“I haven’t seen you on your bike in awhile, are you still riding? Lining up for the AZT800 this fall?”

These are the top two questions I’ve been hearing in the past couple months, and I’m finally ready to talk about it.

TL:DR; this is a very long blog post. I don’t write these often, but when I do, I don’t fuck around. It’s why this unedited blog exists. For those curious about my personal experience and the inner workings of my brain, feel free to read all of it. Maybe there’s some bit of gold in here for you. For those who aren’t (and I don’t blame you), if you scroll, the large bold print will tell the story in a nutshell.

Short answer: No, and no, unfortunately.

For those of you who have inquired about my whereabouts on social media, or out on the trails, thanks for caring about a fellow human. Here’s what’s going on: I generally take the rest of the month after my birthday on Sept 20 away from the internet, just popping in to my social media here and there. It’s been an extended break this year, apparently… unplanned but necessary as I’ve been trying to reset and recalibrate my life and my priorities. I’m still alive, but a lot has changed for me. Here’s the update.

Long story short, then short story long: all summer I talked about how riding was the only place I felt like myself since my concussion a year ago, how I felt normal on the bike, and it was so good for my mental (and physical) health to have one thing that reminded me of who I used to be. Two months ago, that came to an end.

When I got off the CDT in mid-August, I was stoked. I felt strong and capable of long days (and nights) on the bike. I was ready to dial in my top-end fitness for fall racing, and had dreams of “celebrating” my year-anniversary of my accident somewhere on the Arizona Trail, racing through the night in an attempt to best the race record I set in 2019 on a harder and longer course. The only victory I was really attached to was proving I was capable of simply being back out there… that I belonged out there again, finally, a year later. Even if I didn’t break the record, even if I didn’t even finish. I just wanted to feel like I was capable of racing an ultra again, after I very clearly wasn’t back in June when I attempted the Oregon Timber Trail.

But there is much more to racing than the race itself.

In the month after the CDT, I got on my bike twice. Then I had one solid training week in Flagstaff, and that was pretty much it.

Navigating a sick geriatric dog close to his end of life which has meant losing even more sleep than I normally do with post-concussion insomnia, in addition to finally accepting the negative impacts of my riding on the rest of my life, finally brought me to the realization that I’m not even a fully healthy normal person right now, much less at the status of an elite athlete ready for an ultra race. Not a long race, not even a short race. Honestly, not even a ride.

In my final session with my cognitive therapist, she helped me finally accept that mountain biking is actually really hard on my brain. The brain does A LOT while mountain biking: not only regulating heart rate, breathing, and muscle activation, but also navigating the demands of balance and coordination at high speeds, responding to changes in terrain and keeping myself rubber side down. All the things that those of us who have been riding for a very long time take for granted. I’ve always taken it for granted myself. Not anymore.

The impacts on my life of continuing to ride and train were significant. While I could feel amazing on a ride, it was a different story when I got off the bike. If I was bikepacking, I wasn’t able to make sense of how to use the basic tools I had with me on my bike: essentially setting up camp and feeding myself. My last days on the CDT consisted of feeling great on the bike, then getting off and staring at all my supplies dumbfounded for at least an hour before I could sort out how to do these basic things I’ve done hundreds, maybe thousands of times. And then packing up the bike in the morning — where does everything go? Even though I’ve packed my bike the same exact way for years, I couldn’t figure it out.

And at home, coming back from a day ride meant I was basically done for the day and had no cognitive bandwidth to use for home care or work tasks. After my current private coaching clients completed their work with me, I couldn’t sort out how to acquire new ones. I wanted to run my Foundations of Movement Medicine group program that I ran last year, I loved it so much and people got a lot out of it, but I couldn’t sort out the logistics of how to make it happen. I wanted to maintain and grow the membership site that I started 4 months after my concussion — stupidly, when I was in denial of how much it was affecting me. But there was no WAY I could handle all those moving parts. I wanted to communicate with potential sponsors for my athlete work who had reached out to me in the spring when I couldn’t do screens or respond to emails — but it turned out I still had trouble responding to emails or even finding them months later.

As September rolled around, I felt like my brain was actually getting worse instead of better.

