down was devastating to us i also heard that e t still kept her high spirits in fact four months after leaving the hospital he did a half marathon earlier this year i'm thrilled mae organized a fund raising race race for eighty and managed to set it up in prospect park we had three hundred people register and a great showing probably two hundred people showed up i had friends from all walks of life people a friend of mine from when i was four years old came in from new jersey i had high school friends appear from different states nearby lots and lots of runner friends were there my closest running friends and sort of my first friends from when i moved to new york who've remained some of my closest friends came in from boulder birmingham somewhere up in maine and we all got to spend the weekend together which was really really nice and then i had other cyclist friends and friends from my time at scholastic where i used to work here in new our utah idea well you going to something about the charter i was born in boston massachusetts and grew up right outside the city i was always athletic but played many different sports the big ones in high school were field hockey and lacrosse did you go on to college i did i went to antioch in yellow springs ohio very progressive liberal arts school i played intermural softball and then i quickly realized that i missed sports i was always very competitive so i started doing things like swimming and running and playing racquetball anything to just sort of get out there and be active  anthropology economics and i focused on latin america i was always very interested in latin america because lots of things going on a human rights lawyer and i interned at a at an organization that that that in coaster rica did that for a little while and i cited maybe law wasn't for me and so then i was a little sort of up in the air about what i wanted my career to be but i thought i wanted it to be something that was focused on international development or internet some in international i'd also wanted to be a teacher way back when i started college so when i moved back from latin america i moved back to boston and thought i would go to graduate school for something in international but like a job at an educational software company i thought i'd stay there for just a little while while while i applied to graduate school but i ended up loving it so my career remained in educational publishing publishing books or i was always more on the technology side of things but some of the programs i worked on were blended technology and books ok i was for twenty years oh that's a lot it's a long time that this came in the boston area i started in boston i was there for six years working at a company called tom snyder productions and then i moved to new york and started working at scholastic and i was at school lastic for most of my career ok five maybe five five miles the i'm like a really long run and i was really pretty proud of myself and then one night i was at a party and a friend of mine said hey you should do this marathon with me i just signed up to do a marathon in alaska and i thought i was you know a couple beers in and i thought oh yeah yeah yeah i'll do that and i woke up the next morning i was actually still kind of psyched about it so i found a training plan online and started training for it i didn't know anything about what you're supposed to do for training for a marathon i remember i do like a twelve mile run and went have a sip of water the whole way i didn't know that you're supposed to drink while you ran and then get back and just whole liter of gator hurried anyway i got to the i did my first fourteen mile run and i called up my friend i was like hey as a go and you know i'm pretty i think i might be actually doing this with you ask and she's like oh i got to ten miles i hate running i'm not doing it but i was way into it so i got my mom to come with me and the two of us went to alaska it was a mother daughter trip and i did my first marathon it was a tough one there's like off road and a lot of climbing i think hills did it in four oath that obviously you enjoyed i did i was hooked actually as soon as i did it i wanted to do another one  laugh at this too probably it was bermuda oh yeah the weather more my got a lot of people that did alaska probably it was probably ninety percent team and training people how you met them yes so when i was out there even when i was flying out there i think i sat next to someone who was also doing the race and that person explained that oh a team in training it's a great you know you raise money for a good cause and you get training you get a coach and you actually learn about running all the things i didn't know so when i went back to boston i quickly went to an informational session by team and training and one of their races was bermuda so i signed up for that  join you know i went with just the team and training friends for that one it was great i wanted to qualify for boston so i set my my target for three forty i actually wanted to do better than three forty i had my goal was three thirty for that one and it was pouring rain it was just felt like a salmon going upstream like some pretty hilly in bermuda so they going uphill water would just be definitely really they trust yeah yeah and so i think it was a pretty finally do that they had prize money and some elites but luckily they only had two elites doing the marathon and i so i managed to squeak  actually so that was the races in january the bermuda race so then i right after that i moved to new york city and i wanted to you know keep working on getting faster so i looked online and i found bob glover's training road runner training speed class and quickly signed up for that and then he's great he's retired now but in his was reading somewhere you also psycho if you didn't exist in one from portland to progress i had to talk about so back in twenty ten i got married to a cyclist and we decided to have our honeymoon be a cross country bike trip and it sounded and we flew our bikes out to portland oregon and started their road north and then dropped south through colorado back north and  finished at our house in brooklyn how many day it's six fifty eight days since it was something like forty six hundred miles south of us how many wheels to retire i don't know it's amazing we