Take-away Wednesday

Last week little miss and I visited a teammate from Team Challenge. If you are just stumbling upon this blog or you simply haven't checked out my donation page yet (link to the right), please go look and at least check out what Team Challenge is all about.

This teammate is in the hospital right now with multiple abscesses - caused by Crohn's - awaiting possible surgery and then hopefully, if she is infection-free, treatment to help with the barrage of symptoms that can go with this disease. She is a cool, tough-looking chick complete with faux-hawk, piercings, tattoos and colorful language. We talked a lot about what she's going through, but also the importance of Team Challenge and the significance of trying to make it to Las Vegas in December.

A lot of people when sick, automatically look to celebrities or athletes in the limelight who have gone through major challenges publicly. Think about that movie that's coming out, "50/50" in which Seth Rogan says to his friend, "You're gonna be fine! Lance Armstrong keeps getting cancer and look at him," or something to that effect.

I think the problem with that, though, is that we often look at people like Lance Armstrong, or Oscar Pistorius, or Bethany Hamilton, or the dude who cut himself free from the bolder, and think, "well, I'm not a seasoned athlete, so I can't do ____." What people don't realize is that there are normal, every-day people who must juggle the demands of daily life with the complications of a chronic ailment who still find the strength to face each day. Some days are better than others, but I can imagine that if everyone went in with an all-or-nothing attitude, a lot of people would just lay down and let disease take over.

My teammate understands she will be faced with physical limitations, so she's certainly not out to PR on a Half-Marathon. Instead, she says, "If I can't run it, I'll walk it. If I can't walk it, I'll crawl it. One way or another, I'm getting across that f****** finish line!"

What I challenge you to take away from this little anecdote is to find your finish line, and f****** cross it. Sometimes we set lofty goals for ourselves, but that shouldn't stop us from accomplishing them. Set reasonable landmarks that you can reach along the way and know that maybe the way you anticipated getting there might wind up being very different from what actually happens. All it takes is one unpredictable variable to throw off even the best-laid plans, so roll with the punches and find your own detour.