Race the Fear

Breast Cancer Awareness Month, the campaign held every October globally to increase breast cancer awareness and raise funds for its cure, just ended. For most women, the fight to fight the disease never ends. Fear fuels it.

To this date, I have been fortunate not to have breast cancer. And I have been blessed to know women who have faced the disease with the guts it takes to hear the news firsthand while empty-handed.

I don’t have a family history of breast cancer, but I grew up with a fear history of breast cancer.

This is why I am here, to share my race away from breast cancer fear.

I met breast cancer in my childhood.

Growing up in Caracas, Venezuela, I eavesdropped on conversations between my mother and our family’s best friend, our beloved Antonia Cotelo, nicknamed by all as Totó. In her 50s, she was diagnosed with a brain cancer that quickly metastasized into breast cancer. And during her arduous fight, I overheard the daily telephone calls my mom had every afternoon that included hopes, fears, and tears. They did not know, but I heard it all.  And I feared it all.

My parents welcomed Totó into our home every weekend. From those memories, her musical voice asking for “las niñas” (the girls) still echoes in my heart, particularly because there was not a single moment where she let her sorrow show when my sister or I were around. She was the epitome of love in joy. Until the day she parted, she held her breast cancer sentence with the grace of a white swan. Her dignity and emotional intelligence in the midst of her devastating disease are to be honored and revered.

My last memory of Totó is the face of an angel lost in time as if searching her way of out hell. An impeccably ivory complexion framing eyes no longer symmetrical and frozen, a wandering expression as if hoping to find focus in the fog of fear. All of it, below a head stylishly wrapped in a colorful scarf, honoring what was still a beautiful mind hoping to get her life back. That’s what breast cancer looked like to the girl in me.

Totó left us one rainy Sunday. Years passed by, my life went on, and my womanhood showed up. All of it with full-grown fears of breast cancer well into my 40s, intensified and out of proportion every time I had any hormonal breast pain, mammograms, thermography, sonograms, biopsies, the many roads to breast health. I knew how to know but I did not want to know. Sounds familiar?

Then I took charge.

Sick of worrying sick, I saw a renowned specialist in Cognitive Therapy who nailed the source of my breast cancer fears and healed it with a resounding closing argument: “That’s not your story. That’s not how you will go.”  So what was I to do? Pass the page? Not a chance.

An empowered girl becomes a brave woman who helps those who have the story, anyone living in fear, the ones who are afraid to check, the ones who wished they had checked, everyone and everybody so that no woman ever goes that way again.

I propelled myself into the subject fearlessly forward.

I now go to my yearly mammograms knowing that whatever technology and medicine find, we will do our best to cure, because this is now and that was then.  Medical treatments and protocols have come a long way, and so has every woman I’ve known who has fought the disease and won. All of them.

We take preventive charge. And we run for more.

Last October 14, 2017, I ran the 5K Susan G Komen’s Race for the Cure.

I raced against fear, convinced that what men, women, and girls don’t know can kill us.

I sprinted for the women who have faced the news and the disease like champions of life. Kelly Jenkins tops my list.  I ran the race as if guided by an angel – Totó flew next to me.

We took off and became mean- freaking- cancer-curing-healing machines. And we won the race.

Ladies and gentlemen,  the race to win starts with the F word to face – Fear.

And this is what we can make most breast cancers look like: Fearless. Alive. Gone.

The Booty Tribe

Every Time, all caps, no mercy, no maybe – it’s Saturday morning and badass rules here.

Head to Brickell Equinox and watch us endure Tarra Martinez’ Booty Blast class, designed to define the kind that defy definition. You’ve been warned.

The club describes the class as “dedicated to the bottom half – glutes, hips, thighs and abs.” I dedicate it to the bottomless.

This is so very beyond a class. A cult comes close. Ask Elderbrook, we dig him.

Tarra starts serving Cola, and yeah, that’s what we are coming for, and yeah, we can tell the difference. She extends a courtesy to the early adopters defining the work as a set of balancing moves meant to “strengthen everything that matters.” A force of gracious will, she steps in her zone – now ours- with an invitingly unabashed “What do you say?”

No ordinary methods to round, lift, tight, harden, reduce, increase, and everything else gluteus medium and minimums I have ever tried apply here. Just as I suspect no ordinary methods have ever applied to anything this tribe of fit women have faced. Or at least yours truly.