With exponentially growing shame and depression and a sense of hopelessness I watched the business I’d been building for 8 years, that I’d been trying to rebuild after the hit it took with Covid and then again when my injury happened a year ago, take its last gasps of air and succumb to the undertow of my poor brain’s executive dysfunction, feeling helpless to even throw it a rope. I watched it get swallowed one final time and not resurface.

At the same time, I watched the savings that I’ve been mostly living on since Covid began, unable to be replenished with the small amount of work I was able to do this year, dwindle to its last pennies. I watched my bank account slide into the red for the first time since 2015, when the con man I unfortunately trusted my heart, my life and my finances to stole everything I had. Everything I’ve worked so hard to build and slowly save since then was gone — in a year where my living expenses are higher than they’ve been in a very long time.

Meanwhile, the list of home care tasks piled up as I couldn’t make sense of those either. It took me two hours to clean the kitchen, and then I’d have to go take a nap. I’d think of something I needed from the garage, then walk back and forth from the garage to the house 8 times as I tried to remember what that thing was as it escaped me four seconds after it arrived. My poor partner picked up my slack, but it grew increasingly unfair to him. He’s working and in grad school, with greater than a full-time load, and I wasn’t pulling any of my weight. I got to the point where all I could do was sit on the couch and stare at the wall, wondering what happened to the capable and ambitious person I used to be.

Finally, I felt increasingly guilty that I kept skipping my bike rides and workouts after I’d lie awake for hours each night, only getting 4-5 hours of sleep. How was I supposed to train for a race like that? I knew my CDT fitness, along with the rest of my life, was slipping away. When I did get to ride, it was the same story — I felt like myself, ahhhh that sigh of relief in remembering who I was, the overwhelming feeling of joy and flow. I’d feel my sense of passion and desire and ambition return when I was out there, and then I came home ready to take on the world… and then all my energy and cognitive capacity would be sucked out of me like my head was attached to a vacuum.

As I started to realize the severely negative impact riding was having on the rest of my life, I knew my time was limited. Even though riding my bike was what was keeping me going emotionally, being the only place where I felt like myself, it was killing me cognitively and energetically. It’s a LOT of work for my brain to keep me upright, on my bike, flying down a trail. My brain couldn’t handle that and everything else, and I was sinking. There is so much more to my life than riding and I was losing all of it. I had to stop.

I knew what I was doing wasn’t sustainable.

“Should I just quit?” I suddenly mused out loud to Dan on one of our morning dog walks as we were talking about if I should race the Arizona Trail or the shorter DangerBird, which follows the Monumental Loop in New Mexico. “Yeah, you should,” he answered bluntly. I looked at him with surprise. “Really?” He continued: “You’re not sleeping, and you can barely function. You haven’t even tried to tackle your splits yet. How is your brain going to handle that?”

I sighed. “Yeah, I know…” He’d never said that to me before. He’s been my cheerleader since the day we met. At first I felt defensive, but a second later I knew he was only echoing what my gut had already been telling me for weeks, what I couldn’t bring myself to say out loud. I had just been hoping that my gut was wrong, that somehow I’d magically start sleeping again and pull myself and my life and my work and my training together again, just in time. Even though my gut has never been wrong. There’s a first time for everything, right….?

A few days later, I finally cracked.

Early one morning after yet another sleepless night killed any energy I had for yet another ride I had planned that would go undone, I called Chris, my good friend and athlete manager at Revel, in tears. “I don’t think I can do this anymore,” I confessed. “I don’t think I can race this fall… I’m not healthy. I have to stop. Are you going to fire me?” Chris reassured me that my value to Revel wasn’t just in racing and that they have my back. They’ve had my back since day one. This is what happens when my sponsors are my friends. They know how much of myself I put into my work, and they know I still make an impact for their brand even if I’m not out breaking records. They know I’ll be back to racing. I know I’ll be back… someday, slowly and sustainably. I hope. I won’t let myself think of the alternatives yet.

