When I was first diagnosed with Crohn’s (almost two months ago now), I was ashamed to admit that I was relieved to hear the diagnosis. Dare I say, ecstatic, even?? After two years of turmoil and suffering, I finally had an answer for all of my problems! But it felt weird to admit that I was excited and relieved to find out that I had an incurable disease. While I’ve had my fair share of really challenging times over the last couple of years, I don’t have it the worst by any means. There are a lot of people out there suffering from far worse diseases—good and young people dying from cancer, and people facing much tougher circumstances than me. So, while I was relieved to finally have a path forward for my own health, it brought with it a sense of shame and guilt for feeling the way that I did. I’m still trying to unpack this, and I think that maybe the right answer is just to hold space for both feelings. Now, after a few weeks of holding space for all of my feelings surrounding my diagnosis, I am starting to notice a shift. The feelings of relief and excitement are not quite as strong as they were. More and more, I am noticing feelings of trepidation and fear starting to weasel their way into focus. I have not been able to start treatment for Crohn’s yet because I am still waiting on insurance to approve my doctor’s request (we were denied the first time, so I’m hoping that her appeal does the trick). I’m starting to realize that having a diagnosis can only get you so far—but without treatment, your disease will soon rear its ugly head. My symptoms have gotten worse since diagnosis and have become a daily reminder that this disease actually isn’t something I want to f**k with. I am admittedly tired from having to live the last two years untreated and pretending like I don’t have a chronic autoimmune disease attacking me from within. I’ve had to train and race as if nothing is wrong, and I have only just barely managed to keep up with this farce from the outside. But on the inside, I am really struggling. I’m starting to realize the full scope of what having this disease may mean. Like many other autoimmune diseases, Crohn’s occurs on a spectrum. Every patient with Crohn’s disease can have varying symptoms and in varying degrees of severity. Some people with Crohn’s may suffer greatly and have their lives and movement greatly impaired by their disease. They may have multiple bowel resections and ultimately have to live with an ostomy bag for the rest of their lives. Others may achieve remission with minimal treatment and maintain that for many years, living a completely normal and healthy life. As a professional athlete, I can only hope to be the latter. As a human, I am naturally very scared of the prospect of the former. In an effort to try and pick my spirits up, I did some research this week to try and find other elite athletes who suffer from Crohn’s or another IBD (inflammatory bowel disease). While there aren’t a ton of examples of professional athletes with Crohn’s, there are a few! They are NBA and NFL stars, Olympians, and World Record Holders. Knowing that it may be difficult to continue doing my job, but not altogether impossible, has been a comforting thought. If these athletes can do it, then I hope I can too. And people have run through far more challenging situations than this! Knowing all of this helps. It helps me when I start to get really down about how I will ever be able to train enough to get fit again. How will I ever heal my body enough to be able to race as hard as I know I am capable of? Could I ever be a World Champion again, now that I have this extra baggage to carry around with me? Will I still be able to set PRs, or are all of my fastest times and performances behind me? Will I ever go for a run again and truly enjoy it—and not feel like shit, or like I have to shit? At the age of just 29, I feel like I was only just getting started. Patience is not my virtue, but it is looking like enduring this challenge is going to be a test of patience, to say the least. So yeah, I would say that the initial excitement and relief of finally getting a diagnosis is wearing off now. I’m starting to feel scared about what the future holds for me. I think that now the real hard work will begin. I will start to get treatment, which should help me start to feel better, but it will take some time. And it will be a treatment that I will have to continue to get for the rest of my life, which will surely be an adjustment as well. Learning how to train and race at the professional level while balancing treatment for my disease will take some time. Learning when it is safe to push and when I need to back down and let my body rest will also take time. I don’t really know what else to say to myself, and this was more of an open-ended ramble than a nicely buttoned-up blog post with a clear message and ending. All I can think to end this with is: Buckle up, buttercup. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.

