Last week, I rode a bike for the first time in seven months.

It feels disingenuous to write that, since I’ve leaned heavily on my indoor trainer to cope with this Year Of Injury. I rode through January while I was recovering from frostbite. I rode through February and early March after I hurt my knee because pedaling was the only motion I could accomplish without significant pain. Two weeks after my March 16 surgery, I got back on the trainer to spin one-legged as my left leg dangled uselessly to the side. After I made it through my six-week non-weight-bearing purgatory, Beat installed a custom crank-shortener so I could pedal two-legged while limited to 90 degrees of knee flexion. I rested my feeble left foot on a platform pedal and clipped in with my right foot to take up the slack as I slowly built strength in my left leg.

On June 8, I finally cleared 12 weeks post op. My walking gait remains stiff and slow relative to where I should be right now. I continue to slog through daily PT exercises, but the puzzle I am trying to solve is how to get my brain back online. Seven whole weeks after I took my first tentative steps, I still struggle with even minimally uneven terrain. When I step up onto curbs or cross a patch of grass, I have to analyze the ground and visualize my next steps. It feels as though I’ve lost what little natural proprioception I had, and my brain and body aren’t communicating well.

But I am strong. Believe me, I am strong. I just need my bike to translate what my body knows, but my brain can’t articulate.

For my first ride out, I was appropriately cautious. I used my gravel bike and stuck to gentle paths around town. The first few pedal strokes felt strange. My left knee balked at the deeper bend, and my wheels wobbled precariously. But within a mile, I was zipping along, deftly maneuvering the curving paths at Zwift-like speeds, and generally behaving as though my knee hadn’t fallen apart and had to be stapled back together since my last outdoor ride in November. There’s a reason for the idiom, “It’s just like riding a bike.”

For my second ride, I took my mountain bike out to ride the Homestead Trail, a favorite neighborhood climb up a steep ribbon of sandy doubletrack. My usual loop adds up to nearly 2,300 feet of climbing over 13 miles. Pedaling up my driveway, I was hit with the guilt of throwing caution to the wind after nearly 13 weeks of never straying from my rigid recovery protocol. Climbing … that’s not supposed to be in the mix for another few weeks. But within a mile, I forgot all about the PT rap sheet and settled into a way of moving that lives in my soul. My body can take cycling away from me, my brain can forget how to walk, but my soul will never lose this flow.

When I am riding my bike, I have no memory of the recent past, of the tedious weeks on crutches, of my ongoing state of brokenness, of a knee held together with chicken wire. I’m just riding my bike, and I am free. I am completely free.

I wish I could describe how this feels after being locked down for four months — tethered to crutches, spinning nowhere on a bike trainer, rowing nowhere on an erg, limping on a stiff and wobbly knee — to finally, freely move. And not just move, but fly.

My heart was positively vibrating with joy. All I was doing was grinding pedals up a sandy doubletrack that I’ve climbed a hundred times, and yet the feeling was as electrifying as my best moments on a bike. It transported me back to a moment that is possibly the happiest of my life. And in the vibrating lightness of that memory, I was suddenly struck with an equally intense sensation of grief, so heavy that I threw a foot down to balance the crushing blow.

Grief has been close to the surface for the past two weeks. It’s June again, and the evening light hits the floor in hauntingly familiar patterns. I breathe air that tastes as it did then, walk outside into heat that feels like it did then. Tuesday, June 16, marks five years since my dad died unexpectedly in a fall on Mount Raymond.

Five years. It was yesterday. I was packing for a long mountain run I’d planned for the following morning, standing in the pantry and stuffing my hydration pack with snacks, when our landline rang. It doesn’t ring often. Its low drone still sends my heart into my throat. My mother had to make the terrible call so many times. I instantly knew from the wobble in her voice, but waited for the words anyway. “He was hiking … he fell … he didn’t make it.” All I could do was scream “NO!” and throw the receiver at Beat before I collapsed into convulsions on the hardwood floor. I still feel shame about how I handled the worst moment of my life. My mom was so brave.

But my best moment also lives in proximity to the heat and light of summer. The Tour Divide is happening right now, and I’ve been glued to the tracker since I started writing the updates for Bikepacking.com. The event has changed quite a bit since I first raced in 2009. There is a lot more clout and pure wattage on the course — not to mention nearly 250 riders, including former pros, versus 50 mostly dirtbag hobbiests in 2009. But it’s still more or less the same rugged adventure through gorgeous country. I’m having a lot of fun reporting on the Tour Divide.

But it has been strange to spend so much time wandering through these memories, especially from my second attempt in 2015, which was a particularly painful experience that I’ve mostly pushed down deep where it can’t haunt me. I vaguely remember what it was like to not be able to breathe, but these feelings aren’t as visceral as the older memories. When my bike ride took me back to the last moments of the 2009 Tour Divide, it was as though all of my ventricles were bursting open at once. Like a broken heart, but also the opposite of that.

It was July 6, 2009, and I’d ridden my bike more than 2,700 miles with a broken heart. I was 29 years old and lost in the recent collapse of an eight-year relationship, with a career on the verge of collapse, no home to go back to, and no idea what the future might look like. So I got on my bike because it was the only thing that made sense.

But damn, it was hard. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you’ve accomplished. The Tour Divide is hard. My still-young body was in tatters. My bike was held together by a whisper and a prayer, with green goo bubbling out of cracks in the paper-thin tires and disconcerting creaks and squeaks emanating from seemingly every part. My knees made a similar sound, sickeningly harmonious with my squeaking Achilles tendons. I had 60 more miles to ride down a desert highway to nowhere, and it was 98 degrees in the shade — not that there was any shade.

I’d made no plans for the finish line, which would come at a remote US-Mexico border crossing with no amenities. I figured I’d curl up in a ditch until I could conjure the wherewithal to make an exit plan. Call the bike shop in Silver City from my flip phone? Stick out my thumb? Pedal back? I had doubts my bike would make it all the way to the border without falling into literal pieces, let alone back to anywhere else. But that would be a problem for future Jill. For now, I just needed to finish. Even that felt like an insurmountable task.

As I pulled onto a frontage road off Interstate 10, I could see a strange reflection rippling through a thick film of heat. It looked like a car with two people standing next to it, waving their arms. A blue car. A mirage? But as I neared the people, I could see they were real. They were my parents! They did not tell me they were driving a thousand miles from Salt Lake City to this remote outpost in the pit of New Mexico. They wanted to surprise me. I gave them both a sweaty hug. I was in disbelief. They asked me if I needed anything. I replied that I couldn’t take anything from them until I was done with the race. They said they’d see me at the border. I babbled that it was 60 miles, it would take me at least five hours, and that was barring a catastrophic failure of my bike and/or legs. Did they really want to wait that long? I remember Dad laughing, because what were they going to do after a thousand miles? Drive home? Their Camry rolled away and turned south toward Mexico. I still wasn’t convinced the meeting had been real.

But after 60 miles of cycling through every emotion I’ve ever had, there they were again. My parents — two people in this big, mean world who still loved me — were standing in front of the closed border gate, arms stretched toward the sky. I raised my own arm in triumph. I’d done it. I’d actually done it. I’d finished the Tour Divide.

And this is the moment. I hit the brakes at the gate and stepped delicately off my bike on my baby giraffe legs. My dad grabbed the saddle to steady us both. Still holding my bike, he wrapped one arm around me in a hug so tight I gasped. As I looked up at his face, his blue eyes were sparkling. His voice broke. He was crying.

“I’ve never felt so proud,” he said.

And that was the moment. For weeks, months, I’d been in pain. I’d been so alone, so lost, so uncertain about who I was and what I wanted in life. But my dad loved me. My dad was proud of me. Nothing, nothing could take that away from me.

Ever.

He’s five years gone, and I still feel this as strongly as I did then. Death doesn’t end love. It doesn’t even diminish it. Love is what endures, even long past the end.

It’s natural after major disruptions in life to ask ourselves what went wrong, to agonize over what we could have done differently to avoid being kicked so violently out of our comfortable status quo. If I had been kinder to my body from the start — maybe no endurance sports, maybe just hiking — would I still be in the state I’m in now? Will I ever be able to practice moderation or be content with life’s simple pleasures? But then I think, without those big leaps into the unknown, I wouldn’t have this. And this … this was worth it.

It’s like that song by Keane, “Love Too Much:”

Then we love too much, or we push too hard
Or we fly too high, or we go too far
For a moment I was all that you could see
For a moment I was all that I could be
And nothing can take that away from me
Nothing can take that away from me.

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The air at home is different somehow. Almost rarified, with a lightness that leaves me feeling warm and a little bit woozy. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the tenuous feeling of floating through different versions of myself, every one that’s ever existed — at least as far back as I can remember.

I walk down the street where I walked my little sister to school, clasping her sweaty hand when she was a nervous kindergartner and I was a world-weary third grader. That version of me thought this sidewalk was too steep. It is too steep. The current version of me takes tentative steps as gravity pulls ruthlessly at my rickety leg. I drop into the parking lot of my old elementary school and limp along the chain-link fence that guards the playground. I catch myself limping, grab the fence, and collect my bearings. As I rest, I catch sight of the grass hill that my friends and I used to somersault down at recess. This hill looks less steep than I remember. But oh, to be able to throw my body into a void without a care about what parts I might shatter on the way down. Oh, to be a child with unimpeded joy.

I cross 10th East and continue toward the back road that used to take us over the old train tracks into Draper. The old road is apartments now, and I get a bit lost in the maze before emerging onto the bike path parallel to the new train tracks. I pass the former location of Frank’s, a tiny grocery store that sold loose Sour Patch Kids and Swedish Fish for a penny. Jolly Rancher Sticks were a dime, and those were my treat of choice, because I could savor hard candy for an hour when gummies were gone in seconds. My sister and I would stuff our pockets with change and walk there after school on Friday to stock up for a night of “TGIF,” which was a block of terrible family sitcoms on ABC. The daughters on “Full House” paralleled my sisters and me in age and personality. Not that my youngest sister knew she was bratty little Michelle.

Frank’s is a bike shop now. I bought chain lube and gloves there before Danni and I rode the White Rim last November … which, when I think about it, might just have been the last time I rode a bike outdoors.

I walk past the old Draper Theatre, which is still putting on plays — good for them! I cross the street toward the former Draper Park School, built in 1912, that served as a community hub when I was a child. Our local library was there, as was my preschool. One of my earliest memories is getting sent to timeout for fighting over a toy and having to huddle in the dark, cold hallway beneath the coat hooks. I was despondent and humiliated, which is why this punishment is lodged in my long-term memory. We only seem to keep whispers of the very best and a whole lot of the worst. Later, I’ll tell my mom about this 43-year-old memory, and she’ll cry out, “You never told me that! Why didn’t you tell me that? I would have gone to bat for you!”

I circle the building, which now houses dance studios and bridal boutiques. I pass a few more businesses — a piano place, a classic barber shop — that have the appropriate vibes but are also financially marooned in a historic section of a small town that became the forgotten corner of Salt Lake’s suburban sprawl.

I approach the Enniss Memorial Park with a blue raspberry Kool-Aid fountain. I’m not joking and I’m posting a picture on my blog to prove it. Next to the park is a coffee shop, and what luck to find a coffee shop here, in Mormon country! I’d set that morning to get a coffee and intended to walk to Starbucks, but then I morphed into my 10-year-old version and mindlessly walked toward the place that used to sell cheap sugar, only it was torn down decades ago. Now I’m back in my 46-year-old version with a bum knee and a slilted gait that’s already taken me more than two miles from home. The Bubble and Bean is a place that also serves those dirty sodas that Utahns love so much. I’m tempted to order “The Draper Mom,” but I stick with the 16-ounce “small” Americano that will actually get me home. The cute older man at the outdoor pickup window wants my life story. He keeps asking me when I'm going to move here, and I keep trying to explain that my mom is the one who is moving, that I grew up here, but I live in Colorado. The third time he asks, I think, “Maybe I look like I belong here.”

And my next thought, as I walk away with my coffee and the 22-ounce blackberry-lavender soda I ended up ordering on the side is, “But I don’t know if I’m ever coming back here.”

Mom is selling her house, so I traveled to Utah to say goodbye. She’s already sorted through most of her things, and I’m still mostly an invalid, so my trip was about wandering down memory lane rather than being of any help. I stood by for emotional support and took photos of old rocking chairs, vacuums, and chalk writing on the concrete wall of the basement while my sister and 69-year-old mother — who recently had back surgery — lugged heavy cabinets up a narrow flight of stairs.

Mom had to let go of the play kitchen that her father built for her when she was a little girl, which my sisters and I played with 25 years later, and which her grandchildren played with 55 years later. She kept the rocking chairs — both the tiny chair she used as a toddler and the sturdy brown chair where she nursed us when we were babies. Emotions ran high this weekend — the relief and sadness of letting go, the excitement and anxiety of change.

This is something nearly everyone goes through — saying goodbye to their childhood home. And I want this for my mom — the freedom and fresh start she needs. But her move is coming at a weird time, and I’m not sure how to process it. I’ve been in such a bubble with my knee injury. The past 115 days have been both an instant and an eternity, and it’s hard to describe how this injury has changed me. Maybe the best way I can describe it is that on Feb. 13, I was rudely and rather violently kicked out of the house where I’ve lived for my entire adult life, the house where I developed my sense of identity and purpose, my way of moving through the world. Now I live in a different house, a fixer-upper. It may ultimately turn out to be a good house, but I am still trying to figure out how to live here.

I follow a bunch of knee surgery forums these days, so I know I’m not alone in this feeling, and I know it can last for years. There is interesting research into the ways knee injuries alter the brain’s neural networks. During the 10 weeks I spent on crutches, my brain adapted to the trauma and disrupted mobility by reducing motor commands. It overrode my natural proprioception and started relying solely on visual cues. Ten weeks is a long time. Now there’s good evidence that my brain struggles to send and receive signals from the leg I didn’t use for weeks. It’s less likely to communicate the necessary functions to rebuild my diminished strength.

There are also the lingering pain pathways. The chronic pain I experienced in the four weeks before my surgery was severe, and the experience has heightened my sensitivity and instinct to protect the knee to an unworkable degree. Medical providers can scare me all they want with warnings about my repair failing if I overdo it. My brain does not care about the mechanical implications of a retear. What it fears is the pain. And the desire to avoid pain is a far bigger motivator than nebulous future dreams of athleticism. My brain doesn’t want to walk, because using my knee for this kind of motion signals pain. My brain tells me that if I ever run again, I will feel the terrible pain that still lives in my skull like the teacher who banished me to the frigid hallway in preschool. Right now, I believe my brain. I don’t want to run again. Ever.

Of course, there are ways to teach my brain to trust my left knee again, by forming new pathways through neuroplasticity. This is often done through coordinated movements, sensory reconnection drills, and repetition. In other words, training. Intensely focused, dull, time-consuming, repetitive training. All of this, just to learn to walk again. I’m working on it. Believe me, I am. I’ve never in my life worked so hard for any one thing as I’ve worked on this injury.

And still my knee does not feel like a knee. It feels like a cheap cabinet hinge held together with rusty staples. And yes, healing continues. I know it’s a long process. And I know it’s just one knee. Life goes on. But also, I’ve attached most of my lifestyle, my relationships, and my identity to my mobility. So maybe you can understand why I’m processing this injury as a loss. That, regardless of how hard I work or how I feel on day 116 or 209 or 1,345, my mobility will never be the same. Not exactly.

This body, this house, is where I live. You can’t go home again.

In the evening, I walk to the front yard to gaze at Lone Peak in the golden light. Dad is up on that mountain now, in the way he’s everything and everywhere when the light hits just right, when I breathe out the heaviness of the day and breathe in the realization that love goes on, and beauty goes on, no matter what changes. Mom can see Lone Peak from her new place, and that’s a big reason why she decided to move there. It’s a low-maintenance home that she can age into, where she’ll live just minutes away from her daughter and grandkids, and that she can leave for long blocks of time to travel. What more could we want for her?

I turn to look down the street toward the Point of the Mountain. The 16-year-old version of me would sit on the lawn at dusk right here, gazing at the red and white ribbons of light streaming along I-15. She would imagine the Interstate as the only way out, an escape route that could whisk her from her staid suburban life into something exciting, Las Vegas or LA. She wrote bad poetry about it in her journal: “It’s me and my fears and my forgotten dreams, heading south on I-15.”

I open the gate and walk into the backyard, scanning the fenceline for the grave of the beta fish I kept as a pet in ninth grade. Mom would remind me later that she returned the round stone gravemarker to me a few years ago. “Here lies Pearl Jam, 1994.” That was the name of my fish — Pearl Jam — but one might argue that the band never recorded another good album after Vitalogy.

I cross the yard under the towering maple tree that grew after one of a thousand seed helicopters took hold in the sandy ground in 1987. Our cocker spaniel puppy, Callie, chewed the sapling until the top half broke off. I was upset that the dog killed my baby tree, as I’d been purposefully nurturing it and watering it with the garden hose. Dad gently dug up the chewed stick that was all that remained of my maple and replanted it in a more hospitable spot, farther from the house and exposed to more sunlight. To my delight, two new saplings grew away from the jagged wound. Now, 40 years later, the double-trunk maple towers over the house. I gaze up at it in wonder, marveling at the resilience of life, the power of time.

I walk to the far corner of the yard, where Dad built a playhouse from scratch around the same year he replanted the maple. The playhouse used to be pink; I don’t know when he repainted it. I haven’t been over here in a long time. My childhood friends and I used to have sleepovers inside, well into the years that we were too old for sleepovers in a playhouse. Eventually, my parents wised up to the ways we used the sleepover excuse to escape and wander the neighborhood in the middle of the night, buying toilet paper at the 24-hour Albertsons and committing light vandalism. Before the hooligan years were the slightly more innocent years of decorating and acting in a “Halloween Haunted Playhouse.” The October event became so elaborate that we terrified neighborhood children enough to cry.

As I jiggled the rusty latch on the playhouse door to look inside, I glanced down at the large boulder beside me. The writing on the rock caught me by surprise, enough that I momentarily stopped breathing. I blinked a few times, then, without warning, my blinks became tears, then caught in my throat, which spiraled into gasping, and then I was down on the ground, holding myself off the dirt push-up style because I cannot kneel, hugging the rock and sobbing.

I did not know Dad buried our cat Sadie, that he rolled this stone into place, and painted this epitaph. It’s his handwriting. Sadie was a gentle cat. He was a gentle dad. And this was the thing that broke me open, the thing that signified the shift in the timeline for everything Mom’s house represented.

Grief, like pain, is another inevitability of life that triggers profound neurobiological changes. The pathways to our alarm and pain systems break wide open, with the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex sucking up most of the energy for weeks, months, sometimes years. My neuropathways are patched with aluminum foil and rusty staples. I know this, but I’m still surprised by these sudden dam breaks. I’m crying a little bit for this gentle little cat that I still miss, but mostly I am crying for everything else. It’s a needed release.

Still, when I think about how Dad’s been gone five years, and how the wound still feels so raw. Maybe my brain is not so good at neuroplasticity. How will I ever learn to walk again?

