Hello, it's me!
The last two years since I posted have been quite eventful! But also not at the same time? Here's a quick(ish) recap:
When I last posted I had just run my first ultramarathon, and shortly after that Ben and I started looking to move on from our penchant for urban living and buy an actual house. We closed on an amazing waterfront home just like we always dreamed we'd have in April 2019 and have been here for nearly two years now! At the time I was in the thick of training for Ironman Lake Placid - I am happy to report that I survived, but it may forever hold the record for the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. The spring/summer of 2019 was chaos between house-hunting/moving and Ironman training, but somehow I made it.
In the fall of 2019 I had the incredible opportunity of racing Ironman 70.3 Superfrog, a race course that was designed by Navy SEALs training for the IM World Championship in Kona. Ben happened to have a work conference in Los Angeles the week after Superfrog in San Diego, so I jumped on the chance to do the race. It was by far the hardest 70.3 I have ever done (over half of the run was on the beach, which was simultaneously amazing and impossibly difficult).
About a month later I raced IM 70.3 North Carolina in Wilmington, which had been both my first half Ironman in 2015 and my first Ironman(ish) in 2016. I knew this would likely be my last big race for a while, as Ben and I had been planning on trying to start a family soon, but we were both shocked to learn that less than a month later we were pregnant! We couldn't believe it had happened so fast, but we were both SO excited - we celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary a few months prior so it had certainly been a long time coming!
Unfortunately, that pregnancy ended in a miscarriage about 6 weeks later, right at the beginning of 2020. To say that we were devastated doesn't even begin to describe it, and I think I will be carrying and processing the aftermath for quite some time. We had another even earlier miscarriage about six months later, at which point we decided to reach out to a fertility specialist. To make a very long story short, I was diagnosed with Diminished Ovarian Reserve (i.e. I have the eggs of someone 10 years older than I am), and we went through two rounds of IVF in late 2020, which in total yielded one poor-quality, most likely not viable embryo (which we currently have frozen for the time being).
Going through over a year of failed pregnancies, an infertility diagnosis, and failed treatment wreaked total havoc on our marriage, our sanity, and our emotional well-being
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