Let me start with yesterday, because yesterday was a big deal, even though it will not be showing up on any leaderboard, anywhere, ever.
I walked a little over two miles at a 19 minute mile pace. I am aiming for 18 next. I said this out loud to myself with the same pride most people reserve for finishing a marathon, and honestly, for me, it might as well have been one.
Here is the part that will either make you laugh or make you wince along with me. In my younger days I was a runner. A real one. I trained for and finished the Honolulu Marathon, and my pace goals back then were reserved for splits 10 minutes a mile or under. Ten minutes was slow for me back in the day. Ten minutes was the number I apologized to my training log for. So somewhere, the thirty something version of me is currently clutching her stopwatch and staring at the current me in polite horror. And the current me is standing there with her arms up like she just won something, because she did.
That is the whole story of aging with chronic illness, honestly, folded into one ridiculous, wonderful mile.
The Three Months I Am Not Proud Of, But Will Tell You About Anyway
I did not arrive at this cheerful little victory lap gracefully. I want to be honest about that, because I think the tidied up version of these stories does everyone a disservice. When COPD, MAC disease, and a newly aggravated case of osteoarthritis all decided to move into my life at once, uninvited and with zero regard for my calendar, I did not respond with grace and an inspirational soundtrack. I responded by having a tearful, angry pity party. A real one. It lasted about three months. There was no inspirational soundtrack playing while it happened, just me, and some genuinely uncooperative lungs.
I was confused. I was angry. I was frustrated in the specific way that only comes from a body that used to do exactly what you asked of it, without complaint or negotiation, suddenly filing a formal grievance every time you asked it to walk across the room and forget up the stairs. I was disappointed, in my lungs, in my joints, and if I am being fully honest, occasionally in the universe, which did not appreciate the feedback.
Here is what I want you to know if you are currently somewhere in your own version of those three months. That pity party is allowed. You are allowed to be furious that your body changed the rules without asking you. You are allowed to grieve the runner, the gardener, the dancer, the version of you that climbed stairs without doing math about it first. What is not required, and what I eventually figured out was optional, is moving in permanently. A pity party with a start date and an end date is called processing. A pity party with no end date is called a lease, and I did not want to keep paying rent on it.
The Lemon Stand
At some point, somewhere in month three, I got tired of being furious at my own lungs. Not because I suddenly felt better, I did not, but because being furious was taking up energy I needed for other things, like breathing. So I made a decision that had nothing to do with my test results and everything to do with my attitude, which is the one part of this whole mess that was still, stubbornly, entirely mine to control.
I decided to make lemonade. Not the fake, forced, everything happens for a reason kind of lemonade. The kind where you look at a pile of genuinely sour lemons, COPD, MAC disease, joints that ache like they are settling old scores, and you say, fine, I did not order these, I cannot return them, so what is the most useful thing I can possibly do with them today.
For me, that meant learning to walk again, on my own terms, at my own pace, with my own lungs setting the schedule instead of my ego. It meant pursed lip breathing on the stairs instead of pretending I did not need it. It meant a pace tracker that, some days, felt like the most insulting piece of technology ever invented, and other days, like yesterday, felt like a trophy case.
What a 19 Minute Mile Actually Means
If you had told thirty year old me that one day she would be celebrating a 19 minute mile, she would have laughed you out of the room, possibly while stretching. But thirty year old me did not have COPD. She did not have MAC disease quietly setting up camp in her lungs. She did not have osteoarthritis renegotiating the terms of every joint in her body. She was comparing herself to other runners. I am comparing myself to March of this year, when two miles of anything felt like a rumor about a life I used to have.
This is the actual wisdom I want to hand you, wrapped in a slightly ridiculous personal anecdote about my own pace times. Stop comparing your current body to your younger body, and stop comparing your current body to anyone else’s body. Compare it only to where you started this particular chapter. That is the only fair race, and it is the only one you can actually win.
There is a concept from the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl that I lean on constantly these days, the idea that between whatever happens to us and however we respond, there is a small gap, and in that gap we still get to choose. My lungs are the stimulus. My joints are the stimulus. A 19 minute mile is not a consolation prize. It is my response, chosen on purpose, in that gap, over and over, one slow and deeply satisfying step at a time.
The Part Where I Tell You to Go Celebrate Something Small
So here is my actual advice, the kind you can use starting today, whatever your particular collection of curses happens to be.
Give yourself the three months, or however long your own pity party needs to run its course, without shame. Then notice when you are ready to leave it, and leave. Stop measuring today against your best day ever. Measure it against your hardest recent day instead, and let yourself be legitimately thrilled by the gap between the two, even if that gap would look like nothing to anyone else watching. Find one small, unglamorous, slightly absurd win, a slower mile, a full night’s sleep, a jar you managed to open on your own, and celebrate it exactly as loudly as you would have celebrated a marathon medal once upon a time. You earned it. Arguably, you earned it harder.
I am aiming for an 18 minute mile next. My old marathon splits are not invited to that conversation. This chapter of my life gets its own scoreboard, and I intend to keep winning on it, one comfortably slow, gratefully breathing mile at a time.
If any of this sounds like your life too, the aching joints, the lungs with opinions, the strange new math of what counts as a win, you will find a lot more of this same mix of humor and honest tools in my book, Mindfulness for Grownups: A Playful Guide to Peace, Presence, and Purpose in Your Prime. Come sit with me a while. Bring your own lemons. We will figure out the lemonade part together.
My WIN!