But one thing I am good at is willing myself into forward motion, however forward motion can be achieved. I say my goodbyes to Sadie, and I’m ready to let go of the physical space that holds all of those old versions of me. I walk inside the playhouse and immediately see the tribute I scrawled for Callie on the day we said goodbye to our gentle, dumb, loving cocker spaniel who chewed my baby tree, who always slammed into the fence when we threw the ball for her, and who ran like a bat out of hell whenever she broke free of our grasp. I say the words out loud and feel a warm rush of peace:

Good bye.

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I miss Mama Moose and Little One. Like most of our wildlife visitors, they waltzed in for a few days, made themselves completely at home in our garden and driveway, decimated a few of my favorite plants, and then moved on to greener pastures. We’ve had everything from black bears to turkeys to mountain lions establish this sort of presence within sight of our house. But this is the first time I’ve seen a cow moose with such a young calf.

For a few days, I stood at our windows and watched as this brand-new citizen of the world explored his domain. I don’t actually know his gender, which is why I call him “Little One.” But I did some cursory Internet research and spying with the binoculars, which caused Beat to exclaim in mock horror, “Such an invasion of privacy!” But now he’s a boy to me. The cutest, most curious, most rambunctious little boy. All legs and ears and devotion to his mom.

As Mama Moose lumbered about, devouring my favorite flowering bushes, Little One ran in frantic zoomies, sampled bits of grass and leaves, licked rocks, strained toward his mom’s teat until she relented and let him suckle for a few minutes, and then collapsed in the grass, as content as any creature I can imagine. He stumbled on his unwieldy legs and didn’t seem to have a clue what he should be eating, but he was fearless. He discovered our small pond and sometimes broke away from his mom to splash for a while. She’d come chasing after him, making low grunting noises to counter his adorable squeaks.

I became mesmerized by them, spending long minutes walking from window to window, looking for signs of zoomies. What beautiful, simple lives moose seem to lead: browsing greens, snoozing in shady nooks beneath the pines, and nuzzling one another in unmistakable gestures of love. I know in reality their lives are fraught with dangers. Perhaps Mama Moose decided to stick close to the house to deter predators; predation is the primary reason two-thirds of moose calves don’t live past their first year. Mama Moose wouldn’t let Little One out of her sight. As chill as she seemed, I knew she would stomp me to pulp the second I became a threat. I always looked both ways multiple times before stepping out of the front door and gingerly tiptoeing toward my car. My neighbors also developed an informal alert system in group texts: “The pair are sleeping by our propane tank” and “Mom and calf are heading your way!”

Yes, it was a fun few days with the moose. But now they seem to have moved on, and I feel a little bit lost. Beat left this week to spend a couple of weeks in Europe. He’s working on projects at chez nous in France — projects that I failed to do in March because I exploded my knee and had to stay home. He’s also visiting his mom in Switzerland and celebrating his birthday, which is May 31, by running an 81-kilometer race called Swiss Canyon Trail with his friend, Chris. The race has 11,000 feet of climbing, which he called “practically flat by Swiss standards.” When I pointed out that the 50-mile race didn’t quite add up to the 57 he’d need for a proper birthday run, he shrugged. “Maybe we’ll tack some on at the end.”

Of course, I’m jealous. I was too broken for travel in March and I’m still too broken, which is why I didn’t go with him. Beat has made it through 57 years of life doing whatever the hell he wants with his body, whenever he wants. I couldn’t even make it to 47. I’ve been sitting at home watching life pass me by for 100-plus days now, and suddenly it’s the end of May.

Back in 2002, I bought a CD from the bargain bin at Graywhale CD Exchange, mainly because it had nice cover art and it was $2.99: “Graveled and Green” by The Actual Tigers. I ended up loving the album and put Track 9 on repeat whenever I felt sad, which was a lot in 2002. “The End of May” is a song about loss and regret, about the way a whole year can pass you by while you feel like you’re standing still.

Longer days
More time to sit and watch the pendulum sway
In quiet rage I'm staring at an empty notebook page...
In times like these you feel like you are done with feeling
You feel you want to stop the pain from healing
Because you feel like you're the only one who ever felt this way

What have I been doing for the past 106 days? Working to recover from an injury. That is it. That is all I do. I still have a job, it’s true. But even while I’m working, I’ve got an ice pad wrapped around my knee and the ice machine running, or I’m using my NMES unit, or standing on the balance board with my laptop propped on the couch. I usually spend 60-90 minutes a day on physical therapy, and another 60-90 on “real” exercise, usually at my gym or on my Zwift bike at home. The mundane and uninspiring sort of exercise. I still have all of my usual life stuff and errands to do, which all took three times as long when I was on crutches. Day after day just slipped away.

But I get it. I’m privileged. I once complained to my sister about the tedious existence I was leading and described a typical day to her. She replied, “That sounds like a normal day to me.” My sister has four children, ages 7 to 16, and a part-time job in nursing. I get that many, if not most, adults don’t have much time for fun and enjoyment in their lives. And I am grateful, so grateful, for the progress I’ve made. But I’ve never had to work so hard for anything, and the payoffs are so incremental as to be almost invisible. I could have run a solid 100-mile ultramarathon with the “training” I’ve put into this injury. Instead, I’m posting my 3-mile walks on Strava and hoping for someone, anyone, to tell me “Good job.”

(Maintaining 3 mph in that walk was so difficult, and I did get a kudo from my friend Erika. Thanks, Erika! It really did mean a lot.)

Injury is a lonely place. I’ve found myself becoming increasingly addicted to my Instagram feed, where the algorithm feeds me a steady diet of random videos from strangers recovering from knee surgeries. They are mostly hot young people who have had ACL repairs, but they are doling out the gallows humor and positive reinforcement that I crave. I don’t love that I’m scrolling again, but it’s a step up from the Reddit threads where I used to spend my time before they convinced me that I’d never recover from my injury and would be, like those poor souls, disabled for life.

Today, while standing at the window scanning for moose, I decided it was finally time to take down the puzzle that my sister, mom and, I put together in the days leading up to my surgery. I was crutching around Target with my sister Lisa, looking for cheap puzzles to pass the many dull hours ahead of us. I picked out this likely AI-generated image of polar bears and the aurora borealis. Lisa is a whiz at puzzles, and I’d admittedly rather stare off into space than force this level of concentration, so she and my mom did most of the work. But it’s become a warm memory: Sitting at the dining room table with my mom and sisters, eating Dollar General snacks, laughing at shared memories, and squinting at these incomprehensibly abstract pieces. Later, we figured out that the puzzle glows in the dark. In fact, the experience of looking at this puzzle after turning out the lights is not unlike catching a glimpse of the real Northern Lights — as your eyes adjust to the dark, the initially dull glint sharpens and comes alive in waves of color.

I’ve been unwilling to take the puzzle apart. It fills me with warm nostalgia for a time I can’t believe I feel warmly toward, but I do. I was in so much pain, and so frightened of the prospect of surgery, when my Mom and both of my sisters rushed to be with me. I felt seen and loved, and I miss it — pain and crutches and all. As I look back on the experience of this injury, I see that it’s been a lot like a gruelling, difficult endurance race. In the midst of the pain, it’s all harrowing and horrible — half-earnestly begging my husband to chop off my leg and promising that if this ever happens again, I will be utilizing the extremely progressive assisted dying policy in Switzerland. I don’t mean it … any more than I’m being truthful in a race when I muse about chopping off my feet or vowing to never sign up for another 100-miler ever again. But damn if those emotions don’t feel true at the time. Still, once I can see a light at the end of the tunnel, the pain begins to fade behind this sharpening glow of accomplishment. I can still do hard things. I will walk again.

That warm, bright glow — it reminds me of this puzzle. But it’s been sitting on my table for 11 weeks. 11 weeks? Could that much time have really passed? What have I even been doing for all of that time? I scanned the window for moose again and then scooped the 750 puzzle pieces back into their box.

I don’t have to crutch around everywhere anymore, and I do have a lot more free time these days. In just 10 more days, I will hit week 12 post-surgery, and I will be cleared to ride a bike outside again. Re-learning to walk has been frustrating, but I think the biking will come back quickly. Cycling is my natural stride. I have been building good strength on my Zwift bike, even with the quads that my PT says are severely atrophied and the hamstrings that feel like tight rubber bands, while pedaling the short cranks that limit my range of motion to 90 degrees. For the past four weeks, since I returned to weight bearing, I’ve pedaled an Alpe du Zwift to gauge my progress. It’s not bad! Last week, I pedaled the virtual climb in 1:19, which is a solid 50th percentile median in my all-time results (PR is 1:08.) My time this week was slower because I’m doing more at the gym with both legs now, and walking, and I’m genuinely so very tired.

So what to do with my time until I can return to the freedom of wheels? Under the strong encouragement of my therapist, who does not like my doomscrolling, I am sketching again. I found an old Sketch diary that probably outdates my Actual Tigers CD, judging by the number of pages ripped out and the $1.99 retail sticker on the cover. But this is how I’m keeping Little One in my heart, even if the process of sketching is nearly as maddening as puzzles (seriously, what happened to my 2002 attention span? I miss it.)

Come back, Little One. I need you. But I know Little One doesn’t need me; he’s living his best life somewhere beyond my small range of sight. He still has a whole world to discover.

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Here in the foothills at 7,200 feet above Boulder, Colorado, during a single week in mid-May, we’ve received more precipitation and nearly as much snow as the entire winter of 2025-2026. After a March that was so hot it would have qualified as one of Colorado’s warmest Aprils on record, and an equally disappointing April, it’s heartening that spring decided to make at least a little splash before the horrors of fire season are upon us. It’s only a dent in the drought, but I find myself thinking a phrase that was often uttered in public prayers during my childhood in the drought-stricken state of Utah: “Our dear, gracious Heavenly Father. We’re thankful for the moisture that we’ve been receiving.”

The phrase echoed in my mind even before I remembered that one of my favorite podcasters had recently released a collection of essays under this name. Eli McCann runs the storytelling podcast “Strangerville” with his co-host Meg Walter in Salt Lake City. It’s a wholesome, funny podcast that captures the foibles of Utah culture in a way that helps me feel both nostalgic and seen. I feel like Eli could be my long-lost cousin. Since we both hail from sprawling LDS families with Utah roots that run ten generations deep, there’s more than a small chance we are related. His book is a collection of columns he wrote for the Salt Lake Tribune and is titled, “We’re Thankful for the Moisture: A Gay Guy’s Guide to Mormon Faith, Family, and Fruit Preservation.” I bought the audio version and listened to it while doing my home physical therapy sessions this week. It’s a good time.

Listening to Eli’s book left me feeling wistful for my Utah childhood. It’s hit especially hard since my Mom put her house on the market. My parents moved my then-baby sister Lisa and me to this home in 1983, when I was 4 years old. It’s the only home I’ve known. The house has been a lot for Mom to manage since Dad died, and she’s struggled to move forward while living with so many ghosts. My sisters and I have been begging her to sell and move to a new space where she can build a new life for herself. She wasn’t ready, and she wasn’t ready, but then, two months ago, she suddenly was ready. This all happened after she left Colorado following my knee surgery. I’m still barely walking, and meanwhile, she decided to move, organized her affairs, bought a house, and has almost sold another. My childhood home officially went on the market a week ago, and she already has an offer that will likely go through. Of course, I want this for her, but the reality has been surprisingly hard to digest.

I’ve started to dream about the house, almost nightly. It’s interesting because recent dreams about childhood almost exclusively took place in my Grandma Homer’s former house, a rambler that my grandfather designed and built in the 1950s. It’s as though my identity is anchored in these lost places, and my psyche is trying to hold onto them in any way it can. I dreamed of my grandparents’ shag carpet and pink bathtub and remembered what it was like to feel completely safe and unconditionally loved. The reality, as always, was more complicated. Grandma’s love wasn’t entirely unconditional. I learned a hard lesson a few months before my 30th birthday, well after I’d ventured off the straight and narrow path of the idealized future she’d imagined for me. But I believe she was trying her best, as most of us are.

After Grandma died in 2019, my dad let my sisters and me walk through her house and pick out items to save before Dad put his own childhood home on the market. I grabbed one thing — this kitschy sign that used to hang in the bathroom of their cabin near Causey Reservoir:

Grandma would use this phrase on us frequently, whenever we complained about the heat, or when she put us to work pulling weeds in her yard, or when we cried because we went out to eat at the Burger Bar and came home with a thousand mosquito bites. I never believed for a second that Grandpa originated this phrase, even though she attributed it to him. But I did take it to heart. As I age, I increasingly understand how much I took it to heart.

Grandma was a proud member of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers, regaling us with stories of our ancestors joyfully enduring discomforts and dangers during their handcart trek across the Great Plains. I wanted to follow in their footsteps, live out their legacy, be fearless and strong and tough. Even as I ventured far away from the future Grandma envisioned for me — one of a devoutly religious wife and mother — I never stopped wanting to make Grandma proud. She kept an entire wall full of photos of her 6 children, 19 grandkids, and many great-grandkids. In 2007, she replaced one of my generic high school portraits with a printout of a photo I’d e-mailed to her. In it, I’m standing at the start line of the Sustina 100, clad in my winter gear, grinning in front of my bike. For all the aspects of my lifestyle she couldn’t endorse, Grandma wholeheartedly embraced this side of me. I cherished her acceptance.

But fearless and strong and tough is not who I really was, or am. I am sensitive and vulnerable, a soft animal of a body who loves what it loves, who feels things deeply and doesn’t want to stop feeling deeply just because life is full of grief and pain, who would rather see equity and peace in the world than continue living, but who knows equity and peace are likely to continue slipping farther away as long as I’m alive. My knee injury has been so difficult, but there’s freedom in stripping away my armor and cutting to the core of who I am and who I’ll continue to be, regardless of what my body can and can’t do.

Wednesday, injury day 96, was one of the most difficult days of my recovery so far. I’ve been seeing two different physical therapists for this injury. The first is a private sports PT whom I pay out of pocket. I always leave sessions with him feeling like my recovery is going great and that I can do so much more than I think I can. The second is a harried, overworked PT prescribed by my surgeon at the overly busy orthopedic center. I’m not sure what it is about my relationship with her. It’s as though she simply doesn’t like me and maybe has it in for me, but I often leave these too-short sessions feeling like the worst sort of failure. I’ve been thinking about canceling the rest of my sessions with her for a while, but I worry what my file will look like if I “quit” official PT, and I have yet to find a replacement who has availability and will take my insurance.

There’s never anywhere to park my car at the orthopedic center, overbooked and marooned as it is in a business park wasteland. I try to show up early, and on Wednesday, I was 20 minutes early, but the parking situation was particularly bleak. After five minutes of circling with no luck, I decided to drive across the street and find a place to park next to the car dealerships and unsigned office buildings. I zoomed up and down side streets and ended up parking more than a quarter mile away. With about eight minutes to make my appointment, and terrified of the withering disapproval of “Mean PT,” I walked as fast as I could down the sidewalk. I reached Pearl Street, a wide, busy road, with no crosswalks for many blocks. I misjudged the speed of the cars and my own speed as I set out on a half-panicked jaywalk, and had to break into a run to save my own life. There were probably a good five steps in there where both feet were off the ground. Running. At just 9 weeks post-surgery. I’m not supposed to even think about my first steps of running until week 16.

The regret hit instantly, even before I returned to walking and felt the shift in my knee. The joint was squeaking audibly, and it felt like there were pebbles of loose gravel beneath my patella. Utter dismay. Everything I’d fought for, for 96 days. I’d wrecked it all. Just like that. This is what I believed while limping into Mean PT’s office, unwilling to bend my knee for fear it would make those horrible sounds.

I was on the verge of a panic attack. It was so hard to hold it in. What I did manage was a form of disassociation, standing somewhere outside myself while my body tried to perform the physical therapist’s commands. Before I left myself, I told her that I had parked far away and had to walk a quarter mile, and now my knee was making strange squeaky noises. She merely nodded and told me that I needed to start bending my knee and stop holding my hip so far back. Straighten up!

I admit I could almost hear my grandmother’s voice in the admonishment. HOMER UP! But I was failing, failing. The PT cut our session five minutes short, and I straight-leg limped back to my car, trying to comfort the side of myself that was still battling to escape my body: “So maybe you’ll go back to the crutches. They weren’t so bad. You were getting really good at them. Maybe you can just stay on the crutches for life. Who needs walking anyway?”

I cried on and off for the rest of the day. I researched what might have happened to my knee when I took those running steps and decided it probably wasn’t catastrophic. But I still couldn’t get over the extreme vulnerability I felt.

Several weeks ago, I signed up for a timed entry for Rocky Mountain National Park on Friday, May 22. That was the day Trail Ridge Road was set to open, which traditionally happens on the Friday before Memorial Day. I hoped to drive the road and look at beautiful mountains. I can walk short distances, but I am still not allowed to hike trails or weight-bear beyond 90 degrees, which means no outdoor biking, either. So there’s not much I can do in the park besides drive and look at beautiful mountains.

Then, thanks to all of the moisture we received, there was far too much new snow, so the road remained closed. I decided to go anyway. Maybe I could walk a bit on the closed section of the road. It would be boring, but my knee was feeling much better after Wednesday’s scare. The gravelly sensation and squeaking had subsided. Dare I say that my knee was feeling less stiff, and maybe even stronger? That perhaps my misguided running steps broke up some of the inflammation that’s been holding me back? Such things have happened to me before. (Someday I may have to tell the story of my Ventana Wilderness Miracle.)

I set out from Many Parks Curve feeling reasonably good. Loose, steady, somewhat strong. That my pace is still in the 2.7-mph range and it’s a strenuous effort to move that fast means I’m still a long way from normal. But I’m better than I’ve been.

The walk was quiet, and the day was gorgeous. I used to bike Trail Ridge Road every spring and always viewed this section as the boring part of the ride — the long switchback in the trees before the road finally climbs into the alpine. But that was old me, the person cosplaying a tough athlete who was so determined to move fast and go far that her effort drowned much of the scenery. Slow the pace down to 2 mph, and this section is stunning.

It was quiet, but I met a few folks along the way. I stopped to chat with all of them. Two were older women who, like me, were hiking alone. One woman stopped to pick up a few pebbles and rolled them around in her palm as we talked about what a beautiful day it was, how happy we were to be here, and how lucky we were that they hadn’t opened the road. Then there was an older couple on ancient mountain bikes with bald tires. The man was suffering from the altitude. I passed them at my 2.7 mph pace. They’d take a long time to catch up and pass, and soon I’d pass them again. Every time we leap-frogged, the man threw down his foot and demanded to turn around. His wife pleaded to go a bit farther.

“It’s just a bit farther to the 10,560-foot elevation sign,” I egged him on. “At least go there, you can say you’ve ridden a bike two miles high.”

I saw them one more time before I decided to turn around because I’d walked 3.6 miles, and that was way too far. A seven-mile hike after a day like Wednesday seemed terribly reckless. But the day had sucked me in.

“3.6 miles?” the man replied when I told them why I was turning around. “That’s how far we’ve gone from the gate?” I nodded. He turned to his wife, clearly proud of how far they’d biked at 10,000 feet. “Fine, we can go to the next curve.”

I was at mile 5.6 when a ranger drove up and told me they were going to open the gate to the next curve. Did I want a ride to avoid being on the road when traffic started moving? Yes! But I’d already mentally committed to 7 miles. And if the road was opening to Rainbow Curve, perhaps I could hike a bit higher.

