Life Gets in The Way: Powering Through Adversity with Grit and Grace

INTRODUCTION

I should have been dead. Don’t get me wrong—I do not have a death wish. I love life, even though my quest for adventure has put me in some life-threatening situations. Some of my antics were youth-based stupidity—like the time I was dragged on roller skates by a car going 50 mph, or the time I ripped open the veins in my legs hopping a chain-link fence running from the police. I’ve also done more than my fair share of illegal and legal drugs (the prescription stuff, thanks to my current health status). I’ll blame peer pressure on the illegal stuff—more on that later. However, if I could have traded places with loved ones who have suffered and those who have died, I would have. But I wasn’t given that choice. (Spoiler alert for those who don’t want to read the whole book: I survived!)

Those of you who are planning to read the entire book will be happy you did—you may just get inspired to live life like it’s the last day earth will be in existence. (And I don’t mean like it’s your last day and you’re lying in a hospital bed. I mean like it’s Armageddon—the end of the world.) I hope to inspire you to stop wasting time worrying but instead use every minute possible to enjoy life—because you’re never going to get the chance again to live this very moment. I want to empower you to do what you always dreamed of doing. Let nothing, let nobody, stand in your way. Do not wait until life throws you a curve ball to make the change because that just might be your third strike.

Speaking of lying in a hospital bed, did you catch the part where I said I survived—past tense? I had cancer. Let me repeat, I HAD cancer. Did you also get my reference to choosing death? It’s true. I would have let cancer beat me if it meant that others could have won. That was the one time in my life I would have preferred to lose, but no, that didn’t happen. Therefore, I had to make the best of the situation.

My late husband and best friend, Pete, passed away in 2009 from a very brief, eight-month battle with melanoma caused by a genetic disorder. A year prior to his death, I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. Soon after his death, I found out that two of my three children possessed the same genetic disorder as their father. I took my negative feelings out on the stairs—yes, you read the right . . . the stairs. I ran up the stairs as fast as I could to relieve the stress. Eventually this stress reliever put me in the best shape of my life and got me a world ranking . . . in stair climbing. Yes, it’s actually a sport.

I am now a professional stair climber, a motivational speaker, a writer, and a video talk show host, none of which I planned to be. These accomplishments are all the results of life getting in the way. I hope my story can empower you to go for your dreams, because Life Gets in the Way is not just my story—it’s anyone’s story who thinks they can’t handle life’s challenges. I wish I could tell you that this is a book about overcoming adversity, but unfortunately, it’s not. Nor is it a tell all book. Along the way, I’ll name some names, but others I will keep a secret—and that is not to protect the innocent, but rather not give the guilty any extra attention they DO NOT deserve. (Yeah, you know who you are.) This book is about fighting through adversity. It’s about grit. I found inspiration in obstacles, and joy in overcoming them. You can too!

1

GENESIS

June 12, 1967

Dear Diary,

Today I ran to the beach with Marion. I didn’t stop once!

Mom said I ran a mile. I can’t wait to go again. It was fun.

Love, Sally

Whoever came up with the theory that the eldest child in the family is the smartest while the youngest seeks rebellion by attention must have studied my family. It’s really funny that they seldom mention anything about the middle child, especially if there is more than one. And in my family, there are three.

Being the youngest caused me to seek a lot of attention, aka rebellion. Luckily, to save me from being a total derelict, my four older siblings were great role models. I wanted to be just like my big sisters. I did everything they did—which was good and bad since they were a lot older than me. I grew up fast. And what I lacked in brains I got in street smarts, which I believe is a higher form of intelligence that can take you just as far if not farther than a 4.0 GPA. I would never have told my three children this while they were growing up, but since they were all student athletes who have achieved post-graduate educations, I can say this now. You know, the old do what I say, not what I do way of parenting.

September 1, 1969

Dear Diary,

I won the 50-yard dash and the pie-eating contest at Field Day. I like blueberry the best. I got two blue ribbons.

Sally

When I was younger, I wanted to be a lawyer and write a book. Well, since I lacked that smart gene, I choose the latter, and at the age of fifty-five, I’ve shed my inhibitions and started to share what I wrote. Age has never stopped me from doing what I wanted. When I was too young, I did it anyway. When people tell me I’m too old to do something, I still do it. Why would I let anybody or anything, especially a number, stop me? I love to challenge myself. People say I’m competitive, and maybe I am. But I’m most competitive with myself. I always want to better myself. And when I feel I have mastered something, I look for something new. Some people also confuse conceit with self-confidence. I’m not self-centered; I just have a high self-esteem.

