Packing up the past: Honouring every mile while making room for what's next.

Today, I packed up my medals and race bibs.

I’ve been avoiding it for a long time. They’ve stayed where they were, little pieces of a life I think some part of me was still waiting to get back to.

But today, I decided it was time, and it feels a lot like a bad breakup. The kind that blindsides you. The kind you didn’t choose. The kind where you’re left holding all these reminders of something you loved, trying to figure out what to do with them now that the future you imagined is no longer yours.

Before my stroke, I was a long-distance runner. Even saying that in the past tense gets me in the gut.

Those medals aren’t just medals. Those bibs aren’t just pieces of paper. They represent years of my life when I felt strong and capable and, in so many ways, limitless.

They represent ridiculously early mornings and impossibly long days. Training runs and race days. Sore legs, finish lines, ugly cries and huge smiles.

They represent hours spent in some of the most beautiful places, with nothing to worry about except putting one foot in front of the other.

They represent friendships forged over miles. People I met along the way who became part of my story. People who ran beside me, waited for me, pushed me, laughed with me and cheered so loudly that I started believing I really could do anything.

Running gave me so much more than fitness. It gave me adventure. Community. Confidence. Freedom. It gave me a version of myself that I really, really loved.

And then, without warning, a stroke ended that chapter for me.

There was no last race where I knew it would be my last. No final run where I stopped to take it all in. No finish line that felt like a goodbye. I didn't get a farewell race. I didn't get to decide I was done. That decision was made for me. All I was left with were the artifacts of that life: Medals, race bibs, photos, and memories of a version of myself I never imagined I'd have to grieve.

One day I was a runner.

And then I wasn’t.

Maybe that’s why packing these things away feels so heavy. Because this isn’t just decluttering. It’s acknowledging something I haven't really wanted to acknowledge: That chapter is over. Packing it away doesn’t mean it didn’t matter. It mattered enormously. I did those things. I ran those miles. I crossed those finish lines. I stood on mountains and trails and starting lines wondering if I was capable of what was ahead of me, and then I found out that I was.

A stroke can change what my body is able to do now. It cannot take away what it has already done.

So today I’m packing up the medals. Not because that part of me no longer matters. But because maybe I don’t need them hanging on the wall to prove that she existed.

She did. She was strong. She was brave .She was a little bit ridiculous. And she had one hell of a run. Stroke recovery is a marathon, not a sprint. But unlike every marathon I've ever run, this one doesn't have a finish line. I don't know exactly what the next chapter looks like yet.

But today, I made room for it, and I'll keep putting one foot in front of the other.

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Some marathons don't end at the finish line. The memories stay, even when the medals are packed away.