Follow-up Race Report from Anna

I thought you might like to know that Anna Kaschner, who wrote the inspiring story of running post kidney transplant in a previous blog post, just completed the Great Turtle Half Marathon on Mackinac Island. She wrote a really great race report over on her Embody blog, if you'd like to check it out, click on the picture below:

Inspirational Stories: Running after a Kidney Transplant

Anna and me at
The Legend Trail Runs

The running community is full of amazing stories and people who have overcome serious obstacles to become the runners that they are today. When we hear stories like this on television or in magazines we don't realize that there are equally incredible stories within the group of people that we see each week on the roads and trails. When the stories do come out, they are both surprising and inspirational. 

This week is an important milestone for one of my running friends. Her name is Anna, and she is not only a fellow runner but also a fellow blogger (check out her blog titled "Embody"at http://kaschner.typepad.com/blog/ ). If you saw Anna, you would just see an incredibly healthy looking and vibrant young woman. You would never guess what she had gone through to become the runner that she now is. This week is the third anniversary of her receiving a kidney transplant. I thought her story was inspirational and was absolutely ecstatic when she agreed to share it with us in a guest post. I hope you enjoy her story: 

I hated running as a kid. If I walked into my middle school gymnasium for P.E. and saw ten minutes’ time on the big clock used for basketball games, I knew I was in trouble. Ten minutes of running. Straight. Ugh. I was not an athletic kid, or an athletic young adult. In my 20’s I began practicing a vigorous style of yoga that seemed to suit my stubborn, unrelenting personality; an advanced yoga practice requires not only some athletic ability, but endurance and patience as well…but I still wouldn’t have called myself an “athlete.”  And running never crossed my mind.

I suppose even during my time as a hardcore yogi, I was setting myself up to become a motivated and dedicated runner. What drew me to yoga was its ability to help me cope and de-stress while moving my body, and it was nice to have a community of like-minded folks I could connect to. Running fills that space now, but the activity itself means less than its function as a tool to facilitate placing one foot in front of the other when even that seems impossible.

Three years ago, on October 9, 2009, I walked into St. Mary’s Hospital for a kidney transplant. I’d been diagnosed at 25 with an auto-immune disease of my kidneys, and within a year of that diagnosis I’d had to start dialysis to stay well. At first I continued to work, to go to school, and to teach and practice yoga. But I was getting sicker all the time, and eventually I quit my job and withdrew from my classes at MSU. I became reclusive and inconsolable. I spent 5 years on dialysis waiting for a new kidney, which is typical for a patient in Michigan. Many patients die every year waiting for an organ that matches them, which is why it is so important to register with the Gift of Life Foundation to donate your organs and tissues-- if it wasn’t for an anonymous donor, I would have never received my transplant and quite possibly died waiting.

Walking into the hospital that day was the single most terrifying thing I have ever done. I spent 11 days there in recovery, uncertain that my new transplant would be able to start working well enough to get me healthy again. There were a lot of tests, and I was in a lot of pain. I couldn’t keep food down and I was miserable. I couldn’t see much outside my hospital window, but I knew it was Fall and that I was missing my favorite season.

Anna, just out of anesthesia, with her mom

When I was able to return home, it took me months to get well, and I thrived on making tiny advances like being able to brush my own teeth for the first time, being able to get myself out of bed, and making it up a flight of stairs without having to crawl on my hands and knees. One big day I walked from my front steps down to the corner of our street and back on my own, a quarter of a block. This year I ran 2 half marathons and am getting ready for a third…it kind of puts things in perspective a little.

At Legend trail run

At first I didn’t think about my transplant much when I ran, other than how I hoped I was inspiring people with debilitating illnesses to get up and move. I wanted to be an example. Most of what I remember about my time in the hospital is a mish-mash of intense pain, discomfort, and fear, and at first I let those feelings dominate my recovery. I was always afraid that I would get sick again, or my new kidney would fail, so I proceeded cautiously into the world of physical fitness. I used running as a way to distract me from those memories, and I would blast my headphones and "check out." Then, somehow, I became an athlete.

In January of 2011, I joined Team Playmakers, a local running and walking club here in Lansing, Michigan. I met a lot of great people that helped me along as a newbie runner. I competed in my first sprint triathlon and twelve 5K races. I also ran my first 8K distance and swam my first mile in open water. 

In May of this year, I ran my first half marathon,  at Bayshore, and my second in early September (the Capital City River Run). I tried out trail running and am heading to beautiful Mackinaw Island next weekend to run my third and final half marathon for this year at the Mackinaw Great Turtle Half Marathon . Right after that, I’m heading to Chicago to run in a huge race called The Hot Chocolate Race, where everyone gets chocolate fondue at the end!

Finishing first half marathon at Bayshore  2012

Now I run music-free, and I don’t mind being inside my own head so much. I still use running to help me de-stress and cope with life, but I don’t feel like I’m fighting so hard anymore. I used to feel like everything, even running, was a matter of life and death. Now, if I’m running, I know it’s because I’m alive, at least for the moment. Life doesn’t come with guarantees, so I trust my body and its signals, and I’ve learned that while getting outside my comfort zone is, well, uncomfortable, it is also necessary to move forward.