With Chris’s blessing and Dan’s encouragement, I made the decision to let my fall racing ambitions go. I still had a couple more fun-riding trips planned, plus one more work trip for a media shoot, that I hoped I could hold it together for. Maybe I couldn’t race, but maybe I could still ride and have fun, even if I wouldn’t be as fit as I’d like.

A couple weeks later, just after my birthday on September 20th, I went on an overnight bikepacking trip on the Colorado Trail with my friend Jeff (more on that trip later). Aside from not being acclimated to high altitude, I actually felt strong. We did pretty short (for me) days, 8 hours each day, while keeping a good pace. I had fun, rode well, and overall felt pretty great. I tried really hard to keep my brain focused while setting up/taking down camp, talking to myself out loud which felt silly but worked, and Jeff didn’t have to wait two hours for me to pack up camp like he did on our previous trips this past year (somehow I convinced him to do not one but THREE backcountry trips with me this year, and he was the best partner I could have asked for… thanks buddy). Despite admitting to Jeff over our evening campfire high up on a ridgeline that I was going to give up my fall race ambitions, I felt good enough that as we finished our trip I found thoughts creeping in that maybe I could pull together a race effort this fall after all. Maybe my gut was wrong. I still had time to get my fitness back if I really focused on training…

Then, immediately after that trip I headed to Moab for a three day media shoot with a great film crew, Dan and Kaare, and my friend Doom as the other athlete on the project. Although a ton of fun, shoots are physically demanding with early mornings, late nights, and repeated hard efforts on the bike to get the perfect shot in the perfect light. Not great for someone with post-concussion insomnia. In the middle of day 2, my brain just… quit. Full stop, done. I lost the ability to follow instructions from Dan and Kaare about where we were supposed to ride and what we were supposed to do. They would give Doom and me instructions, we’d ride to the starting spot, and I’d completely forget everything they said. Fortunately, Doom was incredibly patient and let me ask him a ridiculous amount of times to re-explain what was happening and what I needed to do, and let me just follow him on the bike when I still couldn’t sort it out. Fortunately my physical ability to ride was still present, and just as fortunately we nailed all our shots on the first two days. Day three was short, affording me the afternoon to rest.

After making it through the shoot I met up with some friends in Moab and then Grand Junction for what I’d already established in my head would be my final few days of riding for the season. I wanted to go out on a high note and just have fun shredding with my buddies, but my brain and body had already disconnected from each other and the flow I so regularly find on my bike was simply non-existent. My brain couldn’t make my body do things, and my body couldn’t figure it out on its own. Easy maneuvers like lifting my front wheel over a small ledge weren’t happening. I literally could not make my body go through those motions: load, explode, weight shift. I couldn’t do it. I felt like I was transported back to the rider I was over a decade ago, with no business being on the technical trails I was trying to ride. I was stiff, making stupid mistakes, and growing increasingly nervous about wrecking. Fortunately I know enough to just get off my bike and walk around consequential features when I can’t pull it together, and while I still enjoyed being out in such beautiful places with rad people I knew I was truly done.

One of those final rides was only 90 minutes long, and I came back to my friend’s place feeling as exhausted as if I’d just ridden 90 hours. I was complete trash for the rest of the day even though I had a hearty to-do list to take care of that afternoon. The final blow came the following and final day, when I had a “crash” that was exactly like the one that dropped me on my head and changed my life a year ago: tagging my left handlebar/front brake on a small but mighty cut-off tree hiding in some brush, sending me abruptly over the bars and onto the ground before I even knew what was happening. Only this time I was lucky: I was going uphill, it happened at a very slow speed, and I was able to ease myself to the ground in an awkward but acceptable fashion unharmed. It took me losing the physical ability to ride for a second time since my injury to finally drive the message home, but I finally gave in.

I finally took the not-so-subtle hint, and on that note, my off-season promptly began.

And here we are. Over the past month I’ve been taking the rest I probably should have taken back in June after my attempt at the Oregon Timber Trail, trying to sleep and rest as much as possible, and trying to sort out the remnants of my life and what’s worth trying to salvage from the ashes of everything I unwittingly burned down as I looked the other way.

If you think this all sounds overly dramatic, it probably is. I’m a storyteller, so shoot me — and you’ve also likely never had a brain injury. It’s really fucking hard and sometimes it feels dramatic. If you have had one, you understand.

