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73: From Addiction and Liver Transplant to a 300-Mile Ultramarathon with Kelly Thrush · The Everyday Awesome Project

• 0:27
  Polly Mertens: Welcome to the Everyday Awesome Project.
• 0:30
  Kelly Thrush: Perfect, thank you.
• 0:32
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 0:32
  Polly Mertens: So what we're going to talk about today, you and I, my friend well, first of all, we'll give a kind of a quick briefie is how do we even know each other?
• 0:40
  Polly Mertens: My side of the story might be different than yours, so let's have some fun.
• 0:45
  Polly Mertens: What's your side of the story?
• 0:54
  Kelly Thrush: I'll go through mine first, right, right.
• 0:55
  Kelly Thrush: So it was oh shoot, 2022.
• 0:56
  Kelly Thrush: And I got invited to Charlie's Angles event movement for recovery out in Maryland.
• 0:58
  Kelly Thrush: Where we did it was a fundraiser for an addiction recovery facility out there in Harvard, to Grace, maryland, and I got invited and I had zero idea what I was getting into, but we were going to run or move for 30 hours around this campus as part of the fundraiser project, right?
• 1:18
  Polly Mertens: What's the longest you'd moved before that?
• 1:21
  Kelly Thrush: 50 miles 50 miles at one event at that particular moment, and that was like a month before or whatever.
• 1:27
  Kelly Thrush: And so I went to this crazy event and I had all these ideas.
• 1:33
  Kelly Thrush: I didn't know what the event was, but maybe I could get a hundred miles out of that.
• 1:36
  Kelly Thrush: You know, thinking that was kind of the.
• 1:37
  Kelly Thrush: And it didn't take long to figure out that was not the purpose of that event.
• 1:42
  Kelly Thrush: It was not to go do a 100 miles, it was more about the camaraderie and sobriety and celebrating all the different things that we do there.
• 1:49
  Kelly Thrush: And then you were the race director, so to speak, at that event.
• 1:54
  Kelly Thrush: And that's how we came across, because my first I mean we had met a few times during the first day, but I really remember meeting you in the middle of the night I don't remember what time of night, but it was well into darkness.
• 2:09
  Kelly Thrush: And well, yeah, I'll be frank, I hadn't peed all day because it was like 100 degrees with 100 percent humidity, and I'm a desert rat, oh yeah, and I was not used to it, and I started getting worried about this.
• 2:22
  Kelly Thrush: And so I came by you and ran through some of my symptoms and you're like now you'll be fine Once you cool down in the in the nighttime and you cool down and get something to eat, you'll be okay.
• 2:30
  Kelly Thrush: And sure enough, I was, you know.
• 2:32
  Polly Mertens: You force fed me some peanut butter and jellies or whatever it was that we had there, and it was magic and we did meet in a pain cave, you know, like the fact that you were deep in it up to your ass, and alligators.
• 2:49
  Polly Mertens: So frickin beautiful to be in those moments with any person you know.
• 2:52
  Polly Mertens: You and I thrive off of that.
• 2:53
  Polly Mertens: That's just who we are.
• 2:54
  Polly Mertens: But that was so cool to see you in that experience and watch you literally in front of my own eyeballs evolving as an ultra runner, but not just as an ultra runner, like doing the thing, but as a human being, sure, right, and then understanding a little bit about your story of sobriety and your story of organ transplant and so on and so forth.
• 3:15
  Polly Mertens: So I was like I gotta, I gotta stay connected to this dude.
• 3:18
  Polly Mertens: He's going to do epic shit in the world and I want to be there to see it go down.
• 3:23
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, and you have.
• 3:24
  Kelly Thrush: I mean, I know we don't live in the same space and we don't necessarily talk every week, but you have been a part of each one of those milestone moments, specifically in my ultra running journey, where we chat and celebrate and I'll bounce things off that big brain of yours and get some ideas and you show up sometimes at my stupidity.
• 3:45
  Polly Mertens: I do Like we were just talking about the across the years, a hundred miler.
