patients I expected to recover, and graduated patients I didn’t think would make it a month. Then a number of years later my husband nearly died in a skydiving accident. Sitting next to his bedside willing him to live is probably the only time my mind has focused itself on one task. My brain is a non-stop, constant chatter of voices, but for those days in the SICU they were all focused on one thing. I was reminded of what I knew…that death was random, unpredictable, and sometimes harsh. I could only hope it spared us. For reasons I’ll never understand but be eternally grateful for, it did.

When my dad was diagnosed in August of 2015, no one would speculate as to how much time we might have, but we knew it wasn’t a lot. Metastatic pancreatic cancer is a ruthless, relentless asshole that spares no one. But a few months turned into a few years and we made the most of it. With three more Christmases, three more trips to Cape San Blas, the arrival of Erin’s kiddos, we treasured our time together. We didn’t talk about the realities of his illness much, but we felt it’s shadow. It was a good exercise in being present, in enjoying today without knowing what tomorrow might bring. In December 2017 he spent four days in the hospital with sepsis. I’m still not sure how he survived it. My dad’s quietly fierce desire to stay with us has been incredible to witness.

But now the shadow has grown long. The inevitable march of his disease has picked up the pace. We still don’t know how much time is left, but the window is most definitely closing. For three-and-a-half years, I’ve known there wouldn’t be enough time. He could live to be 90 and it wouldn’t be enough time. But as I think back to all of the runs we went on before his back got bad some years ago, the vacations my family has shared, the lunches we’ve had both when we worked in the same town and more recently since he’s been sick, I realize that I have nothing but gratitude. My parents were dealt an incredibly shitty hand. None of this will ever be ok. But no tumor can take away what my family has created together. That will live on in us.

The lesson here is to love your favorite people hard. Love them hard, hold them close, do life together. Be close enough (literally or figuratively) to annoy the shit out of one another. Cherish every day you have, because there will never be enough days. We only get one go at this. Don’t waste a minute of it.

Turning A Corner: Or When Progress Looks Different Than You Expect

It was early last year (2018). I don’t remember the date exactly, and can’t find it on my calendar, which is really annoying for some reason. It was my regular quarterly appointment with my doc. I’d been stuck in a sort of groundhogs day over the previous year or so, not getting worse but not getting better. I’d recently started to see a *slight* improvement in how I felt, so rather than keep doing what I was doing, I decided to cut back on the amount of meat in my diet.

I’d only been eating meat again for a couple of years, after being vegetarian for well over a decade. Meat got reintroduced not because I decided I couldn’t live without cheeseburgers, but because I started having trouble maintaining iron levels. A dietitian I was working with at the time thought I would see more progress with food and supplementation, rather than just throwing some pills at it. So I gingerly began eating meat again, figuring I’d go back to being vegetarian when things normalized. So when I started feeling better in late 2017, instead of realizing this was likely due to my having left my job at the end of June that year, I decided it was a good time to start cutting back on meat.

Which means that when I walked into my doc’s office that day in early 2018, before I even sat down, she said to me “what’d you do?” And not in a good way. She told me some of my markers were off, worse than three months prior and she wanted to know what I’d changed. I reluctantly told her I’d cut back to having meat once/day, to which she replied “you can’t do that!”. She explained that my body might never tolerate being vegetarian again, and that if it was something that was really important to me, I’d likely be sacrificing some of my recovery. We moved on to other topics, with more conversation about why things weren’t improving, just like every other appointment. It was a reminder to me that food would play an important part in my recovery, but I didn’t yet have any idea of how big of a role it would end up playing.

Right before I started working with Claire (my dietitian) in September, I coincidentally had another quarterly appointment. I didn’t get to see my physician this time as she was on maternity leave, but I met with the nurse practitioner. All of the providers in my doc’s practice go through extensive training in functional medicine, and even though my doc was on leave, she still kept an eye on all of her patients. So the nurse practitioner knew of my story and where I was at in my recovery. I told nurse practitioner that I was embarking upon some significant dietary changes, and she was incredibly supportive. The paleo diet, and a more restrictive version of it called the autoimmune protocol, is best practice for addressing autoimmunity in the functional medicine community. So my working with a Whole30 coach was right in line with recommendations supported by my physician. While we’d discussed diet, my doc hadn’t come right out and said that NEEDED to change my diet. But I’d done enough reading and had enough understanding about where I was in my own journey to know that diet was the next step. It was the only health behavior I hadn’t touched. The best part about the timing is that I’d have blood work from right before I made any changes, and blood work again three months into the program. At this point, I still doubted my ability to follow-through as I’d made countless attempts to change my diet over the last couple of years and got myself nowhere.

I’ve written about my experience through the first two-thirds of Claire’s program, so won’t rehash that here. The last month didn’t bring anything too exciting, beyond the reintroduction of a few foods and several more pounds lost. I learned that I tolerated small amounts of cheese, enjoyed some amazing gluten-free sourdough bread from Bread SRSLY, and successfully reintroduced Picky Bars. Most, but not all, of my digestive issues were resolved, and I lost 13 lbs. The weight loss puts me exactly halfway between my starting point in the program and my former training (running) weight. My former weight isn’t the goal, but it’s a good benchmark of a time when I was much healthier and fit. Other “wins” included: increased self-efficacy in taking care of myself, complete elimination of cravings for foods I shouldn’t be eating, resolution of the brain fog that’s followed me around for the last three+ years, no more colds or stomach bugs which were so prevalent the last few years, and running is much more enjoyable. The big test would come at my doc appointment scheduled for early January, which required a blood draw on Christmas Eve. I was so anxious to see if my dietary overhaul would show up in my blood work, and if we’d finally see some resolution of the persistently high (dangerously high) inflammation levels.

So when I walked into my doc’s office on Wednesday, January 9, I was cautiously optimistic. I told myself that even if my blood work hadn’t improved, that I still had so many wins from the last three months. In addition, I had a very bizarre occurrence of hives in early November that I hoped she could shed light on, as my allergist was no help beyond testing me for an almond allergy (eating a higher-than-normal quantity of almonds seemed to be the trigger, but the allergist determined it was nothing more than a coincidence). And I’d also had some eczema on my face this past spring that I still didn’t know the cause of. I really felt this was all connected somehow. The medical office assistant walked me back to the office, and again before I even sat down my doc exclaims “what did you do?!”, but this time with a smile on her face. I didn’t get a chance to respond before she exclaimed “you look so healthy!”. I just grinned. I sat down and she walked through my lab results. The first thing she pointed to was that inflammation marker. For the first time in several years, it dropped, and dropped significantly. My HS CRP has been routinely in the 8-9 range, way too high, but this quarter it dropped to 2.0. That is still in the moderate category, but a significant step in the right direction, especially considering the improvement in just three months time. The reduction in inflammation is also what allowed me to finally lose weight. Everything else appeared to be normalizing, including my iron levels, which have been slowly climbing since that fateful appointment earlier last year led me to add more meat to my diet.