Let me start with yesterday, because yesterday was a big deal, even though it will not be showing up on any leaderboard, anywhere, ever.
I walked a little over two miles at a 19 minute mile pace. I am aiming for 18 next. I said this out loud to myself with the same pride most people reserve for finishing a marathon, and honestly, for me, it might as well have been one.
Here is the part that will either make you laugh or make you wince along with me. In my younger days I was a runner. A real one. I trained for and finished the Honolulu Marathon, and my pace goals back then were reserved for splits 10 minutes a mile or under. Ten minutes was slow for me back in the day. Ten minutes was the number I apologized to my training log for. So somewhere, the thirty something version of me is currently clutching her stopwatch and staring at the current me in polite horror. And the current me is standing there with her arms up like she just won something, because she did.
That is the whole story of aging with chronic illness, honestly, folded into one ridiculous, wonderful mile.
The Three Months I Am Not Proud Of, But Will Tell You About Anyway
I did not arrive at this cheerful little victory lap gracefully. I want to be honest about that, because I think the tidied up version of these stories does everyone a disservice. When COPD, MAC disease, and a newly aggravated case of osteoarthritis all decided to move into my life at once, uninvited and with zero regard for my calendar, I did not respond with grace and an inspirational soundtrack. I responded by having a tearful, angry pity party. A real one. It lasted about three months. There was no inspirational soundtrack playing while it happened, just me, and some genuinely uncooperative lungs.
I was confused. I was angry. I was frustrated in the specific way that only comes from a body that used to do exactly what you asked of it, without complaint or negotiation, suddenly filing a formal grievance every time you asked it to walk across the room and forget up the stairs. I was disappointed, in my lungs, in my joints, and if I am being fully honest, occasionally in the universe, which did not appreciate the feedback.
Here is what I want you to know if you are currently somewhere in your own version of those three months. That pity party is allowed. You are allowed to be furious that your body changed the rules without asking you. You are allowed to grieve the runner, the gardener, the dancer, the version of you that climbed stairs without doing math about it first. What is not required, and what I eventually figured out was optional, is moving in permanently. A pity party with a start date and an end date is called processing. A pity party with no end date is called a lease, and I did not want to keep paying rent on it.
The Lemon Stand
At some point, somewhere in month three, I got tired of being furious at my own lungs. Not because I suddenly felt better, I did not, but because being furious was taking up energy I needed for other things, like breathing. So I made a decision that had nothing to do with my test results and everything to do with my attitude, which is the one part of this whole mess that was still, stubbornly, entirely mine to control.
I decided to make lemonade. Not the fake, forced, everything happens for a reason kind of lemonade. The kind where you look at a pile of genuinely sour lemons, COPD, MAC disease, joints that ache like they are settling old scores, and you say, fine, I did not order these, I cannot return them, so what is the most useful thing I can possibly do with them today.
For me, that meant learning to walk again, on my own terms, at my own pace, with my own lungs setting the schedule instead of my ego. It meant pursed lip breathing on the stairs instead of pretending I did not need it. It meant a pace tracker that, some days, felt like the most insulting piece of technology ever invented, and other days, like yesterday, felt like a trophy case.
What a 19 Minute Mile Actually Means
If you had told thirty-year-old me that one day she would be celebrating a 19-minute mile, she would have laughed you out of the room, possibly while stretching. But thirty-year-old me did not have COPD. She did not have MAC disease quietly setting up camp in her lungs. She did not have osteoarthritis renegotiating the terms of every joint in her body. She was comparing herself to other runners. I am comparing myself to March of this year, when two miles of anything felt like a rumor about a life I used to have.
This is the actual wisdom I want to hand you, wrapped in a slightly ridiculous personal anecdote about my own pace times. Stop comparing your current body to your younger body, and stop comparing your current body to anyone else’s body. Compare it only to where you started this particular chapter. That is the only fair race, and it is the only one you can actually win.
There is a concept from the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl that I lean on constantly these days, the idea that between whatever happens to us and however we respond, there is a small gap, and in that gap we still get to choose. My lungs are the stimulus. My joints are the stimulus. A 19-minute mile is not a consolation prize. It is my response, chosen on purpose, in that gap, over and over, one slow and deeply satisfying step at a time.
The Part Where I Tell You to Go Celebrate Something Small
So here is my actual advice, the kind you can use starting today, whatever your particular collection of curses happens to be.
Give yourself the three months, or however long your own pity party needs to run its course, without shame. Then notice when you are ready to leave it, and leave. Stop measuring today against your best day ever. Measure it against your hardest recent day instead, and let yourself be legitimately thrilled by the gap between the two, even if that gap would look like nothing to anyone else watching. Find one small, unglamorous, slightly absurd win, a slower mile, a full night’s sleep, a jar you managed to open on your own, and celebrate it exactly as loudly as you would have celebrated a marathon medal once upon a time. You earned it. Arguably, you earned it harder.
I am aiming for an 18-minute mile next. My old marathon splits are not invited to that conversation. This chapter of my life gets its own scoreboard, and I intend to keep winning on it, one comfortably slow, gratefully breathing mile at a time.
If any of this sounds like your life too, the aching joints, the lungs with opinions, the strange new math of what counts as a win, you will find a lot more of this same mix of humor and honest tools in my book, Mindfulness for Grownups: A Playful Guide to Peace, Presence, and Purpose in Your Prime. Come sit with me a while. Bring your own lemons. We will figure out the lemonade part together.