• 3:48
  Polly Mertens: You're just like, hey, what's up?
• 3:49
  Polly Mertens: I'm like this sucks, Make it stop.
• 3:52
  Polly Mertens: And you're like, yeah, keep running.
• 3:53
  Polly Mertens: Next.
• 3:55
  Kelly Thrush: It's supposed to suck.
• 3:56
  Kelly Thrush: That's why we're here.
• 3:58
  Polly Mertens: Okay, a hundred percent Okay.
• 4:03
  Polly Mertens: So for the audience, let's kind of impact your story a little bit so they can get to know you and what a beautiful human you are.
• 4:07
  Polly Mertens: So before running and before all the insanity and we're going to talk about your latest shenanigans, the 300 miles on the Arizona trail before all of that, you're just a normal dude cruising in life, right Like, just trying to make things happen, like any normal human would be in the world.
• 4:24
  Polly Mertens: Perhaps there was an issue with addiction or when?
• 4:28
  Kelly Thrush: oh, I don't know, I don't know, perhaps it was full-fledged, yeah, it was for sure.
• 4:32
  Kelly Thrush: I mean, you know, maybe in my 20s uh, before I recognized it as a problem, it was a perhaps, but it didn't evolve that way.
• 4:39
  Kelly Thrush: So, yeah, so, um, prior I mean to give the short version of this long story basically, what it was is you know, I, out of college, I played competitive sports and whatnot.
• 4:50
  Kelly Thrush: You know, as a kid I played competitive baseball and and then quickly discovered, when I was in college playing ball, that I was really good at a couple of things.
• 5:00
  Kelly Thrush: One was people.
• 5:02
  Kelly Thrush: I was very good at interacting with people, and then I was very good at drinking beer.
• 5:06
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, I was pretty talented, and so, of course, I picked a career running bars Because it's people.
• 5:16
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, it's people and booze 24 seven, you know and sports.
• 5:20
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, for that matter.
• 5:20
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, absolutely.
• 5:21
  Kelly Thrush: It was an upscale sports bar that I was part of that for 10 years.
• 5:24
  Kelly Thrush: I was part of that company or something thereabouts and yeah, and I was good.
• 5:28
  Kelly Thrush: I was good at that stuff and so, as my professional career sort of advanced, my drinking career did as well level and all-star at this level.
• 5:47
  Kelly Thrush: So let's take it up another notch until finally it got to be an issue.
• 5:48
  Kelly Thrush: In fact, actually, I heard Dennis Quaid, the actor, who's also sober.
• 5:50
  Kelly Thrush: I saw him on an interview or a little clip and he described his journey perfectly with mine and it was the three stages of addiction.
• 6:00
  Kelly Thrush: And he says the first stage of addiction is it's fun, because it was, you know, the first few years or whatever was super fun.
• 6:07
  Kelly Thrush: Then the second stage, it's fun with problems.
• 6:10
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, yeah, that was that was mine.
• 6:12
  Kelly Thrush: And then the third stage was this is a problem, and so that was kind of the three stages.
• 6:18
  Kelly Thrush: And so finally, in my late 30s, after, you know, trying to quit, knowing to have a problem, maybe it's not as bad of a problem all the denials kind of go through.
• 6:28
  Kelly Thrush: Finally, in January of 2018, I got very, very sick.
• 6:35
  Kelly Thrush: Unbeknownst to me, my liver was failing as a result of my booze and drinking over the years, because it had really accelerated that last year of my booze and drinking over the years, because it had really accelerated that last year.
• 6:46
  Kelly Thrush: You know, alcohol had dissolved my first marriage the year before, and so in 2017, I really spent the wrong end of that year in the wrong end of the bottle.
• 6:55
  Kelly Thrush: And so, yeah, finally, on January 8th was really when I started to notice that year where I didn't feel good, and for friends of mine that I tell this part of the story to you know, I only drank two drinks that day, two shots, and that was it that day, which should tell you how bad I felt.
