6 Years

So, first off, apologies to my tiny blog world for falling off the radar and not blogging for the past 10 months.  Oops!  My bad!  I've set a goal to blog at least once a month in 2018...once a week would be awesome but let's set me up for success here at first.  You can hold me to it...at least try to!

Wow.  6 years.  6 years today.  January 2012.  I've written about this before but this still means a lot to me and where I am now in my life.  I had had surgery on my foot in early January to take out a growth on my nerve that had occurred due to an injury.  I had spent a few years hurting going to different doctors and getting wildly different diagnoses.  I couldn't run, didn't walk without pain.  I thought that this was how it was going to be...forever.  This surgery was going to finally get me back doing all the things I had given up doing. But about 3 weeks after surgery I got an infection and with it a lot of pain and fears.  I definitely was fearing the worst case scenario when I went back to the doctor. Would the surgery that was supposed to give me back a pain free foot going to turn around and possibly take it all away from me?  The sleepless nights when the painkillers didn't work.  The worry that I had to combat and ask God for peace when I had none, trust when I had little, and healing.  This all took place within the matter of 4-5 days (the worst of the infection) but it might as well have been a month in my mind.  But I don't write this to talk about what did happen or what could have happened.  I write this because of what happened afterwards.  This "gift" wasn't going to be wasted.  Another chance to do things I wanted to do, even though I didn't know I wanted to do them yet!  

Later that same year I did my first Warrior Dash and did 5 more after that.  I have run a half marathon.  I have done 5 Spartan races and earned a trifecta.  For every single one of these races, this event, January 2012, has been on my mind at some point.  It's usually in the form of, wow, look what I'm doing now!  And to think I almost couldn't do any of this again.  I almost broke down in tears as I hit mile 12 of the half marathon when I was so overcome with emotion.  Emotions of gratefulness, of thankfulness, of gratitude.  I learned to not take any of what I was doing for granted.  In the grand scheme of things, this was a small event.  I was never in any life threatening situation but I still came out of it with a changed perspective.  Don't take any of it for granted.