It will probably surprise no one that I walked another 1.8 miles past Rainbow Curve, nearly to the “top” at Little Thompson Overlook. I stopped short of that point because there was still quite a bit of snow on the road, and I finally reached a point where I would have had to posthole through deeper drifts. At least I was smart enough not to try that? But I honestly felt better as I went, even on the steeper parts of the descent. It was as though my knee was finally opening up after three months of being trapped inside of inflammation and pain.

From crying in my car, utterly broken, to hiking 9 miles in the high mountain sunshine two days later. This injury has been a wild rollercoaster of leaps forward followed by plunges back to zero, at least mentally, often in the span of days. But I’m grateful that I’m able to meet myself where I’m at.

Would Grandma be proud of me? I don’t know. As we grope our way blindly through this incomprehensible life, we try so hard to find patterns and create stories that will make sense of it all. Often, those stories are too broad, too rigid. Even when they no longer fit, we refuse to let them go. Grandma was adamant that we Homers were so very tough and invulnerable, but I don’t think that’s true for any of us. Even my dad, who I so long thought of as invincible, had his struggles. Many of them I didn’t learn about until after he died.

I still can’t believe that Mom sold her house, that things are changing so quickly, and I’m still here, practically standing still. February 13 was both a lifetime ago and yesterday. I’ve hardly moved, and yet I’m decades older. I’m decades older but I’m also a child again, wandering through my house and straining to remember the pieces I can file away in my dreams.

And I’m looking at the calendar, marveling that it’s the end of May already, and thinking, “But can it just snow again? One more time?”

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The drive to Brainard Lake was way more emotional than I’d expected. It’s the sort of thing I used to do almost every weekend — load up a big backpack, throw my trekking poles or mountain bike in the back of my Subaru, and head west for a little adventure. But it’s just been so long now — 13 weeks — and the last time I was here, I was on foot, running toward the dark clouds of a gathering winter storm.

I gawked at the bright green buds sprouting out of the aspen trees. Summer? How did it get to be almost summer? Never mind that town greened up more than a month ago. Town is the realm of my current life. This is the realm of my past life — the mountains — and this was my first glimpse at just how much time has passed. It was jarring. I felt disoriented as I turned north on the Peak to Peak Highway.

As I rolled through Nederland, a glance at the bright yellow facade of the Mountain Peak Cafe broke me open. I felt the weight of both arms around the shoulders of two Good Samaritans, legs probing helplessly as the men carried me through the door and deposited me at a booth. I needed to use the bathroom, but every time I tried to put weight on my left leg, my knee fully buckled, so I held it. I sat bewildered, staring out the window. Drops of rain were starting to dampen the sidewalk. The server asked what I wanted. I didn’t have my wallet on me, but decided I’d figure that one out later, and replied meekly, “Do you have soup?” The server brought me green chili with chicken, and a glass of Diet Pepsi. I’d fully abstained from the terrible stuff for nearly six months, but you know what, no time like the present to fall off the wagon.

I remembered the tears hitting my soup, a gentle rhythm in harmony with the rain outside. Occasionally, I’d glance up at the impossible distance down the hall to the bathroom. My body had always listened to me despite all of the ridiculous things I asked it to do. Even in injury, after crashing into the ground or being hit by a truck, with a cracked sternum or blown-up elbow, I was able to keep moving my body to safety. This was my first-ever experience with true failure, of needing to be picked up off the road and carried into a restaurant to await rescue. The tears falling into my soup looked like droplets plunging into a bottomless abyss. I still had no idea just how deep the void went.

And damn it, now I’m back here three months later, crying again. Alone in my car is where I prefer to indulge, so I let the snot flow as I turned left out of Nederland and continued climbing toward the 10,000-foot trailhead where I’d find terrain gentle enough to let me be in the mountains with my still-broken body. I continued passing familiar roads and trails where I used to be so utterly free, and I took all of that for granted. Sure, it might come back. That’s what they say. But a lot of the knee injury folks I meet are telling me otherwise, so I’ve been hedging my bets, mentally preparing for a future of diminished freedom that awaits us all, but came sooner than I’d hoped.

I parked at the winter trailhead at Brainard Lake and gathered up my supplies — not a backpack full of warm clothing and survival gear, but my locking knee brace and a tiny fanny pack for my keys and phone. It was all I was going to need for the hour I planned to walk, slowly, up the paved road that was still closed for the season. The locking brace was needed in case a rogue gust of wind blew me over. Winds here regularly top 50 mph, and the forecast was for wind, so it was not an idle danger. But even the prospect of encountering the tiniest bit of danger, I confess, brought a zing of thrill that I hadn’t felt in months.

Wearing this knee brace in the wild has brought me into the community of knee surgery survivors. I had no idea this was a thing, but it very much is, and I’m grateful to all the folks who have approached me at the gym, at the park, or while crutching across parking lots to talk about their own experiences. They’ve helped me feel less alone through my first weeks of grieving my old life. But, I confess, many of these interactions have fed my already strong tendencies toward pessimism.

This past Wednesday, I was at Davidson Mesa for a two-mile, well, you know, I’m still calling what I’m doing “toddling.” It started well, but by the end, my lower leg was hopelessly stiff, and my limp was pronounced as I neared the trailhead. A woman, probably in her mid-60s, who was walking a little dog, stopped beside me.

“Knee surgery?”

“Yeah, about eight weeks ago.”

“I had five surgeries before my replacements,” she said while shaking her head. “First was in ‘99. Back then, they didn’t have the technology they do now. They had to slice me clean open, break some bones, really wrench stuff around in there.” I looked at her knees, exposed beneath a pair of white linen shorts. They were criss-crossed with enormous scars.

“It is better now,” I agreed. “Arthroscopic surgery. I got a root repair, which they weren’t doing widely until just a few years ago. They used to just remove your meniscus, and yeah, replacement always came soon after.”

“Five surgeries and twenty years.” She shook her head. “But don’t worry. It gets so much better once you get your knees replaced.”

“Five surgeries, huh?” I repeated dumbly, as I was pretty sure what she meant was seven. She wasn’t even counting her knee replacements.

“It’s a new life,” she said brightly, and wished me well as she continued up the path with her pup.

I didn’t have to drive all the way to the mountains to walk for an hour. But the pessimism is starting to fester, and I am looking for ways to cut out the rot. My PT tells me that this particular recovery is like growing grass. It’s more like growing a saguaro cactus. So slow it’s almost imperceptible. Meanwhile, the soil that sustains the whole system is being displaced by mold and desperation. So I’m here, brightly reminding myself what a privilege it is to be alive on this beautiful, bluebird, inexplicably already summer day. But deeper down, I am straining with a frustrating level of effort as I chant out loud the prompts of movements I still can’t do without thinking about it — hip straight, heel, toe, knee bend. Hip, heel, toe, knee. And I am staring in dismay at my watch as my pace drops from 2.3 mph to 2.2 to 2.1.

The road was fairly quiet despite dozens of cars at the trailhead. It’s a low-snow year, and the trails are already mostly clear. Several road bikers passed. I remembered how hauling out my skinny-tire bicycle and riding from town to Brainard used to be my thing to do in May. A cool 5,000 feet of elevation gain in one long climb to welcome the start of mountain season. Damn, those were the days.

A single runner flew past. My jaw quivered a little as I marveled at the raw power of his legs, his impact, his speed. He made it look so painless. People joke about running wrecking your knees, and you laugh, haha, but you don’t understand what that means until it happens to you — what a knee injury is actually like, how disabling it can be, how deeply painful. But then runners go through these sorts of injuries, and they return to running. I still can’t conceptualize it. What that runner now far ahead of me is doing … that feels as reckless and unfathomable as me jumping off a roof because I’ve decided I want to fly.

Another thing I’ve laughed about, haha, before it happened to me: The identity crisis of the injured athlete. These past few years have already rocked me to the core and torn up the roots of everything I once believed. I think most of us are feeling this with our rapidly shifting geopolitical circumstances and climate chaos. I’ve been trying to cope with the hormonal chaos of perimenopause, grieving the loss of my father and a good friend, planning major lifestyle changes with my husband, and watching everything else about life become increasingly uncertain and less real. What even is anything anymore? What can we even believe? We make our own truth, and when everything is true, nothing is. Are you saying a bunch of people got on a nature cruise, and now we’re facing down the next pandemic? Are you saying we sold our future to technocats? That I’m going to spend my Golden Years hiding in caves and bunkers? That’s plausible. But now you’re telling me I used to run all day in the mountains? No, that was just a dream. The strangest, most visceral dream.

No, I was asleep for the longest time. But somehow, time still passed, months still passed, and I woke up here. Where is this? Who am I? I used to be an adventure athlete who knew at least something about myself, if not the world. Now my slate feels as blank as the surface of this lake, with ripples masking the depth of whatever lies below.

Oof, I walked all the way to Brainard Lake. I knew this was happening. I stopped often to rest on rocks, check in with my leg, and tell myself I was making reasonable decisions. But, 2.5 miles. I now had to walk that far back, and it would require another hour-plus of trying so hard not to limp. I was at a mere two miles total just two days earlier, and I had felt quite sore then, when the Ghost of Knee Injury Future stopped me near the trailhead. Dumb, Jill. Dumb. You think you’ll change, you’ll think you’re irrevocably changed, but you never change.

A cool breeze rippled along the lake, drawing me into its tranquility. A multiverse suddenly flickered into view: sitting on this bench with my road bike, fat biking along the frozen shoreline with Dave, snowshoeing into a 50 mph whiteout with Betsy, sled dragging with Wendy, treks up Mount Audubon in all of the seasons, Pawnee-Buchanan, scary Mount Toll, and the looming profile of my old friend, Niwot Ridge. So many memories here. So much life.

Is it all in the past now? But of course it is. Everything is in the past. The present is forever this single fleeting moment. And the future is just a story we tell ourselves. I need to stop telling myself I’m irrevocably broken.

The lake rippled, and I never wanted to leave this present. But the future gnawed at me, my anxiety about getting myself safely back to my car without issue. It turned out not to be an issue. My leg grew heavy, and I needed more sit-down breaks. But it wasn’t too sore. The pain was minimal enough that I slipped into flow state, floating effortlessly on the surface of the present without a thought about anything else, because I was back to doing what I’ve always done — moving through the world.

As I neared the trailhead, I encountered a group of four — a younger couple and an older couple. The older man had a pronounced limp.

“How far to the lake?” the younger woman asked.

I looked at my watch. “I just walked there and back; it’s 4.7 miles round trip,” I answered.

The woman blinked with a bewildered look on her face. "Or did you mean Red Rock Lake?” I continued. “That’s just up the road, about a half mile maybe?”

Her face relaxed. “Yeah, that’s the one.” She turned toward the older man. He nodded, so I guessed that she was seeking his approval to embark on the hike. She turned back to me, lowering her eyes toward my Frankenstein-sized leg brace. “You walked 4 miles?”

“Yeah. I’m rehabbing my knee. Maybe not my best idea ever.” But, I confess, her tone of disbelief at my mileage did tug at the atrophied remnants of my formerly athletic ego. It was 4.7 miles, a measly 4.7 miles at a 27-minute-mile pace. And it felt like a real accomplishment, a leap toward a future that could still be whatever I want it to be.

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The absentee winter decided to do a drive-by in May. I pulled my PT mat up to the window to watch the hummingbirds fight to survive. The spring blizzard raged. Their tiny bodies stalled mid-air in buffeting wind gusts. With great strain, they clasped cold metal railings with toes as delicate as thread, then nosed through the accumulating snow to reach the “nectar” Beat had mixed for them. Air bubbles percolated through the feeders as they drank long and hard, filling bellies that looked distended but were probably just puffed-up feathers.

I appreciate more than most humans the sensation of glucose hitting my bloodstream when I’m out in the cold. I could vicariously feel the warmth flowing through my own hopelessly stiff muscles. Straight sugar, relentless motion, and an “oh shit” down parka have gotten me through many hard miles in subzero conditions. Hummingbirds come retrofitted with feathers and enviable metabolisms. They are built for the weather and seemed unbothered by this storm. But I fretted about them all the same.

What if their little feet froze to the feeders? What if the wind blew them into the window and they broke a wing? How do their tiny shoulder joints cushion the wear and tear of flapping their wings 50 times per second? I may need to look that up later. Animals’ ability to survive injuries in the wild has been a subject of much fascination recently. Because, as a human, without modern medicine and technology, I would have been dead so very long ago. As it is, I still have doubts that I’ll ever actually walk again.

Getting back on my feet 12 weeks into the injury of nature’s most questionably designed, structurally necessary yet nonvascular body part has been brutal. Don’t get me wrong; I’m able to do so much more than I was two weeks ago, and I’m grateful. I can stand at the counter and make myself a salad without needing to balance on one leg. I can carry things in my hands — no more grocery bags slung around my neck. I have mostly ditched the crutches, even though the lurching thing I do, which one might call walking, is still incredibly laborious and moderately painful. Sometimes I get up in the night and, remembering I left my crutches in the entryway, just can’t face the pain. Instead, I will lower my body to the ground and butt-scooch to the bathroom.

Walking. I want it so badly. You don’t even know. You don’t quite realize how much freedom this simple motion affords you until it’s gone. I have so much respect for adaptive mobility and the resilience of people who go through life with lower-limb limitations. When the pain of my meniscus tear and ITB Syndrome first put me on crutches, I hated them with the fire of a thousand suns. My shoulders hurt. My hands hurt. I had blisters above my rib cage. But after ten weeks, my shoulders were strong, my biceps looked fierce, and I could swing myself across a parking lot nearly as fast as other pedestrians were walking. At that point, I was told I must give up my crutches. This has paradoxically been just as difficult. So many things hurt again. The distance across parking lots again looks impossibly far.

The problem with returning to weight-bearing after 10 weeks is that it’s not just my knee that needs rehabbing. Sure, my knee still looks bad and feels bad and works bad, but it’s not even my problem. Despite my best efforts with PT, my lower leg has badly atrophied. My foot has weird neuropathies, a shooting electric pain when it hits the ground. And my calf muscles locked up so badly after my first couple of longer (one-mile) walks that I couldn’t hobble out of bed. Thus the butt-scooching.

But walking. I want it so badly. On Monday, my nice PT got my calf muscles firing, and I was able to walk reasonably well after leaving the session. So promptly overdid it with a 1.6-mile crutch-free effort through a gorgeous open space in Louisville. It was such a nice day. I was so happy to be outside. After that, I was deeply sore and back to hobbling indoors for the next two days while it snowed. On Thursday, after a demoralizing session with my mean PT (she is not really that mean, she is just unsympathic and she makes me work), I went to nearby Valmont Park to try again. Patches of snow still covered the grass, broken tree branches littered the paved path, and most of the park was closed to allow cleanup of storm damage.

“I am going to walk well,” I vowed. I focused on relaxing my upper body, swiveling my hips, bending my knee, and rolling through a full heel-to-toe flexion. Sadly, I could only concentrate on one mechanical goal at a time, and the rest of my body reverted to its stiff, lurching baseline. Within a quarter mile, I was experiencing the sort of full-body pain I only used to experience at the end of long ultramarathons. I couldn’t even catch up to a lady walking a tiny dog who stopped to sniff something every four seconds.

I stopped to rest at a memorial bench near the small lake. I admit I have forgotten the name of the person who died in 2020 at the age of 45, but I ran my hand over the plaque and said a quiet “I’m so sorry” for the people who loved them. I had been on the verge of tears since leaving PT, and let a few escape. Memorial benches can be a hair trigger for my grief, and everything feels so volatile right now. I gazed across the lake, a rippled reflection of spring green and the stunning snow-covered flatirons. I smiled at the thought that I used to pay good money and run long distances to feel this wrecked and demoralized in beautiful places. Now the hard physical challenge is instantaneous and free, but it comes without assurance that this particular endurance race has a finish line. I’ve been at it for twelve weeks. Grinding, grinding, grinding. Just to end up here, broken after a quarter mile.

Water splashed in the reeds just beyond the edge of my peripheral vision. As I turned to look, a Great Blue Heron launched from the surface of the lake with stunning force. The thrum of her wings echoed as she glided across the water to the opposite shoreline. I blinked in awe at this living dinosaur, her six-foot wingspan and long neck stretching toward the sky. Sometimes I want to give up, call the knee a loss, crawl into bed, and stay there. But I know the grind never stops being worth it, and I’m grateful for affirmation from these beautiful places I miss so much.

With renewed determination, I got up from the bench and continued my walk. I’d recently made a new playlist with any song I could think of about walking and recovering — “Walk” by the Foo Fighters, “Learn to Walk Again” by Bad Wolves, “Walk Again” by the Nicotine Dolls, “I Wanna Get Better” by the Bleachers. You get the picture.

In the way music often does, one of the songs transported me back to a time I’d nearly forgotten — 1998, the autumn of my second year in college. I’d recently moved out of my parents’ house to a shared room in a duplex with four strangers. It was fairly demoralizing time of my life when I was still trying to find my footing in my college education, working too many hours, not at all comfortable in my living situation, and briefly dating an older, 6-foot-8 man who I met at a dance club, and who turned out to be a terrifying stalker (he never hurt me, he only called incessently and kept coming around the house for several weeks after I asked him to stop doing either, and it was a bad enough experience that I can’t comprehend how so many women who have been through so much worse manage to cope.)

So, yeah, 1998, not my favorite year. But that autumn, R.E.M. released a song that I became a little bit obsessed with and made my anthem for a short time, then promptly forgot until now, 28 years later, after I scoured my memory for songs about walking.

As the sun comes up, as the moon goes down
These heavy notions creep around
It makes me think, long ago
I was brought into this life a little lamb
A little lamb
Courageous, stumbling
Fearless was my middle name

But somewhere there I lost my way
Everyone walks the same
Expecting me to step
The narrow path they've laid

They claim to
Walk unafraid
I'll be clumsy instead
Hold me love me or leave me high

A meme that’s been floating around Substack recently reads: “I think midlife is just becoming who you were at 16, but loving her this time."

Perimenopause does feel a lot like a second adolescence, with ping-ponging emotions and rage and confusion and absolute bewilderment with my body. Now I have this injury that feels like a hard reset, and it’s still difficult to guess what life will look like on the other side. I’ve spent much of my adult life following this increasingly narrow path of a lifestyle until I hit this dead end. Sure, I might wander around in the dark for a while and pick up the same route farther down the trail. Or I might find something else entirely. It could be anything. There’s excitement in that — a sense of a vast and intimidating future rolling forward with no set course or even road maps to guide the way.

That’s how I felt in 1998, a bewildered 19-year-old who’d become hopelessly stuck on the narrow path she’d laid. So I talked several friends into piling into my Toyota Tercel to hit the road west to Oregon over Christmas break. My best friend from fifth grade had recently moved to Portland, and I used that excuse to visit my dream city. We had very little money and no idea where we were going — these were the days of Rand McNally Road Maps. I thought maybe I’d make a few new friends, make a few promising contacts, and find a way to uproot from my stuck life in Salt Lake City. It didn’t work out that way, but just taking that trip and figuring out that it was possible — that you can just do things — was a huge turning point in my early adult life.

Beat has been enjoying his first week of sabbatical, his “practice retirement.” But he also feels intimidated by the yawning unknowns of the future. It could be anything. I was doing my endless PT as he stood over my yoga mat and posited various projects he could work on. As his ideas became increasingly absurd, he paused. I shrugged. “Yeah, but is anything real anymore?”