• 7:13
  Kelly Thrush: And then I felt worse on Monday and didn't drink at all.
• 7:15
  Kelly Thrush: And then I felt worse on Tuesday and didn't drink at all until finally, wednesday, at the request or demand of my boss, I ended up going to the hospital, which is where they told me I was an end stage liver failure, and I had no idea, yeah, or if I knew you're what age, where I was 38 at that point 38, and they're telling you you're an end stage liver disease correct End stage liver failure from as a result of my drinking, wow.
• 7:44
  Kelly Thrush: So the way that the story kind of went down is Jamie, who is now my wife, was then my girlfriend.
• 7:51
  Kelly Thrush: We toured the hospitals around Tucson.
• 7:54
  Kelly Thrush: There were four different ones that we went to for a certain period of time.
• 7:58
  Kelly Thrush: The first one I went to.
• 7:58
  Kelly Thrush: I was there for a couple of weeks and the doctor said nothing we can do for you.
• 8:02
  Kelly Thrush: Maybe let's try this hospital, see if they can help.
• 8:04
  Kelly Thrush: Which the next one?
• 8:06
  Kelly Thrush: They worked on me for a couple of weeks.
• 8:07
  Kelly Thrush: There's nothing we can do for you.
• 8:09
  Kelly Thrush: We really don't think there's anything anyone can do for you.
• 8:11
  Kelly Thrush: But go see this liver doctor here in town who was the hepatologist which is liver doc of all hepatologists here in Tucson, and he had two appointments with me.
• 8:22
  Kelly Thrush: The first appointment was simply to get my blood work and then the second appointment lasted about 15 minutes because he told me you got maybe a month, month and a half, to live and there's nothing I can do.
• 8:32
  Kelly Thrush: You need to get your affairs in order.
• 8:33
  Kelly Thrush: And thank goodness Jamie and I had met and worked together at that point because she was my advocate and basically rolled me out of that hospital or that doctor's office and told them that's not good enough.
• 8:48
  Kelly Thrush: And so the next day, after having a very, very poor health day, I couldn't get out of bed.
• 8:54
  Kelly Thrush: My family was there, kind of having a no shit moment, like what are we going to do?
• 9:00
  Kelly Thrush: They got me to the university hospital down here, which is where I spent the next three months, yeah, and got me there the next day after the doctor's office.
• 9:11
  Kelly Thrush: But, and even when I got there, that team said sorry, you know, they can't help me.
• 9:15
  Kelly Thrush: That liver team there and the transplant team told me no originally, because, well, there's a couple of hurdles that I had to overcome.
• 9:24
  Kelly Thrush: So there's the original hurdle that transplant recipients have to go through All of us do and is you have to be the right amount of sick, right Cause if you are too sick, uh, well then you're not going to survive the surgery anywhere.
• 9:40
  Kelly Thrush: At least odds are that you're not going to.
• 9:42
  Kelly Thrush: So we don't want.
• 9:43
  Kelly Thrush: We have to get healthier before we're willing to risk this beautiful organ that is going to save somebody's life.
• 9:50
  Kelly Thrush: And the other flip side of that coin is if you're not sick enough, well then you can wait, because somebody else is and needs that, that new organ and I tended to fall on the I'm too sick side of that score.
• 10:04
  Kelly Thrush: It's called a meld score for for liver patients.
• 10:06
  Kelly Thrush: The big hurdle that I had to come over or overcome, excuse me, was I wasn't sober, you know, and the docs looked at me like we are not giving you this liver in somebody who's going to go out and drink tomorrow correct.
• 10:21
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, that's a losing, yeah, and I don't blame for that, I mean I get it, you know.
• 10:25
  Kelly Thrush: And then things have changed a little bit in the seven years, but back then it was you had to be sober for a year, would have had to gone to, yeah, sober for a year, having gone through whether it's AA or smart recovery, some program of that, that genre, as well as therapy and all these different checkboxes that you have to hit before they'll even consider you for the transplant list.
• 10:48
  Kelly Thrush: I didn't have that kind of time I had.
