The 10 K

I ran five miles once. My brother and I challenged ourselves to run around the entire section. A county road section is normally a total of four miles, but the one that we ran was actually five. You could definitely say that we took it slow! But we made it. And I was pretty sore the next day.

I'm thinking back on that experience because early tomorrow morning, Tracy and I are going to do the Omaha 10 K. We signed up months ago figuring that this would be a good challenge for us as we celebrate a return to normal after the conclusion of Tracy's chemotherapy and radiation treatments.

Or so we thought.

We vastly underestimated the time that it would take Tracy to recover from her cancer treatment. Everybody's different, of course. But in Tracy's case, she has tried to get back to where she was before the diagnosis. She used to work out regularly. She's even run a couple half marathons. But Tracy experienced light-headedness during or after workouts. One night, her symptoms were so bad that we went to the emergency room. Given her history with herceptin and the way that it affected her heart, we were very concerned. We wound up spending the night in the hospital that night, but in the end we were relieved that the tests showed that her heart was fine. We found out that she had been having trouble with low potassium. Since then, she's been able to manage that problem, but we decided against training for the 10 K.

One thing that we learned from all of this is that, cancer treatment is not easy to come back from. It takes a long time for things to even start to feel normal again. But we will be there tomorrow and we will participate.

We will take it as a small victory.