The Universe Will Make You Whole

I started doing Ironman in 2006. I signed up for my first race nine days after my youngest daughter Mercy died at birth August 29, 2005. I needed something to focus on, something to make me look forward to the future, and something to check off a list every day to tell myself I was moving forward. And, I admit, I also needed to punish myself with pain. A lot of pain.

After I did that first Ironman, I swore I’d never do another one. I’d never been much of an athlete. I’d been on the swim team in high school, but hadn’t been very good at it, and I’d injured my knees trying to run at the beginning of my freshman year in college. I figured my need to hurt myself was finished and now I could move forward with the rest of my life.

But I kept doing Ironman. I’ve done almost 20 races now. I began to dream about doing the “big” race, the World Championships in Hawaii, but I kept getting slower and slower and I just didn’t think it was going to happen. Finally, when Covid hit and closed down the 2021 World Championships in Hawaii, that race got combined with the race I had already signed up for locally in Utah. I wasn’t going to Hawaii, but I was going to do the World Championship.

I was in the middle of what I call now the never-ending divorce (yes, it is still never-ending). I’d left my home, my religion, and most of what I thought of as my community. I had given up my dream of being a full-time writer and had gotten a job on the phones in the financial world, possibly the very bottom of all the jobs in the world. But I could still do Ironman. Sort of. I could only run 2-3 minutes at a time because of lingering Achilles pain, but I was thrilled to be doing the World Championships even so.

It was a brutal course, 95 degrees with the most intense hills I’ve ever seen. By the time I hit the “run,” I was mostly walking. Then came mile 20. A race official came over and started pulling people off the course. She insisted that we were past the cut-off time, even though we weren’t. A couple of women argued with her and then took off, continuing to run. But this race official threatened us all with never being able to compete in Ironman again if we tried that, so I was driven to the finish line and never got to finish the World Championships.

I couldn’t think of anything that would make the loss of this last dream of mine up to me. I tried to believe that I was a World Champion even though I didn’t have a medal or a T-shirt. I was very low, as low as I’d been when I found out that my husband wanted a divorce after 30 years of marriage and 6 children together.

And then the universe (I struggle to say “God” anymore, but bear with me) decided to make me whole. The head of Ironman called me and apologized. She offered to let me do any race in the next two years, even the World Championship in Hawaii. I signed up and tried to figure out how to pay for it. I was desperately poor and a friend suggested I set up a GoFundMe. I did it, without ever thinking much would happen.

Over the next 24 hours, many people signed up to help me achieve my dream, after it was crushed. Then a local TV station heard about it from GoFundMe. They came over and told my story on the news that night, complete with me in front of all my race medals (I have more than 200). My GoFundMe went bonkers. Tons of total strangers signed up to help me achieve my dream. After everything I had lost, I was getting back more than I’d ever believed possible.

The trip to Hawaii with a new friend and my older sister was more than I could have hoped for. It wasn’t that I suddenly became fast or that my Achilles pain disappeared. I was one of the slowest people on the course, and most of my “run” was in the dark, slowly walking to the finish. People tried to yell at me to run and I kept telling them that I had no interest in trying to go faster. I was trying to enjoy this only chance I’d ever have to do the World Championship. I have a video of me finishing that race with my friend shouting for me in the background. It was of the happiest moments of my life, and it came after two of the most devastating, painful, and hopeless years I’d ever experienced.

This is the first of hopefully many essays I will be writing to talk about what happens when you are thrust Kicking and Screaming into a new life that you never wanted. But perhaps it is the best life that the universe could have offered you. This is a new life that I think of sometimes as a “glimpse” like Nicholas Cage got in the movie “The Family Man,” a chance to see what might have been if I hadn’t stayed at home with my kids, if I hadn’t decided to become a writer, if I’d instead pursued a career in finance, if I’d thrown myself into earning as much money as possible. If I’d done what I swore never to do, to give up my love of words and be greedy and selfish instead.

This is my new life, and while this essay is a happy one, I don’t promise they will all be like that. This is an honest record of my journey through real life after you’ve lost everything—and maybe gained everything, too. This is the story of Job, except I gave up hope in God just like Job’s friends tell him to. I’ve cursed God and wished I was dead. Only I’m not dead. I’m still alive and still trying to figure out how to want to be alive. I’ve had miracles happen and I’ve contemplated suicide. I’ve wept with joy and with anguish.

I suspect that there are a lot of us who are in the same boat out there. If you are, I’m offering you an arm into this ship of mine. I’m no captain. I don’t promise wisdom, only honesty and a companion along the way.