Life Before Radiation

 Tomorrow afternoon is the first radiation session for my wife. The lump in her breast has been removed. There will be no chemotherapy per her doctors. Twenty sessions, one every day for the next twenty business days, should do it.

The initial shock has worn off to an extent. Yes, there's a real desire to return to normal life. Normal life that is more intensely experienced for having had this brush with mortality. The knowledge that cancer has invaded, that it could still return, that from now on, even after five years of confirmed victory, there is no ultimate victory. You always knew that death will come, as it always has to everyone, but you're shaken when it first extends its exploratory tentacles. You circle the wagons and defy it to even slow you down.

So we plan much more deliberately now.
We take some satisfaction in the fact that we've balanced life thus far reasonably well, having saved for retirement while travelling and doing a lot of the little things that give life colour. Going to the theatre, for example. Staying at hotels that are just a bit more expensive and a bit nicer. Taking off to the beach for the weekend even though you ought to rake the lawn and finish up odd jobs, even though this is the third weekend in a row that you've done so.

You can't do everything, but you can at least work yourself into a job that you actually like. A job that you actually look forward to returning to after the radiation treatments are done and the doctors give you the green light. You can live a life with no reasonable regrets.

You can live a life that you don't put on hold for a minute longer than necessary. You can be very deliberate in planning for those things that weren't so urgent before but are now far more important to ensure take place. Things like finding a beach front place for retirement.

Make it count. Stop planning and plotting only long enough to relax and enjoy the scenery.

Third Time Around the Bay - 2012

This race was all business for me this year. I ran Around the Bay for the first time in 2010 and posted a 3:05 time, which was acceptable to me. Last year I ran it roughly a month after having my appendix removed, against my doctor's emphatic advice, and posted a 3:42 time. Last year's result was heartbreaking, because no matter how you approach it or what you expect out of it, it is, after all, a race. So I try to put that stupid exercise behind me, try to forget the soul destroying experience of puttering along knowing that this proves nothing apart from the fact that I'm every bit as pigheaded as my doctor knows me to be, that the registration money I "didn't waste" would have been better wasted.

This year the weather was perfect, more perfect than it should be on March 25th in Hamilton, Ontario. The runners were all psyched; the energy that coursed through the 9000 plus runners was incredible. I started out strong and fast, disposing of my garbage bag jacket almost immediately. The crowd was energetic; the runners were all focused and pushing hard. This was more like it; this was what it's all about.

The first 20 kilometres flew by at a pace around 5:00. I was well under my 3 hour goal; wasn't even breathing hard, barely breaking a sweat. There was very little chit-chat in this crowd of runners because it was clear that most of us were having a surprisingly fast race and didn't want to jinx it or lose focus.

Proof that I was focused, that I could not be distracted from my laserlike quest: I did not partake at the bacon station. Which reminds me: there was no beer station the whole way. Suggestion for the organizers: get the Grim Reapers to dole out beer shots next time, work that barley harvesting metaphor!

Right before you hit the 20 km mark there is a series of rolling hills, nothing too serious but significant enough to notice. Right after the 20 km mark is a long, very long, and reasonably steep hill. On this hill, just after Mike S. flew past me on the way to his own personal victory, I started to feel a little dizziness, just enough to make me scale it back just a bit. I kept the pace under 5:20, so still pushing.

Self awareness, objective monitoring of your status, becomes important at this point. And you don't simply learn it as you go through the race; you have to have developed this sense in your training. You have to know where that redline is, because although you don't want to become one of those unfortunates being loaded into ambulances along the way if you can help it (and you can't always help it, of course), you don't want to scale back so far that you haven't given it everything you've got. You want to cross the finish line on an empty tank, but you want to stay upright through the food lines.

A collective gasp ran through the group that I was running in as we approached the ravine that was part drastic downhill and part drastic climb. Part of that gasp was fear, but there was an undeniable sense of appreciation of the beauty of the rock formation we were about to tackle. I high fived the little guy on the approach to the hill and began the ascent.

The great thing about this hill is that it climbs quite steeply to a point after which you round a corner and see that the hill continues for another few hundred feet at an even more acute angle. I love to hear the utter depair voiced by first-timers at this point. And I confess that I actually walked the last 50 feet or so this time. I consoled the guy beside me who was also walking, saying that we'd survive to do it again next year. "I hate being passed. I just hate it," he said.

So I loped in the last 3 or 4 kilometres from the top of the hill, knowing that I could push it a bit again, never going slower than a 6 minute km. Sprinted into the entrance of Copps, arms straight up and smiling across the finish line,chip time 2:47:57, 17 minutes faster than 2010. Anyone watching me would have thought I was staggering, limping, hobbling toward the exit after that, but in my mind I was swaggering. The thrill just never gets stale, not when you've given it 110%.