We’ve been fighting each other for the last 2 years and it has been exhausting. While I have been fighting against you and pushing you to your limit many times over, I have also been fighting for you. I’ve seen nearly 20 different specialists, had hundreds of vials of blood drawn, and completed medical procedures that I can’t even pronounce. I’ve had imaging done to most of my organs and body parts. We have found lots of interesting things that make you unique but not the answers we were looking for. Until last week. We finally had a colonoscopy and endoscopy done and suddenly it all made sense! All the warning signs that you have been sending me for years finally made sense. The roller coaster of symptoms that would appear then seem to dissipate with time and rest now make sense. You were try to tell us that we have Crohn’s disease.  I am so sorry that I started to believe that it was all made up. I had fully lost trust in you. When I started college running I vividly remember telling my college coach that the one thing I was really good at was listening to you (my body). I’m sorry that I lost this skill. I endured months and months of feeling bad, continually being told that “nothing is wrong” or “all of your tests came back normal”. Months of being gaslit by almost every doctor. My symptoms have been blamed on me just “having anxiety”, being “burnt out”, “overtraining”, “underfueling”, “depression”, and even “the altitude in Flagstaff” if you can believe it. After a while I stopped listening to you and started to believe that the doctors must be right. This must all be in my head. You (my body) had no idea what you were doing and I was making everything up. I just needed to be tougher and buckle down. I started to believe that it was all my fault all this time. That maybe running, and living, had always been this hard but I had just lost my spark and ability to handle stress. For months I have internalized this blame and have fought tooth and nail against every fiber of what my body was telling me to continue moving forward. To continue competing and doing my job. I trained when it was the absolute last thing on this planet that I felt like doing. And while most of the time you felt bad, there were a couple sessions that looked pretty good on paper to give us false hope. Such a rollercoaster. In reality, what you really wanted was to just sit down and rest or to sleep for days.  I showed up to races (albeit only doing a few in the last 2 years) feeling completely undertrained, tired, underfueled, and defeated. But I used my mind to overpower your feelings. On paper these races don’t look so bad. They include winning a 3-day stage race in Argentina(11/2023), landing on the podium on the GTWS race in China (4/2024), and winning US mountain running champs for the 4th time (7/2024). But after every hard effort you (body) would flare in response to me asking so much of you. And rightfully so. You can’t pour from an empty cup , and yet here I was, pouring away. And by the end, I had poured out everything including my spirit and possibly my love for the sport. I think that my stubbornness is partially what makes me a good athlete but in this case it also led to your destruction.  So body, I am truly sorry.  Sorry that I gave up on listening to you. Sorry that I continued to push you when you weren’t ready to be pushed.  After an all out war against you, pushing you, I was starting to resent you. Starting to feel like I had drawn the short end of the stick and that I was given a defective meat suit to live in. I started to hate you and I even started to hate the way you looked. The way you got way too skinny too easily, the swollen face, the bags under your eyes, the rashes on your skin. All so ugly on the outside and yet all you were trying to do was let me know that something wasn’t right on the inside. I used to be really proud of my body and I thought that I had won the lottery. I won this body that was good at running and had a seemingly high VO2 max and high natural hemoglobin. Just perfect!  I’m sorry that I have spent the last few months starting to resent you. You were just trying to help me and I wasn’t listening. And actually I think I still did win the body lottery. I think you (body) actually are pretty strong after all. You have put up with not only an onslaught of Crohn’s disease but a crazy captain of the ship who refused to take no for an answer. You have raced at the highest level when asked to (even if it meant weeks of flaring on the other side) and without your strength I am sure we would be in a much more advanced disease progression category than “moderate”. Again, I am sorry. I appreciate all you have done for me. And with some help from western medicine, and a little bit of luck, I hope you can find it in you to do more for me in the future (after some much deserved rest of course!).  I can’t wait to get on some medication and see how you feel. I can't wait to maybe be able to string together more than 5-6 weeks of training before you crash and burn. I am excited about the prospect of going for a run and not having anxiety about where I can go to the bathroom when the sudden and uncontrollable urges arise. I am excited for life with you and Crohn’s disease, as crazy as that sounds. I am not in remission yet, but me and my doctors are hopeful that that is on the horizon. Soon life could return to normal and maybe even to something that more closely resembles “consistent” training even if that means running or professional running might look a bit different for us. I know the path forward won’t be clear cut, as it never is, and we will undoubtedly encounter more setbacks and obstacles. But having a diagnosis and a direction to move forward in feels delightful. I promise to treat you right, to listen to you when you aren’t feeling good, and to stop pushing you when you just aren’t ready to be pushed. I vow to work on healing both physically, and mentally, for you. I’ve only got one of you (body) for the rest of my life so I want to make sure we live a good and healthy life moving forward.  As my agent so thoughtfully told me “a healthy person has 1000 dreams, an unhealthy person has 1”. My dream for the last 2 years has been to get a diagnosis for why you have been feeling so bad and we finally got one. I have wished and prayed to every god/goddess out there for a diagnosis and here we are. We got our 1 dream, now let’s go dream up 1000 more.  And lastly I am sorry I was mad at you (body) not being tough enough. Turns out we’ve been really fucking tough this whole time I just couldn’t see it.

