I know you all have been on the edge of your seats wondering where I've been since I last blogged on January 20. Guys, I'm not gonna' lie, it's been a ROUGH start to 2013! In the first six weeks of the year I managed: two sicknesses (first a bad cold and then bronchitis), finding out my BRCA status, five doctor consultations (due to said BRCA status), three diagnostic tests (also due to BRCA status) and a family death/funeral. As you can imagine, tri training has been pretty spotty for January and February resulting in some panicked e-mails to Coach Liz about my loss of fitness and re-thinking races and goals for this season. Of course, cool-as-a-cucumber Coach Liz just keeps coming back to me with:
"Be patient. It will come back. Just focus on giving the best you can each day."
Huh. Pretty good advice. But patience and taking things one day at a time is something that completely escapes me. Then it clicked...
Maybe that's what this year is supposed to be about. Learning to relax. Learning that it's okay if things don't go exactly as written in my calendar. And learning that even if I can't schedule every hour of every day for the next year that things will be OKAY! So I set out to turn myself from a Type A into a Type B, and things were going really well.
And then, after several weeks of being in medical limbo, I had an appointment with my primary BRCA doctor at Northwestern, Dr. Seema Khan. It was a great appointment and we came up with a plan....A PLAN! We agreed that I will be having a bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy (BSO) - say that 10 times fast! - on March 19th. I will recover from that surgery and then return to see Dr. Khan in early August (with some testing in between) to start planning for a prophylactic (hopefully!) bilateral mastectomy in very early 2014. In between I will race lots of triathlons (including a half ironman), half marathons and a full marathon!!
After this appointment I immediately went back to work and started filling in and highlighting my 2013 calendar. YES! I felt more like myself than I have since learning my BRCA news in January. I am back to training full time and logging all of my workouts faithfully in Training Peaks and on Beginner Triathlete. I have alerted everyone of my out-of-office days for the next month. And I've signed up for almost all of my races. Life is good.
I guess once a Type A, always a Type A.
Happy Training!
- HER
"Be patient. It will come back. Just focus on giving the best you can each day."
Huh. Pretty good advice. But patience and taking things one day at a time is something that completely escapes me. Then it clicked...
Maybe that's what this year is supposed to be about. Learning to relax. Learning that it's okay if things don't go exactly as written in my calendar. And learning that even if I can't schedule every hour of every day for the next year that things will be OKAY! So I set out to turn myself from a Type A into a Type B, and things were going really well.
And then, after several weeks of being in medical limbo, I had an appointment with my primary BRCA doctor at Northwestern, Dr. Seema Khan. It was a great appointment and we came up with a plan....A PLAN! We agreed that I will be having a bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy (BSO) - say that 10 times fast! - on March 19th. I will recover from that surgery and then return to see Dr. Khan in early August (with some testing in between) to start planning for a prophylactic (hopefully!) bilateral mastectomy in very early 2014. In between I will race lots of triathlons (including a half ironman), half marathons and a full marathon!!
After this appointment I immediately went back to work and started filling in and highlighting my 2013 calendar. YES! I felt more like myself than I have since learning my BRCA news in January. I am back to training full time and logging all of my workouts faithfully in Training Peaks and on Beginner Triathlete. I have alerted everyone of my out-of-office days for the next month. And I've signed up for almost all of my races. Life is good.
I guess once a Type A, always a Type A.
Happy Training!
- HER
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