“No,” he agreed. “Not really.”

R.E.M. knew what was up. You could rewrite the lyrics to “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” with lines about hauntavirus and the FIFA peace prize, and it would still hit the same as it did in 1987. Of course, you don’t even need to rewrite the lyrics for that song to hit the same, and that’s the point. We’ve always lived here, in the chaotic absurdity of life on Earth, flailing through endless uncertainties. The point is not to change the world. The point is to find the courage to live in the world as it is. To — as Rainer Marie Rilke wrote — let it all happen to you, beauty and terror. To live in the question. To live in widening circles that reach across the world. To just keep going.

To embrace honest clumsiness over false security. To trip and fall and pick yourself up. To walk unafraid.

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It’s International Workers’ Day, and I’m stuck in another long service appointment at the Subaru Dealership with my long-suffering Outback. Killing time. I’ve been pondering the ways the different generations deal when confronted with the universal experience of orthopedic injuries:

The Silent Generation does not think it’s a big deal and does not want to have it looked at. They’ll take a few Tylenol and continue lurching around on their locked-out knee while their Boomer children beg them to see a doctor.

Baby Boomers effortlessly navigated the labyrinthine health care system on their Medicare life rafts. They’ve already had the surgery and are half-heartedly engaged in the physical therapy. They expect everything to just work out because it always has.

Gen X cynically waited weeks to get checked out and months more for their corporate health insurance to clear imaging and treatment. In the meantime, they acquired six new ligament tears and built up so much scar tissue that they’ll probably need multiple surgeries to return to full function, but screw that. They take inspiration from their Silent Generation grandparents and look forward to being lurching and mean in their old age.

Millennials hurt their knee playing basketball two days ago, and they’ve already joined four Reddit forums, bought six self-help books on the power of positive recovery, purchased all of the necessary supplements for joint and muscle strength, and are trying out this podcaster-recommended bamboo knee sleeve and restorative yoga.

Gen Z has no health insurance and doesn’t have time for that type shit. JoyzAI recommended an experimental stem cell treatment, and they’ve got a GoFundMe going to have it done in Mexico over spring break.

Gen Alpha is doing all of the things their Millennial helicopter parents are making them do. But once they hit adulthood, they’re going to do what AI tells them to do, and it will likely work. They will shake their heads in pity at their lurching Gen X grandparents.

My six-week appointment with my surgeon’s PA happened on Monday, and honestly, it was a bit of a nothingburger — five minutes for her to tell me to stick with PT and see you in ten weeks. It makes sense, but I suppose I was hoping for a party where we ceremoniously burned my crutches and I went skipping out of the office. It’s still a long damn road back, and this week has been the hardest since my first week after surgery. Some pain has returned, and frustration has crept back in as the depth of my limitations becomes clear.

The most I can do still requires two crutches. One is tolerable with more focus at a slower pace. With no crutches, I have one leg that’s an inpatient chihuahua and another that’s a wobbly baby giraffe, and they are not syncing at all. I had to remind my physical therapist that I was non-weight-bearing for more than a month before surgery, and I have below-average proprioception when I am able-bodied. But I have been doing the work. Because what else can I do? It’s getting tougher because it feels like that’s all I have or do anymore — tedious, grinding work — and the remainder of the time I am practically collapsed in exhaustion. I am looking for ways to inject little delights back into my life.

I escaped from my car appointment to crutch-walk along the St. Vrain greenway. It was a gorgeous May 1, with clear air after yesterday’s storm and temperatures in the 50s. I slathered my arms and face in sunscreen because I hoped to be outside long enough to need it. First sunscreen in months! A real excursion outdoors! The distant mountains were blanketed in fresh snow, which I tried to appreciate for its beauty rather than remember that Colorado’s snowpack is the worst on record and Super El Niño is coming. Will this be the summer the house burns down? No, no, stop thinking that way. Gawd, look at the geese or something.

During my first venture out on Wednesday at Valmont Park, I crutch-walked a mile in 43 minutes, including breaks. For my Friday walk, I wanted to go a little farther and a little faster, focusing on bending my bad knee rather than swinging my leg wide. The greenway scenery was lovely and distracting, and I had to remind myself to focus on my stride so I could do it correctly and not trip (I continue to wear a brace that locks when it hits 90 degrees, reducing the chance of damage if I make a mistake.)

I exchanged knowing nods with a gentleman using a cane, and received an enthusiastic cheer from an older woman walking her dog. A group of three 30-something women runners seemed to eye me warily, as though I was a black cat crossing their path. I smiled as I imagined waving a crutch and giving them my best Grampa Simpson impression: “It could happen to yooooou.”

The sunshine and camaraderie with my peers did succeed in boosting my mood. I managed 1.35 miles in 42 minutes, which is almost a 31-minute mile. And that included a short bout of walking without my crutches, which does not hurt my knee but is shockingly hard and feels strange. I was grateful to be back on crutches, which have become like, well, like a crutch against the weirdness of the world.

Little delights. A couple of weeks ago, I read a book that I’ve been chewing on ever since. I had just been thinking about how I can’t stomach adventure books right now when I saw a friend’s post about “The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating” and thought, “That looks like exactly the opposite of an adventure book.”

Elisabeth Tova Bailey was 34 when she was struck with a mysterious viral illness while traveling in Switzerland. After her flu-like symptoms subsided, her autonomic nervous system was severely scrambled. She developed severe fatigue and hypotension. Soon, she was so weak and dizzy that she was unable to even sit up in bed. This was years before much of anything was known about post-viral syndromes — Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Long Covid, and my own experiences with autoimmune thyroid disease following a bout of pneumonia in 2015. Elizabeth may have experienced something similar to Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS.) Her doctors concluded they couldn’t help her and sent her home.

Her world shrank to a single room, a caretaker, and the occasional visitor. One friend bought her a pot of wild violets and a woodland snail she’d found on a walk. Unable to focus enough to read and unable to bear the noise of television, Elisabeth became mesmerized by the snail and its tiny world. She wrote an entire book about this: Lying in bed, watching a snail. It’s the dullest plot ever — and I can’t stop thinking about it.

The writing is gorgeous, and I finished with a sense that Elisabeth had shared an important lesson about the human condition, one I’d do well to learn. Just as I used to marvel at memoirs from polar explorers who had ventured to the edges of human endurance, I’m fascinated by Elisabeth’s journey into the depths of human quintessence. By narrowing her aperture to the world of a snail, she cut away the dissonance of our human machinations and exposed the core of what it means to be alive.

Finding meaning in the minuscule. For so long, I’ve leaned on adventures to feel alive. Big experiences, big emotions, a big dose of doing to infuse life with meaning and purpose. As Elisabeth pointed out, this is the ease of health. Take away those certainties, and the hard work of living begins. Injury and illness are a rough portal into self-understanding, but they may be the truest one.

Not that I am anywhere near so enlightened. I still feel betrayed when I wake up in the morning and remember how hard it is to get out of bed. I still dream about planning another adventure. No running 47 miles this year, but maybe by my August birthday, I’ll at least be able to ride a bike that far? But why should it matter how far I can ride a bike? Why does any of that matter? I’m awake, I’m alive, and I’m still moving through the world on a gorgeous May afternoon in Longmont, Colorado.

But I’m envious of my car, which can just have new parts installed over an afternoon while I whittle away time at the park. Woodland snails are capable of regrowing eyestalks, tentacles, and repairing damaged shells. Just before my car appointment, I went to the eye doctor for my first exam in more than a decade. There, I was fitted for my first pair of reading glasses because, the also-46-year-old doctor shrugged, “Time comes for us all.”

“If we’re lucky,” I thought, and I try to keep that truth in mind.

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On April 24, 2016, Beat and I finally arrived in Boulder after following a spring storm east for nearly 1,300 miles. We packed up our Subaru Outback with five bicycles and a few duffels and bid goodbye to Bay Area traffic. We swerved through several inches of icy snow over Donner Pass, fought hurricane-force winds through Nevada, a “salt storm” in western Utah, and more snowy whiteouts across Wyoming’s Great Divide Basin. The clouds didn’t lift until we were home — a magical land of daffodils, mountain snow, sweeping views, and space to breathe.

It’s hard to believe we’ve been in Colorado for ten years — the relentless march of time and all that. Beat wanted to move to this state for a kind of semi-retirement after nearly two decades in the fast-paced Silicon Valley. Mountain living and trails out our front door were a dream, but his job continued to push him through the bureaucratic stress of working for a large corporation. He’s been frustrated for a while. A week from now, he’ll officially soft-launch his full retirement, and I’ve been having … feelings about it.

First of all, I am excited for him. I’ve been prodding him to do this since 2020 with all the usual platitudes. Life is short. It’s even more unpredictable. Never take the future for granted. “You think you have time,” until you don’t.

But right now, I am struggling with the uncertainties of the lack of control I feel in my own body, and by extension, my life. I’ve had so many limitations since my injury, and I’ve felt overwhelmed by the simple demands of day-to-day life. I’ve stopped being “fun.” I haven’t been all that useful. I’ve been needy and moody. I’ve lost the strength to absorb big changes.

Through it all, I am being tormented by memories from this week in 2009. This started when Facebook reminded me of a video I posted on April 15, 2009, about riding by fat bike in Juneau. I was surprised this video hadn’t been erased from the Interwebs, and watched it several times to soak in the nostalgia.

(Disclaimer: The video quality is terrible, and it’s nausea-inducing because I filmed it with a clunky late-aughts digital camera wedged in my bike helmet.)

But after my third watch, the memories started to expand. “That was the last good day,” I thought. It was the week I quit my newspaper job in Juneau — which had been downgraded to a furlough — and packed all of my belongings into a storage unit. My then-partner, Geoff, and I had big plans to drive south and spend the next few months training for dream races. He was going to try to win a golden ticket to Western States, and I was going to prepare to ride the Tour Divide. We had already paid the deposit and first month’s rent on a cabin in Teasdale, Utah. We had our tickets for the ferry to Skagway. The date we were set to leave was April 20, 2009.

On April 19, I wrote a blog post titled “Nearing an End,” where I reflected on our uncertain future:

“Every time I approach a life change, I’m met with all sorts of regret and unrest. It’s not focused negativity; it’s just there, reminding me that, regardless of what happens, I can’t return to the same situation as the same person. It reminds me that I didn’t do things perfectly, that I don’t always treat my life with the awe and love it deserves, even as I struggle with powerless legs as the rain dissolves the snow and exposes a winter’s worth of decay. That maybe Geoff and I haven’t been spending as much time together as we should because we’ve been so caught up in our own lives. That maybe it will be strange to get in a small car and travel across the continent together, again.”

That night, he didn’t return from Alaska Folk Fest until several hours after I’d gotten home from work, which was already well after midnight. In those wee morning hours, he climbed into bed and told me he’d met someone else and didn’t want to be in a relationship with me anymore. He’d strung me along with these trip plans for weeks, when all along he had no intention of following through. I rushed out of the apartment and spent the rest of the night crying alone in our shared storage unit. But I still returned in the morning, and we drove away together to board the ferry out of Juneau. What followed was a terrible couple of weeks while we drove to California, which I mostly erased from my mental reel. Except for it’s still there, haunting me with found memories of “on this day in 2009.”

It’s funny what still stings 17 years later. A friend is going through a divorce that caught her completely by surprise around the same day that I was injured. Meanwhile, my brain is taunting me with intrusive thoughts about how my husband is perfectly capable of trading me in for a newer model, someone who isn’t so weak and broken. I shared these fears with him, and he laughed it off, which is appropriate. He’s done nothing wrong and has given me no reason to believe he wants to leave. Reality has never been a match for my anxiety.

I do think this train of thought is pretty ridiculous. I’m sharing it here because I want to illustrate the vulnerability I’m feeling right now. Prolonged physical injuries are a real mindfuck, and it’s the side of recovery that not many people talk about. You follow the protocol, you do the work, and you assume things will get back to normal. You expect life on the other side to look much like it did before. Now, I don’t think that’s possible.

“It’s not focused negativity; it’s just there, reminding me that, regardless of what happens, I can’t return to the same situation as the same person.”

On Monday, I’ll hit six weeks post-surgery and meet with my surgeon’s PA to get the clearance to return to weight-bearing. My PT has started me on simple toe-touch motions with the crutches. Even these feel a little painful and strange. My knee still feels like it’s about to catch. My foot is having nerve pain, probably from extreme underuse. Am I really going to walk again? It’s strange to contemplate.

Still stranger is the question of whether I’ll return to running — this year or ever. The feeling I get from running is like no other. I was on top of the world, spending the entire day flowing effortlessly across sand and slickrock in the Utah desert as recently as Jan. 31. But injuries like this — this is a steep price to pay for a hobby. Add to that all of the little issues and scars I’ve picked up over the years from falls that happened while I was running. Not that I’ll protect myself from pain just because I’ve given up the sport. But it does surprise me that others who have gone through major knee injuries are so gung-ho about jumping back in without hesitation.

Anyway, I am off to practice my two-legged crutch walking and shore up some optimism as I head into this scary new stage of recovery. I’ve spent the past three hours stuck at the Subaru Dealership, killing service time that I used to wile away with a long bike ride. Instead, I wrote this post and thought about good songs to represent this particular journey and healing process. The people of my generation love a good mix tape, so I made a playlist to listen to while I’m doing my PT today.

1. The Good Times are Killing Me” by Modest Mouse

2. “Nobody’s Fault But My Own” by Beck

3. “Losing a whole year” by Third Eye Blind

4. ‘It’s Alright” by Mother Mother

5. “Help, I’m Alive” by Metric

6. “Last Hope” by Paramore

7. “My Silver Lining” by First Aid Kit

8. “Tough on Myself” by King Princess

9. “Shake It Out” by Florence and the Machine

10. “The Middle” by Jimmy Eat World

11. “Heal” by Catherine Wheel

12. “Unintended” by Muse

13. “Recover” by Natasha Bedingfield

It will be a while yet before I’m back on the adventure train. Hopefully, the memory machine will feed me something better to write about next week.

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A rectangle of warm sunlight stretched across the hardwood floor, so I scooched my yoga mat over it. I lay in Corpse Pose, mentally preparing to move my leg in uncomfortable ways for 45 minutes. As the golden glow warmed my skin, I extended my limbs to Starfish Pose, spreading my fingers and toes as wide as they’d go. Streeeeetch. I rolled to my side to stretch my back and heard a high-pitched trill outside the nearby balcony door. My head cocked — a weird flex that felt involuntary. Hummingbird! I sat up, scooched to the stool, and hoisted myself up on crutches to try to catch the little bird before it fluttered away. I didn’t make it, so instead I leaned on my crutches over the balcony railing and watched other little birds going about their day, chipmunks scurrying along the garage roof, and a fat squirrel bounding through the dry grass. And after about 20 minutes had passed, and I still hadn’t even started my PT, I thought, “Geez, I am turning into Cady.”

I want to tell you about Cady, the best cat ever. Cady was a Tortoiseshell-Siamese mix with creamy fur, gorgeous light blue eyes, and a black blotch across her nose that earned her the nickname “blotchface.” We met in August 2004, near the rundown fourplex where I lived in a studio apartment on the outskirts of Tooele, Utah. I remember it like it was yesterday. I was pulling up to my driveway just as she jumped out of our building’s dumpster. She was covered in black soot … because apparently one of my neighbors was burning coal? In the summer? But she was so skinny and dirty that my heart melted. I rushed into my apartment to find a can of tuna to crack open and leave on my porch.

The next morning, the tuna was gone. I started to see the cat more often — prowling near the dumpster or sitting on top of my next-door neighbor’s motorcycle. I asked my neighbor if she belonged to him, and he said he didn’t know anyone with a cat. So I started leaving out tuna every day after work. When I ran out of tuna, I invited the cat into my apartment and fed her whatever crappy thing I was having for dinner — macaroni and cheese, pasta with red sauce, Suddenly Salad. It didn’t matter; she gobbled the plates clean.

Finally, I went out and bought her a bag of kibble and bowls for food and water. Every day, she’d be there sitting on my porch when I came home from work. I’d let her inside, feed her, and then we’d spend the evenings together. When she started scratching around in my potted plants, I bought a litter box. She started spending the night. But I refused to call her my cat. She was a friendly stray. She had good manners and had apparently been litter box-trained, but none of my neighbors claimed her. I didn’t want that responsibility. I didn’t even give her an official name. I called her Kitty or Sadie, which was the name of my parents’ cat.

Then, in October, I took a new job in Idaho Falls and moved out. When it came time to say goodbye, I couldn’t find the cat anywhere — not in the dumpster, not on the motorcycle. She was gone. I cried for the entire three-hour drive to my new apartment. I was going through some stuff at the time … taking a job I wasn’t excited about to move to a city where I didn’t want to live to get away from a relationship that was not working. But the cat — losing the cat brought all of that disappointment and grief to the surface. I missed her fiercely.

That night, I called my dad and confessed I had made a huge mistake. I loved Kitty/Sadie, and I was so sad about leaving her behind. The next day, my parents drove to Tooele, tracked down the cat, coaxed her into a cardboard box, and trapped her. Like me, she cried and scratched at the box for the entire drive to Idaho Falls. But my dad did that for me because he loved me. God, I miss him.

So I had a cat. I want to say right now that the way I raised her was modeled after the latchkey generation of pet care that I witnessed when I was young. I would do things differently now.

It took a few months and a tomcat that started hanging around the apartment a little too eagerly, but I did finally take her to the vet to have her spayed and vaccinated. They confirmed my guess that she was about a year old, so I made her birthday January 1, 2004. I also officially gave her the name I’d started calling her, the combination of Kitty/Sadie, but it was the vet’s prompt to write her name and my favorite movie at the time, “Mean Girls,” that inspired the spelling: Cady.

Cady had a good life in Idaho, I thought. She was still an alley cat at heart, so I fashioned a swinging cat door out of plexiglass and fitted it next to my window air conditioner unit so she could come and go as she pleased. Often, I’d come home from work and hear her crying high in the sycamore tree next to the rundown four-plex where I had a one-bedroom apartment. I can’t even count the number of times I had to climb that tree and pull her down, yelping loudly as she dug her claws into my shoulders and neck. She was great at getting herself into trouble she couldn’t get out of. I still don’t know how she survived the first eight months of her life.

One day, I came home from work, and she wasn’t in the tree. This was a rare occasion of her being inside the apartment before I came home to feed her. She was limping on three legs with her left hind leg off the ground. At closer inspection, she had a cut along the heel that didn’t look great, but it was no longer bleeding. I did my best to clean it and wrap it with gauze and medical tape, which she quickly demolished.

Since it wasn’t bleeding and didn’t look infected, I thought I could let the cut heal on its own. But a week later, she still wasn’t using her leg — although she was still going out to play every day. I finally took her to the vet, who told me her Achilles tendon was likely severed, and she’d never walk normally again. The vet thought she’d been in a fight with a dog, but I thought it more likely that she had gone into my neighbor’s garage through one of the many broken windows and cut herself on a shard of glass while jumping out. She was endlessly clumsy. She was very much my cat.

Her only hope was a specialty vet in Ketchum who could perform a repair surgery, but it was likely to cost at least $2,000. I didn’t have anywhere near $2,000 in my savings or my credit card limit. Yes, I was an irresponsible 25-year-old. But I regret to say that Cady seemed happy and not in pain, and so I decided maybe she could live out a good life as a tripod.