My doc and I spent quite a bit of time talking about the dietary changes, and she was happy to hear I was working with a coach/dietitian. I mentioned the hives in November, and how I was eating more almonds than usual that week, and she immediately brought up histamine intolerance and mast cell activation. Coincidentally, I read about mast cell activation syndrome recently, so her mentioning that phrase scared me a bit. But as she explained more about histamine intolerance, it made a ton of sense. And totally explained the eczema in the spring, along with the hives in November. We nerded out a bit while she explained the biology behind how all of this stuff is related, and she added a few more supplements to my regimen. While it seems counterintuitive to think that an appointment that ended with more dietary restrictions and more supplements was actually the best appointment I’ve had in three years, that is absolutely the case. My addressing the dietary sources of inflammation allows us to dig deeper and get to the root cause of what’s going on, and it also revealed that diet was a HUGE root case in-and-of itself.

I did some quick research on my own when I got home Wednesday evening, just to see what this low histamine diet was all about. I immediately noticed that many foods I eat regularly are either high in histamine or histamine liberators. The upside to this is that there was the potential for substantial improvement (which includes never again being woken up in the middle of the night by hives, as I was for five nights in a row in November), the downside is that I’d be removing some staples. But the success of the last three months helped me get over any feelings of scarcity pretty quickly. If I feel this good already, how much more of my health and well-being can I recover by taking this next step? Since we’d just returned from vacation on Monday evening, I needed to do some cooking anyway, so this was actually a perfect time to start walking down this road. Armed with this new information, Thursday evening’s grocery list looked a bit different than normal. Gone were the avocados, tomatoes, strawberries, fermented veggies, lemons, bananas, spinach, nuts (which I’d already been avoiding for the most part since November anyway, even though my allergist told me I was fine to eat them), chocolate, collagen peptides, and cheese. Also gone was my beloved sourdough bread. Some of these foods I wasn’t eating much of yet, but others like the collagen peptides in my coffee, avocados, fermented veggies, tomatoes, strawberries, bananas and lemons, I used frequently. And because we’d just returned from vacation, where I enjoyed more than a few treats that aren’t normally part of my diet (which I thoroughly enjoyed without any feelings of guilt or shame – REVOLUTIONARY), I choose recipes from the autoimmune protocol in hopes of more quickly reducing the increased levels of inflammation that I’m certain are present, unrelated to this histamine business.

In just a couple of days, I’ve noticed a significant change in my allergies. I normally take Allegra and Benadryl, even this time of year in the midwest when everything is dead. And even with those medications and a sinus rinse, I still have sinus and nasal congestion all day, every day. Within 24-hours of walking towards a low-histamine diet, I saw substantial improvement in my allergy symptoms. I’ve had bad seasonal allergies since I was a teenager, allergies that have only gotten worse as I’ve gotten older. I never considered improvement in them to be a possibility. I’ve had allergy shots, but because I’m allergic to so many things, they didn’t help much beyond allowing me to be in a room with a cat without wanting to claw my eyes out. So not only will these new dietary modifications likely ensure I won’t ever wake up in the middle of the night with a terrible case of hives, or get eczema on my face after eating a burrito, but they’re already making my day-to-day life more pleasant. It took well over a month this fall for me to see significant improvements in my gut health, three months for me to lose 13 lbs, but these improvements were comparatively immediate, and I haven’t even started the new supplements yet (they’re being shipped), or talked with my dietitian to get her insight on next steps (that happens Monday afternoon). To say I’m encouraged is an understatement.

A few months ago, before working with Claire and doing the hard work of straightening out my head as related to diet and getting out of my own way with regards to my recovery, I think an appointment like Wednesday’s would have left me feeling defeated. As for all of the progress and wonderful improvement in my blood work, I still walked out of there with more supplements to take – not fewer as I hoped, and more dietary restrictions – which came on the heels of the successful reintroduction of some foods I really enjoy. But rather than view this as a set-back, or a recalibration of what I believed to be tremendous progress, I saw it was one more step forward in this journey back to health. More dietary restrictions and more supplements is not a step back, it’s true progress, as we’re uncovering the real issues at the heart of my poor health the last four years. If I don’t do the hard work of the last three months, and cover all of that ground, these remain questions without answers. And there’s a good chance I get woken up with a bad case of hives again. And I continue to test the upper limits of how much Benadryl is safe to take before one spouts a third arm or something. I am so excited to have this information, and to know that there is more I can do to help myself get better. I am drunk with progress.

As I’ve looked back over the last few years, something that’s really bothered me is how long it took me to make these changes to my diet. Everything I read told me it was important, my doc told me it was important. In my over-analyzation of it all, I realized that several factors contributed to my figurative feet-dragging. Initially, I was way, way too hung up on what used to work. I was vegetarian for well over a decade, I was an endurance athlete who trained a lot and raced a lot, and incredibly healthy while doing both. Both of those go against convention in the autoimmune community. I got stubborn about what worked for me in the past, instead of realizing that the paradigm had shifted and that what worked for me previously was no longer relevant. Secondly, it’s really hard to made big lifestyle changes when you feel like shit. Overhauling ones diet takes a ton of mental energy, not to mention the physical labor of preparing food. There was a fair amount of time where I didn’t have the mental or physical resources to dedicate to the change. Which super-sucks, because it turns into a chicken-and-egg situation. The very changes that would help the most are out of reach, but the changes need to be made or recovery won’t happen. I think leaving my job allowed for just enough improvement for me to commit the mental and physical resources to the diet change, which ended up facilitating the big improvements I desired. Lastly, I realized I couldn’t do it on my own and sought out help. I knew that my biggest gaps weren’t in knowledge or information, but in changing habits and behaviors, especially since my health still wasn’t great and making the change was going to take a lot of effort. Having a good understanding of the type of help I needed allowed me to find the right person to partner with, and that was Claire. Her program focused way more on the process of the change as opposed to simply sharing a bunch of information about what a person should be doing. And her program was set-up so that the responsibility of doing the work lied completely with the client, which went a long way towards rebuilding my self-efficacy in doing Hard Things.

While I look back and see a lot of things I could have done differently the last several years, the one single thing I’m most proud of is that I didn’t give up, and that I found a health care provider who didn’t give up on me either. This summer, I started to think I might not recover, that this crap was the new normal. Which honestly was depressing as fuck. Signing up to work with Claire really felt like a last-ditch effort. A hail mary. The crazy thing is, it worked. The same relentlessness and tenacity that served me so well in running, and in my career once upon a time, turned out to be the most important characteristic that I carried into this mess. We just got back from Breckenridge where I skied for the first time in a few years. When I was sick, just putting on all of the gear seemed like SO MUCH WORK, not to mention the actual skiing part. But this year I skied, several days even. On two of those days, I skied for a few hours and then went for a run or a hike. At 10,000ft. A few months ago, none of that would have happened. And I came home from that vacation, not in a fatigue hole like normal, but ready to hop back into regular life, which ended up including a big change to my diet. It’s like my world has been in black-and-white for four years, and someone suddenly flipped the color switch. Everything looks so bright and vibrant. And I have hope, so much hope for the future. I still don’t know what role running will play in this new normal, or if I get to race marathons – including Boston, again. I’ve decided it really doesn’t matter. I still love to run, and running 25-30 miles/week while barely half of my old “normal” mileage, feels like a wonderful miracle. The racing question will answer itself in due time. And I can wait.