Back in February, a dream (albeit a f***ed up one) came true for me. I finally received a diagnosis for why I have struggled to stay healthy the last ~2 years. During those two years, I have suffered from a strange constellation of symptoms that no one could seem to put together. I have seen so many doctors I have lost count and specialists from ENTs, to pulmonologists, to rheumatologists, top gastroenterologists. If they are an -ologist I have probably seen them. I even saw a naturopath and spoke to a few registered dietitians. Almost every test would come back normal and I would be told some version of the phrase “you are fine, nothing is wrong”. Evidently, nothing was wrong enough  for anyone to be able to help, despite feeling at times like my body was completely giving out on me. The most of an answer  that I ever got (until a few weeks ago) was that it was likely something autoimmune in nature.  As a professional athlete, it has become my job to listen very closely to my body. I am supposed to listen to every little creak it makes; to every little ache and pain. While this has helped to make me a successful professional runner it also led to me noticing subtle things that doctors and standard medical tests couldn’t detect. Don’t get me wrong, I did have a handful of symptoms proven by tests. I noticed that I had suddenly lost hearing in my right ear. After completing an audiology test, I had indeed lost hearing above a certain frequency in that ear. I also had a rash that covered both of my legs from shins to thighs. While I was not able to get this biopsied by a dermatologist, I did take photos of it and everyone agreed it was not a normal rash. But what all of this really taught me was that in the US medical system, it doesn’t matter how bad you say you feel, you must prove it with hard evidence. You need to bring the receipts, so to speak. Otherwise, very few doctors will take you seriously or be able to help you. It doesn’t matter if you are a 2x World Champion either, no one will believe you when you say you are tired or don’t feel well if you can’t somehow prove it too. I have a lot to say about the American medical system and about how doctors treat their patients but that is a story for another day.  ***And one caveat to note is that I do have a primary care doctor who I would trust with my life and he is the only doctor that listened to and believed me unconditionally during this time. As you can imagine, I started to believe that all of this was in my head. Maybe it was just anxiety? Depression? Not eating enough to fuel my training? It didn’t help that doctors were also suggesting these ideas as possible answers for why I wasn’t feeling well. And so, I would do what any pro athlete would do, I would try to convince myself that things were fine. It was me, I was the problem. I just needed a little motivation to get things going so I would man-handle my way through weeks of training. I would get in 5-6 weeks of decent training before my body would blow up on me again. I have had a few astute coaches ask me why my Strava graph looks like the Patagonia logo and this is why. Despite how difficult and unfulfilling training was, I did manage to make it to a few start lines during this time. And on paper, these race results are all things to write home about: " 3rd in my Golden Trail Series debut", "won my 4 US Mountain Running title", "won a 3 day stage race in Patagonia".  But after every race I would experience an inevitable crash, or flare, as I have now learned they are called. The surge in inflammation after the hard effort was like a runaway train and too much for me to recover from no matter how much I slept or ate. Mentally, I would be completely drained from the amount of emotional and mental energy I would have to expend on race day to will my body to perform at the level it needed to. So I started to internalize a lot of this. I started to think that maybe I was just a bad pro athlete, that I wasn’t tough anymore, and that running had always been this hard I just lost my motivation. I started to think that I was a crazy lunatic living in an alternate reality, or worse, a hypochondriac. My self-esteem and confidence took major hits.  Only after symptoms escalated to repeatedly passing blood in my stools, while losing 8 pounds in 6 weeks, all while eating nearly 4000 calories a day was an answer to this madness discovered. In February I underwent an upper endoscopy and colonoscopy and it was found that I have Crohn’s disease in my small intestine. According to the Mayo Clinic Crohn’s disease is “ a chronic inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that affects any part of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. It causes inflammation and damage to the lining of the intestines, leading to various symptoms and complications . The exact cause of Crohn's disease is unknown, but it is believed to be an autoimmune disorder where the body's immune system mistakenly attacks healthy intestinal tissue. Genetic and environmental factors may play a role in its development ”. So they were right about something, it was autoimmune in nature.  After getting this diagnosis I felt an overwhelming sense of relief. The one thing that I had been dreaming about the last 2 years had finally come true. Yes, it is true that I had been diagnosed with a disease. Probably news that would make most people more upset than relieved. But for me, it was all I had wanted. During the last 2 years, I hadn’t even been able to dream about goal races or setting PRs. The only dream that I had the mental, emotional, and physical space for was getting an answer to my problem. And now I have one and I can finally breathe. I can finally start to live again and move forward.  My doctors have told me that treatment for this disease may take up to 12 weeks before my body starts to respond and feel like itself again. As per my doctor’s request, I have agreed to tone training down to a very minimal amount during the first 12 weeks of treatment to give the medicine a chance to work. This means that my races this spring and summer might look a bit different than originally planned (more to come on that!).  After that, my team is very hopeful that I will be able to find a training and racing regime that works for me and my health constraints. I acknowledge that I am lucky to have a mild to moderate case of Crohn’s right now. My goal is to keep flares to a minimum so that the disease does not progress and ruin my quality of life later on. Some people with this disease are not so lucky and experience far more life threatening complications than I have thus far and my thoughts go out to them.  Undoubtedly, it will take some time for me to physically and mentally recover from this ordeal. But I am taking things in stride and truly this diagnosis is a bright light at the end of a very very long tunnel for me.  For more information on Crohn’s Disease or ways to support those with IBD please visit https://www.crohnscolitisfoundation.org/