What it means

EDITORS NOTE: This month, Climb For Kids is heading to China to participate in the Great Wall Marathon. One of the participants, Jessie Alan, was kind enough to put together a bunch of thoughts on the event, her preparation and what the run means to her.

Running stairs could not suck more. It’s great for your heart but it makes your head kind of swim. It’s hard on your knees on the way down, and hard on your IT bands, hamstrings and calves going up.

On the upside, it’s great for your butt.

But it’s boooring. Unless you happen to be in the company of your other main source of inspiration, which for me – cue the gagging – is my boyfriend, Matt Kowalczyk. Those nasty stairs you see in the photo are just one flight of about a dozen that climb the steep western side of my Capitol Hill ‘hood. He introduced me to these stairs and they’ve become our semi-regular training grounds for the Great Wall run.

I will try to keep the gratuitous fawning to a minimum, I promise, but it must be said that this trip wouldn’t be happening if it weren’t for Matt’s courage and passion. He founded Climb for Kids as a way of coping, healing, and sharing his strength and his story with others who suffer as he has, and there’s no other word for it: it’s just plain inspiring.

Anybody who knows Matt knows that he is what we call an “external processor”. The man has no internal monologue. It’s a real treat, listening to him mutter to himself while he’s thinking – it’s where I get most of my best standup material. But what it also means is that he is incredibly open about the things he experiences and feels, even if he isn’t entirely sure what they mean. Combine that with his gift of online gab and what you get is someone who expresses himself beautifully and shares freely, which draws people to him and lets those who are going through the trauma of fetal syndromes know they are not alone…and that, in Matt’s words (borrowed from Dan Savage of course), it gets better.

Matt’s story about his twin daughters Emma and Ella is all his own, it’s not mine. I only know Emma as the tiny infant in the photo on Matt’s landing, laying on his naked chest and wearing tubes in her nose and a knit cap I imagine to be no bigger than a teacup. I know he loves her dearly and remembers her every day. I know that her birth and her death were two of the most earthshattering and lifechanging events of his life to date. And I see how he honors her memory and celebrates his surviving daughter Ella by throwing himself at mountains and now also by running 20 miles at a single go to prepare for his full marathon (yes people, FULL marathon, not the wimpy half like me) on the Wall.

This charity run we’re doing to raise money for Climb for Kids is a lot of things to me; it’s an amazing adventure in a country I’ve wanted to visit my whole adult life; it’s a window in to Matt’s history and experience with twin-to-twin-transfusion syndrome; and it’s an opportunity to lend support to this worthy cause. I’m so grateful to be part of it.