For five and a half years, I wasn’t just overwhelmed — I was suffocating. Not in the poetic way people use that word. In the real way. The way where your chest stays tight for months and years. The way where you forget what a full breath feels like. The way where you learn to hold yourself together so tightly that crying becomes a luxury you don’t have time for.
I lived on the edge of tears every day. Not because I was fragile — because life was doing its best to beat me down into nothing.
And yes, some people will call this dramatic. But that’s because they didn’t live it.
The hardest part wasn’t the exhaustion. It was the distance between who I had been and who I had become.
I used to be the woman who could run marathons. The woman who celebrated every finish line, no matter the pace. The woman who felt joy in her own body, who could laugh at mile 20, who could find light even in the grind. The woman who stood at the top of Rugged Maniac’s Accelerator, terrified and exhilarated, and took the plunge anyway — screaming, laughing, alive.
I miss her.
But somewhere in the last five and a half years, she disappeared under the weight of caregiving, crisis, responsibility, and a kind of emotional erosion that doesn’t announce itself — it just slowly takes pieces of you until you realize you’re living on instinct instead of breath.
I wasn’t weak. I wasn’t failing. I wasn’t dramatic.
I was drowning in plain sight. In ways I still am.
And when you’re suffocating like that, you don’t dream. You don’t plan. You don’t imagine a future. You just try to make it through the next hour without breaking open.
I still don’t dream. It hasn’t felt worth it.
The Spark That Pulled Me Toward Air
Late last summer, when everything felt scorched and small, a tiny idea showed up — the earliest version of OCR Buddy Beyond Borders. It wasn’t a project then. It wasn’t a campaign. It was a lifeline.
A reminder that connection still mattered. A reminder that community still existed. A reminder that maybe I wasn’t as alone as I felt.
And here’s the truth I’ve never said publicly:
Buddy Beyond Borders didn’t just inspire a community project — it inspired me to start trying again.
It gave me something to reach toward when I didn’t have much left. It gave me a reason to look up. It gave me a spark of possibility in a season where everything else felt like ash.
The Part People Don’t Say Out Loud About Virtual Races
There’s something else I need to name, because it shaped this entire rebuild.
Virtual races get dismissed. They get mocked. They get called silly, pointless, “not real,” or a waste of time.
And some of the people who say that are people who know me. People who know what the last five and a half years have looked like behind the scenes. People who know how hard I was fighting just to breathe, let alone train.
But here’s the truth:
When your life has burned down, a virtual race isn’t silly — it’s a life line
It’s a lifeline. It’s a reason to move. It’s a way to stay connected when you’re too overwhelmed, too exhausted, or too broke to show up/.
And let’s be honest about the sport right now:
Racing has become stupidly expensive. Logistically insane. Or simply not happening.
Entry fees doubled. Travel costs exploded. Events disappeared. Accessibility shrank.
So when people roll their eyes at virtual races, they’re ignoring the reality a lot of us are living in.
Virtual races kept me moving when I couldn’t race. They kept me connected when I felt alone. They gave me structure when everything else was chaos.
They helped me start trying again.
Join OCR Buddy in the OCR Buddy Beyond Borders Project https://ocrbuddy.bigcartel.com/product/ocr-buddy-across-the-world-virtual-race
