Why I Stopped Telling You My Story (And Why I'm Starting Again)

If you've followed Marathons & Motivation for a long time - and I know some of you have been here since the very beginning - you may have noticed that somewhere around 2019, I went quiet.

Not quiet about recipes. The recipes kept coming. Air fryer chicken, berry cobbler, hundreds of dishes tested in my kitchen here in Maine. But quiet about me. The training updates stopped. The race recaps stopped. The honest blurbs about hard training cycles, the ones so many of you followed as I worked my way to the Ironman finish lines at Mont Tremblant and Lake Placid - they just disappeared.

I never explained why. So here it is.

In 2019, a race I couldn't finish - Ironman Chattanooga, where near heat stroke and a hamstring injury ended my day - forced me to stop running. And stopping, it turned out, was what finally let my body show me what had been quietly going wrong for years.

In 2021, after months of strange symptoms, dismissals, and COVID-delayed appointments, I was diagnosed with degenerative disc disease and underwent major cervical spine surgery after coming dangerously close to paralysis. As a nurse with 25 years of clinical experience, I understood exactly what I was facing - which was both a gift and one of the most sobering experiences of my life.

When I realized I couldn't run marathons anymore, I made a quiet decision: I thought my story was over. This blog was called Marathons & Motivation, and I couldn't do marathons. So I figured the safest thing was to stop being a person on this site and just become a recipe index. Useful, reliable, and completely impersonal.

For seven years, that's what I did.

Then this past year happened. A knee injury that hounded me for twelve months. Knee replacement surgery. A comeback plan I was genuinely excited about. And then - another spine surgery, another setback, another stretch of starting over.

When I shared a little about my knee surgery on Facebook, something unexpected happened. Dozens of you reached out. People I hadn't heard from in years. People who, I suspect, originally came here not for the recipes but for the story - and who stuck around hoping it would come back.

It made me realize something I should have understood a long time ago: I was wrong about my story being over. It wasn't over. I just stopped telling it.

So I'm starting again.

Over the coming months, I'm going to tell you the whole thing - from the beginning. The 13-year-old swimmer at the YMCA who dreamed of becoming an Ironman. The bicycle crash during Ironman training that, I now know, is still echoing through my body more than a decade later. The finish lines. The diagnosis. The comments strangers have made about my body over the years - some of them I'm still carrying. The year everything went sideways. And the comeback I'm working on right now, because I am not done.

I'm not telling this story because it's tidy. It isn't. I'm in the middle of the messy part as I write this. I'm telling it because somewhere out there is someone sitting in a recovery room, or limping through a grocery store, or quietly grieving the athlete they used to be - and I want them to know that the story doesn't end where you think it does.

The recipes aren't going anywhere. But neither am I. Not anymore.