Chronic Illness: A Reconciling

It was Thursday evening, November 15th. I was tired. REALLY tired. As in, I can’t get myself off the couch or even read a book tired. Again. M had been gone for nearly three weeks, at training for a new airplane. And despite having the best week of training since at least April the week prior, I hadn’t ran a step in a five days and counting. But I wasn’t frustrated, mad, or disappointed. Of course I was tired.

It’s been three years since the flare of Hashimoto’s thyroiditis really ramped up and laid me flat for the first time. Four years since it started percolating in the background. During that time, it’s only been in the last 17 months that I’ve fully committed to regaining health and wellbeing. The first few years consisted of a heavy dose of denial with a side of stubbornness and a shot of insolence. Because I lived with Hashi’s for so long without any of the “normal” complications (I was initially diagnosed in 2000 at the age of 25), I assumed I was different, special even. I trained harder and at a higher volume than medical professionals said I could, I didn’t follow a paleo diet or the more restrictive Autoimmune Protocol. In fact, I was vegetarian for nearly fifteen years, which flew in the face of known best practice (in my defense, none of this I knew for the first ten years). I held stressful a job, and trained hard even while giving plenty of attention to my career. It wasn’t unusual for me to get up at 4-4:30am and run 10-12 miles before work. I didn’t consider the pace I kept to be remarkable or unusual, most of my runner-friends did the same, many raising a family on top of it. M and I traveled, going on vacations where we hiked or skied the days away. I thoroughly enjoyed my life and how I spent my time.

When I first started to get sick, I didn’t realize what was happening. I thought if I just waited it out, it would resolve itself on its own. Initially, signs of the flare only showed up in training. My exercise tolerance was down, my weight started to creep up despite few changes to diet or training volume. I thought I was just getting “old” as this was about the time I turned 40. And recognizing that I’ve been running since I was 11, I expected my performances to plateau sooner than some of my friends who didn’t begin training until later in life. I could explain it all away. My job was stressful, but I didn’t consider this to be the source of the problem, even though intellectually  I knew the dangers of chronic stress. After six months, I went to see a Naturopath in Fort Collins who worked with athletes. My local endocrinologist was terrible and I knew she’d be no help. He uncovered some nutritional deficiencies and saw some warning signs in regards to the Hashi’s, but being a Naturopath couldn’t do anything about it. Looking back, this is the moment, in late 2014, when I should have found a functional medicine MD. I don’t know how much of what followed could have been prevented, but with the right medical care I’m guessing a fair amount of it. I worked with a dietitian to address the nutritional deficiencies, which included adding meat back into my diet (something I still haven’t fully reconciled, four years later), and talked to my endocrinologist back home in Illinois about the Hashi’s. He didn’t see anything that concerned him, he assured me I was fine. I trusted him.

Throughout 2015, things got much worse. I’d run my last marathon in April of that year, which coincidentally was also my last Boston. I ran well through the summer, but my dad getting diagnosed that August coupled with an even more stressful new job seemed to be my undoing. By October of that year, my weight was as high as it’d ever been and I was barely running. My endocrinologist continued to insist I was fine – the 20-25 lb weight gain was not a red flag to him, neither was my nearly complete intolerance to exercise. Late 2015 is when I finally found a few doc. I’d researched Hashi’s extensively by now, and knew what I needed. Using the website for the Institute of Functional Medicine, I found Dr. Sarah Zielsdorf. I saw her for the first time in January 2016. We talked about chronic stress and diet, but I still underestimated the work I needed to do to get well. I didn’t make meaningful change to my diet, still riding the wave of cockiness born from 15 years of doing what I wanted while living with this condition. I worked part-time from Oct. 2015-Oct 2016 – this was my “sacrifice” – and in seeing some recovery, assumed I was out of the woods. My weight was still high, my training still a third of what it used to be. Turns out, I was still standing in the middle of the forest, not remotely close to finding my way out. I took a full-time job at the local health department in Nov. 2016 that kicked off the final march to rock bottom.

In the eight months I worked at the health department, I came down with five colds, had the stomach flu for the first time in over a decade, had more asthma flares than the entirety of my previous 41 years on the planet, and gained an additional five pounds, just for good measure. My training came to a complete halt that spring. I’d applied to Wilder a week into my new job, while still riding the wave of progress I made in 2016. I learned I’d been accepted before Christmas that year, and by the time I arrived at Caldera in late May 2017, I was a sick as I’d ever been. While I would give about anything to go back and attend that retreat healthy and fit, meeting those women for that weekend in the woods at precisely the moment I did gave me the courage to make the radical sacrifices needed to get well. In them, I could see how sick I was. How I could barely complete the workouts, how much I missed being able to use my body in sport. I’d go home from the retreat and give notice at my job, committing to myself to take as much time as needed to get well.

It would take another year and the onset of some fairly disruptive digestive issues for me to finally tackle my diet, but in doing so, I’ve found what I believe the last piece of the puzzle. I’m still frustrated with myself, that it took this long for me to finally address my diet, but stubbornness is a hard drug to quit. My weight fluctuated over the last year, consistently hovering 15-25 lbs above my former training weight, with another high point coming this past September. Since I’ve been addressing nutrition, I’ve lost about 10 lbs and started training again. By early November progress was coming quick, quicker than it has in some time, before fatigue forced some time off mid-month.

Addressing the digestive issues brought forth an unexpected benefit, a full reconciling of how life has changed with this flare. Somehow in recognizing that my body won’t tolerate certain foods as it has in the past, it allowed me to make peace with other things that were altered by this flare. I acknowledge that my body will likely never tolerate the stress levels it did before, which dramatically shifted how I think about my career, and role it plays in my life. In October, I took a part-time job as the education coordinator at the local arts center, working with a friend I made through rotary when we lived here the first time. The flexible schedule and reduced hours (~20 hrs/week compared to 40+) fit perfectly with where I’m at right now, as does my lack of responsibility when compared to my previous work. I’m still considering going back to school, having been accepted to an online Masters program that starts in January. Working part-time and with less stress leaves physical and mental energy for me to devote to other areas of my life such as training and traveling. During the flare, work got most of my focus. It was a choice I made, but not consciously. It took taking a break from my career to really sort through how I wanted to divvy up my much smaller pie. We’re going to Breckenridge in January, and I expect to have the energy to ski for the first time in a few years.