I’m fine, really.

And by fine, I mean I’m headfirst down the black hole of a mental health/identity crisis, but I’ve been through worse (I think). What I mean is, I’m still alive and breathing and that isn’t likely to change.

I’m fine.

I’ve finally accepted exactly where I’m at, and it’s only when we accept where we are that we can get ourselves to someplace different. Otherwise, it’s like crawling around in a dark room bumping our head against the walls trying to locate the door. If we flip on a light switch, everything is illuminated and finding the door becomes a lot easier. I’ve flipped on the light switch, and it turns out there are many doors… I just have to choose which one to open. I can’t open them all, I’ve learned that’s no longer possible since my concussion. Instead of choosing one and rushing out like I’m prone to do, I’m sitting in here until I figure out which door is the right one.

The door labeled “mountain biking,” for now, will remain closed.

So here I am, finally accepting my position in life. Accepting that I’m proper fucked, as some may say, and I’ve done it to myself. When I find myself in this position as I have a few times in my life, face down in a steaming pile of shit, I start with the basics. It’s not my fault, but it is my responsibility to extricate my face from said shit pile and clean up the mess. When we know better, we do better.

A year after my accident, these are some things that I know for sure:

One of my core beliefs is to always mine for the gold in life’s dark caves.
I don’t believe in silver linings, and I’m not an “everything happens for a reason” sort of gal. But I’ve always known this: I am someone who will always mine for the tiny gold nuggets buried inside the dark caves of life. If I know nothing else about myself, I know this to be true, and I know they are in there. I’ve found a few and I’m holding on tight to those, and continuing to mine… slowly. Sometimes the cave is very big and very dark, and the gold takes awhile to find.
“Deconstruct to reconstruct” is a strategy that’s worked in many places for me, and it’s one I’ll use again.
Let me explain: I say this to my clients when I’m taking them through functional movement training. Basically, this means breaking down or deconstructing a complex body movement (like a squat) into all its tiny pieces, and starting over from the very beginning; the foundational basics. We usually need to do this when we’re battling an injury or we’ve rooted out an unhealthy movement pattern causing bad alignment that might get us injured. And this is how we reconstruct: First, we learn how to breathe. Then, we learn how to engage a muscle and hold it. Then we put those things together, and then we move, focusing on keeping our body in alignment. We do one simple movement, and then another. As we reconstruct, slowly adding elements back into a complex movement piece by piece, we build our body back stronger than before with a solid foundation. I’m currently applying this strategy to my life. (More on this in a minute.)
Some people that we value in our lives can’t handle our hard stuff, and that’s okay.
Some people can’t handle the changes we’ve had to make, and don’t want to restructure their lives around our needs. It’s okay to let them go peacefully, in whatever capacity that needs to happen, without resentment. I relearn this lesson every time I go through something challenging in my life. Those of us in the shit have to handle it — we don’t have a choice. It’s landed in our lap and now it’s ours. But everyone else has a choice, and I’ve learned it’s best not to fight with them over that choice or deny them the right to make that choice, regardless of how close to us we think that person is. People are going to leave us, or we’ll need to step back from them when we realize they can’t accept us the way we are, and that’s okay. It’s normal for people to come into and out of our lives, and for relationships to take different forms over their course; what makes it difficult is when we try to cling to them. Sometimes people simply don’t have the capacity to be with others’ hard stuff, for whatever reason. If we accept this reality without fighting it, it saves a lot of heartache. Sometimes it’s us, we’re just too much for anyone but ourselves (and sometimes even for ourselves). And sometimes it’s them, maybe they’re having hard times of their own and so their capacity is limited, or maybe they’re just someone who’s only here for the sunshine and rainbows.
Sometimes those people we let go will come back into our lives, and sometimes they won’t. If they do, we get to decide what role they play for us moving forward. It’s okay for relationships to change form. It’s also okay for us to grieve the loss of what they had been for us, what we thought they were — though personally I’ve found it saves a lot of heartache to not attach so strongly to people anyways, knowing the ephemeral nature of life in general. People we thought would never leave us, leave us. And sometimes we leave them. Not all relationships are meant to last forever in the form they’re in now. Love can be unconditional, but relationships aren’t. Boundaries are healthy, and people have different capacities to navigate challenges with others or simply be with others’ suffering and discomfort and let what’s real be okay. Some people have a massive capacity to sit with discomfort, and some don’t. The sooner we accept this about humans, the better. Love without attachment is hard as fuck, but it’s a worthy goal.
I’m so grateful for the small handful of people in my life who HAVE been with me up-close through the shit without shaming me for my faults.
For those who have been so patient with me as I floundered around and fell on my face over and over again trying to sort myself out and retain some semblance of the person I used to be, and not so gracefully let go of parts of myself that I loved and could no longer hold. (This is a long one.)