• 10:51
  Kelly Thrush: You know, the doc that told me I had a month or month and a half was pretty spot on, and so what ended up happening was there were two docs at that hospital that were my internal.
• 11:02
  Kelly Thrush: They were hospitalists, or are hospitalists, my internal medicine doctors, who happened to be on shift the day I came to the hospital and I happened to become their patient and they saw something in me.
• 11:18
  Kelly Thrush: I don't know what it.
• 11:19
  Kelly Thrush: I don't know that they could really put their finger on it.
• 11:23
  Kelly Thrush: They stuck their reputations on the line and convinced the transplant team that I was worth the risk.
• 11:30
  Polly Mertens: She missed us.
• 11:31
  Kelly Thrush: Who are these?
• 11:32
  Polly Mertens: angels.
• 11:33
  Kelly Thrush: They're two docs.
• 11:34
  Kelly Thrush: I've talked to them since you have.
• 11:35
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, I've talked to them since a couple of times.
• 11:39
  Polly Mertens: I mean you literally owe them your life and they're perfect strangers that walked into the room.
• 11:43
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, very much so.
• 11:45
  Polly Mertens: That could be anybody's story.
• 11:46
  Polly Mertens: So pay attention to who's walking in the damn room people.
• 11:50
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, okay, I do a lot of public speaking now and some of that public speaking is with medical professionals in the transplant world and that's a very powerful part that I talk about that because I get it.
• 12:02
  Kelly Thrush: They see so many patients and a lot of this is just on paper and if you look at my story on paper, I shouldn't have survived.
• 12:11
  Kelly Thrush: There's no way I should have gotten a transplant.
• 12:13
  Kelly Thrush: Zero, zero chance.
• 12:14
  Kelly Thrush: Um, but these two doctors happened to get to know me, uh, and decided that they would convince the transplant team and that was the beginning of March.
• 12:23
  Kelly Thrush: That was probably six weeks or eight weeks after I really started getting sick.
• 12:28
  Kelly Thrush: And then things moved very quickly for two reasons.
• 12:30
  Kelly Thrush: One, I got moved Once the transplant team said yes.
• 12:34
  Kelly Thrush: Then I was put on the transplant list and I was moved to the top because I didn't have the time and they were able to recover an organ for me within about 10 days or two weeks that matched right.
• 12:48
  Kelly Thrush: That did fit me as a person physically, because you got to find the right sizes right, because if they have, you know, a liver that was from somebody who was, you know, five foot tall and 100 pounds, anatomically it's not going to fit.
• 13:00
  Kelly Thrush: And then it had to match all the other markers, and there's a whole series of them that they have, and so, luckily, uh, they were, they were able to find or uh recover one for me, uh, and that was on the 20, well, really on the 22nd of March, uh, that year.
• 13:16
  Kelly Thrush: So this is what two and a half months later, uh, something along those lines.
• 13:21
  Polly Mertens: Unbelievable dude yeah pretty crazy.
• 13:23
  Polly Mertens: It is crazy.
• 13:24
  Polly Mertens: It is crazy and you could have actually also.
• 13:27
  Polly Mertens: I mean, I know we attribute a lot now to your wife, but like you also could have given up on yourself.
• 13:32
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah and say fuck it, I'm out you know, and it's interesting, I've had this conversation with me when I'm out there in the trails and looking back at those weeks while I was in the hospital.
• 13:44
  Kelly Thrush: I didn't ever have a moment of that, of saying you know what, this isn't worth it.
• 13:55
  Polly Mertens: This is stupid.
• 13:55
  Polly Mertens: I'm out of here Like cause I could have very easily um, or I choose the alcohol.
• 13:58
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, yeah I choose the alcohol, yeah, and just discharge myself.
• 14:00
  Kelly Thrush: And now I went.
• 14:01
  Kelly Thrush: I didn't have any of those moments.
• 14:09
  Kelly Thrush: Um, I had a moment where well, that's not true.
