Just minutes earlier, as I awoke in the recovery room, my doctor told me that he found a few polyps, which he removed. He paused, “and a significant mass.”

Most people don’t fail to start things because they’re lazy. They fail because the thing they’re trying to start is too big to pick up. Write the book. Get in shape. Turn the organization around. Fix the marriage. You stand in front of a goal that size and you freeze, because there’s no obvious place to put your hands. So you wait. You tell yourself you’ll begin when you have a plan, or more time, or the motivation you’re sure is on the way. It isn’t on the way. There’s a bet

When things go wrong — and they will, in any life that amounts to something — the people who know themselves have a very specific advantage over everyone else.

When someone dies of cancer, we say they “lost their battle.” It’s meant as honor. They fought. They were brave. But the phrase subtly suggests that If the dead lost, they must have been beaten. And if they were beaten, some part of the story whispers that they didn’t fight hard enough.

The climbs aren’t hard because they hurt. They’re hard because you can’t see the top. You grind upward with no proof the crest is close, and the only thing keeping you on the bike is the next pedal stroke, then the one after that. That’s chemo. That’s the waiting room. That’s the stretch of recovery long after you ring the bell. You don’t get through it by believing the summit is near. You get through it by refusing to stop.

I’ve been diagnosed with cancer twice. Prostate cancer first. Then stage 3b colorectal cancer. Two separate diagnoses, multiple rounds of treatment, and lots of time sitting across from doctors, nurses and research associates recalibrating everything I thought I knew. Both times, I made it through. Both times, I kept working, kept training and desperately trying to hold onto the life I had. There were lots of days when I wondered whether I would survive.

Ask anyone who has worked with me for more than five minutes and they will tell you the same thing. I am direct, move fast in a way that sometimes misses nuances, and I have very little patience for drawn-out meetings that could have been emails or quick conversations.

Nobody hands you a manual for what to do with a medical diagnosis that isn’t quite a death sentence but isn’t nothing either. You figure out who you’re going to be about it mostly by trial and error — and by watching other people navigate the same terrain and deciding, quietly, what you do and don’t want to become.

Completing a defined challenge, one with clear parameters and measurable milestones, activates a reward system that open-ended work simply cannot replicate. And over time, I’ve found that regularly experiencing completion in my athletic life has made me more resilient, more patient, and more effective in a professional life where completion is rare.

About six weeks into my chemotherapy, I sat down to write an email that I had written a hundred times before. A routine “Five Bullet Friday” update to the FCA board. Nothing complicated. I knew exactly what I wanted to cover. And I could not find the words. Not in a poetic, searching-for-the-right-phrase kind of way. In a genuinely frightening, the-cabinet-is-open-and-the-shelf-is-empty kind of way. I sat in front of that screen for ten minutes. I got up. I came back. I tried

First Catherine O’Hara on January 30th, then James Van Der Beek just days ago on February 11th. Both gone from colorectal cancer. Both far too soon. And as a two-time cancer survivor myself, their deaths don’t just make me sad. They terrify me. Catherine O’Hara was 71 when a pulmonary embolism caused by rectal cancer took her life. She’d been in treatment since March 2025, though like so many cancer patients, she kept her battle private. James Van Der Beek was only 48— a de

Real gratitude - the kind that actually sustains you - doesn’t look like the social media version of Thanksgiving.

Sometimes the speeches we need to give and the speeches others need to hear find each other at just the right moment.

As a two-time cancer survivor, I’ve learned that the anxiety leading up to scans and test results - what the cancer community calls “scanxiety” - can be just as debilitating as the initial diagnosis.

Cancer doesn’t care how many miles you’ve logged or how fast you can run. Chemotherapy doesn’t negotiate with your VO2 max. Your cancer cells aren’t impressed by your swim times.

What was happening to my body, however, was only half the battle. The other half was the story I was telling myself about what it all meant.

I had the pleasure of running all 86 flights or 1,576 stairs up the Empire State Building last night as part of the NYU Langone team.

Cancer deaths in the United States have dropped 33% since 1991, saving an estimated 3.8 million lives, according to the American Cancer...

Imagine finding out that you have cancer via a text message while barreling down the Northern State Parkway. I did. It was a Friday,...

One of the songs that's made its way onto most of my running playlists is "Hall of Fame" by The Script. These lines - "You can go the...