A New Date Is Set
A BIG Announcement + What Happens When You Refuse To Move The Line.
By-when? — It’s the question that lingers at the edges of my mind. If I’m to do a task, by-when is the rudder that steers my sails.
Wind is needed, certainly. But I can’t control the wind—I can only harness it when it comes, and wait patiently when it doesn’t. I’ve had to revise my by-whens more than I’d like to count—like when I told myself I’d have a solid book proposal and a literary agent within six months of writing. (That was in 2017.)
Still, I’ve hit significant by-whens that mattered—ones that changed everything. And today, I am deeply excited (and overwhelmed) to share another. Before I reveal the big announcement though, I’m taking you back to my run across America in 2010 to one of my favorite moments in San Francisco. This is an excerpt from Chapter 4: The Date Is Set of my memoir — the morning a family gifted a car to my non-profit just days before I began my crossing, and ultimately, the launch of something much bigger than me.
Chapter 4: The Date Is Set [excerpt]
Sitting in Skye’s Toyota—which was now my charity’s Toyota—I ran my hands across the top of the smooth leather steering wheel.
They knew we needed a support vehicle because I had asked them where to buy an inexpensive moped, which had been my cheap solution for getting to and from the route each day from the camper.
Sitting in the Camry now, I realized how silly that plan had been—me, loading up my running gear, food, and supplies into a moped basket. Nate, driving down the highway with me teetering on the back, heading to and from the route every day for six months after running a full marathon—through rain, snow, and whatever else we’d face until we reached New York.
Really?
I chuckled at myself, shaking my head.
Even in my lumbering, I felt conviction. Here I was—recently introduced to this family by a man I’d never met—sitting in a car they’d intended for a charity the entire year I trained for this event. Then I arrived at their home, having created a charity that needed a car.
How else could I explain these remarkable coincidences except to believe that it was all meant to be? It reminded me of the RV parked out front, which had appeared just forty-six days before I was scheduled to leave for the start of the run.
“We don’t have a motorhome,” Nate had argued. “We’re supposed to leave next month! We need to discuss pushing the date back.”
But I wouldn’t. I held the line.
“If we change the date now, that means we never believed it was there for us in the first place. You know what I’m talking about,” I said. “You gave me the book.”
The book was The Secret, one of his favorites that he’d handed it to me shortly after we started dating. It put words to something I’d already learned from my parents—that intention is a tangible force.
Like when my mother’s abilities fluctuated from fluid, to manageable, to crippling and back again due to her MS. The good days would link together until they were suddenly swallowed by the immobility of the disease.
During those times, she’d lie on the couch for days, only getting up for trips to the bathroom. My parents bought no wheel chair for help; installed no guardrails for balance.
Instead, my father would wrestle the deadweight of her body onto a cobalt blue office chair with wheels. She’d wobble around — ever present, yet as cooperative as a hundred pound bag of pudding — and he’d push her from the living room, through the kitchen, to the bathroom.
There, he’d hoist her to the toilet, wait, then lift her back to the chair, and onto the couch. Over and over, until her strength returned.
This bathroom routine happened often during a relapse on account of the disease’s effects on her nervous system, making it hard for her to sense urgency—it was an accident waiting to happen if she waited too long.
During the daytime, she wore underwear to preserve her dignity. At night, she wore adult diapers on account of all the laundry.
From the outside, this looked like madness. Why not just get a wheelchair?
“Ashley,” my Father explained. “What you allow continues. If we put her in a wheelchair, we may never get her out.”
They weren’t above these things. Just, they’d wait it out until the very last possible moment, when all other options, like an office chair that didn’t represent the unbearable weight of disability, were no longer feasible. And they’d make it feasible much longer than most.
Truly, it was work…A lot. Of. Work.
And MS could be cruelly unpredictable—sometimes symptoms faded, sometimes they didn’t, and one could hardly know which it would be. Still, their intention remained. It was a clearing for mobility to return and they’d hold space for it as long as they could manage.
And now I had a guy who believed in that kind of thinking, too.
“This day holds just as much promise as the ones before it. You know this, Nate,” I encouraged as we spoke about my event timeline. “It’ll happen.”
“I know,” he said. “It’s just—we’re running out of time. Eight weeks out and we don’t have a motorhome or the money to do it yet. It makes me anxious. What are we going to do?”
“We can’t think about what we don’t have. We have to focus on what we know,” I said, grabbing his shoulders. “We proceed, expecting it to appear. Okay?”
He nodded. “Okay.”
“The date is set. March 16th, we leave Wisconsin. March 22nd, I run across the Golden Gate Bridge towards New York. Right?”
He stood tall. “Right.”
And, with everything we dreamed we needed in hand, that’s exactly what happened.
To this day, that story still pushes me to focus on what’s possible over what the world and my inner critic tells me is realistic. Because it was never about the car, or the date, or the run. It’s about what happens when you commit to an idea no matter the circumstances—when you move forward, even before the road is paved. And when the road doesn’t look like what you expected, you find a way.
When you believe in something you feel to be true, rather than what you see.
And now, years after I first sat down to write the story of that journey, I finally get to share it with the world as a book!
📘 My memoir publishing date is set!
AHHHH, WHAT?!
Yes! After years of searching for the right path to publish—through frustrations, dead ends, and delays—the date is set!
The full manuscript is currently in the hands of my editor and I can’t wait to share the rest of the story with you in print.
Soon, I’ll be sharing the exact date it can be purchased and other exciting announcements (like the celebrity writing my foreword & other major details!).
🛣️ Want to be the first to hear the official announcement?
If you aren’t already, Subscribe here to my Substack to get the details before anyone else, sneak peeks of book excerpts all summer long, and other exciting giveaways.
Stay tuned.
And thank you, always, for being part of the wind in my sails.