• 14:10
  Kelly Thrush: I had one moment where I really thought I was going to die, you know.
• 14:11
  Kelly Thrush: But I never had that in the back and I don't know, maybe it was denial, or maybe a big chunk of it was denial, maybe it's just kind of my personality of you know, there's always a positive side of things, maybe a combination thereof, I don't know.
• 14:24
  Kelly Thrush: But I never really had those deep, deep dark moments in while I was in the hospital.
• 14:28
  Kelly Thrush: Even when I'm filling out, you know my living will and what I want people to do when I die and how I want to prepare a funeral service or any of those things which we did.
• 14:39
  Kelly Thrush: We went through all that paperwork and it was, it was a formality, went through all that paperwork and it was, it was a formality.
• 14:59
  Kelly Thrush: But, you know, even Jamie tells a story of when the night I got I had surgery was not good.
• 15:01
  Kelly Thrush: I was in the ICU, my body had crashed, I was the term is bleeding out.
• 15:03
  Kelly Thrush: At that point I was bleeding from anywhere that you can bleed from, to the tune of for anybody who's in the medical professional or profession, I had 27 units of blood transfused prior to surgery while I was in the ICU, and a unit of blood is about 250 milliliters.
• 15:21
  Kelly Thrush: So what's that?
• 15:23
  Kelly Thrush: Seven liters of blood transfused, uh, while I was in there, and so, and I was in and out of consciousness, um, jamie was actually by my side in the icu holding my blood bucket, for lack of a better term.
• 15:38
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, and when they finally, um, got, you know, have the liver flown by private jet back to tuc, to Tucson and are wheeling me down to the operating room.
• 15:48
  Kelly Thrush: I think what sums up my personality is, you know, she's, she's a mess, she's crying and I'm being sort of whisked away, if you think you know Grey's Anatomy style down this hallway with all the doctors to the, to the OR.
• 16:00
  Kelly Thrush: I'm holding her hand as they're about to say goodbye because I'm going through the double doors into surgery.
• 16:06
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, I kind of went.
• 16:07
  Kelly Thrush: I have the ventilator and that one hooked up to everything, I can't talk and I just winked at her like yeah, we got this, it's fine, I'll see you in a few, you know, kind of deal, um, and sure enough, you know, 14 or 16 hours later, whatever the surgery was, you know, I, she was in my hospital room.
• 16:24
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, waiting for me.
• 16:26
  Polly Mertens: Pretty crazy.
• 16:27
  Polly Mertens: Somehow you found this inner peace to just go through the process and trust.
• 16:33
  Kelly Thrush: Mm.
• 16:33
  Kelly Thrush: Hmm, yeah, and that was.
• 16:34
  Kelly Thrush: There was a moment for that.
• 16:37
  Polly Mertens: There was a few moments.
• 16:39
  Kelly Thrush: Well.
• 16:39
  Kelly Thrush: So when I first got into the hospital, I was super ashamed of why I was there, Right.
• 16:46
  Polly Mertens: Obviously, this is all my own doing.
• 16:47
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, and the shame and the guilt were just crippling Right.
• 16:51
  Kelly Thrush: You know, I I didn't even let Jamie tell anybody.
• 16:54
  Kelly Thrush: I was in the hospital for the first 10 days.
• 16:57
  Kelly Thrush: Um yeah, not my parents, not my siblings, not the only people that knew were the my work, because obviously I wasn't at work, but they were the only ones that knew.
• 17:12
  Kelly Thrush: And so because I was convinced the doctors were going to give me a pill, pat me on the butt and send me on my way and then I can continue drinking and life goes back to normal.
• 17:16
  Kelly Thrush: No, but nobody's none the wiser.
• 17:18
  Polly Mertens: Right, that's an addictive mindset.
• 17:19
  Polly Mertens: You convince yourself of all these things.
• 17:21
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, you're living such a story that you've crafted and created in your own head yeah and that's.
• 17:28
  Polly Mertens: It just continues that way.
