Scars and Stories

This year I pushed my body to do things that it had never done. I tried to go past my previous limits and challenge myself. I feel that I was successful. I can look at my body and relive the story. Long after the gained fitness vanishes and the muscles atrophy, I will still have the scars. I managed to accumulate quite a few of them and they all are now woven into my history. Of course, my leg modelling career is now officially over but when I am old and frail my body will tell a story of a life worth reliving.They say that scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue. I am embracing each of my new marks of adventure as symbols of outer and inner strength.

My left knee now appears to be completely healed from its brush with the evil branches and I have a nice raised purple scar. Purple is one of my favorite colors and it is much cheaper to get it on my body this way than a tattoo! In my last cross race I finally wasn't having any twinges in that knee and all was going well, as you may know I won. Anyways, I was racing so hard that going over the barriers on one of the laps I managed to ram my bike stem into my right chest wall. This is good in that I was actually moving quickly and had momentum rather than gingerly slow stepping, but bad in that I took a pretty hard hit. Let's just say, I don't have much chest padding and it hurt. However, the stem in question had an ever constant reminder on it that made this buttercup suck it up and keep racing.

Are you a Pussy?

Post race, my chest hurt pretty bad and by that night it was awful. I figured it was badly bruised and would go away. That night was kinda rough and taking a deep breath was out of the question. The final nail in the pain coffin was when I sneezed! Take the knife out of my ribs now!! The weekend double header of racing was not to be. At least I went out with a win, right? Sundays race had other women in my category so maybe just maybe I was faking. You know you are only as good as your last race and right now I won my last race;) I am optimistic that I just have rib bruising and that in a week all will be back to normal. Until I am able to sniff without bracing myself for a shot of pain I will just spend my hours reminiscing on all the fun I had this year. I don't need medals and awards to remember all this year has been (although, I am not giving back the buckle), I have memories permanently marked onto my body. I get to take these scars and the stories that made them with me and one day if I am no longer able to tell the stories my body be a canvas marked by adventures. Or, people will look at all the purple marks I have accumulated and learn the true story, I am a klutz!

Here I am racing where I first saw Cyclocross



'The human body is the best picture of the human soul'- Ludwig Wittgenstein