Running like my life depends on it

In June 2020 -- while we were enjoying our brief (then may-as-well-be-forever) pandemic lockdown with the rest of the world -- we made a decision to come home to New Jersey.

My family (at that point my wife Jessica, our 4-year-old daughter Etta, our pup and two cats) were living in Pittsburgh, PA and our entire extended family was back in Jersey. We were drowning on our own trying to keep Etta's days filled with attention while both working remote, same as so many others, so we made a deal with our folks that we would come back and pod up, getting some much-needed child care help from Etta's grandparents and hopefully going less stir-crazy than we had been isolating in Pittsburgh. We had some other stuff to attend to in Jersey and everyone agreed it would be beneficial all around.

I had been doing some work on the house we left behind to renters while we lived in Pittsburgh (with plans to sell it thinking we'd be in Pittsburgh more permanently) and one day Jess's mother mentions to me that my legs look weird. My right leg has swelled to almost twice the size of my left leg. Well, shit, I thought. Jess dropped me at the hospital — the last place anyone wanted to be in New Jersey at that point during the pandemic — and after an ultrasound and X-Ray I heard the last thing I expected from the doctor: you need to make an appointment with this oncologist.

Fuck.

A few days later after being admitted by Dr. Francis Patterson at Hackensack University Medical Center I was endlessly carted around the hospital and subjected to scan, after scan, after scan. CT, MRI, bone scan, all kinds of scans. Finally a biopsy of the swollen area in my left leg confirmed something I thought was so impossible for me — a young-ish guy with a few bad dietary habits but generally in okay health — cancer. Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma, aggressive and raging.

I worried a ton about death. Missing my daughter growing up, leaving Jess the responsibility of moving on. Nasty and dark stuff. But Jess is my rock and (metaphorically) slapped me straight across the face. We were gonna fight this, every day, together. She sourced second opinions across the country, but they all pointed back to Dr. Andre Goy — the leader of the John Theurer Cancer Center at Hackensack UMC as one of the leading minds in Lymphoma — and endorsed his very aggressive treatment plan for my particularly aggressive cancer.

My diet got strict — as little of the fried cafeteria food as I could manage to keep down which became increasingly hard as I got mouth sores from some of the chemo drugs. Regular bottled water tasted bad which was an insane sensation — I had to drink alkaline water to keep hydrated since the docs said flushing the medicine as soon as possible would help mitigate side effects.

Another important thing: moving. The docs and nurses (and reddit and WebMD and whatever other sources we could find) said walking and moving would be great for flushing my system and keeping the side effects at bay.

So I walked. Jess brought me an Apple Watch and pushed me to close my rings, every day. Walk 30 minutes in intervals, get up and move, stand up.

Walking hooked up to various IVs by a chemo port was awkward at first, but I did it. I shambled around slow and steady, and I closed my rings every day, and every day got closer to the end of my rapid and heavy dose of chemotherapy, getting hit with nasty "medicine" that have lifetime maximum doses that I was rapidly approaching.

From mid July to the end of September I worked the plan of intense, in-patient chemotherapy that was prescribed by my care team. I put up with all the chemo, stayed well enough to not push back any treatment and stayed on schedule. The light at the end of the tunnel was so appealing, I wanted to be done and start healing from injecting mustard gas into my body. After a pretty brief series of radiation therapy to make sure the angry little cancer cells were good and dead, I was done. The end-of-treatment PET scans showed great results. The relief was incredible. What a joy it was to stop the constant hospital visits and be with my family.

One thing I did not stop when the hospital visits stopped was the Apple Fitness rings. Always with the Rings. It was easy after chemo — my body was so decimated a stroll around the block counted as a workout. So I kept it up.

Eventually, my walks had to get a little faster to get my heart rate up. It was slow but steady progress and at some point in December my stride kind of accidentally turned into a trot or a jog. I'd hated running, loved cycling in college, but it seemed like the next logical thing, so I ran. It kind of became an addiction. I made a deal with Jess to not hurt myself, so I ran on the track to have the extra padding of the rubber surface for a while (my lymphoma had eating away at my bone a bit so I needed to be cautious).

By the end of 2020 I had gone for just a handful of runs, and couch-to-5k seemed like a good idea, so I tried to sign up for the Virtual RunDisney Star Wars run in the spring. Unfortunately for me, the novice runner, the 5k proved very popular and sold out immediately (how do you sell out of a virtual race? Just order more medals no? I digress...)

So a 10k then.

I signed up for the Star Wars Virtual 10k and jumped right into Couch-to-10K. It took a bit longer than I liked — taking it easy on my leg and so on kind of stalled some progress, but I finished a 10K. I kept going. I found longer trails, and kept going.

We were in Disney World on a vacation in March 2022 when the idea of doing an in-person race started appealing to me. It would be very cool to run around the theme parks, and they were returning to in-person racing "after" COVID (we were still highly cautious at this point because my immune system is a bit of a wimp after chemo). It sounded fun!

I did another virtual 10K in early 2022, and planned to sign up for my first in-person race with the Wine & Dine 10K at Disney World in November — but you'll never believe, the damn thing sold out immediately again...

The half marathon had space though.

13.1 miles? The word "Marathon"? Even if preceded by "Half"? That sounded hard.

Not as hard as fighting cancer, though.

I decided to do the thing. I made a serious training plan for the majority of the year, and besides a small injury setback I kept on it like a fiend, hitting distance targets and feeling great.

In November 2022, I ran and finished the Disney Wine & Dine Half Marathon.

It was not fast, but it was comfortable and I wasn't destroyed for the rest of the vacation that followed. I wept openly when I crossed the finish line. It was cathartic to lift my arms across the finish line, pump my fists in the air. To openly proclaim "I did it!". I finished a half marathon! I beat cancer!

And the overwhelming joy to share with the world — in a photo with my finisher's medal and my 6-year-old daughter — that we were about to become a family of four after the docs said there were no more kids in our future.

I run because it's "me" time, it keeps me healthy for myself and my family, and it's a reminder every time I am out there breathing and pacing and stepping that I am a fighter more than just a survivor.

This past week, I completed my second half marathon, again at the Disney Wine & Dine weekend. Training was a lot harder with a toddler along for the ride, often literally in a jogging stroller on a lot of my runs during the summer mornings, and I didn't feel as ready for the distance. I'm sure I don't need to run any more than a half personally, but I'm glad to have proved myself at this distance. I might scale it back to 10Ks, try to get faster maybe, but I am so proud to say I am a two-time half marathon finisher.