Lastly, I acknowledge that getting over-tired is part of my life now. I can’t just power through being over-scheduled as I did pre-flare. I can’t train through fatigue as I did pre-flare. De-programming YEARS of “just endure and persevere” mentality, which running and training only reinforced, has been very, very hard. But I’ve done it. Which is how I found myself couch-bound last week, without much disappointment or animosity. Of course I was tired. We traveled to see three concerts in October. M was gone for three weeks in a row, highly unusual for him outside of deployments, leaving me to get up with our early-rising pup while I was already short on sleep. I started a new job. Lots of good stuff, but lots of good stuff that made me tired. So I took a week off of running. A week off, immediately following the week where I had a breakthrough with training. A recognition that it would be a big set back, as I don’t have enough training under my belt to just jump back in after a week away. But by eating a nutritious, anti-inflammatory diet, and resting as much as I could, I knew that I was doing what I needed to do to ensure the fatigue resolved itself as quickly as it could. And that I’d be ready to resume training when it passed.

I still don’t know what all of this means for racing, if I’ll ever be able to train for and race marathons again. I don’t know if I’ll be able to work full-time in the future, at a job with a nice office and fancy title again. I don’t know if I care. My pie might have permanently shrunk itself during all of this. If it did, I can live with that. I have a lot of pride for what I accomplished professionally and through running while I was healthy. I never thought I’d be fast enough to run Boston five years in a row, or that I’d be a dean. But those accomplishments don’t carry as much weight as they used to. They didn’t make me a better person, or more valuable to society. I’m certain I over-valued them at the time. I appreciate the perspective I’ve gained while being sick, the clarity it fostered. The recalibration of priorities. I’ve been forced to make hard choices about how I spend my time, as doing it all is literally not an option anymore. I’m young enough that I hopefully still have quite a bit of time on this earth. It’s safe to say that the next 20 years will look radically different than the previous 20. And while I wouldn’t have chosen any of this, and I occasionally do get very angry about it all, I’m curious and invigorated by this knowing.


“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.” ~ Susan Sontag

Confessions of a Campaign Staff Newb

The noise was deafening. I don’t know how many people they anticipated at the party, but the room was packed. I have no idea what this crowd was doing on Election Day two years ago, but I was at home with my husband watching early returns through horrified eyes. I went to bed extremely early that night, unable to watch the train wreck that was taking place. Upon waking Wednesday morning, November 9, 2016, I immediately checked Twitter to see my worst fears confirmed. Our country elected a foul-mouthed, misogynistic bigot as president. I honestly don’t remember much about the other races on the ballot that year, beyond my senator Tammy Duckworth (Tammy Duckworth!!), mostly because of how unbelievable the race for president became.

For me, that election was a reckoning.  Hillary Rodham Clinton’s candidacy laid bare once and for all how far women still had to go in order to break through that final glass ceiling. Much would come to light thanks to #metoo about how terrible men in media shaped our national dialogue about her candidacy, her viability as a candidate. Men such as Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Mark Halperin. But the deed was done as they say, and no measure of consequence could set back the clock a decade or two (or three) to change the conversation about the woman who was bold enough, ambitious enough, to want more.

But her candidacy and ultimate failure lit a lot of us on fire. I’m guessing there was no shortage of people, particularly women, in that big hotel lounge on Tuesday night who were there in large part due to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Women like my dear friend Jill, who the morning after in 2016 said “what next?” and immediately got to work connecting with other people who felt the same. I’ve known Jill for ten years, since we worked together as administrators at the local community college. We became good friends after we moved back from Colorado several years ago, and the conversations she, myself and our friend Julie have about politics at our regular dinners are always a highlight of my month. These women are thoughtful, articulate, well-read, but most of all gracious and kind. I’ve learned so much from them in their willingness to talk about Hard Things.

Several months went by, and we’d get regular updates from Jill regarding the local meetings she attended. Soon enough, she floated the idea of running for office. Deliberately and intentionally, she set her sights on her state house race, as the current representative had been in office for nearly 20 years and ran unopposed for the last decade. This was summer 2017, and I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams that just a few months later I’d be joining her campaign staff. But there we were at a dinner that September, with Jill mentioning her difficulty at finding a campaign treasurer, and me just a few months into my sabbatical to finally address my persistent and debilitating health issues. Knowing nothing of political campaigns, but with an affinity for numbers and mundane details, I thought I could help. So before I could talk myself out of it, I jumped in. We were nearly a year into the Trump presidency and in many ways, he proved as terrible as we feared. Voting wasn’t enough at this point, I needed to DO something.

So that’s how I found myself at a watch party Tuesday night, an event coordinated by the McLean County Democrats. Being an introverted introvert means I didn’t attend many events during Jill’s campaign, preferring to work anonymously in the background, but I recognized a lot of faces that night. I felt part of something bigger than myself, part of something even bigger than Jill’s campaign. This was the start of a movement, regardless of who won or lost.

As the night wore on, the energy in the room got more intense. Returns on the east coast started coming in, the crowd cheering or booing with every result. I took refuge in the war room for a time, sitting with Alanna, Jill’s campaign manager, while she watched for returns. Even though I rarely stay up past 10p, I wanted to be there as our local races were announced. Lizzy, Jill’s volunteer coordinator and a candidate for county board in my district, rode the roller coaster of thinking she’d lost but then learning she’d won. Two more county board candidates won their races, as did the dem candidates for state-wide offices. Jill would lose her race, despite running an incredible campaign, as would the other dem candidates for state and US house.

Even though the results were a mixed bag for local candidates, Tuesday night felt like a tremendous win. Not only did local residents have more ballot choices than they’ve had in decades, but local democrats were energized and mobilized like never before. All residents benefit from an engaged and participatory electorate, and the increased organization by local democrats is no exception. Voter turnout in my county increased from 49.2% in the 2014 midterms to 61% this year. Because so many races were contested, elected officials participated in debates and answered questionnaires…or didn’t answer them, which was feedback in-and-of itself. Many of these same elected officials hadn’t been held to account for their votes in years. So even though a number of our candidates lost, they forced increased engagement from those who did get elected, a win for all constituents. The fire that started on November 9, 2016 is in many ways still just a spark. It will take time for democrats to build the visibility and infrastructure to win more elections locally, and this year was an important next step.

For me personally, getting involved with Jill’s campaign provided an outlet for the seemingly endless frustration and despair that accompanied the news reports each morning. I still can’t reconcile that we are a country that imprisons children, that sends the military to the border to confront asylum seekers, that put another sexual assaulter on the Supreme Court. But writing checks, keeping spreadsheets, making deposits provided an unlikely outlet for that frustration. Knowing that I was doing something to get good people elected provided tremendous peace-of-mind.

For my friends who are similarly discouraged, regardless of political affiliation, I encourage you to connect with local politics. There is no shortage of campaigns that need good, dedicated volunteers. While there will always be a need for canvassers and phone banking, there many other things that don’t require knocking doors or making calls. I couldn’t have imagined two years ago that a good friend of mine would be running for office, or that I would be volunteering with her campaign. But I am so encouraged knowing that people like her are stepping up and stepping in, and many of those candidates got elected Tuesday night. And many more people like me were pulled in with them. Together, I believe we are laying the foundation for transformative change in this country.

And I’m going to try to get myself to more meetings now that this campaign is wrapping up (there are still checks to write and data entry to do, even after the election). I want to stay engaged with this movement, to get more connected. There are municipal elections next spring, and then it’ll be time to start looking to 2020. But not until next month. During this month’s meeting I’ll be at the spa.

