Recipe for Thankfulness

First of all, happy American Thanksgiving from my family to yours! If you want to feel truly thankful on Thanksgiving, try getting really really really sick the week before. It puts all else into blinding perspective. You come to appreciate the little things - walking up a flight of steps without feeling so weak you're afraid you're going to totter right over, eating food and having it stay in your stomach, being able to keep up with your kids, let alone do simple things like prepare them a meal. This Thanksiving, I was grateful just to be able to eat a tiny bit of the lovely food and sit there with my family talking about the things we are most thankful for.

In general, I think I am a pretty grateful person. Many times as I go about my day, I smile and feel thankful for the life I am incredibly lucky to lead - for the beauty that surrounds me, my loving husband and healthy happy kids, my strong and fit body. But this little brush with incapacitation taught me about all the small things that go unnoticed, how I take my body and its capabilities largely for granted. I'm not talking about the ability to run fifteen miles either, that's easy to be thankful for because it really does seem like a miracle to someone who can still remember not being able to run one. But on a daily basis, my body performs a thousand small and seemingly inconsequential miracles, things like moving me from the chair to the counter to pour a cup of tea, or swallowing that tea and digesting it around in my stomach instead of staging a mini-revolution and sending it back where it came from, things like breathing easily and moving without pain. This week I've had cause to examine all of those privileges and realize how easily they can disappear. How quickly you can go from vibrant good health to can't get out of bed.

I've been reading a book called The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--And How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World , which is really a fascinating book if you have any interest in epidemiology, cartography, the history of cities, and many other related subjects. But it wasn't the best book to finish shortly before being struck down with a mystery virus. The book is all about a dreadful cholera epidemic that literally took 1 out of every 10 people in the 1800's London neighborhoods it visited. As I suffered through my little bout of stomach flu, I thought of those people who went to bed one night healthy and woke up the next morning knowing that they'd be the next corpse tossed on the loaded carts that made their rounds through the streets. We go through our lives thinking the next day will be just like this one, that all the things we can do today we will be able to do tomorrow, and some days this just isn't true at all.

I'm still nowhere near 100% after this illness took my feet out from under me this week. I'm reduced to eating the BRAT diet (Bananas, Rice, Applesauce, Toast) and even my usual mug of mate' sits uneasily on me these days. I've lost about 6 pounds, but sadly my high tech scale says my body fat has gone up (now that is just blatantly unfair, isn't it!!) I went thrift-store shopping with my good friend the week before taking ill, and all of my new cute jeans that I bought now hang a bit baggily in all the wrong places. Still, I did get in the pool this weekend and tagged behind my lane of guys for aboue half the usual workout. I know it will come back quickly and for that I am grateful, as well as for everything else I am vowing not to take for granted anymore.

When You're Going Right and God Tells You to Go Left

For this entire season I've been so excited about the Nationals being here in Oregon again next year, finding a qualifying race, and snagging a slot to go. They're usually in June, when a lot of other good races get going, so I called USAT to find out exactly which weekend in June they would be. They're not, in June that is. They'll be in September next year, mid-September. Mid-September as in right smack in the middle of a family vacation that we've been planning for six months already. Not that I'm complaining really, we're planning on taking the kids on a one-month cycling tour of Italy and that trumps the Nationals any day. But still, it's really disappointing to find out that after all that, I won't be able to go after all.

So it seemed rather serendipitous that the same day I found out about the Nationals date change, I got an email in my inbox saying that the local Team in Training chapter is looking for a triathlon coach. It's something I talked to them about doing a couple of years ago, but at the time they didn't have a local group doing triathlons, just running events. It's a reasonable time commitment, but one I might have a hard time fitting in if I was going to have a serious triathlon season on my hands, and also they're aiming to take a team to the Pacific Crest race, which would've fallen right when I thought Nationals was going to be. So it seems as if maybe I'm being shown a different path for this upcoming season. Maybe one that involves less tri-ing for me, and more tri-ing for other people. I've coached people on and off through the last fifteen years, but not in any large-group format, so this would be an interesting stretch.

To top it off, my neighbor died of cancer last night, she is probably only a decade and change older than I am. It's sobering to think of how quickly all that we take for granted here on earth can be gone. This summer she was riding her bike up our hill with a smile, and now she is somewhere else entirely. It seems like a good time to be giving back for me, so keep your fingers crossed that this opportunity works out!