It took another couple of months, but she incredibly healed on her own. Even when her mobility was still limited, she continued crawling around my air conditioner to go outside to play every day. But she always came home at night, and she was adorable about settling into my lap during the long, lonely mornings when I was really going through some stuff. But she truly didn’t know what she was in for when she adopted me. By the following summer, we were on our way to Alaska.

In Homer, we melded families with my partner’s cat, Midnight, who never warmed up to Cady and was a frequent source of strife. Cady stayed outside more and more, roaming the forested hillside through territories ruled by grizzly bears, which we’d occasionally spot in our yard. Cady loved to stalk ravens and was laughably bad at it. She continued to climb trees, but Alaska trees are smaller, and she got better at getting herself down. She had a nemesis in my boss’s cat, who lived next door, and once came home with a hole in her ear so large I could see daylight through it. She liked to catch voles and bring them back in the house, still alive. I think she enjoyed watching me panic and chase them around my house with a saucepan and lid so I could recapture them and release them back to the wild, thankfully still alive. I once saw Cady do her ridiculous raven-stalking moves as a bald eagle perched on our backyard bench. As I laughingly told this story to my co-worker, he told me his little dog was one carried off by an eagle while playing in his yard. The evidence was in the tracks and the blood in the snow. He never saw his dog again. I shut up about eagles after that.

The point is, I wasn’t the best pet owner, but Cady enjoyed an adventurous Alaska life. I hauled her to Juneau, where our lifestyles continued. She rode in my small sedan for several multi-thousand-mile moves, and we ended up in Montana. Then, in 2010, I met Beat, and decided to move Cady to California.

Beat lived in a third-floor apartment in a large complex squeezed between two freeways. Cady, who had been a semi- to mostly-outdoor cat since birth, suddenly found herself in a living situation where it was impossible to let her go outside. I fretted about forcing her into the life of an indoor cat. Would she hate it? Would she hate me?

Incredibly, she settled in without missing a beat. She cried at the front door for perhaps a week before giving up. I’d moved around with her so much that she was preconditioned to settle into whatever strange new situation she’d been forced into. In this case, a two-bedroom Bay Area apartment with a small balcony three stories off the ground. I’d let her out onto the balcony, where she’d settle into a cushion and spend her afternoon clicking her jaw at the birds fluttering through nearby redwood trees. Sometimes a squirrel would bound across the railing, and she’d lose her mind. But she was still happy. She never stopped being a happy cat. It wasn’t her adventurous life that made her happy. People are what made her happy. Tuna is what made her happy. Living is what made her happy.

In 2015, Beat and I decided it would be best for all parties if Cady went to live permanently with her longtime catsitter, a wonderful retiree named Karen. Beat and I traveled so much, and Karen struggled as Cady flitted in and out of her life. Karen could no longer handle the emotional strain of having to give her up after we returned from our vacations, so she gave us an ultimatum, which was perfectly understandable. We were never going to find a better catsitter. Cady seemed even happier with Karen, who doted on her endlessly. I still dropped by regularly to visit. But just a few months after she went to live with Karen, Cady was diagnosed with mammary gland cancer. Her cancer was deemed aggressive and terminal, requiring intensive treatments to manage the symptoms. Karen took on this extremely time-intensive hospice role. For all of the serendipity that brought Cady and me together, Karen was truly who she needed at the end. Cady died in July 2016 at the age of 12.

I’ve been thinking about Cady as I reflect on the last time I visited her at Karen’s house, which just happened to be exactly ten years ago today. Cady was my adventure cat who adapted flawlessly to becoming an indoor cat who loved sunbeams and balconies and clicking her jaw at birds. I’m now nine weeks into an injury that has forced me to become the same — an indoor cat. And now that I’ve gotten over one of the tougher humps — my week of meowing at the door, so to speak — I can’t say I hate it. The sunshine is nice on the balcony. Today it snowed, and I didn’t have to go outside at all.

I’m still on crutches, now at nine weeks, going into a tenth. I will admit that I am also thinking of Cady’s three-legged era, and even though it thankfully didn’t last, she adapted so well. I like to think that I have settled into my crutches — carrying things around my neck in grocery bags, flowing with ease across parking lots, sidehopping through tight spaces, only becoming a little winded for the long trips from the hospital parking lot to my distant allergy clinic.

On Monday, I passed the four-week mark since surgery and was given the go-ahead to start toe-touch weight bearing, which feels like a frustrating trick only designed to make my life harder. Hopping is easier! But I have been working on it, along with the added PT and short-crank pedal spinning. PT is basically all I do now, when I’m not working or hopping around grocery stores with a bag slung over my neck.

But I’m not unhappy. The sun is shining, the hummingbirds are trilling, and it feels like enough. Even though I acknowledge this state of being won’t last forever, that feels like something I only know on an intellectual level. On an emotional level, I’ve moved toward acceptance and better appreciation for who I am — an indoor cat.

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It was the day Betsy forgot who I was, or perhaps the day after that. A hospice CNA dropped by to wash her hair. The CNA was not who I’d expected — a woman closer to our age, tall and imposing with tattoos across both arms. She liked motorcycles, specifically dirt biking, and we quickly bonded over the trails we’d both ridden near Buena Vista. Betsy had reached a state where she winced in pain at the slightest touch. I told the CNA I wasn’t sure she’d enjoy having her hair washed. Did it matter? The CNA assured me clean hair would make a difference.

I sat back as the CNA filled a small basin with warm water from the kitchen, then transferred some of it to a plastic trash bag. She lifted Betsy’s head from the pillow, so slowly and gently that the motion sparked only the slightest wince. Then the CNA slid the plastic bag underneath Betsy’s head and settled her scalp into a shallow opening. With dexterity I couldn’t quite fathom, she held in one hand Betsy’s head and the bag without spilling any of its contents, and massaged shampoo into her hair with the other. Betsy’s face softened to a degree I hadn’t seen in days.

“There, does that feel good?” the CNA said, and repeated the question multiple times as Betsy’s stiff shoulders seemed to melt into her muscular arms. We had closed the blinds against the harsh July sun, but light slipped through a lower slit and cast a single strip of warm light across Betsy’s forehead. Her expression was serene, as though she had finally sloughed off the weight of her pain, as though being lifted by angels. Which I suppose, in a way, she was.

I’d given up a supported hiking trip in the San Juans with friends to be there. It was a tough thing to let go; I’d dropped nearly $800 on my share of the expenses before backing out at the last minute. Of course, staying home was always worth it, because that time afforded me the last days I could spend with Betsy while she still remembered me, while I could still show her how much I loved her.

Now that moment had passed. She no longer acknowledged my presence. I thought all that remained was grief and pain. But that moment, with the CNA cradling Besty’s head in a bag of warm water, with the sunlight caressing her face, with her soft smile and brief release from pain — my heart swelled in awe of the gentleness, of the grace. Nothing I could have seen on the Softrock trail would have been as beautiful as that moment.

The moment was too brief. More of the cruelties of dying happened that day, and I backslid into my pit of grief and rage. I was coping particularly poorly with it all — a combination of perimenopause, withdrawal from antidepressants, and my usual summer asthma flare that robbed my brain of oxygen. Driving home from Betsy’s house was always the hardest. The intrusive thoughts were deafening, the urge to drive my car off the steep side of Gross Dam Road. It was all I could do to drown them out. On this day, I played “Weird Goodbyes” by The National on repeat — to remember the CNA and the graceful moments of serenity. To remember the dynamic of darkness and light, that life’s brutality is what brings us to beauty, that life’s impermanence is what gives us meaning.

Memorize the bathwater, memorize the air
There'll come a time I'll wanna know I was here

I am again looking to those weeks in July with Betsy for inspiration and wisdom. For all of the things I experienced in 2025 — and there were some great, beautiful moments — those brutal weeks have proven to be the most impactful. My emotions were hard to control, and I lost so much of that time to grief and rage. But as the distance grows, what remains is the beauty and love.

Easter Sunday was — I hope — a low point in this injury journey. It would have been Betsy’s 47th birthday. I spent the day home alone while seemingly everyone was out doing fun things on a beautiful spring day, and I was filled with resentment. I remembered how Betsy wanted to spend her 46th birthday snow biking in Leadville, and how I vehemently talked her out of it because I feared for her safety. Instead, we (our friend Danni was also there, having flown in from Montana to help celebrate) took Betsy birding and bison-viewing at a local wildlife refuge. Betsy tried to appreciate the outing, but her eyesight was failing, and she was exhausted. In hindsight, I wish we had taken her snow biking. The effort probably would have failed early — she’d become so weak and imbalanced in those last months. But just to try her most beloved activity on her last birthday would have been meaningful. Anyway, one year later, I was having regrets, and I was feeling isolated and alone.

Several things happened on Tuesday that helped break me out of my spiral. First, the threat of nuclear Armageddon, which reminded me that shit, yeah, things are really bad everywhere. I kind of agree with the theory that we all died of COVID in 2020 and are currently in Hell. But also, nothing is a given, and every day is a gift. Also, I went to see my longtime physical therapist, Sue, after a long break. She is capable of working magic on my sore back with dry needling. With all of the sitting and crutching, my back had been hurting a lot. I hadn’t even fully acknowledged the discomfort since I am still coming around to the strange absence of level 7/8 pain in my knee. But Sue took my back pain away, at least for now, and I feel loads better. It’s honestly funny how much relatively small shifts in our bodies affect our entire worldview. I should know by now with perimenopause and the stupid crushing impacts of hormones. But I’m still bemused by this reality — that my mind isn’t all of me or even most of me. I’m just another sack of chemicals like everyone else.

It’s only been a few days since Tuesday, but I’ve been so much better. I’m in less pain. I’m getting stronger. My little chores around the house aren’t nearly as hard. I can easily stand on one leg long enough to make myself a whole dinner. Crutching isn’t the worst. It’s slow and rather strenuous for its speed, but I can get myself around. Maybe not to the top of Bear Peak, but enough time has passed that I’m already partly able to let go of that “old” life and be more accepting of where I’m at now.

And I can appreciate where I am now, because I appreciate how meaningful the last weeks of Betsy’s life were. Just being here — “being” as the operative word — on a sunny spring day can be enough. And of course, I have a lot of privilege and great medical care. My husband and I still have a lot of fun together, which has assuaged some of my fears about how our relationship would shift if one of us — by choice or circumstance — had to slow way down.

I also continue to be amused by the antics of Anton the moose on our Ring cameras. But tonight we acquired a new outside pet. I wonder if we should call him or her “Mittens.”

The grief, it gets me, the weird goodbyes
My car is creepin', I think it's dying
I'm pullin' over until it heals
I'm on a shoulder of lemon fields”

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“Have any fun plans for Easter?” PT Jana asked as I strained to move a yoga ball back and forth with my calves.

“Um … “ I sputtered, stumped by the question. “No!?”

“I get it,” she said. “Staying home, keeping the legs up …”

“Some friends are planning a long run,” I offered as something. I don’t know why. I always feel a little ashamed when strangers assume I have no social life. Which I don’t. But still.

“No running for you.”

“Oh, I know.”

Jana went on to talk for five minutes about what a big deal Easter is in Germany and what people do to celebrate. I was grateful — anything to turn my attention from my humilatingly small life.

Living as I have for the past seven weeks has been, for me, like the pandemic on steroids. At least in April 2020, I went outside. In my injured state, I am truly quarantined from the world. There were small breaks in the monotony when my sisters and mom came to visit, but for the most part, life has been tedious and the same, day after day. You know the feeling of getting on an international flight, spending 11 hours in the sensory deprivation chamber that is a cramped airplane seat, and emerging to a strange new day on a different continent? That is what the past seven weeks have felt like for me — I got on a plane in February, and suddenly, somehow, it’s April. Only I’m nowhere near my destination. I’ve merely slid open the window shade and caught a disorienting glimpse of the Greenland ice cap far below. Or, in this case, somehow the window scenery changed to spring.

Similar to COVID times, I’m easily influenced and willing to try anything and everything that might help me break out of my prison. To start, I’ve purchased a pharmacy’s worth of nutritional supplements to add to the assortment of “hope placebos” I was already taking — calcium, vitamin D3, creatine, and UC-II collagen to aid in muscle fiber building and bone health. I’ve been aiming to eat at least 120 grams of protein per day — mainly through plain Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, chicken, pea protein powder, and whey protein bars. I also eat a pound of frozen berries nearly every day, to bulk up my yogurt breakfast and lunch protein smoothies — anti-inflammatory and fiber! I’ve abstained from alcohol even though I want to guzzle wine every night. I told a friend I’m considering alcoholism as my next thing, but for now, I am hanging onto the dream of health.

Earlier this week, Beat surprised me with a second set of crutches as my “downstairs crutches.” This way, I can butt scooch down and up our terrifyingly steep set of wooden stairs without having to carry my crutches, because there’s a set waiting for me at the bottom. I tried them out on my way to the Zwift bike and exclaimed how amazing they felt. My old crutches had six hard weeks of mileage on them, and the tips had become soft and mushy, like limping along on a pair of flat tires. The new crutches were firm and grippy.

“Just like new shoes!” I exclaimed, a little too happy about it. “New shoes!”

Beat, who is always on the lookout for gadgets and gizmos to solve my problems, went online and found even sturdier, grippier crutch tips and ordered a set in pink. These tips feel invincible when I’m making my way along uneven ground or wet surfaces — like when I accidentally spilled a bottle of water on my hardwood floor and didn’t realize it. The old crutch tips would have slipped and put me on the ground, but not these babies. These are the trail runners of crutch tips. The best.

Something PT Evan has been having me do since I was 10 days post op is blood flow restriction training. For this, I use a borrowed “Smart Cuff,” which is a device that restricts arterial inflow and venous outflow to my left leg during my more active prescribed PT exercises (quad sets, straight leg raises, hip adduction, and hip extensions). The limited blood flow induces muscle hypertrophy that mimics the stress of heavier lifting. Evan says this will help reduce muscle atrophy, although some atrophy is inevitable. I did a few sessions of BFRT in the office with Evan pre-op, but the effect was probably limited since I was non-weight-bearing for 30 days before surgery.

Only time will tell whether this helps. But it does make my quads feel like I’m trying to squat 150 pounds while doing the simplest movements. I often can’t make it through a full round before my muscles fail, I’m gasping for breath, and my leg turns an unnerving shade of purple. The purple means it’s working, right!?

A tip I recently received from Kendall (one of two women who finished the Iditarod Trail Invitational on a bike last month) is Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation, or NMES. NMES uses electrical impulses delivered via skin electrodes to trigger muscle contractions. There’s good clinical evidence that this helps improve strength, reduce atrophy, and enhance range of motion. Often, after knee surgery, quad muscles stop firing as a reflexive reaction to swelling, pain, and damage. I seem to have reasonable firing even in my weakest (medial) quad, but NMES is also something that can help keep this going while reducing muscle atrophy.

This device arrived just yesterday, so it’s very new to me. I’ve tried it on both legs and learned I need to use a much higher setting to generate similar contractions in my left leg than in my right. So it seems there is already some muscle deterioration, or perhaps nerve damage? I intend to ask my PT about the discrepancy. The sensation is strange — pulsing electric zaps that stimulate involuntary contractions in the medial and lateral quadriceps. It is not comfortable. It is borderline painful.

Kendall said I should set the amplitude to just below the maximum I can tolerate. What does that mean? I am still trying to figure it out. Yesterday, I turned the dials until I reached a setting where I could no longer concentrate on what I was reading — I just had to sit back, close my eyes, and endure.

Today, I decided to try an even higher setting. Pop! Pop! Pop! Something about that extra zap induced perverse excitement that made me want more. Stupid leg, you think that hurts? I’ll show you. I quickly recognized this impulse as not good and turned the settings back to yesterday’s level. I see this starting to creep in, and I know I can’t give in to it, but it’s there … self-harm.

I’m just so mad at my body right now. It betrayed me without a modicum of warning — aren’t knees supposed to at least hurt before they explode? This knee took away the thing I love most — moving myself through the world. Now I feel trapped. A prisoner in my own body. And of course, I know it can be so much worse. Of course, I know this won’t last forever. But I don’t see how I can ever go back to where I was before.

I had anxiety about mountain biking for years after taking a bad header and ripping open my elbow. One could say I never got over it. The memory of the pain and the anxiety about riding technical trails still triggers me in a way it never did before the injury — and that happened in 2011. Fear and pain stay with me. My knee betrayed me, and I’m never going to trust it again. I can’t trust the right one either, since that has been my bad knee for as long as I’ve been active. The sharp pain I felt while bike touring across the country in 2003, four months of recovery from chondromalacia patella in 2007, a torn MCL in 2013 — all in my right knee! I

I’ve been trying to figure out where I went wrong with my left knee. I remembered that last summer my knee was being weird — not painful, but “wobbly” and sometimes it would feel as though it was about to lock up while I was running. I thought maybe that was my torn meniscus … maybe it was loose in there all along, and the Feb. 13 long run was just the final tear. But no. I couldn’t remember the knee that was causing me problems. I went back to reference my Strava posts, and my summer 2025 problems were in my right knee, too:

Anyway, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before the other shoe drops. Literally. And I know, I shouldn’t be so fatalistic, but seriously, how can I trust my body?! A year from now, I can picture myself second-guessing every single outdoor activity I want to do, because how will I get myself out of the backcountry if either one of my knees fails?

I know I’ll have to figure it out one way or the other. I don’t want to live the rest of my life in fear of my own body. But I can already tell it’s going to be a mental battle that will go far beyond my physical “back to normal.” And they don’t make devices that can help me with knee anxiety … just time, determination, and therapists.

Meanwhile, Anton is just bopping along, reminding me that moose never worry themselves with these useless hypotheticals. Nature demands they move through each day with confidence, and if any part of them fails, well … mountain lions are here to take care of that.

Don’t worry about me. I am just having another moment with my anger. Weekends are harder for me than weekdays, because it seems everyone I know is out having fun in the sun while I am stuck at home. Easter Sunday was especially hard because it’s unquestionably spring, my airplane window is open to the abstract landscape far below, and all I can see is the world passing me by.

I want to strive to be more like Anton, more Zen about the harsh realities of life. Just go through my day and do the best I can, and be grateful that I haven’t been eaten by a mountain lion. But I’m not going to give up my supplements and devices, which give my flawed human mind and sense of moving forward, while my flawed human body is forced to stand still.

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(P.S. Thank you to all who have been sending me messages through my coffee link. I have not found a way to reply — some come through anonymously, and there’s no contact link. But I am grateful for them all. I’m sorry I haven’t responded! I don’t mean to be rude, I just can’t figure out how.)

I feel like I want to apologize to the many millions of people living with a disability or chronic illness. I’m sorry that I ever made myself out to be some sort of hero because I participated in silly endurance races. I’m sorry that I used words like “suffering” and “agony” to describe mundane discomforts. I’m sorry for smug cheerleading phrases like “Mind over matter” and “You’re as strong as you think you are.” I’m sorry for all of the ableist narratives I helped perpetuate because I thought I was not special — that if I could do it, anyone could do it. I was absolutely special. Health is a privilege that makes everything exponentially easier. My “100-mile epic battle” was the equivalent of a day of errands for you. I couldn’t conceptualize the dynamic before, but I can now. And I’m sorry.