This is so very beyond the butt. A balancing act, the gravity of willpower.

Grab the toys – the weights, the bands, the ball, the gliders, the block. Yes, that zen-looking yoga block we used to love, until now. Here, the block is the obstacle we step one foot on, all strength on heel, while we bend the upper torso and lower body like an accordion, all on one compact move, plunging slowly to grab -or strangle- the lazy ball of shame laying on the ground waiting for our trembling everything to bring it up, only to bring it back down again.

Hello distant floor, can we talk?

Losing your balance has never been so redeeming. We kick ass when we start anew. Laura Walsh’s Cold Front “I don’t want to leave you know” is so à propos on the forgiving background.

“Keep your own pace”, “You are fighting nature!” Tarra howls and echoes, as we endure a dozen of hell-bents and squats, perched on faith, to the count of eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, and that famous Tarra branded “And Now Recoooooover!”  Hell, we do. Only to revisit tough love strapping the mother-torturer black loop bands on our thighs to squat the self, jump, and squat back again to the count of eternity.

“And now pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse.” No baby is coming out, but a resourceful woman who works on her strength.

And to think that I enlisted here in search of soothing leg isolations. My ass. My burning all. Sciatica, you better get it. Why on earth do I self-impose this ritual every Saturday morning? Because I choose what I  master. Up the ante. Every time.

Magalenha plays on. So do we.

No wonder this is one of Equinox busiest classes while one of its hardest – what we say we do, where we step we own, what we saddle, we lead. Girlie grit.

Filled to capacity, floored to endurance, enter at your own glorious risk. And if you do, don’t let the booty name fool you into expecting the conventional class and gals. We certainly look it, but tight ass doesn’t make it here, kick-ass is a pass.

What do you say?

Irma’s Sleepstream

What a difference a week makes. Especially if you counted on a category five hurricane to swipe your hometown and self in pieces.

Last September 10, Hurricane Irma churned the state of Florida making its catastrophic land in the Keys and spreading calamity on through Florida’s southwestern coast, mercifully brushing Miami as a category three hurricane due to land interaction.

Irma was the first major hurricane to make landfall in Florida since Wilma in 2005, the strongest Atlantic hurricane to strike the United States since Katrina in 2005, and the most threatening in size and strength observed in the Atlantic since Dean in 2007.

Everything about Irma had intensity about it – first, historic, unprecedented, and catastrophic. Ask the damage done to parts of the northeastern Caribbean and Florida during a week of relentless activity.

A day before its expected landfall in Miami, I took cover in the hotel right across my high-rise building in Brickell Avenue for fear of being slammed by a flying crane crashing thru my balcony on a 34th floor. Seeking shelter across my street seemed stupid for some, but being displaced from my original evacuation plan right before a mandatory evacuation, alarming warnings, no gas on tank or open station on sight, and the city airport closed explains my across-the-street diaspora.

What propelled me to make a hotel reservation next door? I did not want to die alone and have my family and friends suffer from my lack of preparation.

As Irma breached our coast unflinchingly, I bunkered at my hotel ballroom located in its fifth floor with no windows around us. Here, the husband of a dear friend, my dog and I bonded with 350 guests during eight hours of uninterrupted angst, electricity, and Wi-Fi, allowing most of us to call, text, and go online to watch images of rising floodwaters rushing thru businesses and residences downstairs; read about cranes crashing down; and hear about window panes turning into projectile glass blades one block from our hotel flying straight into my building.

Irma left Miami mid-afternoon, leaving thousands without power and covering Brickell in one murky and turbid body of restless water. After all the devastation she left in the Caribbean and the Keys, Irma baptized our financial district with a forgiving bath.

Grateful does not even begin to describe it.

A week later, I am lucky to be home with minor damage to my building, power and water restored, a full fridge, and a not-so-distant past stuck in my memory like a wet trunk. Many in my community are still without power, others in Florida and the Caribbean have lost it all, included loved ones. My hope is that with time, life and faith blossoms in all of them with blessings in disguise.

Fallen trees, shattered glass, twisted metals, and huge muddy ponds.

I walked counting blessings – my rock-solid family and lifetime friends who called relentlessly to ensure resources were available and my safety was not compromised. And then, kind souls who I mistakenly referred to as acquaintances kept me in their prayers like close friends do – the very strong connections made during a power-outage.

Hot, humid, and stormy Irma slipstreams gifted me with trails of truth.