“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.