I have been all kinds of grumpy about life on crutches as I awkwardly ambulate around the plate into week eight of this existence. In theory, I only have three and a half more weeks of total dependence on this modality. But freedom feels farther away than it ever has. In this state, everything about life is hard. Everything. Going to the bathroom at night when it’s dark and I’m a little out of sorts is downright scary. I wake up in the morning and remember the effort it takes to make coffee and breakfast, and I think, “How much do I really need caffeine and food?”

This morning, I decided to skip that step, only to end up reeling with low energy, precariously wedged between the world’s heaviest coffee shop door and a seemingly hurricane-force gust of wind at 10 a.m. A nice man came to my rescue, and I was able to procure a most delicious cup of black coffee and botanical sparkling water to enjoy with my protein bar. This coffee was a gift from a reader who is two years out from major knee surgery and gets it. She wrote:

“I too thought I'd take the time after surgery and "chill out" and "do low-key hobbies" and then I realized it took all my energy just to feed myself (standing in front of the fridge since I couldn't carry things), crutching around, and do my rehab exercises.”

Thank you, Dani. I was ready to crutch into traffic after my Friday morning PT and took a reckless safety risk with that coffee shop door, but that cup of coffee saved me for another day. Thank you to all of the folks who have sent me nice messages through my coffee link. I’m sorry I haven’t responded. I’m a little tech-dumb, and I’m not sure it’s possible to do so through the site, but I have very much appreciated them all.

Besides coffee shop doors, another unexpected safety risk I’ve been dealing with this week is a young bull moose that Beat and I have taken to calling “Anton.” About a week ago, Anton decided to make the open space surrounding our home his own. He’s been all over our Ring cameras and outside our windows, napping in the sunshine and stripping our lilac bushes of all of their budding leaves. This year’s green-up is extremely early.

Anton seems to be a fairly chill moose, but it’s not like you can rely on a moose’s outward demeanor to determine how likely they are to stomp you. On Thursday morning, I placed a grocery order and casually crutched to the front door, only to meet Anton’s unnervingly enormous face less than 10 feet away in the driveway. I closed the door, crutched back to the couch, and waited for 10 minutes before trying again. He was still there, now near the gate and blocking my only exit.

Under normal circumstances, I’d feel confident in my ability to calmly walk from my front door to my car and get inside before a moose could react from 45 feet away. But these are not normal circumstances. While injured, I am extremely vulnerable to any exterior threats. I couldn’t outrun an angry beetle. Mind you, even in my best shape, I am not capable of outrunning a grumpy moose. But there is something especially unsettling about being limited to one leg that makes me feel like I am always minutes away from an animal or human attack. I am completely unwilling to go out at night or in a storm right now.

Thirty minutes later, Anton had moved to the daffodils. He was scratching his scraggly winter coat on tree branches and sniffing curiously at the flowers. After 45 minutes, I wondered if I should cancel my grocery order and stay home. I poked my head out the door. “Hey!” I said, loudly but not unkindly. “I just need to hobble over there to my car. Do you mind very much scootching out of the way so I can’t see you? Just for a minute? That’s all I need.”

Anton flicked his enormous ears back and forth and regarded me. I could not make out any emotion on his face. Grumpy? Bemused? Murderous? But after another minute of standoff, he seemed to shrug and lumber away. What followed was some of the most nimble and fast crutching I’ve managed to accomplish.

Today — Friday, April 3, seven weeks since injury — Beat had to do the stern talking to scootch Anton away from my car so I could leave for my physical therapy appointment. It went reasonably well. I’m unnerverd by how swollen my knee still is, but I’m achieving the range of motion I need and have no problem completing the prescribed exercises. The PT gave me a few more exercises to work on my weaknesses — knee extension and calf flexibility. Doing all of these twice a day now adds up to nearly 90 minutes of PT alone. Why did I think injury would gift me more time for books and movies? I have less free time than ever.

Still, I am getting stronger with my limited non-PT exercises, and this makes me more eager to do them. After coffee, I headed to the gym for a third time this week. While doing the one-legged rowing machine, I caught sight of my shoulder muscles in the mirror — something I hadn’t noticed before because I am usually wearing baggy T-shirts. There was real muscle definition there — a nice curving shape along my upper arms and even a little bulge through my biceps. Not that I’ve even done that much lifting in the past seven weeks, but crutching apparently builds strength. It will be interesting to see what my body composition looks like at the end of this. Chicken legs and swole lats? One can dream.

While rowing, a young woman, probably mid-20s, walked up to me and motioned. I pulled down my headphones.

“I just want to say that you’re amazing,” she said. “I’m ten weeks out from knee surgery and here trying to do my rehab. I wasn’t anywhere near that level when I was in a brace.”

She, like every other stranger who has struck up a conversation about my knee brace, immediately assumed I had torn my ACL while skiing. “No, I was just running. I tore my meniscus.”

I asked how she injured her knee. “Oh, I tore everything. ACL, MCL, LCL. And I was just babysitting. Took a weird step or something.”

I was perplexed by this description. How does a young woman tear her entire knee apart without a major fall … even if she was chasing kids around? I thought I was unlucky for tearing through my entire meniscus without so much as tripping at age 46. I’m embarrassed about it. I like that people assume I’m a skier. But her story was … amazing. I grinned.

“Wow, that’s rough. How’s the recovery going?”

“Oh, pretty good. Really trying to get back into it. I just want to say that you’re my inspiration.”

Typically, I do not like being called inspirational or amazing. It’s always meant well, but it’s hard not to take it as condescending. Still, I was immediately rooting for this woman and her knee recovery. I thanked her. “I appreciate you saying that. I’m trying to do what I can.”

I spent 90 minutes at the gym today. After my conversation with the young woman, three other people approached me about getting after it on crutches. It’s funny, because I’ve been going to this gym regularly since I was injured, and I haven’t yet had near this level of interaction with strangers. There’s one guy who works Saturdays who compliments my efforts and asks me how many pullups I can do now (still zero) … and that’s it. Maybe something changed in my demeanor today. A kind of quiet determination that I wasn’t projecting before.

My therapist has been trying to help me reframe my injury by comparing it to an endurance race. I’m at mile 30 of a 100-miler, and I’m already so tired and sore, and I still have so far to go. “Don’t think about the finish line,” she tells me. “Just think about the mile you’re in. Just get through this mile.”

“Don’t think about the finish line” is a common piece of advice to help people get through tough spots in a race. The problem is, I too easily see through it. A major knee injury is not a race. There’s no finish line. I may recover to a good degree, but much of this is a lifelong impact. And how long that recovery will take is up in the air. If I make a mistake, I could be whisked back to mile 0 in a heartbeat. And everything about this is much harder than running. I have been in pain and felt weak during my races, but it’s never been to this degree. It’s never been so consistently hard, day after day after day. This is why I have so much more respect for people who must live with these sorts of limitations. I respect them, and I look to them for wisdom. I have no guarantees that I won’t join them someday … that I haven’t joined them already.

That is why I’ve been doing better with the mantra that my friend Jorge taught me, the pessimist’s key to getting through the most heinous storms on the Iditarod Trail: “This will never end.” The finish line is too nebulous, too far away. To think about it, to hope for it, will just make every moment of the storm harder. But if there’s no finish? Then I have to learn how to live with this. It sucks, but I can adapt. I can go to the gym and pull my heart out with one leg strapped into the rowing machine. I can take pride in my shoulder muscles. I can sweet-talk a moose that I’ll never be able to outrun.

I just need to work on not getting caught in coffee shop doors.

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Over the weekend, I had several breakthroughs in my 6.5-week-long existence with a disabling medial meniscus tear and surgical repair. I’m driving again, I’m doing small chores around the house, I returned to the gym, and I even managed a couple of short sessions of one-legged pedaling on my Zwift bike.

On Saturday, my mom returned to Utah after doing almost everything for me for 10 days, so I’ve been thrown back into the scrum of managing my own life on crutches. It’s been frustrating. At least before surgery, I could still put weight on my locked knee, although I paid for it with pain. Without that ability, the smallest things have become even more time-consuming and exhausting. I wore a heart-rate monitor while cleaning up the kitchen and averaged 120 beats per minute, which is about the level of cardiovascular effort I put in on the rowing machine when using just one leg. I’ve already broken two dishes, stepped on a shard of glass with my good foot, and rotated through most of my clean shorts after spilling things on myself. But I haven’t fallen … yet. Small victories.

Most notably, the sharp knee pain and leg soreness that I’ve been living with since mid-February have almost entirely disappeared. Finally, I seem to be on a road to healing. I thought this breakthrough — the loss of chronic pain — would be all I needed to be happy again. Surprisingly, or maybe unsurprisingly, I’ve struggled more with despondency in the past few days. There is something to be said about pain being extremely grounding, forcing our minds to slow down and stay focused on the present.

As pain released its grip, my focus expanded outward toward the future. It’s been hard to face. Every new ability brought a temporary spark of joy, only to be crushed by knowledge of the many more things I can’t do. The orthoepdic center sent my physical therapy protocol through week 16, which crushed any hopes I had of hiking in the Alps in August. Week 16 will only bring the tentative beginning of my return to activity, and that will come in July. And that’s only if everything goes well with my very strict recovery protocol. July! I try to soothe myself with reminders that three months ago today was the day I got frostbite in Alaska, and that wasn’t so long ago, and even that healed (thank goodness. It was my right foot.) But then I’ll marvel at this unbelievable truth, because Dec. 31 already feels like a lifetime ago.

One thing that’s been bringing me life is an episode recently released by Scotty at Ten Junk Miles. I used to listen to this running podcast regularly from 2018 to 2020. Scotty and his gang became my virtual buddies, accompanying me on my long meanders in the mountains. The “Long Run” interviews could clock in at four hours — yet they were effortlessly entertaining. I downloaded at least 60 hours of back episodes to listen to when I was out on the Iditarod Trail in 2020. But after a difficult experience in Alaska created hard associations, and the 2020 pandemic massively disrupted my routines, I drifted away and never went back. Over the next few years, I let go of most of my consumption of sports-related media and stopped following endurance sports in general (my Iditarod obsession notwithstanding). There is just too much happening in the world to care about Western States anymore. But I’ll confess that I miss being a fan … although mostly what I miss are those carefree years of the 2010s (le sigh.)

But back to Ten Junk Miles. I recently saw a post from Scotty about returning to jogging after a meniscus repair in August. Wanting to learn more, I clicked on his podcast page and saw he had just released a Long Run episode with Cory Reece.

Cory is one of those folks with whom I feel connected, even though we haven’t met. We’re a similar age with a similar background — Utahns with an LDS upbringing. We’ve written memoirs about our unlikely participation in endurance sports. We love music, redrocks, and running, even though we emphatically lack talent. In 2016, I helped Cory edit his first book, “Nowhere Near First.” At the time, he was a fairly well-known personality in the sport. He had big-name sponsors. He was all over social media with his colorful Southern Utah jumping photos, or sharing another nutty adventure like running 100 miles at sea on the deck of the Ruby Princess Cruise Ship. He was, as Scotty called him, “Like running herpes. He’s everywhere. You can’t get rid of him.”

But amid the disruptions of 2020, Cory seemed to quietly walk away. Later, he revealed that he had been dealing with debilitating depression amid a faith crisis and the onset of an autoimmune disease that wrecked his immune system. In 2021, he released another memoir that was a world away from his humorous debut. This book, “Stronger Than the Dark: Exploring the Intimate Relationship Between Running and Depression,” came out the same week my dad died. I had already downloaded it, but it took me months to pick it up. I admit I haven’t retained many specifics from that muddled year in my life, but I do remember Cory’s book lifted me through a particularly dark time.

The Ten Junk Miles interview follows up on what Cory’s been doing since his 2021 book release — which, for the most part, is not running. He’s dabbled here and there, even recently running an ultra with his daughter. But after his battle with depression, he further deconstructed his relationship with running and realized it hadn’t been healthy. It had been a way to override his body, which had been his way of coping since his father died by suicide when he was 14. He was good at overriding his body, and this fueled him to seek out more and more. But over time, with his nervous system blown out and the demons creeping in, he realized that he had never been able to outrun himself.

“I could run one 100 miler one weekend and then run another 100 miler the next weekend,” he said. “It became an asset, an attribute to just be able to override my body. … I’m not going to override my body anymore. I’m actually going to rebuild my relationship with my body, reconnect with myself.

“I’ve spent so much of my life being hard on myself to achieve things ... and now, I just want to be nice to me.”

Scotty: “Do you think you had an unhealthy relationship with running?

Cory: “Yes.”

Scotty: “If you could go back, is there anything you would change?

Cory: (Long pause) “No.”

I could quote the transcript from the 2-hour podcast for days, but I’m going to try to keep this post (relatively) succinct. I’ll just say that I very much relate to Cory’s journey. My future in endurance sports is also very much in question. Currently, this reality feels cruel because it’s a choice I didn’t make. But I also have to be honest about the ways I’ve waivered back and forth since 2020: Is my relationship with running and ultracycling unhealthy? Should I step away? I so value the experiences I’ve had in endurance sports, but I also acknowledge a long roster of painful mistakes and life-changing setbacks. I wouldn’t change anything, though, because I wouldn’t be who I am without it. But who will I become without it? How will I cope with the despair of the world?

Like Cory, I use running to ground my mind in the present. Running works with an effectiveness that even cycling hasn’t quite been able to attain. When I’m intensely in my own body, I can escape the gyrating ruminations and existential despair that often haunt me. Running helps remove my mind from thoughts that are more painful than running — that, I’ve discovered through this injury, can be more painful than pain. Cory touches on his efforts to seek mindfulness and presence through other means, such as music. He also confesses how hard this can be.

“Can you develop that type of focus, that type of mindfulness in your everyday life without being in the middle of the race? And that’s what I’ve tried to focus on — just being here in the present, being here now. And that’s really fucking hard. I get why they call it a spiritual practice because it’s really hard.”

This continues to be my goal for these interminable weeks of body limitations — trying to stay grounded and present even when I can only use the weakest part of my body: My mind. Watching the birds from the balcony. Lying on the floor with my brace off and listening to music. For weeks, I have intended to start drawing again. But for now, I have to spend most of my time on work, PT, and breaking things in my kitchen. Maybe this weekend …

Also this week, I received a lovely message from a Canadian woman, Kirsty, who lives in a remote town in the Yukon. She’s sent supportive messages about my winter races for years, but she has continued to follow my injury posts and stories about my late friend Betsy. She was walking along a popular path in Whitehorse over the weekend when she came across a “grief tree.” People had tied ribbons on the branches of a birch tree to remember lost loved ones. She thought of me and tied a ribbon for my friend. She shared this picture and an image of a poem posted near the grief tree:

“For when we feel our frailty,
How can we not respond?
And reach to hold another’s hand,
And feel the common bond?”

I broke down bawling when I read this. Kirsty told me that on April 3, the ribbons will be taken to a local church and read in a prayer during an Easter service. Betsy would have loved this. She so loved the Far North.

So thanks, Kirsty, for making a hard day better. And thanks, Mom, for spending 10 more days with me after Lisa left, even though I didn’t think I’d need that much help and tried to talk you out of such a long stay. I needed you. Your help meant everything. I miss you already.

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Gavan marched into Nome last night, wrapping up a 32-day journey across 960 miles of cold and snow. His final day was a 15-hour, 45-mile nonstop march along the frozen Bering Sea. The scenery was a flat, white expanse, and the weather was in the 20s with a slight breeze and overcast — the Iditarod Trail equivalent of being trapped in a sensory deprivation chamber.

You might think he’d be relieved after so many days of intense cold and wind to have relatively easy sailing into the finish. But the tedium can be unbearable. I laughed at the Instagram videos Gavan posted from Nome, narrating the monotony in his delightful Irish accent.

“Ugggh. Just fuckin whiteout. Low light, flat light, whatever you call it. Some sea ice there. And the misery is such that I would like for a fuckin polar bear to just come off the ice now and fuckin maul me, and that will be the end of it. Just need to get to Cape Nome. There are a few alder bushes there, just to make life a bit easier, just to see something. Fuckin misery.”

I laughed out loud at the polar bear comment because I can deeply relate. Last night, I mused to Beat about how sick I am of my left leg, of the pain, of having to drag the useless thing around everywhere I go, and how I’d like to have it lopped off and replaced with one of those prosthetic blades. Beat chided me for hyperbole, but sometimes you need to vent frustration. I’ve been on crutches for six weeks. I can’t even stand and use my hands at the same time, unless I’m balancing on one leg, which is super precarious. I have to carry things around my house in grocery bags draped around my neck, and this is how it’s been for six weeks. I am done. Yet not even close to done. Still, replacing all of my messy human parts with bionic parts would in itself be a long, painful process. Getting through life in a deteriorating body is something most of us have to do, and I can’t help but ask why. If this were prehistoric times, nature would have solved this problem for me a long time ago. Sometimes, late at night, a swift end by polar bear doesn’t sound like the worst outcome.

Then I wake up to a new morning and start looking for those alder bushes. There continue to be frequent flickers of joy and beauty to break up the monotony, to make life a bit easier, to keep on keeping on. Yesterday, I went with my mom to see the memorial bench that Betsy’s husband Josh had installed for her at the park near his house. Betsy and I shared many nice moments in this park after she became too weak and unstable to be able to walk much farther, which was most of the last four months of her life.

Getting to this bench was tougher than I anticipated. I’m 10 days post-surgery and thought I had much of my pre-surgery strength and energy back, but I was wrong. Plus, it was 85 degrees, and I essentially haven’t been outside in six weeks. The sun is kryptonite for me right now. Mom pulled up to a parking spot where I determined it was impossible to get out of the car without tipping over, so she drove me to a dip in the curb.

I crutched along the hot cement, feeling out of sorts and feverish. I had to concentrate hard and be mindful of every crutch placement, a technique my (head) therapist encouraged to help me feel less anxious about moving my unforgivably fragile left leg through the unpredictable world. I thought back to all of the times Betsy and I walked across the park, my arm linked around hers to help stabilize her unweildy right side. I moved my crutches over the grass and remembered how she used to take off her shoes and walk barefoot here, to feel the grass through her toes, to feel something real.

The connection I felt with Betsy in this moment was intense. The sensation almost convinced me she was walking beside me, propping up my unwieldy left side. The bench and its message were lovely; even Mom became emotional. I wanted to sit here with Mom for hours, but the sun seared my pale winter skin, and my feverishness deepened. Worried about becoming more wobbly, I conceded defeat and announced it was time to leave.

We bought a giant icy drink and some lunch, after which I felt strong enough to face “Mean PT” for our second post-op session. For her lack of bedside manner, Mean PT has been incredibly motivating for me. After our abysmal session on March 19, I wanted to prove to her I can be strong. I dutifully did all of my prescribed exercises and added in a bit of core work. By March 26, I was able to do everything she asked with good form, and even got my knee flexation to 90 degrees.

“I don’t need to measure that,” she proclaimed. I beamed. Gold star!

She’s still critical of my calf tightness, so that’s something to work on this week. I’m also planning to return to the gym for upper-body weight-lifting on the circuit machines, and possibly some one-legged rowing machine, although I’ll have to see what my energy allows. The crutch across the park revealed that I don’t have a lot of “fitness” or strength to work with right now, which is hugely humbling. I continue to feel like a stranger in my own body, and I’m trying to work out the best ways to reconcile that. Push harder? Or let go?