Second Half Marathon: CCRR 2012

Every year when this early part of October comes around, I try to spend a bit more time paying attention to the things that I often take for granted. I breathe the fresh Fall air or hold a soft kitty, hearing their purr. On this day in 2009, I was fighting to get off an IV of morphine so I could go home, and I had months of a grueling recovery ahead of me. I try to remember that time at St. Mary’s, instead of forgetting, and I allow myself to accept the experience as a part of my story. It may be behind me, but it is still part of the path I am taking to move forward. Whatever way that path ends up going, I hope to do it running.

If that is not an amazing story, I do not know what is! As you are out there doing your training this fall, think of those people who may just be wishing and hoping that they can be out there doing that someday. Be inspired!! 

Turning 50: Why I Don't Mind Aging Up

"Quit? Retire? Hell, no. Next year I am really going to train!" -- Marty Liquori

I turned 50 this year. For a lot of women, that might be a traumatic event, but that was not the case for me. I owe a lot of that to running.

Runners often have a hopefully optimistic approach to getting older. The runner's version of the "grass is always greener on the other side of the fence" mentality is the "Wow, this age group is tough. I can't wait to age up."  Maybe those coveted age group awards will be easier to attain in that next age group. No doubt that mindset had some effect on me, but the real reason I don't fear aging as a runner goes deeper than that.

When I first started running, back in 1998,  I was lucky enough to fall in with a running club called the Loma Linda Lopers. This was a large (over 700 members) and well established (founded in 1976)  club in Southern California that specialized in training runners for the L.A. Marathon each year, but it was such a wonderful group of people that most runners stayed long past that first marathon. By the time I found the club, many of the runners had literally been members for decades.

Bill beating me in the Holiday Classic 15k

Like all new runners in a club like that, I was placed in a group with others who were at approximately my pace. I had the extreme good fortune to be placed with an experienced runner who was over 60, named Bill Wall. I was too inexperienced as a runner at that time to realize what a really fine runner Bill was. Sure he usually won his age group at the races we went to, but he was so humble about it that I barely noticed. However, as time went on, I came to appreciate what an outstanding runner Bill was for his age.

Bill had come to running later in life, like me, and had excelled. During the years we ran together, he had various accomplishments that helped me see that older runners could still be competitive. He made the Running Times magazine list of Master's Runners of the Year one year and was on the bronze medal winning U.S. Marathon Team at the World Association of Veteran Athletes (WAVA) games in Brisbane, Australia in 2001. I just had a note from Bill earlier this week. At 79 he is still running the occasional 5k (and still placing in his age group).

Gordon 1957

Gordon today

The Lopers also introduced me to other veteran runners who inspired me then and who continue to inspire me now. One who has had a huge impact on me and who is one of my dearest running friends is Gordon Barnard. Gordon was an outstanding half-miler in Brighton, England in 1957 (56.2 in the Southern Championships) but had a horrible motorcycle accident that left him with a limp. That did not stop him from running (although it did stop him from ever reaching the heights that he was probably talented enough to reach), and despite having a few artificial parts here and there, it is not stopping him now. 

Last year Gordon went back to England and ran the Brighton and London Marathons just a week apart, not bad for a guy who is 74. The thing about Gordon was that he always had it in him, no matter how much he was struggling on a run, to encourage everyone who passed by him. He showed me that despite obstacles, running can be a lifelong passion and source of joy.

Another person who was significant to me at that time was a woman named Muriel Berger, one of the few older women runners I knew. At the time I met her, around 1999, Muriel was 69. Both she and her husband Lou were runners. Well technically Muriel was mostly a walker. Every Sunday on a run, no matter how intense our run, if we saw Muriel, Bill and I would stop to walk with her for a while. She was such a delight!

Muriel and Lou Berger
(picture from the Lopergram)

 I will never forget how proud she was when she came home from  her first marathon, the 2000 Maui marathon, and had gotten third in her age group (Her husband Lou had placed in his group as well). She was glowing. She had this absolutely beautiful ceramic fish that was her age group award. I remember how I laughed when she said that she walked a lot in the marathon but that she ran across the finish line so that she would look good in the pictures. I knew right then that I wanted to be just like that -- almost 70 years old and running across the finish line trying to look good for the pictures. I haven't seen Muriel in years, but a quick look at Athlinks shows me that she was still running in November 2011 at the age of 81. Amazing!

These people were major influences on my life during my "formative years" as a runner. I am sure that none of those people really knew they were inspiring me in the ways that they were, but those lessons have been so important to me as I have moved up through the age groups. It is hard to fear getting older when there are people like this leading the way and showing how rich and full life can be as long as we are doing what we love.

There are also the stories of older runners that I sometimes encounter that make me smile and keep me motivated. One of my favorites right now is a video getting passed around the running community called "Grandmothers of Endurance."

These are people who have inspired me. As runners, we will all find our personal heroes and inspirations. I am sure that you have yours. And, if we hang around the sport long enough, maybe we can end up being the inspiration for someone else. Who has inspired you as a runner?