The Unraveling

This is Part 4 of my story. If you're just joining: Part 1 was the girl at the YMCA pool. Part 2 was the crash. Part 3 was two Ironman finish lines, Mont Tremblant in 2015 and Lake Placid in 2018, and the version of me a lot of you first met.

At the end of Part 3, I told you there was one more start line. This is that race, and what came after it.

At the end of September 2019, my family and I went to Chattanooga, Tennessee, for my third Ironman. A week before the race, I looked at the forecast. It was in the high 90s every day we'd be there. I checked my weather app twice to make sure I'd typed in the right city.

The swim was the best of my life. The river was 80 degrees, too warm for wetsuits, so I swam in my tri kit. I counted the buoys, and nobody kicked me once. I climbed out in 1:17, saw my family, and headed to my bike with my heart full.

At mile 6, my chain fell off. It never falls off that bike. After Mont Tremblant, I have a little bike PTSD, and it rattled me more than it should have. I put it back on and made myself calm down.

By mile 45, the heat had gotten into me. I had worried about it for a week, but only for the run. I never thought it would catch me on the bike. I poured water over my head at every aid station and put ice everywhere I could fit it.

Just past the halfway point, everything unraveled. I hit a wall unlike anything I'd ever felt. I took a gel, an electrolyte tablet, and a drink, and all of it came back up. I was hot, sick, and confused. There were people down all along the course. One man was lying beside his bike, done. A police officer was helping someone off the ground. On the one real climb, a man at the top was bent over, vomiting.

My hamstring had been complaining all day, too. With everything else going on, it barely registered.

At mile 92, I got off my bike, leaned it against a tree, and was sick again. I looked down and saw a red rash all over my thighs. I was so dizzy that I lay down in the grass.

An EMS car pulled up. I told the paramedic I was okay. He told me I wasn't. He was right. He asked where I was from, and when I said Maine, he said, "Bless your heart, ma'am." He made me promise not to get back on my bike, and I kept that promise.

A woman rode up, put her bike down next to mine, and was sick too. It was her first Ironman. Her whole family had made t-shirts. We sat together in the grass and waited.

The van that picked me up was full of people whose days had ended the same way. The man next to me said, with tears in his eyes, that this had been his redemption race after a DNF a few weeks earlier. We stopped for the mom I'd chatted with in the swim line, whose three kids were wearing her race number on their shirts. I heard later that more than 300 people didn't make it off the bike course that day.

My family met me at the medical tent. My kids hugged me hard and told me they were glad I didn't finish. They had been watching sick people go into that tent all afternoon.

It was the only race of my life I didn't finish.

The next week, I wrote about it. I ended that post by saying the sun did rise on Monday, and that I knew in my heart I had the courage to try again. I meant every word.

It was the last personal thing I wrote for seven years.

Two weeks after Chattanooga, I ran a half marathon. I finished it. That was the day I knew my hamstring was done.

So I stopped running to let it heal. It was supposed to be temporary.

When I tried to come back on the treadmill, something was wrong, and it wasn't my hamstring. I felt clumsy. I tripped on a moving belt, over nothing. It felt like running in clown shoes. I decided the shoes were the problem. I returned a pair because I was sure they were too clunky to run in.

For years, it turned out, all that training had been covering for something. Strong muscles had been quietly doing the work for the ones that weren't getting the message. When I stopped training, the cover came off.

Then it was 2020, and the whole world closed. There wasn't much anyone could do about anything, including me.

Here is what I was living with, and what I told myself about each piece of it.

I had been tripping since around 2009, not long after my daughter was born. I decided it was nerve damage from childbirth. You've already seen it in this story: the bloody knee at my first triathlon summer, and the stumbles before the crash that I never wrote about.

At Mont Tremblant, my hands went so numb I couldn't tie my own shoes. I blamed the shifters.

On the treadmill, I blamed the shoes.

I fell, and not gently. I fell on the tennis court. I fell on a trail walking my dogs, when I caught my foot on a rock and came down hard on my knee. I told myself I needed more strength training.

My handwriting fell apart until sometimes I couldn't read what I'd written. I decided I had arthritis in my hand, and that I'd gotten lazy.

I had to go to the bathroom all the time. I found a reason for that too.

I was stiff, especially in the mornings. I saw a chiropractor through those two years, and she told me more than once that I was one of the stiffest patients she'd ever had. One day she said she thought my right foot looked like a foot drop. I heard her, and I filed it away with everything else.

People noticed my walk. Strangers asked what I'd done to myself. I'll tell you more about those comments later in this series. I assumed I was dealing with an injury.

There was an excuse for every single symptom.

I've thought a lot about why I didn't go looking for answers sooner. I was a critical care nurse. If a patient had handed me that list, I would have been worried within a minute. But it never came to me as a list. It came one piece at a time, over ten years, and every piece came with its own explanation.

The same thing that got me across the finish line at Mont Tremblant was working against me now. I didn't quit. I didn't accept no. So when my body stopped cooperating, I assumed the problem was effort. I thought I was weak. I thought I needed to work harder. I pushed through, because pushing through was who I was.

That fall on the trail still scares me. I didn't know that day how much could have gone wrong. I'll tell you why in Part 5.

Then I fell badly twice in one week, and I finally went to a doctor.

I told her everything: the tripping, the falls, the years of it. She didn't seem to be listening. She didn't do a thorough neurological exam. I'm a nurse, and I believe a real one would have shown her right away that something was very wrong.

At the end of the visit, she watched me walk down the hallway. I was wearing sandals. She suggested I think about wearing different shoes.

I had already tried different shoes. I had returned them.

- Angela

Coming soon: Part 5: The Diagnosis.