When Love Refuses to Break
Kind of a year in review: Two athletes' journey through both breaking our pelvises in the same year and surviving a summer of foot surgery
As 2024 comes to an end, I contemplate on how 2024 has been about love. Though there are many ways to view our reality, let alone package up a whole year, 2024’s theme was certainly about how love can conquer trauma after trauma, if you keep choosing it. It was about falling in love and about how love is not just romantic and beautiful - it’s scrappy, resourceful and stubborn. Love is a survivalist. And certainly if love was a person, it would climb winter 14,000 ft peaks because it’s that goddamn durable.
2024 is a story about a love that survived a nightmare summer. A summer of broken bones— we both broke our pelvises this year, went through emergency hospitalizations, family strife, and weathered challenges of being at different places in our lives. But I’ll get to that in a minute. This is also about celebrating one year in each other’s worlds.
This month, on December 13, my partner Adam and I celebrated our 1 year Saunaversary. If you’ve never heard of a saunaversary, don’t be surprised. We made up the term. It’s what we call the day we met for the first time when we met in the North Boulder Rec sauna. It’s not exactly a romantic place, it’s at a minimum a gross public sauna, but I digress.
At the time I was using the sauna to heat train for the HURT 100 mile Ultramarathon and Adam was using the sauna after a swim workout because his apartment pool was closed that day. It was an unlikely meeting and had one of us tweaked our schedule slightly we wouldn’t have met at all— I bought a sauna for my house shortly after that fateful day and Adam had only gone to that sauna a few times that winter.
To be honest, we almost didn’t talk in the sauna that day and if we hadn’t I wouldn’t be writing this post. I walked in the sauna and immediately saw him in the corner, the only other person in the sauna. I averted my eyes because I thought he was so attractive I didn’t want to look like I was staring at him. I sat in the opposite corner, as far away as possible and played with my watch scrolling the fields to distract myself. I’m not usually so shy, but there was an electricity between us when I entered. Thankfully, he started up a conversation after about 10 minutes despite my seemingly complete lack of interest in interacting.
It took about a month and a half for the two of us to actually go on a date. We met in mid-December, then finally went on a hike January 31 and I still wasn’t sure if it was a date (it was). In December, I was deep in training for my 100-mile ultramarathon and focused completely on that. I spent part of the next month in Leadville, CO before traveling to Hawaii to compete. At this time Adam was in his off season after finishing Ironman Arizona in November, not quite beginning build up for Ironman Texas in April. An ironman athlete and a trail runner—not a likely combo as we tend to be opposites, trail runners a bit too laid back and triathletes a bit too concerned about metrics and sleep scores, but we both shared an obsession for pushing ourselves and understood each other. And there was a curiosity and respect we had for each other’s athletic process.
It was clear that we had a special spark from the start. Some will say a spark isn’t important, but it’s surely what got us to finally go on that first date despite a very busy winter and almost a month and a half passing since we met. We also shared a deep interest in training and competing, giving us the ability to understand each other’s obsession with sport and a full commitment to that lifestyle. Something many partners outside of competitive athletics don’t understand.
Over the first few months of our relationship we spent time together as much as we could (I traveled to Japan and New York with my kids) and even managed to go on some trips together and support each other’s training and competitions. Adam joined me in Arizona before I started the Arizona Trail FKT project, then I returned and joined him for Ironman Texas as he qualified for Kona World Championships.
Gallery (above) Adam and me at Ironman Texas where he qualified for the World Championships.
It was an exciting time, though my FKT project ended prematurely with a bad foot infection and extreme fatigue— Adam was going to Kona— a dream of his for many years— and the excitement was contagious. Could two athletes support each other’s goals and make a relationship work even with two very different lives? My life was with two nearly grown teenagers and an established race organization business. Adam had quit his corporate job in February and began coaching and training as a full time athlete, still figuring out how he wants to live his life. To be fair, I feel like I’ve always been trying to figure out what I’m going to be doing, so it worked. It would be a year of big change, not all of it easy, in fact, most of it extremely difficult.
Just a couple months into our relationship being “official” I broke my pelvis and wrist in a bike accident and Adam flew back from a family trip to support me. It was also this month that he met my almost-grown children (my youngest daughter graduated high school this year) and he met my parents. We were diving in, because life can’t just be lived in separate boxes — one for our relationship and one for sport and one for work and one for family, no, the boxes would be poured into each other and shaken around as we navigated this relationship and life.
All long term relationships have to weather ups and downs and the reality of daily life, but ours was about to be tested beyond a normal amount of hardship, just a couple months in.
Here’s some of what April through October brought us:
April: was treated for a bad infection of my right foot/big toe joint after running 450 miles on the Arizona Trail during my Arizona Trail FKT project and committed to getting foot surgery in the summer as I was unable to complete big running projects due to my constant foot pain and deformation of the bones.
May 15: I broke my pelvis and wrist and got a concussion in a bike accident.
June 12: I broke my wrist AGAIN and my hand in another bike accident
June 21: Had foot surgery (lapiplasty /bunion surgery). 3 weeks on crutches, 3 weeks in a surgical boot
July: Was hospitalized for depression due to being unable to do my usual activities
August: I was able to resume biking again post surgery after 6 weeks of no activity. Signed up for the HURT 100 despite not knowing if I could actually run it (it is Jan ‘25)
September: Was able to resume running starting with 1.5 miles at a time.