42 Days Without Sandwiches Or Bad Foods Do Exist

Six weeks. It’s been six weeks since I had a sandwich. You see, I love sandwiches. Soft bread, crusty bread, lots of toppings, a few toppings (I’m looking at you PB & J), I don’t discriminate. They’re all wonderful little creations that I enjoy immensely. Part of joining the Nutritional Freedom program was reconciling that I’d be breaking up with sandwiches for a while, potentially a long while. Sure I enjoy pizza, burritos, toast, and the occasional beer, but I REALLY LOVE sandwiches. This would be hard. But not being able to run and race, and seeing the physical manifestations of inflammation in and on my body, was much, much harder. I could give up sandwiches for a while if it meant I could train again, if I could repair my relationship with food – a relationship that was heavily damaged over the last several years of being sick.

Five years ago, before the autoimmune flare that changed the entire fabric of my life, I was vegetarian and had been for more than ten years. I certainly held no shame for those that chose to eat meat, but animal welfare was important to me and our food system  was/is terribly broken. I ate when I was hungry, enjoyed treats on occasion, and ran A LOT-50-75 miles most weeks. I was thin, fit, healthy. Having been active my entire life, I avoided the complicated relationship with food that is many woman’s experience. I knew I was extremely fortunate.

Then I got sick, and was sick for a good long while. I no longer had energy to cook, and a stressful job changed what foods I craved. Low iron levels were suddenly an issue, and a dietitian I was working with at the time suggested I start eating meat again. I thought about it extensively and decided that I wanted to be healthy more than anything, so I reintroduced meat into my diet. It was super-weird at first, and while it’s been four years since I began eating it again, I still haven’t reconciled how I feel about our food system and how we treat our animals. I am careful about what meat I purchase, and get the best quality I can find. But this was the start of my using food to heal myself, a journey that would come full-circle this fall.

As my health issues progressed, I read extensively about other women who’ve used a paleo diet, or a modified version of it called the Autoimmune Protocol, to recover from autoimmunity. Inspired by their experiences, I dabbled with changing my diet, never fully committing. Beyond being vegetarian, I’ve never excelled at following dietary rules of any kind. I bought into the “all foods in moderation” philosophy, even though this approach was clearly not doing me any favors. I’d experience small improvements in my recovery and see it as proof that I was different, that I didn’t need to take such drastic dietary measures to heal.

But then this spring happened. As I shared on social media and here on my blog earlier this year, I felt good enough through the winter to ramp up training again, to think about racing. I ran the Tenacious Ten in Seattle in April with some of my Wilder sisters and ran a local race, a 12k, a few weeks later. Both were terrible, but most especially the 12k. I walked the last half of that race because of how upset my digestive system was, eventually throwing my bib in a trash can at the last aid station before the finish. This was the start of what would be several months of significant digestive issues, issues that were made especially worse while running. Things escalated even more when on vacation with my family in early August, which effectively ended my outdoor running until joining Nutritional Freedom in mid-September. The five months it took me to seek out help is a good indicator of how stubborn I was about not changing my diet. “There is no such thing as a bad food or food group”, I kept telling myself, “moderation is healthier”!

For some people, perhaps. But not for someone who has an autoimmune condition and the gut issues that typically accompany them. I felt like I was at a real fork-in-the-road. Either I wanted to train and race again, or I didn’t. Either I wanted to continue carrying the extra 20-25 lbs I’ve had the last three years, or I didn’t. Either I wanted to repair my relationship with food, damaged by years of being sick, or I didn’t. Finally in mid-September I was tired of my own bullshit. I reached out to Claire, committed to her program – a significant time and financial commitment, and got down to the hard work of fixing what was broken.

I wrote about my first few weeks in the program and the early wins I had here. Good stuff continues to happen. I’ve been at this long enough now that following a paleo diet is not hard. I can quickly discern what I can eat at a restaurant, avoid cookies in the break room at work, find compliant ways to satisfy food boredom. Being able to run again, especially outdoors, is a tremendous reward. I’ve lost enough weight that I’ve had to take a few pairs of pants to the tailor to be altered. I don’t feel like food has a mental hold on me anymore, and even when I’m busy and distracted, I’m still able to make good decisions for myself.

About two weeks ago, I discovered that coffee was the culprit of the digestive issues that lingered, so I cut that out too. I’ve delayed reintroduction a few weeks to let the inflammation from the coffee resolve itself fully before tossing anything new into the mix. And when I do get to reintroduction, there is a lot I won’t reintroduce. There are things I know I shouldn’t be eating and foods I already know I don’t tolerate well, so those foods automatically go into the “rarely consume” category. Foods such as milk, yogurt, and gluten-containing grains. Foods I’m curious about include cheese, peanut butter (peanuts are legumes so not considered paleo), chocolate and gluten-free alcoholic beverages such as wine and margaritas. My beloved sour beers will likely remain a “rarely” food thanks to the gluten they contain.

During the six weeks in this program, I’ve thought a lot about the “there is no such thing as a bad food” movement. I’ve decided it should read “there’s no such thing as a bad food if you have a normal, well-functioning digestive system”. I believe people who promote these food-inclusive messages mean well, but seriously do not appreciate the problems that arise when you live with an irritable or malfunctioning digestive system. And how sometimes healing requires drastic measures. The more my gut heals, the more foods I will be able to healthfully tolerate. But the healing must come first. A healing diet in my case is a restrictive diet, and I am grateful that it’s a tool available to me. I refuse to feel shame because I am not eating certain foods. While I am jealous of those who can eat grains and dairy without any issues, I finally realize am not one of those people. Many of us who follow a restrictive diet do so for health reasons. Whether it be weight management, insomnia, digestive issues, acne, gallbladder attacks, diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, Crohn’s, celiac, heart disease – or any other inflammation-related condition, many, many people are able to heal themselves through diet. Recovery for each of us looks different, especially for those of us living with chronic health conditions, but food is one of the tools at our disposal and we shouldn’t be shamed for using it. I’m getting more comfortable pushing back when I see the no-such-thing-as-a-bad-food-group messages, even though I hate to be contrary. I literally would not be running at all right now if it weren’t for switching to a paleo diet. The foods we eat is such an individual act, and there is room for all of us at the table. If women such as Kristen Boehmer and Sarah Ballentyne, Ph.D. hadn’t shared their own journeys and shown the way, I wouldn’t have known how a healing diet could help me. I wouldn’t have known that Claire’s program was the right one for me, as I could see where I needed to go thanks to Kristin and Sarah’s blogs/social media, but had no idea how to make it happen for myself. Claire provided the road map.

