I have spent much of my adult life flinching with pain as I tried to pull out the threads that bound the shadows of my past to me.

The fact that I spent my life in universities in a manner that I no longer have close identification with bricklayers is a pain to me.

I've never been in any pain, ever, like that in my whole life. Now it's set me so far back, I just don't' have the lung capacity to swim the way I can.

For me, everything that you're passionate about always comes with a little pain. That's how life is, and that's how I want to live it. I don't want it to be balanced and ordinary.

Sometimes my body wakes me up and says 'Hey, you haven't had pain in a while. How about pain?' And sometimes I can't breathe, and that's hard to live with. But I still celebrate life and don't give up.

When I was 12 years old, my father was killed. I lost a loved one to violence. The pain was because I lost my father. It didn't matter that he was an officer... It shaped my life. If anything, it made me a strong advocate for the victims of violence.

When I started running, the pain barrier was very familiar to me, and I had no problem pushing beyond the pain. When for your whole life, every single workout, you are programmed to push beyond belief, it's really hard to just turn that off and kind of just be a social competitor.

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