• 17:29
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, and I'm you know, lying to anybody and everybody, including jamie at that point, uh, and hiding all this stuff and you don't want the the curtain to be drawn so that everybody can see behind it, right, uh?
• 17:41
  Kelly Thrush: And so there was a moment, probably two weeks, maybe two and a half weeks into the hospital, where I realized I'm not getting out of here anytime soon.
• 17:49
  Kelly Thrush: I have to just let go of whatever fantasy I had of getting life back to normal, like I need to let go of that notion and then now just do what the doctors tell you.
• 18:03
  Kelly Thrush: You know, and you're going to be here, you're going to be hooked up to all the machines and the IVs and this is, this is now your life, until they let you go.
• 18:11
  Kelly Thrush: Um, not knowing that at that point, not knowing transplant was the the end result, um, and there was, there was a very conscious moment, uh, of that of just having to surrender ironically enough, even though I didn't understand what that word meant at the time but just surrender to the circumstances and be like I can't control this narrative anymore.
• 18:29
  Kelly Thrush: You know it.
• 18:30
  Kelly Thrush: This, this is the truth of it.
• 18:32
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 18:33
  Kelly Thrush: Accept it and just ride this wave until to wherever it goes, to wherever it leads, you know the suffering basically took over yeah.
• 18:42
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, very much so.
• 18:42
  Kelly Thrush: And the suffering really is the part.
• 18:43
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, yeah, very much so, and the suffering really is the part where we're all in denial, each of us does this all the time?
• 18:48
  Polly Mertens: Daily or whatever, for however many years around.
• 18:51
  Polly Mertens: Lots of things you know having control and having all these things that we deem to be happening in our lives, to us or whatever.
• 18:58
  Polly Mertens: The story is, that we're saying and it takes a long time or something really hard and challenging.
• 19:05
  Polly Mertens: Before that will be released.
• 19:07
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, for me is stubborn and bullheaded as I am, it took it took touching my own mortality to get me to realize that you know you're not alone.
• 19:17
  Polly Mertens: No, no, no, no, I'm not millions of people right Like in that in a way it's alarming, but then at the same time it's not, because this is the human experience we're having.
• 19:27
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, and I think, yeah, correct, there are millions and millions of people who suffer from some sort of an addiction.
• 19:33
  Kelly Thrush: In fact, I have my own thoughts about addiction, that human first off.
• 19:38
  Kelly Thrush: We are wired that way.
• 19:39
  Kelly Thrush: You know I talk about it often that addiction is not a bad word, because every person ever is slightly addicted to something.
• 19:47
  Kelly Thrush: I mean it's on a spectrum.
• 19:48
  Kelly Thrush: You know, there are zero people in the history of people that have been not addicted to anything ever.
• 19:54
  Kelly Thrush: And, on the flip side, there's zero people in the history of people that have been addicted to everything, 100 percent, like all the things.
• 20:01
  Kelly Thrush: It just doesn't work that way.
• 20:03
  Kelly Thrush: Everybody is somewhere in the middle, uh, and so I want to talk about addiction, and mine specifically, because it's okay, it's just the way I'm, we're all wired this way, right?
• 20:13
  Polly Mertens: exactly and put on top of how we're wired, you know, evolution of mankind like it's a real thing, how we evolved, and the science behind all of that kind of stuff, and then looking at society and how we currently have crafted this existence that we're all sharing now is ludicrous.
• 20:30
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah.
• 20:31
  Polly Mertens: Right, because we've taken this primate sort of, you know, way of survival, kind of way that we operate our bodies and our minds in sync with each other.
• 20:42
  Polly Mertens: And then now we've decided to make it even more challenging, as if it wasn't hard enough.
• 20:48
  Kelly Thrush: Right.
• 20:48
  Polly Mertens: We should definitely create an environment where it will become more and more of an opportunity for people to be addicted to new things, more things, because the relentless onslaught of applying that pressure Right.
• 21:01
  Polly Mertens: So when it was back in the day, I mean, I'm older than you, but when people could get addicted to things it would be drugs, alcohol, okay, maybe sex or porn or gambling right.