Six weeks remain in the Nutritional Freedom program, and once I start reintroduction, I will be getting into the “freedom” part of the show. Patience will be required, as foods that I don’t tolerate now, might be agreeable with another month or two of healing. I’m so encouraged by the progress that I’ve made so far that I can give my body the space to heal on its own timeline. I don’t need to rush it or force anything. I’m signed up for a trail race outside San Francisco in February with some girlfriends, and just want to make it to the start line fit and healthy. Without Nutritional Freedom, I would’ve been spectating. Again. Optimism has been on short supply the last four years, but this really does feel like the last climb out. Life will be different on the other side, and I’m ok with that. I’ve been deeply changed by what’s happened the last few years and my priorities are much different. But my love of running and desire to share races with my friends is one thing that’s remained. I’ve held onto it more tightly than is probably healthy, and I think a lot of people would’ve given up by now. But I’m extremely stubborn. Running that race with my friends in February would be a nice bookend to the last few years, a way of putting it behind me. And it would make 42 days (and counting) without sandwiches totally and completely worth it.

Nutritional Freedom/Whole30 – The First Quarter

I mentioned briefly in my post about crewing for my girlfriends at Yeti 100 that I had started working with a new dietitian to address what had become chronic digestive issues. I also suggested I might write a bit more about that later, this is that post. I’ll start from the beginning…

Earlier this year, I shared in both blog posts and through social media that I was finally getting back to some decent running mileage after a spectacularly terrible couple of years due to ongoing issues with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, an autoimmune thyroid condition. Any hint of the speed I used to enjoy was nowhere to be found, but quite honestly I was thrilled to just be able to put in some mileage. I started dreaming about racing again, feeling that I was finally on the road back to competing. I raced the Tenacious Ten in Seattle in April with some of my Wilder sisters and ran the Lake Run, a local race, a few weeks later in early May. Both were terrible. I don’t think the issues at the Tenacious Ten were digestive related, but at the Lake Run they most definitely were. I wrote it off to the sudden onset of summer, as my body never manages the heat well, especially when we go from snow to 80* in a matter of two weeks as we did this spring. Feeling really discouraged after the Lake Run, I backed off the mileage hoping I to relocate the good groove I was in. It was nowhere to be found.

May slid into June, which dragged into July. The digestive issues only worsened. By late July I wasn’t running much at all. I’d tinkered with my diet, but without the focus to sustain any of the changes I attempted, I understandably made no progress. In early August, my family made our annual pilgrimage to Cape San Blas, FL (which was heavily impacted by Hurricane Michael last week – {{sobs loudly}}) where I hoped the change in scenery would reinvigorate my training and help me get back on track. Instead, the opposite happened. Despite eating quite well while we were there, my digestive system was a wreck. I only ran twice and regretted it both times. Usually I run big mileage while we’re there, in fact my only 80+-mile week was on the Cape in 2013. To not even be able to manage a few short runs without issue was a huge disappointment. And knowing what I do now about what would happen to the Cape just two short months later, I’m even more disappointed about it. By not buckling down and addressing my digestive health earlier this year, I missed what turned out to be my last opportunity to run through St. Joseph Peninsula State Park, to take photos of Eagle Harbor, before they both would be devastated by the hurricane.

The dunes at St. Joseph State Park Cape San Blas, FL Aug 2017

It took another few weeks before I would reach out for help, but through the Whole30 instagram page, I found Claire Siegel. With all of the research I’ve done the last few years, coupled with information from my physician, I knew that eating a paleo diet would help. Recovering from autoimmune flares requires reducing inflammation and healing the gut, and for many of us, diet is a huge source of inflammation which only exacerbates digestive issues. Foods that many people digest just fine, people with autoimmune conditions often don’t. Foods such as grains, dairy, and legumes all have the potential to create problems. I’ve experimented with the Whole30 in the past, but being rule-phobic have never finished one. I decided to work with Claire to give myself the best chance at completing the program and to execute a thoughtful reintroduction so I can hopefully nail down exactly what foods are giving me problems. Her program being 12-weeks long meant we’d be working on more than just successfully competing the Whole30, which was exactly what I needed.

Week 1 was a “prep week” for the Whole30. Lots of getting reacquainted with the rules, planning for the first week on the program. Week 1 also included some pretty intentional goal setting, which helped quantify exactly what I wanted from these twelve weeks. I knew I wanted to resolve my digestive issues and lose a few pounds, but what else? I included improving my relationship with food so that I can take care of myself like I need to without feeling deprived. I set some fitness goals that included my getting back to “regular” training mileage again, resuming my dormant yoga practice, and maintaining the strength training I’ve managed to stick with this year (historically, as running mileage goes up, my commitment to strength training goes down). Lastly, I included a daily meditation goal, as I’ve neglected to cultivate a regular meditation practice this year despite several cracks at it.

Week 2 brought the start of the Whole30. I was nervous thanks to past failures in completing the program, but felt I’d given myself the best chance that I could. I was armed with new information that I thought would help, reading in a recent issue of Yoga Journal of all places about how some people have electrolyte issues when switching to a paleo diet due to the body releasing the water that’s stored with carbohydrates. Considering that electrolyte issues have been an ongoing issue for me running and my doc recently noticed that my blood levels run low on the regular, I thought this might explain some of the past trouble I’ve had with Whole30/paleo eating. So I was prepared to salt the heck out of my food and see what happened (this ended up making a tremendous difference). I knew I’d be crewing for my friends in Virginia at the end of the first week of the Whole30, but I planned as much as I’ve planned for anything and was ready for the challenge. Little did I know that driving for 20+ hours on backcountry mountain roads would make me terribly car sick, bringing an unceremonious end to my Whole30 as I snacked on potato chips at 2am on Saturday morning in an attempt to calm my swirling stomach. It helped, my friends finished their race, and I kept all of the food in my stomach. It was a win for the day, but a setback for my own personal goals. Saturday with my friends was not the time to sort through what it all meant, so I did that on the 10-hour drive home on Sunday, deciding that I’d just start over. Redo Week 2 and just move on. What felt like a really big deal, a Terrible Thing on Saturday, seemed like a bump in the road by Monday.

The redo of Week 2 went fine. What lingering frustration I had about the setback was gone by mid-week. We were to see Death Cab for Cutie, one of my favorite bands, in Chicago on Sunday. I focused on preparing for the train ride and planning what we’d eat in the city. It was marathon Sunday, and I knew just being around all of the runners would be energizing, and not necessarily in a helpful way. It was a super-hard day to be in the city and Whole30ing, but thanks to the hubs, me and my Whole30 survived to see Week 3.

Week 3 brought me to the second week of my Whole30, which was getting pretty easy when I was at home. The food I make for myself is usually Whole30-compliant, so I have a lot of familiar recipes to pull from. I was eating plenty of yummy, healthy food and it wasn’t hard. Until we’d eat out. I found myself avoiding eating out as much as I could, which isn’t a bad thing. However, I did manage to attend an engagement party at my favorite brewery without eating any chips or drinking a beer. Major win. Week 3 is when Hurricane Michael devastated the Forgotten Coast, and it was a tense couple of days searching for information on our beloved Cape. During this stretch, I learned that I am not an emotional eater, which was good because I didn’t think that I was. It’s being distracted that is my biggest challenge. So it’s not that I need a cheeseburger because things are terrible, it’s that I eat a cheeseburger because all of my attention is directed elsewhere. This was a huge aha moment. It explains why I’ve had trouble making these changes in the past, and especially why my diet was so terrible when I felt my worst. I was functioning at a such a low level that undertaking something as significant as a dietary overhaul required mental resources I didn’t have. I can give some grace to that girl who was so sick a year or two ago. She was just in survival mode. Week 3 concluded with another concert, this time in St. Louis. We drove so we took dinner with us from home, making a search for a compliant restaurant unnecessary.

