Hill Training & What I Learned About Lung Cancer | Aug 30

August 30, 2023

Attention: This post contains swearing and blasphemy. What else is new, I hear you think.  What can I say? Sometimes you just have to say it as you see it.

__________________________________________________________________________

For the Map Nerd In All Of Us

(or just skip it if you hate maps)

I. The Training Ride

I’m continuing the series of challenges to prepare me for The Big Day, September 15, when I will set out on my 80 mile round trip from home to Multnomah Falls. Included in that little journey will be some profound hill-age, i.e., miles of uphills, some of them Very Big. Today, my coach sent me out to Portland Woman’s Forum in the Columbia Gorge. My mission: ride the approximately 10 miles from Women’s Forum to Multnomah Falls and back. 20 miles? I hear you think. That’s nothing compared to what you’ve done. 

I’ll spare the suspense. I did it. It wasn’t even horrible. The surprise was, I learned more about living with lung cancer than I did about the ride. So, here goes.

Starting at Women’s Forum toward the falls is mostly downhill, which means you are riding along, down, down, down, and looking across the road and imagining coming up the stuff you’re currently riding down. My thinking went something like this for the first five miles of the ride:

Holy.Fucking.God.

Holy.Fucking.God.

Holy.Fucking.God.

Then my thinking changed:

Holy.Fucking.God.

Holy.Fucking.God.

I can’t believe how beautiful this is. 

Holy.Fucking.God.

How lucky that I get to live so close to this beautiful place. 

Huh. I can do this. 

All the while, I was blessing every forward, sideways, backwards lunge, every goblet, suitcase, regular squat. I said thank you to the backside of my volcano and the multiple times I went up it. I made a commitment to find the lyrics to my hill climbing song so I could stop repeating the same stanza in my head.

And I stared lung cancer right in the eye and laughed. Laughed, I tell you.

At one point in the ride, I marveled that 2 years ago, I struggled to walk down my street. I took a deep breath and marveled that the part of my chest that is usually stiff and reluctant to expand seems to have grown more flexible. I thought of the people I knew who have died this year, the people I heard in a meeting this week talk about recurrences, pain, needing oxygen to sleep, needing encouragement to just hold on long enough for space to open in a trial.

I breathed a thank you that the targeted therapy I use is working for me. I thought I’m so grateful I can do this right now even as I added because who knows if I’ll be able to next year. 

On the drive home, I stopped for a really big cup of celebratory coffee.

And, while I now know I can manage these hills, it’s the hills plus distance my coach, AKA my DH, and I wonder if I’ll manage.  Saturday’s plan is for 70 miles with a hard uphill– a section I didn’t try today– because what the heck. It’s time to see what’s what.

Here are some photos I took early in the ride to try to represent the hills as I was seeing them. I call it the OMFG collection. Tip: try to follow the sweep of the road around the curves.

II. What I Learned

What did I learn today? I knew I was afraid in the spring, when I started training for this ride. It’s been hard to say, specifically, of what.  (I preface the upcoming impromptu list with a reminder, to myself especially, that my cancer was diagnosed during the height of Covid, and I spent Covid and longer in my house, with only my little family pod, recovering for 8+ months from treatment and treatment-related badnesses.)

So, fears. In no particular order: Leaving the house. Going on a bike ride by myself. Going on a really long bike ride by myself. Hills. Not being able to catch my breath. (Maybe dying because of it?) The stiffness of my right lung (which seems to have subsided and I am not kidding.) Coughing. Provoking something Really Bad because I am daring to lay claim to something I love? Not being able to breathe. Having to go to the Emergency Room.

You get the drift.

(Hmm. The longer this list of fears, the more I can see they’re related to the worst of my illness. )

But here is the amazing part. Somewhere between loading my bike and my stuff into the car and getting onto the highway, I remembered that I know a lot. Planning a ride, assessing the weather and deciding what clothes to wear/bring, packing food, tubes (for flat tires) and tools. I know in my bones how to handle a bike. And, being on the survivor side of cancer does not delete that knowledge. I still know how to do all this stuff, I marveled today. I know how to do it.

It’s so obvious once you see it, right? Creating a new normal doesn’t mean starting from scratch. I get to keep everything I knew and experienced and felt and, now discover a bunch of new stuff.

I think I left active cancer believing I was much less than I am, certainly physically, but intellectually and emotionally as well. But I’m not. I am still myself, certainly nuanced by time and experience, but me nonetheless.

And if seeing that is what comes of riding a bike a lousy 20 miles, 10 of which were completely uphill, then that’s fine by me.

Thanks for reading. Here’s hoping your uphills are manageable and the wind is at your back.