I’m grateful in a way I didn’t realize I would be for everyone from close friends to acquaintances who have been through a brain injury, or have a loved one who has, who have reached out to share resources and their own stories with me. It’s been so helpful and has made me feel less alone. This is truly something you can’t understand until you’ve been here, and I didn’t know many people who have been here (or didn’t realize they had). I’m grateful for a couple of generous dear friends, and my dear generous parents, who sent me a gift of some money that I used to get some treatment, and to buy food for me and Cody since I haven’t been able to work much.
I’m grateful to Chris, who went through this journey with a former partner and gave me some perspective on ways my injury might be affecting Dan; who listened to me tell him how difficult things were for me and was able to just sit with it and let me be who I am, and who also didn’t fire me from Revel when I didn’t turn out any race results this year. Similarly, I’m grateful to Emily who is always so patient with me even when I’m hard on myself and doesn’t make me feel bad about it, as she knows it would make me even more ashamed. I can tell her any god-damned thing about myself, things I’d never tell anyone else because I know damn well they couldn’t handle it, because she can. Sometimes those who have had so much trauma and survived and healed from it are the ones who have the ability to be with it calmly when it happens in others, and she and I have been that person for each other. When one of us falls on our face, the other steps up. We’ve been through hell and back together over our 16 year friendship, celebrating our wins and understanding our struggles, laughing at tales of each other’s shortcomings because we have the same ones and hence the same morbid sense of humor about them. She’s my ride-or-die for sure.
I’m grateful to the small handful of friends who agreed to venture out into the backcountry with me for not-so-small trips over the past year even knowing my status and my challenges. They probably knew I needed to be out there even more than I did, and I can’t believe they put up with me and never gave me shit about it, but were only kind and patient and helpful without being condescending or patronizing when it would have been so easy to be the opposite. Top of this list are Jeff and Grizel, both of whom were each brave enough to do not one, but THREE backcountry trips with me since my accident. Both of them are relatively new friends as well, and I can’t believe they were so willing to adventure with someone they barely knew who also had so many limitations, and still trust my 20+ years of experience as well as their own ability to pick up my slack and be the stronger teammate.
Allen, Michael, and Dan were also on the now-infamous Winds blizzard crossing with Jeff and me and also put up with my shortcomings on expedition with kindness and grace. Nika and Noelle trusted my depth of experience as a coach to mentor them through their first-ever backpacking trip, while being so willing to bend their schedules to be flexible to my needs with timing and location as I would have not have had the bandwidth to travel. Thank you all, so much. All of those trips were so essential to my healing at the time in so many ways, and I am deeply grateful that you all still trusted me as a competent backcountry teammate even when it took me 2 hours just to pack up camp because I couldn’t make sense of all the moving parts, and when some of you had to carry some of my gear and wait for me because I wasn’t as strong as I wanted to be.
Last but certainly not least, I’m infinitely grateful for my unbelievably kind and patient partner Dan.
(Same Dan who was a Winds teammate; I consider Dan the expedition partner and Dan the romantic partner as two different people.) He gets his own category, as words can’t even describe the gratitude I have for this man. I literally couldn’t take care of myself in the first 4-5 months and you stepped up so incredibly huge for me like no one ever has before. Taking care of the lion’s share of the domestic duties (or all of them), making me all the meals when I couldn’t deal with that process, driving me places, doing all the grocery shopping, taking care of the dogs, going on countless rides and hikes and skis with me when I was able, not complaining when I had to turn around early because I’d get a headache, not chastising me when even my small adventures rendered me useless for the rest of the day. Dropping your own priorities and doing everything to help me get myself and my bike ready when I stupidly decided I wanted to try racing an ultra again back in June, just because you knew how much it meant to me to be out there, and then driving across the state to pick me up when I realized I wasn’t ready 300 miles in. Being willing to (and even excited to) introduce me to your parents and let me spend a week with them recovering from my race, even when you knew I wouldn’t be able to show up as my best self — who I was then was enough for you. Being compassionate not only with me but with my poor sweet old Cody dog as he’s struggled with sickness and incontinence nearing the end of his life. You know better than anyone that to love me is to love Cody, and to love Cody is to love me. Covering my rent and grocery expenses for the last two months, trusting I’ll pay you back someday, even though we both are uncomfortable being in this position as a couple and know the strain it puts on our relationship. Dealing with all my frustrations with myself for my shortcomings, and never contributing to those frustrations by making me feel worse about myself than I already do, even though it’s no secret that I’m hard to be with normally and especially now. Regardless of if we ultimately end up making it through this period of life together or not, I’m so grateful for the love you’ve shown me this year. It’s literally mind-blowing, like nothing I’ve ever experienced from an intimate partner. I never thought this would be possible for me, and I’m so grateful, and I only hope someday I can return the favor (though I wouldn’t wish my situation on my worst enemy much less the love of my life).