Sitting here at the start of Week 4, beginning the third week of my Whole30, the hardest part has been not chewing gum. It’s a bit of a nervous habit, an outlet for the extra energy that’s always bubbling around, but also helps with the dry mouth that accompanies the allergy meds that make life worth living this time of year. I’ve accepted that this is just something to endure, and I’m counting down the days until the end of the Whole30, not so I can have a beer or a cheeseburger, but so I can chew gum again. I’ve also learned that my head isn’t in a great place for meditation right now, so I’ve set that goal aside for the time being. The Kavanaugh confirmation process brought up a lot of stuff that made meditating a bad idea. I’ll try again in a few weeks and work on redeveloping the habit if it feels safe to do so.

Even though I’m only a few weeks into this process, my digestion has already improved significantly. I’ve been able to run comfortably outside again for the first time in months and have had quite a few workouts without any digestive issues. My mileage is still quite low (~20 mpw), but now that I’m through the worst of the fatigue from the transition of the diet (and two of three concerts this month are over), I should be able to start slowly increasing mileage again. I’m cautiously optimistic.

Cape San Blas, FL Aug 2017

 

I Am A Democrat

I’m embarrassed to admit that until five years ago or so, I considered myself rather apolitical. I voted, tried to stay informed of issues in my community, but I didn’t feel a connection or passion for our government, good or bad. I wasn’t raised in an overly political family, I remember my parents voting when I was younger, but we didn’t discuss politics around the dinner table. Nor did we have cable, so while they regularly watched the nightly news, it wasn’t something we watched as a family. While they were actively involved with the local PTA during a teacher strike including hosting gatherings at our home, that’s about the only overtly political act I recall from my childhood. As an adult, I expect that the apathy or disconnect is rooted in privilege, as I am white, middle-class, married to a dude, and have always had access to the healthcare I need. Sure my family didn’t have a lot of money growing up, and M and I were quite poor early in our marriage, but I’ve had the means with which to make stuff happen for myself, which is also a form of privilege. So let me say that up front…I’ve been inordinately lucky in a multitude of ways and I haven’t been as active and engaged in our political processes as I should have been. But in 2013, that all changed.

We lived in Colorado and I worked for the local hospital. I led a public health program, supervising three different coalitions focused on reducing the incidence of chronic disease through healthy eating and active living. None of these coalitions focused on educating the public, all three were focused on environmental, policy and systems change, which meant that rather than tell people to eat more fruits and vegetables for example, we worked with the city government and community partners to ensure that all residents, but most especially those that were disadvantaged, had access to fresh, affordable, healthy foods. One of those three coalitions worked specifically in eight low-income neighborhoods in Fort Collins, neighborhoods that were primarily mobile home parks inhabited by Hispanic residents who were undocumented. It was my first time working hands-on with this community and even though they spoke very little English and I spoke even less Spanish, they taught me more about what’s wrong with our immigration system than any class I could’ve taken. I’ll never forget working with my colleague who coordinated this coalition to help a family who’s home became uninhabitable after the floods in Sept. 2013. The family had just brought home a newborn, and the weather significantly damaged their house. The family was afraid to ask for help, as being undocumented left them extremely vulnerable. E, my colleague, was determined to help. He worked his connections, I helped him behind the scenes. Through Colorado State University, he was able to secure someone who helped repair the family’s home, fixing the roof and windows, making it safe for the family to reside there once again. The family had nowhere else to go, they would have lived in that dangerous and inadequate shelter if we hadn’t stepped in. It put a human face on the immigration debate, and the esoteric conversations in the news suddenly had a face. All of the residents I met through my work with that particular coalition were kind, generous, hard-working folks who just wanted to provide a safe, stable home for their families. Something we all want. Most left incredibly dangerous situations to come here, and I genuinely believe that our community was better for having them be a part of it.

As part of that work with those three coalitions, I also was engaged with affordable housing initiatives, as over-priced rent/mortgages was a key challenge in Fort Collins. I learned about urban renewal and redlining, how our government effectively stole the homes of our African-American neighbors under the guise of “development” or “progress”. As these neighborhoods were cleared to make room for interstates or arenas, those residents often couldn’t purchase homes in other parts of town, most of the time because white residents didn’t want them there. Many of those folks went from being homeowners, living in what we now would call a mixed-use neighborhood with residents of multiple income levels, shops, churches, and other small businesses, to living in projects where their families stayed for decades. Learning how our government had harmed these communities, harmed these residents, was transformative. Especially when you consider how much homeownership can be a mechanism for building wealth. And how many residents were cut out of this mechanism deliberately by their own government. Racist lending policies by banks only contributed to this problem. This article from Roanoke, VA is a good starting point if urban renewal is an unfamiliar concept.  Deepening my understanding of how our government actively harmed and dismantled entire neighborhoods, and how racist community development policies wiped out the wealth of African-Americans gave me a much different perspective on the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” mentality I hear so often from Republicans. It’s hard to pull yourself up when your government took your boots.

Also while working with these coalitions, I got acquainted with the concept of health equity, or rather health inequity, as when considering how low income residents are disadvantaged by the lack of adequate health insurance for example. Even though I spent considerable time working in health care, and had even sat across from patients who were making hard decisions about which medications to take and how to put food on the table, it was in stepping back from the issue that I better understood how our current medical/healthcare system actually harms people. This was also in the early days of the Affordable Care Act and many people in public health and healthcare were energized by some of the provisions included within it. Getting more people insured benefited everyone, as not only would the newly insured benefit from increased access to care, but this would also reduce the amount of uncompensated care provided by hospitals. The birth control mandate meant that every woman, no matter where she worked, would have access to the prescriptions she needed. Community benefit meant that hospitals would be responsible for the health of the entire community, not just the patients that walked through their doors. “Prevention” became more than a buzzword, as many more organizations had an investment in keeping people healthy versus profiting from illness. For the first time, we had real, tangible tools with which to address health inequities and the collectively we really started moving the needle. The Affordable Care Act and my work with disadvantaged communities also forced me to think through my own personal thoughts about access to healthcare. I realized that my personal belief is that healthcare is a right that should be afforded to everyone. No person living in this country should go bankrupt because of a diagnosis, or not be able to take medications prescribed to them by their physician because they can’t afford them. People should be able to walk through the doors of any hospital and receive treatment, the same treatment regardless of their station in life. Currently, we have tremendous disparities in health, particularly along racial and income lines. Disparities such as residents living on the same road ten miles apart having life expectancies that differ by 15 years. Disparities such as African-American women having low-birth-weight babies at exponentially higher rates than white women, even when controlled for education and income. I personally believe the government has a responsibility to actively resolve these disparities.

