Dear Body,

We’ve been fighting each other for the last 2 years and it has been exhausting. While I have been fighting against you and pushing you to your limit many times over, I have also been fighting for you. I’ve seen nearly 20 different specialists, had hundreds of vials of blood drawn, and completed medical procedures that I can’t even pronounce. I’ve had imaging done to most of my organs and body parts. We have found lots of interesting things that make you unique but not the answers we were looking for. Until last week.

We finally had a colonoscopy and endoscopy done and suddenly it all made sense! All the warning signs that you have been sending me for years finally made sense. The roller coaster of symptoms that would appear then seem to dissipate with time and rest now make sense. You were try to tell us that we have Crohn’s disease. 

I am so sorry that I started to believe that it was all made up. I had fully lost trust in you. When I started college running I vividly remember telling my college coach that the one thing I was really good at was listening to you (my body). I’m sorry that I lost this skill. I endured months and months of feeling bad, continually being told that “nothing is wrong” or “all of your tests came back normal”. Months of being gaslit by almost every doctor. My symptoms have been blamed on me just “having anxiety”, being “burnt out”, “overtraining”, “underfueling”, “depression”, and even “the altitude in Flagstaff” if you can believe it. After a while I stopped listening to you and started to believe that the doctors must be right. This must all be in my head. You (my body) had no idea what you were doing and I was making everything up. I just needed to be tougher and buckle down. I started to believe that it was all my fault all this time. That maybe running, and living, had always been this hard but I had just lost my spark and ability to handle stress. For months I have internalized this blame and have fought tooth and nail against every fiber of what my body was telling me to continue moving forward. To continue competing and doing my job. I trained when it was the absolute last thing on this planet that I felt like doing. And while most of the time you felt bad, there were a couple sessions that looked pretty good on paper to give us false hope. Such a rollercoaster. In reality, what you really wanted was to just sit down and rest or to sleep for days. 

I showed up to races (albeit only doing a few in the last 2 years) feeling completely undertrained, tired, underfueled, and defeated. But I used my mind to overpower your feelings. On paper these races don’t look so bad. They include winning a 3-day stage race in Argentina(11/2023), landing on the podium on the GTWS race in China (4/2024), and winning US mountain running champs for the 4th time (7/2024). But after every hard effort you (body) would flare in response to me asking so much of you. And rightfully so. You can’t pour from an empty cup, and yet here I was, pouring away. And by the end, I had poured out everything including my spirit and possibly my love for the sport. I think that my stubbornness is partially what makes me a good athlete but in this case it also led to your destruction. 

So body, I am truly sorry. 

Sorry that I gave up on listening to you. Sorry that I continued to push you when you weren’t ready to be pushed. 

After an all out war against you, pushing you, I was starting to resent you. Starting to feel like I had drawn the short end of the stick and that I was given a defective meat suit to live in. I started to hate you and I even started to hate the way you looked. The way you got way too skinny too easily, the swollen face, the bags under your eyes, the rashes on your skin. All so ugly on the outside and yet all you were trying to do was let me know that something wasn’t right on the inside. I used to be really proud of my body and I thought that I had won the lottery. I won this body that was good at running and had a seemingly high VO2 max and high natural hemoglobin. Just perfect! 

I’m sorry that I have spent the last few months starting to resent you. You were just trying to help me and I wasn’t listening. And actually I think I still did win the body lottery. I think you (body) actually are pretty strong after all. You have put up with not only an onslaught of Crohn’s disease but a crazy captain of the ship who refused to take no for an answer. You have raced at the highest level when asked to (even if it meant weeks of flaring on the other side) and without your strength I am sure we would be in a much more advanced disease progression category than “moderate”. Again, I am sorry. I appreciate all you have done for me. And with some help from western medicine, and a little bit of luck, I hope you can find it in you to do more for me in the future (after some much deserved rest of course!). 

I can’t wait to get on some medication and see how you feel. I can't wait to maybe be able to string together more than 5-6 weeks of training before you crash and burn. I am excited about the prospect of going for a run and not having anxiety about where I can go to the bathroom when the sudden and uncontrollable urges arise. I am excited for life with you and Crohn’s disease, as crazy as that sounds. I am not in remission yet, but me and my doctors are hopeful that that is on the horizon. Soon life could return to normal and maybe even to something that more closely resembles “consistent” training even if that means running or professional running might look a bit different for us. I know the path forward won’t be clear cut, as it never is, and we will undoubtedly encounter more setbacks and obstacles. But having a diagnosis and a direction to move forward in feels delightful. I promise to treat you right, to listen to you when you aren’t feeling good, and to stop pushing you when you just aren’t ready to be pushed. I vow to work on healing both physically, and mentally, for you. I’ve only got one of you (body) for the rest of my life so I want to make sure we live a good and healthy life moving forward. 

As my agent so thoughtfully told me “a healthy person has 1000 dreams, an unhealthy person has 1”. My dream for the last 2 years has been to get a diagnosis for why you have been feeling so bad and we finally got one. I have wished and prayed to every god/goddess out there for a diagnosis and here we are. We got our 1 dream, now let’s go dream up 1000 more. 

And lastly I am sorry I was mad at you (body) not being tough enough. Turns out we’ve been really fucking tough this whole time I just couldn’t see it.