• 21:13
  Polly Mertens: It was kind of a gamut right, and now there's 100 more things that people could get addicted to, because now 100 more things have come into their opportunity, into their vision, into their eyeballs and ears, every day into their hands.
• 21:27
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, your cell phones, that's.
• 21:28
  Kelly Thrush: My favorite example is the cell phones.
• 21:29
  Kelly Thrush: I mean, they're designed to keep our attention.
• 21:33
  Polly Mertens: It's nuts.
• 21:33
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah.
• 21:34
  Polly Mertens: And it's really unfortunate that this has happened to our society.
• 21:38
  Polly Mertens: But we need to talk about it, we need to do something about it, we need to be honest about it, and I think that's the hard part.
• 21:43
  Polly Mertens: Well, that's the hard part is being honest about it.
• 21:44
  Polly Mertens: We need to do something about it, we need to be honest about it.
• 21:45
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, and I think that's the hard part Well, that's the hard part is being honest about it, because you know for me like I'm victim of that cell phone as much as anybody else Like you.
• 21:53
  Kelly Thrush: Just you know, take your social media app, just remove the button.
• 21:57
  Kelly Thrush: You don't have to remove it from your phone, just move the button off your home screen and then count how many times a day you reach for your phone and go to go to click it.
• 22:04
  Kelly Thrush: It's not there.
• 22:05
  Kelly Thrush: You know, and I'll.
• 22:06
  Kelly Thrush: It's double digits at minimum, maybe even triple for a lot of people.
• 22:10
  Kelly Thrush: Um, but you don't want to admit that part because, oh no, I'm not addicted to my phone.
• 22:15
  Kelly Thrush: I can put it down anytime I want maybe.
• 22:18
  Polly Mertens: Well, what's at the root of looking for those things?
• 22:20
  Polly Mertens: One of the root causes could be that, well, i't be comfortable with ourselves.
• 22:26
  Polly Mertens: So what's your root cause?
• 22:27
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, correct, I think it's.
• 22:28
  Kelly Thrush: You know you take out the quote, unquote, boredom out of your life and you can't sit still or sit with yourself for 30 seconds.
• 22:35
  Kelly Thrush: You know, I heard a standup comedian talked about I don't remember his name.
• 22:39
  Kelly Thrush: Talked about this very thing.
• 22:41
  Kelly Thrush: He goes when's the last time you stood in a line?
• 22:44
  Polly Mertens: A line at the grocery store.
• 22:46
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, and just stood there Exactly he goes.
• 22:48
  Kelly Thrush: In 1983, when I was a kid, you know.
• 22:51
  Kelly Thrush: We just stood in a line.
• 22:52
  Kelly Thrush: We stood in a line he goes.
• 22:54
  Kelly Thrush: I had no idea, I was being mindful.
• 22:55
  Polly Mertens: And we sat in a line.
• 22:56
  Polly Mertens: We sat in a chair and waited.
• 22:57
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, maybe you had a someone.
• 23:06
  Polly Mertens: Oh, we might have talked to another human.
• 23:07
  Polly Mertens: How insane is that, or even in line or whatever.
• 23:08
  Polly Mertens: Even in a car yeah, driving with someone else right, he was in a restaurant.
• 23:11
  Polly Mertens: We can't just sit in a restaurant and be like, hey, what's up, homie, we're having breaking bread.
• 23:15
  Polly Mertens: Let's make eye contact.
• 23:16
  Polly Mertens: Last time I checked we might know each other.
• 23:19
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, we're together for a reason, and you still see this, that they're totally looking at the thing.
• 23:26
  Kelly Thrush: What has what?
• 23:27
  Kelly Thrush: What have we done?
• 23:27
  Kelly Thrush: And now I mean, and Jamie and I are the same way, we have to schedule, you know, no phone days or no phone dinners, and like it just turn it off and put it away and like, don't, it's not even the same room, you know, off it goes.