The health equity rabbit hole led to an environmental one, as many lower income folks live in areas with poor air and water quality, they are the ones who live next to toxic waste sites. For example, living in an area with chronically poor air quality leads to higher incidences of respiratory infections and chronic lung conditions such as asthma. I do think the government has a responsibility to understand environmental risks and to protect residents from harm. When residents live next to polluting factories, and the government loosens regulations on those factories, the government is contributing to the harm of its citizens. And this is setting aside how these same residents being uninsured or underinsured when it comes to healthcare further exacerbates any of these conditions. In addition, I think public lands are vitally important, as is protecting sacred Native American sites and other areas of cultural significance. Considering the great harm white settlers inflicted on Native Americans, the lands that were stolen from them, the genocide that occured, the very least we can do now is honor and protect the sacred lands. I don’t think a company’s desire to mine resources from public lands supersedes the public’s interest in those lands. The earth is not a renewable resource. There is plenty of research that tells us climate change is real, that we are headed towards a point-of-no-return when it comes to the health of our planet. Republican legislators, including those governing states that stand to be directly harmed by rising seas, ban the use of the term “climate change”, prevent research, dismantle committees. Only one political party takes this threat seriously and is willing to take any steps to address it.

More recently, I’ve learned that in certain states it’s still within the law to fire someone from their job if they are gay. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 has never been amended to include gender identity and sexual orientation, despite many years of efforts. The Justice Department under the Trump Administration has rolled back previous more inclusive rulings by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, stating that they were legally meritless. At the state level, protections vary widely from some states like mine (Illinois) outright prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, to two states going so far as to prevent local governments from establishing such nondiscrimination laws (Arkansas and Tennessee). Instituting protections at the federal level would ensure that all LGBT citizens are protected from employment discrimination, no matter where they reside.

Relatedly, I learned about how the Reagan administration not only didn’t assist with the AIDS epidemic as soon as it was clear that something was happening, but by actively not getting involved, thousands and thousands more people died. We were four years into the epidemic before the president even said the word aloud in public. Recently, I watched as a baker in Colorado went to court, repeatedly, to get permission and approval to discriminate against his customers. No, I genuinely don’t care what anyone’s religious beliefs say about gay marriage. Either a baker bakes wedding cakes or they don’t. This is no different than the soda fountains in the fifties that wouldn’t serve black people. Many of those business owners also tried to hide behind religion while they discriminated against their neighbors. A business either serves everyone soda or they serve no one soda. That many republicans went to bat for this baker is horrifying. This is not a government that is of, for, and by the people. More seriously than a baker not baking cakes, there are tremendous health disparities that accompany being transgender in particular. People who are trans are routinely denied healthcare, are discriminated against when receiving care, and most crushingly, commit suicide at much higher rates than the rest of the population. A government that mocks this community by making outrageous “bathroom laws” contributes to the pain endured.

With regards to gun violence, only one political party is even willing to discuss or consider policy solutions to this uniquely American problem. Republican politicians have allowed themselves to be held hostage by the NRA and republican citizens have not applied enough pressure to change this. Most Americans are in favor of public policy changes to address gun violence, but because of republican legislators, the CDC can’t even study it. So any policy changes we discuss aren’t rooted in research or best practice. Although at this point, I’m personally in favor of doing something, anything to prevent more kiddos from dying at school or more women being shot by their romantic partners. But I would love to see the CDC be able to address this as they do most any other public health problem, with research and the identification of best practices.

Lastly, abortion. To start, no one is pro-abortion. Literally no one. I saw a headline this morning in a St. Louis paper that mentioned “Abortion Activists”. This term is false. Abortion activists do not exist. Pro-choice activists do, and the language is important. Fundamentally, I believe a woman should have full and complete autonomy over her body, and this includes when and if to have a family. But particularly in this country, in this moment in time, this is even more critical. Presently, fatherhood in our society is optional. A man can get a women pregnant tomorrow and walk out the door, never to be seen again. The legal mechanisms for women to get child support are often beyond the means of low-income women, and that’s even if the father would or could pay. The state of our health care system is such that a woman may not be able afford to have a child, or to raise the child. She might have a job where she can’t get the time off to go to doctor appointments or for the delivery of the baby. She might not have maternity leave. In many communities, affordable childcare for infants and toddlers simply doesn’t exist. Programs such as SNAP, programs that help ensure families have enough food to eat, are constantly under attack from Republicans. How we can’t all agree that everyone has a right to food on the table is beyond me. But the social supports that women of all income levels need to raise a family in this country don’t exist, so for many single women, and even some married women, having a family is financially ruinous, if not impossible. As for anyone’s personal religious beliefs about abortion, those have no place in public policy. And if someone opposes abortion on religious grounds, and is also opposed to Planned Parenthood and the Affordable Care Act, then in addition to being anti-abortion, they are also anti-women. Both Planned Parenthood and the ACA provide women with low-cost, effective birth control, which are vital in reducing unplanned pregnancies. Research proves that providing low-income women with free, reliable birth control (such as an IUD) dramatically reduces the incidence of unplanned pregnancies, for very little money. Republican legislators routinely defund these programs, while actively working to limit access to abortion services. And I won’t even get started about the ridiculousness of a company such as Hobby Lobby having “religious beliefs” they can use to deny women healthcare. The abortion debate really isn’t about abortion, it’s about family planning. When women have access to the health care they need, unplanned pregnancies go way down. We can reduce abortions without making it illegal. But when I see people railing against abortion, and railing against Planned Parenthood, I know their concern isn’t for women. And genuinely, I can’t express how frustrating it is to have large groups of old white men in our government making these decisions. Men who will never be impacted by these policies. Men who use their religion to hide their racism, misogyny and bigotry. I genuinely believe that when we have a government that more fully reflects our country, that same government will become more compassionate and just.

There are a lot of other reasons, but these are the big ones, on why I now call myself a democrat. I’m invested in electing more legislators who believe that healthcare is a right; who want to create a more just and compassionate immigration system – including a pathway for those residents who are here now and are good citizens to stay; who understand our government’s racist past and are willing to work to rectify the damage that’s been done; who understand that climate change is real and will advocate for policies that reduce the human impact on the planet; who believe that being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender is being part of a protected class – meaning that you can’t be fired from your job due to these things or denied healthcare, and believe that marriage is for everyone; who support researching gun violence and support developing policy solutions to address it; who support a woman’s right to choose and who acknowledge that the government has no place in a woman’s healthcare or family planning beyond ensuring access to equitable care. I’ve spent the last year volunteering with my girlfriend’s campaign for the state house and have three yard signs in my front lawn for the very first time. I expect that this is the start of deeper engagement with the political system. In the midst of a year that’s been very challenging for a lot of reasons, knowing that I’m actively helping to get more democrats, and especially women who are democrats, elected, has provided much peace of mind. I’m no longer sitting on the sidelines of this democratic republic. I am late to the party, but I’m finally here.