Okay, that was a lot. Moving on:

Those are five things I know for sure. I may know some other things too, but in true PCS-fashion, I’ve forgotten. Whenever I hit rock bottom, I start with this. What is one thing I know for sure about myself? And what else do I know to be true, without a doubt? Even a few things are enough to cling to when shit is really dark.

Sitting alone in the room of many doors, let’s call it “rock bottom,” now with the light on and my situation illuminated by my acceptance of it, I start with what I know to be true. I’m still alive, and if I’m alive, you can be damn sure I’ll be mining for those gold nuggets. I have a few people in my life I can still count on to be with me and let me move through life and the backcountry at my own pace without becoming overly frustrated with my shortcomings. That means a lot.

Now, deconstruct to reconstruct.

Since my concussion, I can’t conduct my life the way I always have. I’ve always been a high-energy person with a huge capacity to pull in multiple elements to my whole picture. Training, racing, multiple adventure sports, travel, expedition work, coaching, speaking, facilitating retreats, physical therapy, group programs, private client work, media projects, social media, writing, etc etc etc. And that’s just my work life. I’m also a life-partner to Dan, dog-mama to Cody and Bailey, brand new auntie, adventure buddy to several, and loyal friend to my inner circle. I’ve worn many hats and been a lot of things to a lot of people. And somehow, despite my ADHD and general lack of ability to prioritize and organize and have any sense of time or structure, I’ve been able to (loosely) make it all work.

It’s glaringly obvious that I can’t do life like that anymore.

I now apparently possess something called a “brain battery,” according to my therapist, and that battery has the tendency to run dangerously low — or out — when I do things that are hard on my brain.

And when I do too many of those cognitively or energetically demanding things, or do them too much (like mountain biking), my life will go splat.

That battery doesn’t come with a user manual of what constitutes “hard” or “too much.” Everyone’s battery is different, and I just have to figure it out. I fucking hate that battery, but I’m trying to learn to embrace, listen to, and even love it, as it’s the gatekeeper. My body and mind can’t push through when that damn battery in my brain has run out. When I was training, the cognitive demands placed on my brain by mountain biking was all that my brain could handle. It ran the battery so low that there was nothing left for anything else, and I watched myself drop balls left and right, spend hours on the couch staring at the wall, so many things to do and no act of God able to get me to do them, my passion for my work and life in general slipping away, and the inevitable slow spiral down into that dark room such that I’ve finally found myself a therapist (thanks to Dan’s employee assistance program from the University) and am starting to consider antidepressants.

So here we are, and this is where I’m at today.