Betsy and I took our final walk together on July 2, 2025. She was in a wheelchair at that point, having lost all movement in her right leg. Her husband and I had to lift and shove her wheelchair down a steep set of porch stairs, which caused her to cry out in fear. I thought we were handling it well and wasn’t very compassionate about her feelings at the time, but I better understand now. It is terrifying to hand over all control of your body and personal safety when you have little strength to help yourself. Beat and I have been scheming ways to get me up on our bike trainer at home, so I can ride one-legged. So far, all ideas involve him lifting me at the waist and holding my balance as I grab the handlebars, click into the pedal, and swing my braced leg around the back of the bike. I don’t know. One-legged-biking is stupid anyway, right? I’m so scared.

But back to July 2. I pushed Betsy’s wheelchair to the sidewalk and took her the long way around to the park. I’d been out of town for a couple of weeks, so I proclaimed how excited I was to see her again.

“Why are you glad to see me? I can’t do anything anymore.”

I had missed the last “good weeks” of Betsy’s life. Her 20-month decline took a sharp downward turn just days earlier. She was deep in the throes of processing her own death — not just understanding and accepting it, but mourning it. She had no energy or interest in my useless platitudes about the next great adventure or what a beautiful day it was. We spent much of our last walk together in silence. She occasionally emerged from her stupor to mention the smell of fresh-cut grass or the warmth of the sun on her arms. In hindsight, I think she was making that effort for me. These were her gestures toward the land of the living, which I still occupied. But she’d already embarked on the journey beyond, moving through the flat white expanse — the liminal space between life and death.

On December 23, 2023, Betsy wrote a short post on her CaringBridge site that has stuck with me. Her initial decline was rapid after she was diagnosed with brain cancer in mid-November, before several cutting-edge treatments gave her another decent year-plus.

She wrote: “Every day I have watched the light slowly escape from my usually bright self. I’ve been sleeping more, I have been steadily losing all the parts of my body that used to work. I can barely walk, I’m constantly dizzy, I can’t feel most of my right side anymore. I want to cry but the tears don’t even come anymore.

Being in a state of total humility is hard physically, mentally, and emotionally.”

I want to be clear that I in no way equate my knee injury with Betsy’s cancer. But I do feel much more empathy for her journey, feelings that I didn’t understand as well when I effortlessly occupied the land of the living. That state of total humility — I think I understand. It is the prompt, the hard reset, that sets us on the necessary path of letting go.

I have much I need to work on letting go. But for the moment, for today, it’s the Iditarod. I know it’s silly. But it’s been a great distraction. Now it’s over. No more kindred spirits pushing through the blank, white expanse of Alaska. No more dots to follow when I’m awake in the night. No more Instagram stories about the excitement of alder bushes that only exhausted walkers on the Iditarod Trail — or half-bedridden injured people — can appreciate. Their tedious march is done. Mine goes on. But I know I’m lucky for it.

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I’m lying here awake at 5:30 a.m., thinking about Gavan all alone on the windswept coast of western Alaska. He’s been chipping away at a thousand miles for a month now, during Alaska’s coldest March in decades. When he left Anchorage, darkness persisted for 15 hours. He’s since gained over four hours of daylight, and the sun is still up at 9 p.m. The spring equinox came and went, and the persistent 40-below nights gave way to bluebird days in the 20s. The race came and went — from the whirwind start with 115 others, to keeping pace with the eventual 300-mile winner, to languishing for 10 days in 50-below bivies and cluttered tool sheds, to breaking through to the Yukon in a blast of sled dog teams, to a 500-mile battle with a cutoff that he would eventually concede to the North Wind and its terrifying windchill.

Now the cutoff has come and gone. The ITI directors announced the race was over and ceased official reporting. And Gavan’s still out there, with just under 100 miles to go as the accelerating melt of spring clamps down like a vice. He’s hardly stopped moving since the race “ended.” He’s up with me at 3:30 a.m. Alaska time, pressing through the darkness and possibly marveling at this incredible spread of Northern Lights that I have been watching from my couch on the Fairbanks Aurora Cam. I am reminded of a Cake song that was all over the radio when I was in high school.

As they speed through the finish, the flags go down
The fans get up and they get out of town
The arena is empty except for one man
Still driving and striving as fast as he can

Gavan’s not even off the trail yet, and the signups for next year’s race begin in just a few days. Beat reminded me. He’ll sign up, of course. He’s not going to let the disappointment of pulling out of this year’s race with a respiratory illness be his last experience on the Iditarod Trail. He’d rather be out there with Gavan right now, and continues to believe that pushing forward as he had in 2015 could have gotten them both to Nome in time. But it doesn’t matter, because that’s not what happened. The odds don’t always work out in our favor. It seems they usually don’t. But sometimes they do. This week has been especially unnerving in this regard.

Within a couple of hours on Sunday night, I received two unnerving calls. First was from my sister about our cousin, who was admitted to the ICU with an inexplicable brain bleed. She’s healthy, in her mid-40s, but she’s been experiencing occasional excruciating headaches since she took a fall at work and hit her head in mid-January. The bleed is new, though, and even her brain surgeon is baffled by its cause. She’s still in the hospital, but she’s progressing well, and it seems likely she’ll make a full recovery. Still, there were an upsetting few hours in there, and it was in the midst of this worry that I received a cryptic e-mail from a friend.

“I had a crazy day today. I was in a plane crash.” — That was pretty much all of the information she shared until I insisted she call me at 11 p.m.

No, it wasn’t the LaGuardia plane crash. It was a small plane crash. I think that’s all I can divulge, as she’s decided to keep her experience on the down-low for reasons I don’t fully understand. But she managed to walk away almost completely unscathed.

I’m a little mad at my friend right now. Because, like my cousin in January, she has decided she is fine and opted not to get checked out. My choices also trend toward not seeking medical attention. In October 2021, a man in a Ford F250 hit me with his sideview mirror while I was riding my bike up Flagstaff Road. At the time, I also was thrilled to be alive, grateful providence had granted me that crucial 4 inches to have the mirror hit me rather than his front bumper and tire — he didn’t see me at all. But I’ve since been disappointed in the way I managed that incident. I never held the driver to account and ended up with a back injury that bothered me for months, and still arguably does to this day. I wanted my friend to be more proactive about her health. Still, since learning more about the mechanics of the crash, I acknowledge that she probably is actually fine. I’m still mad, but I also acknowledge that my anger stems from jealousy. She walked away from a plane crash, and I can’t even go for a run without exploding one of my knees.

Beat thinks I should cope with my non-weight-bearing melancholy by signing up for the 2027 Iditarod Trail Invitational with him. I’d literally have to decide this week, when I haven’t even done a real exercise session in nearly six weeks, and I have five more to go before I can even stand on my two feet. And anyway, I retired from the Iditarod Trail in 2022 for good reason. Before that wet and wild year, I realized in 2020 that walking to Nome in 30 days was likely always going to be outside my wheelhouse. Even putting this meniscus tear aside, my abilities have only gone downhill since 2020. Yet walking to Nome was the only thing left I wanted to do with this endeavor.

There was a time, and it wasn’t that long ago, when I was so optimistic about my future in sport. Pre-registrations for the 2026 Tor des Geants opened up on February 1, and Beat teased me about throwing my name in the lottery. And you know what — I did. There are only two athletic achievements that I want badly, and both feel so close to the edge of my capabilities that failure seems inevitable — walking to Nome, and finishing Tor330. I attempted the Tor des Geants in 2014 and failed at 200K after a fall caused a left knee (LCL) injury. Like Nome, Tor has only continued to slip farther from my grasp. A baffling 12 years have passed. But there was a time, and it wasn’t that long ago, that I felt Tor might be in reach again, enough to plunk down 10 euros and wait for the draw.

I didn’t get in. Thank goodness. That would have messed with my head in ways I’m not ready to manage. Now I sit here, nearly six weeks into using crutches that I swore I’d throw away on day four, and my future in sport is deeply uncertain. Sure, my medical providers are optimistic, and my prognosis is better than average for this type of injury. I accept this optimism with gratitude. But I also need to be prepared for the other possibilities — that I won’t run again, that I’ll no longer be able to endure hikes with lots of vert, or long snow slogs. And maybe I will, but maybe it will take years. I certainly don’t want to bet big money ($1,900!) on the 2027 ITI.

My friend’s reaction to surviving a plane crash has been to sign up for all of the things. “I think as we are getting older and experiencing more loss and pain and injury we know we have to fucking get after it when and if we can.”

I completely agree. I agreed before my knee blew up, and I agree now. I watched my friend Betsy decline rapidly and know that life is short and comes at you fast. My sister acknowledged that mortality hits differently in our 40s. We’ve lost our dad, we’ve lost friends, and we’ve watched injuries and unexpected setbacks drastically alter lives that seemed bulletproof 10 years ago. My perspective on mortality hasn’t so much changed as deepened. I used to view our experience of life as black and white, life and death. But there is so much nuance in between — pieces of ourselves that wither and fall, deeply held identities that are suddenly ripped from our grasp, seismic events that forever alter our course, losses that accumulate, loves that fade, a thousand little deaths to mourn before we actually die.

Cake’s “The Distance” is a song about not knowing when to quit. A racecar driver pursues achievement at the cost of all other things in his life, including the woman he loves. She’s trying to forget him as he’s “racing and pacing and plotting the course.” The world has gone home, and he’s still driving forward. “The Distance” was one of my high school bops, and I long viewed this as a motivational song. I used to put it on playlists for my races. But now, I’m not so sure. What even is achievement? What are we striving for in this life?

I wonder what motivates Gavan right now. He’s nearly to the village of White Mountain at 8:45 Alaska time (I did snag a couple more hours of sleep and came back to finish this post.) He’s got about 80 more miles to go and favorable weather ahead. Soon he’ll be done, and I’ll still be here in this same place. I’m genuinely concerned about how I’ll cope when this race is finally over.

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The 2026 White Mountains 100 started this morning. This is the race I had been planning to run and training for until my knee blew up on February 13. It seems so strange that this was only five weeks ago. In this short period of time, my body has been forced to adapt to pain and immobility, and my brain has so radically adjusted my perspective and expectations that ultrarunning now feels like a thing I used to do a long time ago. I’m wistful for the good times I had running, but I don’t yearn for it in the way I expected to. Like how I used to snowboard when I was a teenager — it feels that far away.

But I can tell that for the first time in five weeks, my pain has begun to subside for real. Sure, the post-op soreness is still there, especially after I do my PT exercises. But the way I can tell my pain is dying is that I already feel a small spark of FOMO about the race I am missing out on. All month it’s been, “Endurace racing hurts and choosing to hurt is the stupidest thing ever; everyone should withdraw from the White Mountains 100.” But now I look at the list of people who withdrew before the start and think, “You people are crazy. You have working bodies that can do almost anything you want. Why would you toss that gift aside as though you can try again next year? What if you can’t?”

The White Mountains 100 typically has 85 starters and a long waitlist of people vying to get in up until the last minute. This year, they burned through their wait list, and fewer than 60 people started. The reason for the high DNS rate: Apparently, many Fairbanksians on the roster are sick of the cold winter, and it’s been windy and snowy, so the trail is likely to be slow. Which is fair. But now I feel especially disappointed because I am a master slogger! This could have been my year to shine! All of the other women on foot dropped out, so I would have only had to finish to win! Sigh.

But again, running is an echo from a more distant past, and it’s still not hard to see it that way. In my more recent past, haunting me with such intensity that I’ve been dreaming about it, are the three weeks in July 2025 that I spent helping with caretaking for my friend Betsy — the span of time between her becoming fully bedridden and her death on July 22. Although being homebound with a knee injury and dying from brain cancer aren’t even in the same hemisphere of experience, I feel like I am seeing the world from something a little closer to her perspective — strength and abilities diminished, pain encompassing, the world closed off to me, the world moving on without me.

I shared some beautiful moments with Betsy last July — moments of simple joy and gratitude for the beauty that is around us always, not just when we’re using our bodies to move through the world. But most of that experience was difficult and painful, and my mental health took a big hit. I was much more down in August than I’ve been recently, rattled with unfocused anger and intrusive ruminations about why any of us bother with anything in this life. I was able to fight off the darkness fairly quickly with the help of a healing hiking trip in Wyoming before my birthday and a trip to France in September.

I’m not in the darkness now, but I am questioning why my brain has become so fixated on July. It makes sense that living in a semi-bedridden state would remind me of caring for Betsy. But the memories are becoming a little too visceral. I am doing what I do with any source of pain — acknowledging it, sitting with it, reminding it that this is just a story. I don’t have to take that story at face value; I can choose to look beyond.

The memory that haunts me is those last moments I spent with her — a hot afternoon on July 21, 2025. The day before she died. She had forgotten who I was about a week earlier. She seemed to no longer understand who most people were, although she did acknowledge the presence of her mother and children. She’d lost her ability to move any part of her body, even the left arm that she’d retained control of through her deepening paralysis. Her eyesight was gone, her voice gone, her hearing nearly gone. All she had left was her pain. I sat by her side, holding her cold, bony hand as her face contorted into horrifying expressions. The CGI that horror movies use to depict people in unspeakable pain doesn’t come close to the twisting terror on Betsy’s face. She started mouthing something that we couldn’t make out, until it became apparent that she was trying to say “Help me, help me,” over and over and over.

Help me. Help me. Help me.

And there was nothing we could do to help her. Nothing at all. Although hindsight had us all — her unqualified and inexperienced friends and family — questioning how we handled her pain medications throughout her hospice at home, ultimately, in that moment, we were out of options. We had to watch her suffer. Since witnessing this, I swear I’ll never call anything I do “suffering” again, although memory is short and I’ve fought off my share of self-pity in the past month. Betsy died the next morning, and “help me” may well have been her last words. Silent words. But I hear them, somehow, in my dreams. They’ve been tormenting me this week.

So I’ve been bringing Betsy back into my realm, imagining that we’re in this space together. She’s in her wheelchair, I’m on my crutches, and we’re moving at a snail’s pace along Stadley Lake, watching the geese. The air is calm, not too warm, and we’re happy. She’s not in pain anymore. I’m not either.

It’s meaningful that I can scour my Google Photos memories and see that this is exactly what we were doing at this time last year — walking along Stadley Lake with our friend Erika. I was even on a fucking crutch! Why was I using a crutch? Oh, that’s right, because I tore a muscle in my left shin in a fall while racing the 2025 White Mountains 100. My physical therapist Sue lent me the crutches to aid in healing. This time, I’m using her ice machine, knee pillow, shower chair, and smart cuffs. Sue has had my back for years — which reminds me that I am injured a lot of the time. Memory is funny about shutting out the pain to keep us focused on the good times, to make sure we believe that it is worth bothering with anything in this life. March 28, 2025, was a good day:

As I write this, the four cyclists in the Iditarod Trail Invitational are nearly to Nome, just about 5 miles of paved road left to go. They’ll reach the finish just under the 28-day mark — I call this post “day 29” because “day one” started at 2 p.m. Alaska time February 22, and I’ve been going off that count from the start. And Gavan is making his way across the sea ice, now quite alone out there but still pressing forward. I’ll write more about their finish in my next post. Thank you for following along on my injury journey. It has been helpful to keep journaling about it in a way that can reach others, so I feel a little less alone.

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A couple of days ago, French cyclist Erick Basset wrote about talking to his 11-year-old son on the phone. His son asked whether he felt afraid as he faced the usual North Winds of Alaska’s western coast in unusual cold, driving windchills down to the minus 50s. Exposure along this barren coast is extreme. Erick clarified to his son that the sea ice was always intimidating, and he was merely intimidated. But he conceded in his post that fear had taken hold. It wasn’t just the depth of the challenge, but the length of it.

“In fact, I’m afraid of being cold in my hands, afraid of being cold in my feet, afraid that the wind will rush everywhere, afraid of not being able to manage my diet, afraid of being sleepy, afraid of being overwhelmed by fear of not managing what I usually manage very well, afraid that the wind is stronger, afraid of not seeing anything, afraid of being a burden for my teammates...

It’s been a long time for the word afraid.”

I felt this paragraph in my core. I’ve faced the North Wind before, and I used to believe it was the scariest entity in the world. Now I feel even more afraid, and what I fear is my own body.

The first week after surgery is hard. It’s a common experience, and many people warned me about this. But the reality cut me down further than I expected. I had been thinking I was in pain and immobile before I had my mangled left knee rearranged, so how would after be different? But the aftermath has been tears, counting to 100 over and over to dissociate from the pain, and a new, frustrating level of dependency.

My Mom and sister Lisa flew out from Utah last weekend to help me through this. They made their plans before Beat came home from Alaska early, and I tried to talk them out of coming. It’s a sacrifice, especially for my sister, who works and has four children. But they came anyway, and I fully concede that I could not have done this without them.

On Tuesday, Lisa helped me take a shower. The shower situation at my house is not ideal, as I only have a bath upstairs and two showers down a steep and narrow set of wooden “death stairs.” Lisa wrapped my straight, braced leg in one of Beat’s Wiggy’s Waders and applied a tourniquet knot with a yoga strap to make the waders fully waterproof. We did this first, and then I had to scooch down the stairs on my butt while holding up this heavy brace with no oxygen flow to my leg. Then I had to crutch about 100 feet through our winding downstairs area into the guest bathroom, scoot through a narrow passageway into the shower, lower myself onto the shower chair, and let Lisa help me through the whole process.

After we were done, I felt like I had run a 50K. Or something harder. I was exhausted and strung out. Worse than that, I felt rattled to my core with fear. Everything I do presents a fall risk. One fall or even a bad step on my repaired knee could ruin everything. Going down those stairs and hopping up the little steps into the shower was so scary that I think I’ll not be able to do that again. Or maybe much of anything at all.

The vulnerability I feel right now is intense. Lisa was so kind during the process. Sitting naked in a shower chair with my little sister standing over me with a shower wand was a level of vulnerability I’m not sure I’ve experienced since I was a child.

“I can’t believe I used to be the sort of person who could ride a bike across Alaska. And now, this.”

Beat continues reassuring me with “you’ll be back out there,” along with questions about when he should set up the Zwift bike so I can ride one-legged. I can’t even scoot down the stairs to take a shower, so gentle spinning feels like a thousand steps ahead of where I am now. Going to the gym to lift the way I was lifting last week? Two thousand steps. I just want to lie in bed to escape the fear and count to disassociate from the pain. But I also know I need to start doing the work if I want to take any steps forward.

I had my first PT appointment on Thursday, three days post-op. I worked with two physical therapists, a smaller American woman and a tall, older woman who was either German or Eastern European; I’m not great with accents. The American woman treated me from the start like she had no time for my shit. She was mad about my tight calves and difficulty pressing the back of my knee into the table. She pressed on my kneecap and glowered at me like I was a big baby as I yelped in pain. I’m three days post-op! There’s probably a bruise there; I’m not even supposed to remove my dressings yet. The older European woman, going against stereotypes, was much gentler and kinder. It was very much a “bad cop, good cop” experience, but I crutched away from that session with a little more confidence in my abilities. I’m seeing the PT I know and trust on Monday. Can’t wait.

