Finding Leadville Chapter 20: Coming Home

The author and her Chris adventuring in the Midwest

Reframing

I used to be

afraid of bees

from when I was three

because a whole swarm

stung me.

But at thirty three,

I realize

that each bee

mistakes me

for a flower.

A month before Leadville, I requested to break my lease on the cabin early and leave before September 1st.

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” I said into the phone. It was Tuesday morning, 48 hours after the race, and Chris was already back in Minnesota. I could feel him light up over the phone. 

“You sure that’ll be okay for you? You should rest,” he said with half concern, half excitement behind his words. 

“I want to rest at home.”

Home. The word pressed its way into my mind, propping up its feet and getting comfortable. It stretched out its arms and took up space. I was ready for this word. I wanted this word. I was ready to go home. Not just to Minnesota. But, in my own body.

Home.

I packed my things, my car a game of Tetris. Sliding open the door to the back deck, I stepped onto the wood paneling. Pressing my hands onto the railing, I looked up one last time at the mountain shadowing the valley. A crow cawed. Chipmunks ran. And, out of the corner of my eye, I caught a lumbering beast slipping deeper into the trees. A moose was leaving, too. I took it as a sign to get on with it and go.

I got into my car and puttered down the sloping dirt road toward home. 

I had a feeling it would all work out. And it did. I believed in myself.

A belief is a thought we think over and over again, isn’t it? A thought that becomes so very true to our being and life then takes shape around it.

Going into my big training runs, I was intentional about the thoughts with which I knew I could start out with: I am a mountain runner. I am an ultrarunner. I am capable of big miles. This body is strong, I get stronger every mile.

But during those runs, when things got tough, old beliefs had a way of sneaking in. As my body slowed to climb a steep part of the course, my first thought was, ‘I’m weak.’ The same limiting belief that erupted at Twin Lakes when I finished climbing up and over Hope Pass only to exclaim, "I'm not an athlete!" Sometimes we can shift these thoughts on our own. Sometimes, we need someone to help us see what's true.

Many times, in the middle of a memory, I caught other kinds of thoughts. Thoughts about my body, my worth, and who the world taught me I could be. Over and over, bit by bit, I reworked them. I reframed. I sought out another voice when I needed it most. And in turn, I reshaped how I felt. When I caught my doubts and navigated them toward beliefs that supported me instead of tore me down, I carried myself differently.

I am a runner. I am an ultrarunner. I am a strong(er) and (more) confident woman. I am (still) learning what my needs are. I am an adventurer and I can figure things out as I go along. I am capable and strong and powerful and when I don’t feel that way, I rest and recover – like we all need to do, get to do.

Negotiating 

"No,"

said my body, 

"We’re too tired today."

"No,"

said my mind, 

"We deserve to simply stay."

"Let's go,"

said my heart, 

"I can't wait 

to remember why

sweat and wind

and jagged breath

make me feel like

I can fly."

After a two-day drive through Colorado and Nebraska, I was parked in front of my South Minneapolis house. Turning off the ignition, I sat in the humid car for just a second more.

“I have to water my plants,” my first thought.

In the 99-degree Midwest heat of late August, I collected my belongings and pulled them inside the house. No more mountains right outside the back patio. No more thin air or alpine bird songs or single-track trails alongside gushing waterfalls or encounters with through hikers with trail names like Chipper and Stump, Idaho and Limpy.

The next two months, I moved through the rhythms of work schedules and clear weekends. Of reading books and scrolling my phone and watching the world outside shift from summer breezes to copper painted tree leaves. I attempted to write about what I just experienced and fought with the urge to let it all lay quiet, instead.

Chris and I slowly dated each other, holding hands as we strolled through the county fair, motorcycle rides where I gripped his waist and pressed my face into his back. We sat in the shade and sipped cold beers, just as slowly drank each other in, too. We began to tend to our relationship in a deliberate way, like a couple of clock smiths peering into gears, tweezers in hand, delicate, with no intention of rushing, setting the project down when needed. We began to tick after some time, our hearts pumping blood back into the cracks we left there when I left earlier that Spring. 

I was different. And therefore, so were we.

Date Night

I like when we have big conversations

in small moments

the ones nestled between the roll of the die

as the trivial pursuit board laughs at

our not-so-youthful faces scrunched up

in competitive storytelling.

I like when beer slides past our tongues

and we loosen up enough

to bob our shoulders playfully to Prince.

I want to bump knees under the table

as the French fries drift past us

our nostrils flaring

like synchronized swimmers.

The waiter whose name

we can't seem to remember

never forgets a hello,

his smiley face tattoos

charming us every time.

I like trusting you with the car keys

your night vision is better than mine

and I get to keep my eyes on you

instead of the road.

If the night ends with me

in a thrown back belly laugh

and you leaning in to kiss me

then I know

we are doing 

this right.