For now, I’m over here trying to figure out which door to open first, now that the light is on in the room. I’m no longer denying what’s happening to me right now and what’s been happening slowly over the past 6 months. Despite well-meaning friends who try to tell me “but everyone…” when I tell them of my struggles. Despite those who can’t understand why I have to set the boundaries I do, and why I have such weird limitations now like I can’t be counted on for any hard plans before 10am or after 5pm. Even if people don’t believe me, or think I’m making it up or being over-dramatic: *I* know I feel different. *I* know I’m not okay, and *I* know I can’t just push through anymore. *I* know I need to focus on healing, and reconstruct my life slowly and intentionally as I make some hard choices about priorities. And that’s what matters.

Now that I’ve had a month or so to focus on rest and sleep, and not riding, I’m starting to get back into basic functional training (no bike) and looking forward to next year. I have ambitions that I think are possible for me, that I’m not talking about to many people yet. For them to be possible, I have to be really smart about it. I’m creating a training plan that’s slower and more intentional than I’ve ever done before, based around my knowledge of the brain and my own brain and its stupid… I mean wonderful… brain battery. I have plans to try to expand its capacity very slowly, which I’ll hopefully do with the help of my new therapist who is an expert and researcher in the field of neuroplasticity.

I’ve been recharging that nearly-dead battery over this past month and regaining my basic functions for daily living, taking on more household responsibilities and taking some of the load off of my partner. I’d love to rebuild some aspects of my business, all of which I’ve lost. I likely won’t rebuild all aspects; I’ll at least start very small, and I don’t have a distinct plan for that yet. It’s like starting completely over, like I haven’t spent the past 8 years building the life I had before it all came crashing down in mere seconds. There’s a lot I’m grieving, but there’s also a lot I’m cautiously looking forward to.

Every ending leads to a new beginning.

For those of you who have been in my community on social media or otherwise for a long time, or even you new folks, thank you for your patience as I sort through the remnants of my life and start to rebuild. Your support means a lot, and will continue to mean a lot as I rebuild elements of my work. If you feel like you or someone you know would benefit from my services as I slowly start to offer them again, that would mean the world to me. I love my coaching and teaching work so much and it’s been killing me to not be able to do it. Again, thank you for your patience as I sort out this whole brain battery thing and how mine works.

To come back full-circle, no, I’m not riding my bike anymore, and I’m unfortunately not lining up for the Arizona Trail Race this week. This isn’t what I wanted, but it’s what I’ve got. It took awhile for me to accept it but I’m here now.

We don’t always get to choose our fate, but we can always choose to be here for it. The opposite, I’ve found, gets us nowhere.

To those of you who made it this far with me, in this long blog post or in life in general, thank you. Whether you remain with me or not, I’m grateful to each one of you for taking the time to care about a fellow human. <3

#fromwhereiride

WILD RAMBLINGS

My writing -- the unedited version. Sharing the ups and downs of life on the road. Capturing my personal human experience. Doesn’t always make sense.

Return to Alaska!

LIFE UPDATE: One year post concussion, late October 2021

“I haven’t seen you on your bike in awhile, are you still riding? Lining up for the AZT800 this fall?”

Short answer: No, and no, unfortunately.

But there is much more to racing than the race itself.

As September rolled around, I felt like my brain was actually getting worse instead of better.

I knew what I was doing wasn’t sustainable.

A few days later, I finally cracked.

I finally took the not-so-subtle hint, and on that note, my off-season promptly began.

I’m fine, really.

And by fine, I mean I’m headfirst down the black hole of a mental health/identity crisis, but I’ve been through worse (I think). What I mean is, I’m still alive and breathing and that isn’t likely to change.

I’m fine.

The door labeled “mountain biking,” for now, will remain closed.

A year after my accident, these are some things that I know for sure:

Okay, that was a lot. Moving on:

Now, deconstruct to reconstruct.

I now apparently possess something called a “brain battery,” according to my therapist, and that battery has the tendency to run dangerously low — or out — when I do things that are hard on my brain.

So here we are, and this is where I’m at today.

Every ending leads to a new beginning.

We don’t always get to choose our fate, but we can always choose to be here for it. The opposite, I’ve found, gets us nowhere.

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