only had three flats the whole way i think we changed tires that the halfway point so we'd have fresh ones to get us through the rest that something you really enjoy doing i loved it i think i loved it way more than my husband  and it reminded me of america every you know there are so many days where it just it was slow going because we were carrying all of our luggage i think our bikes with something like seventy five eighty pounds so thirteen miles an hour would be a pretty good clip for the day so take a long time and i just remember some of the days trying to picture like the end of a marathon than you know how i do that and  he dealt with the bike stuff keep him clean that kind of thing he's much much more inclined to do that and i we basically had a basically that we wanted to do but we'd rework it just about each week and then we'd that luggage that we got out there and we were kind of evolved really and is in oregon they let you ride on the interstate so the only route we could go was on i eighty four  and there was one part we had to go through a tunnel and we had to walk or bike and were wearing you know shoes with the paddle so there slippery and there was a little sidewalk that was about this wide at an angle so we had to walk on that with our our bikes down to host all you know really heavy and trucks were flying by and so that was really hairy  did your parents know about this they weren't that thrilled they're like hey you got to pay heed to yourself ok i loved it and yeah i wanted to do it again or maybe go to another country that had better food and scenery in the middle of it masters we had a really strong masters and grandmaster whatever they call beyond masters had met a vector and raced for i think three or four years and then the team decided to yeah i lived in brooklyn and they were such a big team and had the manhattan side and they also had a really good brooklyn side so i did all the brooklyn workouts and we did tuesday nights thursday night saturday l i decided sometimes i had an itch to do could do something new go somewhere different somewhere with a lot more access to the outdoors and a job opportunity came along in l at first i didn't didn't think i'd take it but then the more i talked to them the more i decided i wanted to go and work at the company for about a month before they decided to shut down the thing that they were so excited about starting up oh yeah well it was a start up but they were mostly a consumer business and they wanted to start a school division and then they sort of backpedaled and read on the money or something th decided that it was too hard and let a bunch of us go so then i started my own consulting business and that was going well hadn't even been there a year it was i moved out there in may twenty twenty sixteen and once i got out there the cycling was so amazing i did a ton of cycling met a lot of people and was riding every week and couldn't wait for the weekend to roll around so i could get out and go into the mountains and then when i got laid off i started doing even more cycling and they could do since i started consulting business i had a little bit more flexibility with my schedule and i could go off on the boss yeah i could do you know two hour rides in the morning and it was fine so one day in april i headed out on a sort of standard morning she was making a left hand turn coming from the opposite side and t boned me drove straight to me you know i thought i did but i recently discovered that i was alert the whole time i just don't don't remember anything from the driver she stopped and ran over to me she started as i think she was probably hysterical she didn't even realize that she had hit a person and she thought a stoplight had fallen out of the sky because she felt the impact and then she saw she pulled over and saw a body in the road that she ran over she's a nurse so she knew what to do and i guess i was trying to get up and get to my bike and she said you know lie back down you know another person ran over who was leaving she was actually turning left to go into her job at a hospital  so another nurse was leaving work and came over as well and i think it was ten minutes before the ambulance got there are you parents hear about this when i got to the hospital they asked to should i who should they call and i had them call my dad and my ex husband so right my parents would i do you know i didn't i had my license in a little bag a little something paralyzed i hoped at that point that it was temporary but i think a couple days in i pretty much knew that it was probably not ok yeah by my side the whole time they stayed for probably five six weeks and they were amazing that the outpouring of support from i can even believe i mean it's overwhelming but the outpouring of support from the for the corners of my life running community by community the last the community friends from high school from everyone came out and people have been so supportive from the time of the accident you know through yesterday it was just more you know yesterday was amazing because i got to see i actually got to see that people  paralysis wasn't bad enough just trying to figure out what am i supposed to do how do i deal with insurance and it's really amazing i mean now i understand how the met you know how all of that works but when i was there at first i didn't know the first thing about you know how to navigate any of that it was actually with that colleague who stepped in and offered support didn't really understand she she works navigating the health the health care system ok because there you help from friends you have little help so much help from friends and family you know you effect when you were having your race yesterday there was a system one appointment and there was also one in sydney australia and one of my d n y team mates is australian and now back in australia hosted a got a little race going there to still live in i have your own house i do ok and i guess you were able to fix it up yeah because of the go fund me and all of the support that i've had from friends and family have i was able to modify it and and now i can live in  was great it was amazing i my teammates from the celta bought me a hand cycle and i was headed to my parents in naples florida for a month over the holidays and i knew that would be a good place to get started