I’m sick of sweating on myself in my basement—using football, sports talk TV or even Friends reruns to distract me from the slowly moving clock. Winter training is beneficial, but boring. With my three-wheeler on a trainer, essentially turning it into a stationary arm-pedal bike, I ride at a higher cadence than climbing mountains. A higher cadence, if my muscles can adapt, could mean higher speed when I get back outside, but right now I just want to forget that spot on my chest that hurts so much. When I’m outside I constantly shift my chest on the chest pad to steer. There’s no steering on the trainer. The chest pad bores into my sternum. There’s nothing I can do except try to ignore it. Pain meditation, that’s what Dave Penney, my expedition manager calls it.

 

He should know. To prepare to guide trips in Nepal he’ll run three 14ers in a day, sleeping on the top of the final one to maximize altitude adjustment. On my birthday in September, Dave ran for seven hours, joined the party, and then outlasted pretty much everyone at dinner. During the winter in his hometown of Crested Butte, Colorado, he routinely cross-country skis after he puts his five and nine year old children to bed. By that time of the night I am usually excited to be warm and dry in my house, not sweating and freezing all at the same time in the dark and the cold.

 

For a long time Dave has talked about “taking a run at the White Rim Trail.” On our long hikes this past summer, he’s often mused about doing it in a day—105 miles in one day. I’ve only done one century in my life and that was on road and when I could still pedal with my legs. One day is crazy, but Dave’s ability to dream separates him, especially since he routinely makes most people’s impossible possible. It shouldn’t have surprised me a couple of nights ago when Dave said, “Let’s do the White Rim Trail.” It’s my fault. I said that I wanted to do a bunch of 4-6 hour days on our next Moab trip—starting tomorrow. “We could go for the record,” he said.

 

I knew that Mark Wellman, Steve Ackerman and Bob Vogel, great athletes all, had captured their epic White Rim ride for Mark’s film Crank it up! The White Rim Adventure. Immediately after hanging up with Dave I Googled the trio. They’d ridden the entire 105 miles on their own using the same One-Off three-wheeler that I had on my trainer. At times, they had dismounted their rigs, scooted along on the ground trailing the rig behind them over the loose, difficult terrain. Other times, one, higher on the trail, would rope assist the others. Reading about it, I marveled at their trip. I’ve pulled my three-wheeler behind me and I can tell you that it’s a dirty, frustrating job. I got nowhere fast. The trio’s trip took six days. That’s the record: six days. With the benefit of our new vehicle, Dave and I thought we might be able do it in three. I have no idea if that’s even realistic, but it’s the all the time we have. It’s just a thought and a hope, but it’s enough to get me excited—that and getting out of my basement.

 

Snow in Moab prompted us to consider the White Rim Trail for our next training session, but it might be our undoing too. If there’s too much we won’t even get a realistic shot, but I’m excited to try. We’ll start on Monday morning, sleep in Dave’s camper Monday and Tuesday nights, and hopefully finish Wednesday. According to the weather report, temperatures should range from 9-43 degrees. We’ll ride for six hours or more a day. I look forward to getting outside. Somehow, I think Dave looks forward to my pain meditation opportunities. He’s toughening me up for the mountain.

 

I plan to report from the White Rim, so please check in daily.

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“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”— Aristotle

 

 

 

“I’m going to beat it. I know I am.” I’m not sure if those were Kate’s exact words, but the power and conviction are accurate. In her resolve to achieve the impossible, I heard myself. I heard myself after my accident, almost 20 years earlier. Doctors couldn’t cure my paralysis. A cure, however miraculous, was up to me. When I planned a trip to New York for a weekend of R&R following our June scouting trip, my tentmate John Lawrence said that I definitely had to meet his new friend Kate. “She will blow your mind.” So we met for brunch my final day in town. In the last year Kate had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a chronic degenerative disease that attacks the nervous systems leaving lesions that break the sheath housing the nerve. Much like my spinal cord injury, these lesions create damage that prevents messages from traveling along the central nervous system. Unlike my paralysis, the lesions will continue to accumulate, damaging more and more of the spinal cord and stopping more and more of the messages.