My head is now almost fully detached from the folks still out on the Iditarod Trail, battling another day of intense North Winds. But Beat is in touch with most of them and is keeping me abreast of their status. He had a long conversation with Gavan in Unalakleet as Gavan mulled the reality of pushing to make the 30-day cutoff versus the decision to “switch from race mode back to survival mode, to keep all of my fingers and toes.” Beat encouraged him to take advantage of the larger village to try to collect more warm gear for the approach to the sea ice. The North Wind is forecast to remain bad today but improve by Saturday morning. Beat is on Team “Do what it takes to win the race.” I am on Team “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me.” Cutoffs and pretty much everything else are meaningless.

It’s been a cold year in Alaska, and Gavan has been a long time in the word afraid. I’m amazed he’s still pushing through. I feel like I’ll never find that strength again, but I want to.

Even though I am deeply self-involved with my injury right now, I’m still cheering for the five still making their way toward Nome. I hope they all emerge from this journey unscathed and amazed by their experience. While scrolling through my March 20 Facebook memories, I found another graffiti mantra to embrace. Beat took this photo inside the Little McKinley shelter cabin about ten years ago. The four cyclists should arrive there today:

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Knee surgery finally happened on March 16, 31 days after I took a strange step during a long training run, collapsed into a white shock of pain, and essentially haven’t gotten up since. The surgeon completed a posterior medial meniscal root repair, along with some “clean up” of inflammation and bone marrow stimulation.

While my post-op progress is yet to be determined, I’m very happy with my surgeon. She took the time to explain the specifics of my injury and how she planned to fix it. She listened as I articulated my long-term goals and was supportive and encouraging. After surgery, she told my mom and sister — who both flew out from Utah to help me this week — that the procedure went extremely well. Although the tear was worse than the MRI indicated — completely torn away from the bone — she was able to complete the repair. Apparently, my cartilage looks much better than the MRI indicated, and is reasonably healthy for a 46-year-old runner. My prospects for a full recovery — returning to all of the activities I was able to do before injury — are quite good. Obviously, this is amazing news. Although my personality compels me to temper my expectations, I genuinely feel optimistic about the prognosis.

For today, though, I am at day one of a long recovery process and day 32 of navigating life with a mild disability and chronic pain — the kind of pain that has dragged my body and soul to the bottom of the pyramid. You’ve likely heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. This psychological theory ranks human needs in five tiers. Our base is physiological needs — air, food, and sleep. Next is safety needs, including health. Then come love and belonging, followed by esteem. The tiny point at the top is accessible to the most privileged among us: self-actualization.

I’ve spent much of my life engaged in the pursuit of this fifth tier. I recognize that this was only possible because I came into this world with incredible privilege, and the first four tiers happened almost effortlessly. But when that second tier takes a big hit, and I lose my health — suddenly everything below it becomes my entire world. Food, sleep, and even breathing are submerged in this cloud of pain, but I must still get up in the morning and drag my body through the basics of life. These basics take so much energy and time that I don’t have much left to engage in my relationships, let alone care about work or my hobbies.

Friends believe I’m sad and mad because I had to cancel my trip to France, because I can’t participate in the White Mountains 100 this week, because I can’t ride my bike or run, because the world is burning, because I’ve lost my usual coping mechanisms. But no. Truly. When I say I don’t care about any of that right now, I’m being sincere. I’m struggling because I can’t sleep. Because I can’t push a cart through a grocery store. Because I can’t lie down or sit up or lean on my crutches without bending into the pain. The pain has ebbed and surged at various times during the past month, but it’s always been here, sitting with me. 32 days. A lost month. A short amount of time, but also an eternity.

The experience has given me a new perspective and empathy for people who, by circumstance, must live most of their lives near this bottom tier, struggling every day to meet their basic needs. No wonder they can’t find the time to pursue passions. No wonder they can’t be bothered with the plight of the burning world. Getting to the end of each day is a win. I’ve found that my expectations rapidly adjusted to this tier, and I feel these wins. This month hasn’t been all misery. I’ve been able to reach flow state while doing the laundry and luxuriating in the beauty of springtime while crutching across parking lots. And I continue to be surrounded by love from friends and family, which I feel so much more acutely as their love shelters my broken second tier from above. I recognize the miracle of modern medicine that will allow me to climb back toward the fifth tier in good time. But for now, I don’t even require the ability to walk. Just let me wake up in the night without pain. Let me wake up in the morning after sleep, real sleep. Surgery was a step in this direction, and I’m grateful.

And of course, I’m still following the Iditarod Trail Invitational and the stubborn six who are still locked in this strange and increasingly distant world. They’ve made impressive progress since breaking through the Interior and are now pushing toward or along the coast. All still have a good shot at reaching Nome within the 30-day parameter set by the race. Beat has been nudging them along while nursing his own disappointment and ongoing respiratory distress since leaving the race in McGrath. After lending Kendall his overboots to help temper the relentless 30-below nights, Beat has stayed in touch with her.

“She’s actually listening to me,” he told me. “She wants to get ahead of increasing north winds and is trying to rally.”

I confess to being a big Kendall fan. Of course, I’m also rooting for Maya and everyone else. But Kendall is so no-nonsense in her approach to this endeavor while showing an impressive degree of selflessness. And she’s run such a smart race. She seems to be leading the strategy that Maya and others near her followed. Beat has more of an old-school mindset and doesn’t fully approve of all of the downtime they took in McGrath. But I think the deep snow slog would have been a pointless waste of energy. It probably was for Gavan, who ultimately did not make much progress while enduring 10 days of survival state in the deep cold. Patience pays off. It’s a good reminder for me as I head into my long recovery.

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Earlier this year, in a flash of prescience before injury, I adopted this graffitied piece of wisdom to strive toward in 2026:

Last week, I came across a photo of another piece of brilliant graffiti on Substack notes. The person who shared the photo captioned it: “French philosophy in a nutshell.” Having read a few of the French existentialists, I had to smile. Such truth:

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Friday, March 13, marks one month since the running incident that exploded my left knee. I remain flabbergasted by that chain of events. My left knee had been my “good knee,” I’d experienced zero pain before that day. I can’t recall a recent fall that impacted that knee (there are still-healing scars across my right knee from a December crash). I’d been grappling with lateral ITB pain for all of 2.5 miles of a 19-mile run. Then, in a sudden burst of blinding pain for no reason at all — “poof” — shredded medial meniscus. Obviously, something had to be wrong in this knee before February 13. But it all seems terribly sudden and unfair.

Yesterday, I came across a post noting that the last time March 13 fell on a Friday was March 13, 2020, and this was “our last normal day” — the day that COVID-19 restrictions spread across the United States and launched us into our ongoing bizarroland. The author noted that perhaps another Friday, March 13, would reset the clock and return us to a gentler time.

Ha, fat chance.

The 2020s have coincided with my 40s. All of the toxic positivity life coaches who insist that life begins in your 40s can eat dirt. My 40s have been the worst: A global pandemic, lockdowns, the George Floyd protests, the 2020 wildfire season that ultimately took down my lungs, “Stop the Steal” that ultimately took down democracy, the Jan. 6 insurrection, the King Soopers shooting, the beginning of my panic attack era, Beat broke his clavical, my dad died, grief completely took over my life for more than a year, I was hit by a truck, resulting in chronic back pain, the Marshall Fire, a bad faceplant crushed my sternum, physical pain sprialed into a mental health collapse, the Lexapro years, my best friend was diagnosed with brain cancer, my best friend died painfully of brain cancer, Project 2025, the winter without a winter, soft-launching World War III, the end of my athletic years and loss of my mobility. And it’s only 2026.

Yes, that last paragraph is hyperbole. Yes, many good things have happened in the past six years. But injury has invoked the stages of grief, and I am deep in the anger stage. Let me have this. Anger snuffs out my anxiety about my upcoming surgery. Anger powers a fierce defiance when my overactive imagination and Reddit tell me that my running and marathon hiking days are over for good. So let me be angry about my 40s. Let me steel myself for whatever comes next. It’s likely to be a long three and a half years, but maybe after this godforsaken decade I will climb out of my midlife slump … if nuclear annihilation doesn’t happen first.

Meanwhile, the stubborn six remaining in the 2026 Iditarod Trail Invitational continue to slowly, quietly churn north. With any luck, they might be able to break through to the Yukon River and the village of Ruby — the halfway point of the trek to Nome — by the end of the day on Friday. This date — March 13 — was the crux day during my trip to Nome in 2016 — an extremely strenuous and scary crossing of 33 miles of frozen sea to Koyuk.

Mike and I holed up in the drafty shelter cabin with a broken stove on the Little Mountain peninsula for more than 13 hours. Similar to the folks remaining in the race this year, we were waiting for the Iditarod Sled Dog Race trailbreakers, whom we hadn’t yet seen more than 750 miles into our ride. Across the vast swath of sea ice, the snowmobile tracks of hunters veered off in many directions. Choose the wrong one, and we’d possibly reach a dead end or worse — open ocean. We both had GPS tracks to follow, but they were almost impossible to read through the ground blizzard while wearing goggles. And these were old tracks that weren’t accurate to current conditions. Better to wait for more knowledgeable trailbreakers to drive some stakes into the proper trail.

Also, I was terrified of the wind. I shivered as I listened to it knock on the rickety roof of the cabin. The North Wind was blowing steadily at 38-45 mph, with much stronger gusts, when we left Shaktoolik the previous day. It seemed stronger out here, and the temperature was 5 degrees below zero. This translates to windchills in the -40s, out on the open ice where there’s absolutely nowhere to take shelter. Beyond the cold, it’s damn near impossible to propel a 70-pound, not-aerodynamic-in-the-least, fully loaded fat bike over uneven snow crust into a 40 mph wind. It’s like climbing a 20% grade on a sandy gravel road for 33 unbroken miles. In addition to those challenges, my right hand had essentially stopped working. I had a yet-to-be-diagnosed but severe case of carpal tunnel syndrome that left me barely able to steer my bike, let alone take on more dexterous tasks like zipping up my coat or making adjustments to my gear. Out there, something as painfully simple as a flat tire could spiral into the end of me.

Mike and I waited all night for a break in the wind. It didn’t come. But the trailbreakers did. We didn’t hear their engines over the roar of the wind, but when we peeked out of the shelter cabin’s broken door at first light, blue and orange Iditarod stakes had appeared.

Mike and I agreed to keep each other in sight for the sea ice crossing, but forming a paceline was a ridiculous dream. Even with a straight headwind, stronger gusts buffeted us all over the place. The trail was churned up spindrift, loose and squirrelly. We usually looked for better lines over the wind-sculpted snow crust — a ripple of petrified waves called sastrugi. If I followed a wave too diligently, I’d sometimes drift a hundred yards off the marked trail. I would snap back to awareness in a panic when I could no longer see any stakes in the distance.

The biking was as strenuous as any I’ve experienced, before or since. The North Wind held me in place like a wall, a veritable wind tunnel. My wattage could probably be measured near my FTP, but my speed — in the saddle! — would often drop below 2 mph. If I stepped out of the saddle to push, I could barely wrestle the bike forward, especially with my bad hand. The bike needed my body weight to hold it down. My body needed to keep moving to stay warm. So I had to pedal continuously, but I was rapidly losing strength. I tried to keep eating trail mix from my top tube bag and drinking from a Camelbak hose that I had to locate beneath many layers of neck gaiters and coats. These tasks also became too strenuous to maintain, and I’d neglect to do either for long hours.

It was full survival mode, and there was no choice but to keep grinding forward. There were moments of levity. Despite consciously choosing dehydration over the risk of flash-frozen butt, I had to stop twice to pull down four layers of pants, squat, and pee. Each time, I’d take a moment to admire the impressively wide fan of yellow snow drawn by the wind. The second time, I analyzed my urine art for a couple of seconds too long. In that time, a wind gust grabbed a nearly full, quart-sized ziplock of trail mix, along with a Snickers Bar and a large stick of Dermatone, from the top tube bag of my overturned bike. By the time I turned around, all of those items were gone. Not a trace. Blown completely out of sight. This was most of my planned calories for the day. I couldn’t help but laugh. The North Wind even stole my snacks. What an absolute bully.

Ultimately, we took 14 and a half hours to ride 33 miles. And yes, almost all of this time was in the saddle. Strava recorded an average moving speed of 2.9 mph, only because the app struggles to register speeds below 1.5 mph as moving at all, and because the wind did die down somewhat as we neared the village of Koyuk, allowing us to reach a blazing top speed of 5.7 mph. My Strava post was terse and to the point: “Day 15. Across the sea ice. One of my slowest and hardest days on a bike. I no longer have any desire to ride across Antarctica.”

As usual, I’m adopting some of the perspective I earned from this day 10 years ago. Riding into the hard edge of an invisible wall, needled by the deadly cold, pedaling as hard as I can to go nowhere, just a blank white slate stretching across every horizon. “This is never going to end,” I think, and I find myself believing this with my whole heart. I have to. Because if I allow myself to hope for something different, my heart aches with longing. I can’t endure it, this desire — the root of all suffering. I have to strive for acceptance.

“This is how it is. This is how it’s always going to be. So how will I choose to live here? Miserable and yearning? Or settling into my discomfort, befriending my pain, opening my mind to curiosity and joy within the confines of reality? Because this is never going to end.”

The secret of this strategy is that things will inevitably change. They always do. They can get worse. But usually, eventually, I’ll arrive in a place like Koyuk — a bright, warm schoolhouse on the shoreline, a place to snuggle into my sleeping bag on the kindergarten floor and marvel at the sensation. Was there ever a time in all of my life that I ever felt so warm and safe? I have reached the pinnacle of joy.

Eventually, the finish line will arrive as well. March 16. It’s almost here. It’s the starting line now, in this godforesaken Year of Our Lord 2026. I’ve been pedaling furiously nowhere for a month, and I can no longer imagine a timeline where this is ever going to end. But I’m learning to live here. I’m okay to keep pedaling.

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I remain fascinated by the six folks remaining in the Iditarod Trail Invitational, who are not even halfway to Nome after two and a half weeks. The sole remaining foot racer, Irish deep-sea diver Gavan Hennigan, is especially an enigma. He walked away from McGrath on March 1 — 10 days ago — and has since been struggling north in such small increments that he’s barely covered 100 miles since. And it’s not like he’s been resting and enjoying the comforts of civilisation all of that time. No, he’s been breaking trail through hip-deep snow, retreating, camping in snowbanks at 45 below, retreating, holing up in an empty miner’s shed, “living out my Alaska bush life dreams cutting wood and hanging out,” scavanging abandoned coolers of meat and Doritos, and waiting, waiting, waiting … for somebody, anybody with more horsepower to blast a trail through what has proven to be an impassable segment of Alaska wilderness.

The others spent most of the past ten days biding their time in a warm and comfy lodge in McGrath, repairing gear and cooking up bricks of energy food for the coming slog. Biker Ryan Wanless left a couple of days before the others, and enjoyed some cabin time with Gavan before the two set out for solo trudges. The cold has been relentless, and Ryan had to resort to many hours in a frigid bivy after following Gavan’s track proved impossible. He reported “crotch deep” snow and an inability to make forward progress with his bike. Instead, he spent 2.5 hours pacing the same 20-yard stretch back and forth just to stay warm, hoping that the trailbreakers would arrive at last.

They finally did, pulling into the Carlson Crossing cabin late Monday night. Ryan and Gavan were able to join the trailbreakers there and spent the night enjoying the nearly forgotten amenities of civilisation — roast beef sandwiches, beer, and Starlink. They now have a trail to follow, so the going is better, if not blazing fast. In the next couple of days, the ITI racers will be inundated by the media, support vehicles, mushers, and dog teams of the Iditarod Sled Dog Race. But that event will be a relative blink of an eye, and then they’ll be alone again, facing the increasingly volatile conditions of spring.

I am fascinated by their quixotic perseverance. At this time, it seems unlikely that anyone will be able to make it to Nome before the 30-day cutoff, meaning they won’t earn an official finish in the race. Others have taken more than 30 days before, and the race director has never budged on this rule. The two women left in the race, Maya and Kendall, professed that they do not care about an official finish; they’re going to reach Nome come hell or high water.

The problem is, “high water” is a real problem on the Iditarod Trail. I used to spend the whole month of March in Alaska while Beat was racing the ITI, and I’m often in Fairbanks in late March for the White Mountains 100. I feel like I see this almost every year. Before March 15, the weather is decidedly “winter.” But then the Equinox sun rises high in the sky, and a switch seems to flip. While it can still be very cold, the solar glare seems to have its own effect, and the melt comes on quickly. Breakup is especially a concern along the western coast, where southerly storms inundate the sea ice and many frozen lagoons lining the coast. There are no alternative routes around the floods. Unwavering stubbornness and a strong desire to finish this journey are not enough. They literally need to race spring to the end.

But they are trying, and I feel an unsettling combination of admiration and pity for them. Gavan left Carlson Crossing cabin 19 hours ago and walked through the day and night without taking a single break — not even a 10-minute pause on Trackleaders — to cover the 42 miles to Innoko cabin, arriving around 6 am Wednesday. No doubt he was loath to do another outdoor bivy — Windy.com is still reporting temperatures around 30 below. But damn. I just. I am in awe.

I can’t help but draw parallels between their eternal slog and my current situation. I have been suffering and struggling for almost a month. I know memory is eternally fallible, but I swear this has been harder than anything I have done. Harder than riding a bike to Nome. And I haven’t even reached the starting line. I’ve been languishing in pain and wearing my body down to a stunning level of exhaustion while chipping away at the tiniest of life tasks, and I haven’t even started. Surgery is on Monday. And beyond that, chronic pain is a concern. People must sometimes cope with pain for as long as they keep breathing. If I let my brain ruminate about it for too long, I want to crutch myself into traffic.

“I don’t give a flying fuck if I ever run again. I really don’t,” was a thing I said to a friend last week in anger. I regret it. I know people are trying to help, but they keep pointing me to some distant future that is so utterly unfathomable that it sounds like a cruel fantasy. Just let me dream of a day when I no longer need the crutches. Let me dream of a day when I’m not in pain.

“But they shoot horses. It’s a mercy,” was another thing I said to Beat yesterday, more in a moment of desperation than anger.

The days have been harder since I had to go off NSAIDs a week before surgery. I’m not allowed supplements either, so no CBD. I may also be ditching the crutches and painfully limping more than I should in sheer frustration about my mobility limitations. Back to disrupted sleep and tears. I won’t be able to ditch the crutches after surgery. I fantasise about staying in bed all day and disassociating.

I did have my share of joy this past weekend, though. My sister Sara flew out from California, putting her life aside just to prop up her big sister for a few days. We crutched around downtown Boulder in the blazing March sunshine on Sunday afternoon. We browsed shops, buying art and clothing. We ate pizza slices and gelato. I had to take breaks every few blocks because my shoulders felt like they were about to detach from my torso, but the sun was warm, and the everyday views were suddenly awe-inspiring. We laughed about shared memories and marvelled at the many ways our childhoods were drastically different. “Damn, you really are a millennial,” was a thing I said to her more than once.

Just like any endurance race, it isn’t all suffering. There continue to be moments of beauty and awe, and love for my sister and Beat. He has been sick with respiratory issues since he returned from Alaska, so it’s been difficult for him as well. We’re both caught up in our own pain, and it’s hard to be there for each other.

As long as we have each other and a few dots to keep poking virtual sticks at, we feel a little less alone. So go Gavan, Ryan, Troy, Kendall, Maya, and Erick. I am rooting for you with all of my heart.

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