October: Adam was diagnosed with a pelvis stress fracture just 3 weeks before Kona World Championships. He ran the race despite this - see his in depth write up on “Crushing Tuesdays”. I joined him in Kona for the race and helped him get around before and after.
Through it all, our love for each other grew deeper. We weren’t sure we would survive the challenges together, but we loved each other. In the midst of it all this summer Adam asked me, “Is love really enough?” A painful question and one I would answer “yes” to. There were many things that could have broken us apart during that time, and almost did in some cases, but instead of walking away we each faced our own beliefs about relationships and love. We openly talked about our feelings and fears. We sat with the pain and discomfort of not being sure if we should keep trying. We weathered each challenge like a storm, emerging sometimes more hurt, sometimes closer. We sat with discomfort, with not knowing.
Although I can’t speak for Adam, I know that for myself what allowed me to keep moving forward was a recognition that many of the negative feelings I had around the relationship were stories I was telling myself, not reality. Bad stories, sad stories. Past stories. When I said no to those stories and actually became present with the relationship I saw a deep love we had that transcended our pasts, our age gap, broken bones and day to day challenges of being in different phases in our lives, me— raising two teenagers and managing a business while running full time and him — quitting his corporate job to be a full time athlete and building his coaching business.
Overcoming my own mind and its desire to write the script instead of being present was the single biggest challenge of the relationship for me, not the actual day to day challenges. When I realized this, the relationship changed for the better, it became easier and more natural. I stopped questioning his love. I just accepted it.
I remember one such moment so clearly. It was shortly after my hospitalization and when I was finally able to start moving (biking in this case) in August after my foot surgery:
I was riding my gravel bike up a long gradual hill in the heat of summer when an epiphany hit me. I suddenly realized that I feel pain in relationships because I do not love myself — my love for myself is dependent on many things, and I withhold it from myself. So when I feel rejected by my partner’s words or actions, I get cut off from my only supply of love. A full body electrical current went through me as I realized this epiphany would change my life. I had it all wrong. Relationships don’t hurt us, we hurt ourselves.
Is it possible to come into a relationship with our own well of love and then our partner’s love is not so tenuous? Not so dangerous to our well being?
I wasn’t sure because I had never really considered what it meant to love oneself. It just always felt like something too self-involved or selfish. It seemed gross to “love your self.” Cheesy, even. But at this point in my life I had to change or the relationship would not work. I had to do things differently and love is one of those rare things that can push up to places we would’ve never gone, to grow in ways that are too painful to contemplate. Love is scrappy, it is desperate and stubborn, love finds a way. What would self love look like in action?
For me, it meant listening to my body. Allowing myself not to always be so driven or productive. It meant not going to my event, the Bigfoot 200, this year as I recovered from my hospitalization. It meant stepping back from work more often. It meant eating more. Caring less about what I think others think. I began making a list of things I would do to love myself. I had to begin to embody this love if I wanted my relationship with Adam to survive.
This is where the magic of relationships can happen. My love for Adam, my desire to “make it work” forced me to become a better person. If I didn’t, it wouldn’t work. Of course I wanted to be a better person for other reasons too like my kids and my work, but those reasons weren’t dependent on it. I was well aware to how urgent and important it was for both of us to take this step. We had to grow and that’s painful. But we did grow, together. By November we began to interact in a more supportive way with each other.
Relationships are hard, that’s what everyone says. But it’s not relationships that are hard, it’s our ability to love ourselves that is hard. It’s our inability to see ourselves or others clearly that is hard. When we enter a relationship, this becomes so obvious - or else we are left blaming someone else for not loving us the way we should love ourselves. The antidote is to let go of our propensity to control the future and instead— embrace the present. The future will always be the scary and unknown. We can embrace love knowing it is impermanent and unpredictable in the here and now. That we deserve it. We can act as though we have the love, not as though we are losing it before we actually have.
Presence is always the answer to pain.
When we express and embody that love for ourselves instead of trying to take it or get it from those around us, we are no longer dependent on the whims of the world, or rather the natural fluctuations of a relationship. Through loving ourselves, we open ourselves to accepting others as they are, accepting their love and their shortcomings. Accepting the discomfort of conversations that leave us feeling empty - not because a partner made us feel that way, but because the story we are telling ourselves about what happened or what was said —is empty.
A long way of saying that I’m grateful to be celebrating Adam and my Saunaversary and a year of love — one year later. Grateful to be in a relationship with someone who is equally committed to living a life of adventure and growth. Cheers to 2025!
There is a famous psychologist, George Vaillant, whose main claim to fame was as the Director of a Harvard study of adults that was conducted over a period of 60 years! Reading your post this morning reminds us of his summary of this longitudinal research.
He was asked, “How do you summarize the way to be well and happy?”
He said, “I can summarize that in five words."
"Happiness is love, full stop.”
Love Mom and Dad
Beautifully said. Thank you for sharing our love story so vulnerably. What an adventure it’s been. Grateful to have you as my partner, in the valleys and on the peaks ❤️