 

Doctors can’t stop the lesions, so Kate took it upon herself to stop them with a commitment to her traditional MS medicine (a daily injection called Copoxone), positive thought, a restrictive diet and the advice of a functional medicine doctor, who looked not just at the symptoms, but also at their origins and the imbalances that created them. He helped her treat her imbalances and the lesion, in her neck at cervical vertebrae 4-5, reversed itself, which, in the clinical world, doesn’t really happen. Lesions don’t reverse. Nerves do not regenerate, but the lesion didn’t show up on the films anymore. Kate seemingly achieved a miracle, but the miracle was more about seizing control of her health, finding balance and harmony.

 

As the July rains fell in sheets on Tribeca’s Greenwich Street raising the smell of summer so nostalgic to my East Coast youth, I felt drawn to Kate’s energy, yet like a magnet of the same charge, I ultimately felt pushed away. Ironically, I pushed away. I want the euphoria of fighting the fight that only has a chance if I tap into that part of me that’s uniquely me, the raw essence, the naked part that’s so easy to cover up. In Kate, I see an unwillingness to hide, and it’s so damn powerful that everyone should experience it, because that’s what it means to be alive – to fight, to struggle, to accept heaps of abuse, to expect it, and keep going when there’s every reason to stop – to seek balance when all scales tip in the opposite direction.

 

I pushed away because I felt jilted by the very approach that made Kate so powerful. When I left the hospital after my accident, I vowed that I’d never be intimidated again. I’d recovered from a broken back and I had cheated death, probably more figurative than literal, but significant just the same. Calm and resolute, I felt destined. I would render disability irrelevant the way Michael Jordan had affected race, but I fell short.

 

I quit my athletic career for many reasons, chief among them was that I couldn’t achieve transcendence. Don’t get me wrong. I was really good, but I out-worked, out-thought, and out-disicplined my opponents more than I out-performed them. The very thing that made me good strangled my inspiration. In an arena that requires bigger, better and often crazier, I’d reached my limit both physically and mentally, and I felt like I left without reaching that destiny in which I’d believed so much, and I felt cheated, jilted because I hadn’t achieved the transcendence that was so central to my career.

 

When I retired, I lost the hope and the outlet to achieve that dream, which I so viscerally felt as destiny. I slipped into a depression. Without sports I wondered who I was. I doubted I would ever achieve on the same level. I grew apathetic and lashed out at the balance that I now saw anchoring Kate’s power. Sulking as result of my lost sense of destiny, I slipped into greater imbalance. My digestive system, stripped by years of antibiotics for urinary tract infections, refused to work properly. Each time I ate or drank I felt and looked like I had swallowed a bowling ball. Yet, even after seeing the power in Kate – the vibrancy, the life – it still took me five months to address my digestive problem, a luxury because it was simply uncomfortable and not life-threatening in any way other than it stripped me of happiness and comfort.

 

The day before Christmas, my integrative medicine doctor gave me a program of herbs designed to kill the bad bacteria and replace the good. He also gave me a drug to boost my adrenals. I needed to cut out all gluten grains – something I’d known on an intuitive level, but hadn’t always followed. On my own, I stopped drinking on December 27^th. I don’t consider drinking a huge health problem, but there’s a part of me that thinks that there might be some relationship between drinking and my UTIs. I have no scientific evidence to back up my hypothesis, but I want to become healthy. As my doctor said, “If your sitting on 10 tacks and you remove five it pretty much feels the same.” I don’t know if drinking is a tack, but it seems best to remove that possibility.

 

In short, I’ve been literally constipated for the past few years. I have felt guilty training because it was part of my former life. I’d gone from under 140 pounds when competed in Athens in 2004 to more than 160 when I landed in Tanzania for the scouting trip in June. We’ve spent so much time, effort and money reducing the weight of the rig by 30 pounds, and now it’s my turn to accept some responsibility. I might not ever achieve the truly transcendent physical feat, but even when I competed I wanted to tell the story – to point people in the right direction and help them see what I saw. This year, I have the opportunity to do that.

 

So in the tradition of New Year’s Resolutions I set mine: to be honest enough and courageous enough to be healthy and happy.

 

Thanks Kate, for facing your demons. You remind me of the person that I want to be. We learn from each other and often the greatest lessons are the ones that we have to learn over and over. Balance is the sustenance of happy, healthy life. Happy New Year.

 

If you would like more information on Kate’s story please visit her YouTube trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35v7UFpBPRs

 

She tells her story much better than I can.

 

 

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