Miracles and Mountains

Most of you know that I love to ride my road bike.  Love.  

Funny enough I never named my bike, but was thinking if I named her now it would be something like C-squared....Cancer Crusher.  

See there was this one time when I lived in Utah (and was really tough) that I would ride  a lot with a group of my friends.  We rode the Alpine Loop and Nebo and Suncrest other pretty tough mountains.  Serious climbs --  if you have never been to Utah or seen their mountains we are talking about elevation gains of between 1200 to 4300 feet.  

And if I'm being honest, I killed those climbs.  

One time I was riding the Alpine Loop with a few other guys (the one girl with a bunch of strong guys) and I booked it up that mountain.....beat them all to the summit.  One of the guys (who I am sure was super embarrassed  impressed that I killed him up the ascent) gave me the nickname of bone-crusher.  I think in his words he said that "His bones would grind to powder" if he were to ride in his big chain ring up the mountain like that.  

The nick-name stuck.  Bone-Crusher.  

Now I have a really big mountain to climb.  This mountain is cancer and I am kicking it into the big chain ring and bone crushing up this mountain. Physically and mentally.  

I look back at climbing those mountains in Utah and it seems like a miracle that I ever made it to the top sometimes, but I always did and the descent was always worth the climb.  I know it will be the same with this battle against cancer.

Right now this climb is killer, and it has only just begun. 

 I have a lot of elevation to bone crush all the way up and am counting on miracles a long the way.  

We are beginning this ascent with a little bit different of a plan then we had originally thought.  

I am going in for surgery tomorrow morning where they are going to remove a part of my colon that is being blocked by a cancerous tumor.  While they are removing the piece of the colon they will try to see if they can also remove the other tumor that was the one originally found.  Then, at the end of August/beginning of September they will start chemo after I have had some time to recover from surgery.  

In a lot of ways I feel like being able to go in and do surgery first is a small piece of the miracle we were praying for (we meaning me and all of you). 

I am going to make it up this mountain and you better believe that I am going into full bone crusher, cancer crusher mode until I make it all the way to the top.....and  with the help from all of you, I'm going to try and enjoy the beauty of the climb on the way up, even when it's hard.