Maybe you’ve heard about the Minnesota Goodbye: The "whelp" with a knee slap, the hugs, the walk to the door, the doorway chat, the ‘we really should be going’, the second round of hugs, the hand on the doorknob, the slow door open conversation that ends with “get home safe!”, and finally, the window wave.

Over those two months, I gave my Colorado summer the Minnesota Goodbye. I’m certain Leadville told me to “get home safe” because that’s how you say ‘I love you’ in the Midwest. Just be safe.

Safe.

Get home safe.

I swam in a kaleidoscope of big feelings post-race. I had days sunk into the couch, Netflix on but not really paying attention to the storyline. I tried to run, even signing up for a fall marathon to “use my altitude lungs for,” but my body sent me all the signals to slow down. Every time I tried to sit at my laptop to write stories, it was impossible to get my fingers moving along the black and white lettered keyboard. It felt like grief, the complicated and nuanced layers of letting something important go.

I once read that grief is “love needing a place to go.” I loved every inch of living in the mountains. Of training for something mighty. Of connecting with like-minded people. Of completing a task that I set out to do. Of the spaciousness to heal something profound within myself. I’ve spoken with folks who have experienced something similar after weddings and giving birth, honeymoons and job promotions. There is a genuine let down after the festivities. 

Yet, all endings bring forth new beginnings. 

And me? I like beginnings. Always have.

-

I grazed my fingertips along the bookshelf in my office, looking for something to read. There, on the bottom shelf, was my copy of No Future Without Forgiveness by Desmund Tutu. I had read it years ago. I remember how I shook with anger, teared up with sadness, and got a bellyache from the stories within those pages. 

I flipped the book toward the back and a pink highlighted line popped out at me: “But what about forgiveness?” It asked, “It is perhaps the most difficult thing in the world – in almost every language the most difficult words are, ‘I’m sorry.’” 

A tear fell onto the page. I turned it to the next and there, glaring at me: “Reconciliation is liable to be a drawn-out process with ups and downs, not something accomplished overnight…”

Just like training for a freaking ultramarathon, I thought.

Desmund Tutu partook in an act of forgiveness far mightier than the ones I was exploring. A nation of war victims is an intensely magnified experience of inflicted pain and deserved healing. Yet, it pointed out perfectly to me: there was room for forgiveness. For the men I never consented to. For the imperfections of parenting. For what I learned from this world. For myself.

I pulled a post-it note and stuck it on the book. Drawing out a pen, I watched as my hand wrote: “I love you. I'm sorry. I forgive you.” I stared at the ink, pen strokes smudging behind the film of water forming in my eyes. I whispered the words aloud, as though shimmying a new coat on that I wasn’t sure I liked.

“I love you, Barbara,” a gentle hand reached up to my heart, pressing against my chest. "I'm sorry. I forgive you." My own hand. The hand of a little girl inside of me. Of the runner. Of the author of her own story.

I closed my eyes, tipped my head back, and breathed out. 

Maybe we can’t wait around for an ideal apology. Maybe, when the time clicks together and the inner work addressed, we can exhale into forgiveness instead. We can forgive people for acting from what they knew and how they learned love. We can reframe what we have with enough profundity to elicit a change within us.

That hand on my heart was my own. The forgiveness I spoke was my own. The newness I was feeling was for Barbara at age two, twelve, sixteen, twenty-two.

I didn’t know what I would do with that note, that book, that moment. All I knew was every cell in me wanted to rewrite the past, to look to the future and just say, “I forgive you.” 

For now – it was just the next right step. Hand on the heart. A note on a post-it. A step on the trail up (or down) the side of a mountain.

Looking around, I marveled at the life I had access to all around me, the woman I had become. And there I was, right there in the room with her, this time inside every incredible cell of every amazing tissue of each remarkable muscle. No longer disconnected. Embodied.

I was a woman who allowed running to take her where she deserved to go.

A woman who now takes no shit, because Leadville taught her how.

Car keys in one hand and Chris’s fingers wrapped in the other, I took my body out the door into date night to celebrate the simple act of good love. 

To my body: I love you. I’m sorry.

Thank you for getting me through it all, so far.

I’ve become a person who

waves at rumbling trucks and cars

as I walk down a mud-dirt road;

drives in silence along winding

mountain passes and fir tree forests;

watches the sun play behind clouds

and dance back out to see me again;

goes to bed under a thick comforter

just to wake with the precious dawn;

takes up space sitting and standing

and roaming the local grocery store;

says "hello!" to birds 

and "excuse me!" to groundhogs

and "good bye!" to each trekked trail;

laughs at the nature of dogs 

marvels at the magnificence of moose;

savors easy mornings 

is enraptured by starlit nights;

slides inky pen over paper each day

to make sense wondrous thoughts;

loses time in a book, legs resting

as a dog lays breathing on me;

runs miles upon miles just to memorize

the holiness of earth’s lush land;

listens for a moment at the rush

of thawed winter turned to stream;

forgets to look at her phone

and remembers to be here

really here

in this place;

I have become a person who

lives and breathes 

as much as she is able.

Thank you, Leadville.