Feathered Heels or Why We Race.

Every day, there are new reminders of how this "personal" challenge, is not about me at all.

What it is, is so much larger than me, and you even. It's about loss and triumph and tears and joy and battles and endurance and blessings. It goes so far beyond my corner of the world, my training routes and waterways. It spans the globe and unites us.

Yesterday morning, I received an email from a woman in Australia that I have never met nor heard from before. She commented about TEAM STINK, applauding the cause and sharing that her brother-in-law was nearing the end of his fight with cancer.

Paul, she shared, had triumphed over so much. Nearly twenty years earlier, he had received a kidney transplant.

His mother was the donor.

The transplant was only supposed to last five years; twenty years, a marriage and a daughter later, his kidney began to fail. It was only when he went in for his kidney, and broke his hip that they found the Cancer. Somehow, it had camouflaged itself and escaped notice.

When Shelley, of www.lavenderladybugs.wordpress.com, wrote me yesterday, her husband was jetting fast and sure across the country to be at his brother, Paul's, side.

Paul is only 46.

Yesterday, I biked 19 miles in 46 minutes.

I thought of Shelley and her husband, and of Paul most of the ride. I thought of Paul's mother, having given, so many years earlier, a piece of herself to save her son. I thought of his young wife and their sixteen year old daughter, Lia.

My son will turn sixteen at the end of this month; in my mind, his face is hers.

It is in this aching, this burning in my legs and in my heart, that wonder begins to take route. Rotation after rotation, hill after hill, breath after breath, I am humbled by the power of a life well lived. Awed at the force that is the human will. Amazed at the ties that connect us from all the way across the world.

I wondered too, if way over there, a world away, if they, somewhere in their grief, feel that sense of wonderment too. Some small comfort that we are united, their family and mine. That, together, today, we all rode breathless across the hills of Pennsylvania, pedaling strong over valleys and roads.
That even as Paul battles, his will was the breath in my lungs and the wings on my heels.


I cannot help but to think that this - this is why we race.