I learned two important lessons at a young age; the first was to train my brain. If you say you won’t or you can’t, your brain will send receptors out to the rest of your body, and it will not do it. I trained my brain with lots of repetition, just like anything you want to master. I just kept telling myself over and over that I could do something until my body did what my brain told it to do. I trained my brain like I trained my muscles. The workout was to be positive—to only emit positive thoughts so my brain could only send positive receptors out to the rest of my body. Like any workout, I had good and bad days. Sometimes it didn’t work, but I would try harder the next time.

I started to train my brain at a young age when I started running. I wanted to run because all my sisters ran. I told myself if they could do it, then I could too. Instinctively I trained my brain to be positive physically as well as mentally. Being positive now comes naturally.

I decided that I would only think and speak positively. Think of it like using the present tense and the past tense. Present tense is positive. Past tense is negative. I never use negative words when I’m trying to accomplish anything. When running a race, I do not say, I am NOT going to let her win. Instead I say, I AM going to win. By using the positive present tense in everything I do, being positive now comes naturally. Try it—you’ll see that it works.

RUNNING DIARY

DATE: May 3, 1975

EVENT: Junior Olympic One Mile Run

COMMENTS: 2nd place; I couldn’t catch Joetta Clark.

Don’t give up. Do it now!

This mindset gave me the ability to excel in running at a young age. But I also had to learn how to lose. No one is ever going to be on top forever. When I was twelve, I learned how to lose gracefully when I came up against my biggest competitor to date. I’ll never forget that day. I checked into the paddock before the one-mile run at the Junior Olympic Championship and saw a tall, lean girl walking very confidently. She had spikes thrown over her muscular shoulder. No one my age had muscles defined like that, let alone wore spikes. I was instantly psyched out. I didn’t know it then, but this was someone I would have to run against and lose to in every big meet for the next six years. Being second to three-time Olympian Joetta Clark taught me to be humble, something I sorely needed. She and her father, the famed high school principal Joe Clark, featured in the true 1989 movie Lean on Me, inspired me.

The running boom of the seventies had just begun, and I was part of it. Although the women’s movement helped Title 9 in college, youth sports and high schools didn’t quite recognize girls’ running as much. My father decided I needed a coach, so he contacted a former student of his, marathon great Tom Fleming. My mother had to drive me all over New Jersey and New York to compete. My sisters Pat and Sue started the girls’ cross country team their senior year in high school. When I entered the following year, there were not enough girls in the sport, so I had to compete on the boys’ JV team. I earned the number-one spot. That spring I was only allowed to run the one mile in track, as anything more was considered too taxing on the female body. As a freshman in high school, I made it to the Meet of Champions.

Running gave me the attention the youngest child craves. But remember, along with that attention comes rebellion. I swear (and I don’t swear), if I were in high school now and did just one of the things I did when I was younger, I probably would be in juvie. Thank God (and I’m not religious either), it was the seventies and you could get away with a lot as long as your parents didn’t find out. It’s not a coincidence that I’m sharing some of these stories now that my parents are deceased.

Our generation was probably more afraid of our parents than the police. At one point my parents threatened to pull me out of Glen Ridge High School, located in the beautiful upper-class small town located just fifteen miles west of New York City, and send me to Point Pleasant Boro High School, in the Jersey shore town where my parents owned a summer home. You would never think that I was born in Newark, New Jersey, and spent the first four years of my life in East Orange, New Jersey, until my father had the foresight to move his family out of there before the race riots hit in the 1960s.

For many growing up is not easy, and I was no exception. Not only was I in the shadow of my four talented sisters, but I was also the daughter of a great football player and coach. My dad was a man who played in the era of leather helmets and coached at a time when an adult had the authority to discipline and was respected for it. My dad was inducted into the New Jersey High School Coaches’ Hall of Fame alongside Vince Lombardi.

I can thank my mother, who modeled in her twenties, for my legs, but I thank my father for giving me the grit to use them. That grit gets me through every obstacle I encounter, whether I have chosen that hurdle or it is thrown out before me. Grit is the power to turn the switch in your brain so it puts your body into another gear. Grit is what makes you tough. I trained my brain to be tough. That gave me grit. You can use grit in sports, and you can use grit in any adverse situation you need to get through. In high school I used this grit to run races, as well as to run from the police once or twice. Now I channel this grit into tower running, facing health issues, and dealing with tough mental situations.

When you use grit enough times, it becomes an instinct. At the age of ten, grit got me to pedal my bike home a mile away with the bottom of my foot slit wide open and bleeding from the base of my toes to the heel. A year later I instinctively used grit to save my life when I