• 23:39
  Polly Mertens: You know I have a question for you.
• 23:40
  Polly Mertens: So how long have you been sober?
• 23:42
  Kelly Thrush: Seven years just over.
• 23:43
  Polly Mertens: Okay, so seven years sober on the daily how much of a battle is this for you?
• 23:52
  Kelly Thrush: Not as much as it used to be.
• 23:53
  Kelly Thrush: The farther it gets away, yeah, the farther it gets away, and it never really was a big battle, because I spent my hard months in the hospital.
• 24:04
  Polly Mertens: That's true, detoxing and getting back to support.
• 24:05
  Polly Mertens: Oh yeah, the first.
• 24:05
  Polly Mertens: I spent my hard months in the hospital.
• 24:05
  Polly Mertens: That's true, detoxing and getting correct.
• 24:06
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, oh yeah the first 10 days when I was in the hospital, I was detoxing, I was hallucinating and you know, I mean there were people that came to visit and I don't remember coming to visit me, um.
• 24:13
  Kelly Thrush: So I had a a blessing in that regard.
• 24:16
  Kelly Thrush: Where the hard, the hard part of getting sober one, I didn't have a choice.
• 24:21
  Kelly Thrush: I was in the hospital like there was no way to sneak in a bottle of liquor for me.
• 24:26
  Kelly Thrush: It's frowned upon, uh, when you do that.
• 24:28
  Kelly Thrush: Uh.
• 24:29
  Kelly Thrush: And then the the hard part then was that first summer, um, because I was not in a good place mentally or spiritually, emotionally, that first summer, and it was multifaceted.
• 24:40
  Kelly Thrush: The big thing where I wasn't in a good place is, you know, now I'm new to this sober world.
• 24:46
  Kelly Thrush: Right, I have this brand new gift that I have been given that, in my mind, I completely did not deserve in any way, shape or form.
• 24:56
  Kelly Thrush: This should have gone to somebody else that deserved it more than me.
• 24:59
  Polly Mertens: That is a better person than me, and absolutely yeah, oh yeah, for sure, survivors guilt for lack is a better person than me.
• 25:03
  Kelly Thrush: Absolutely.
• 25:03
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, oh yeah for sure.
• 25:04
  Kelly Thrush: Survivors guilt for lack of a better term, um, because someone passed away that day and I did not, right, um, and I have no tools on how to cope with any of that, like I didn't have any, any of the tools that I use today, uh, when emotions are hard, I had none of those, and so that, first, call it, four months that summer after, after transplant, they were tough.
• 25:30
  Kelly Thrush: There were some dark, dark moments in there because I, you know, I was beating myself up, I was guilty, I was ashamed.
• 25:36
  Kelly Thrush: I didn't talk about my story, like if family or friends asked me no, no, we're good, I wouldn't talk about it at all.
• 25:42
  Kelly Thrush: I, I hated the word sober, I was embarrassed about it because sober people meant that they were alcoholics, you know kind of deal, and there's a stigma to that and I had no way of dealing with any of that.
• 25:54
  Kelly Thrush: I didn't understand these emotions.
• 25:55
  Kelly Thrush: I didn't understand why I was feeling the way I was feeling.
• 26:00
  Kelly Thrush: And then I wouldn't accept the way I was feeling, right, I wasn't allowing myself way.
• 26:03
  Kelly Thrush: I was feeling, right, I wasn't allowing myself.
• 26:05
  Kelly Thrush: It was trying to use all the old tools that I had, which was compartmentalized, put in a box, shove it away, and we're going to pound this bottle of whatever liquor that I'm throwing back, and then I don't have to worry about it because I'm hammered, you know, and all that had disappeared in a blink of an eye.
• 26:22
  Polly Mertens: Well, you were still the same person.
• 26:23
  Polly Mertens: So just because you had a surgery and got another organ and were forced into detox and were forced into a sobriety moment and experience, you're still the same person.
• 26:35
  Polly Mertens: Even people that walk into you know AA or whatever treatment centers are walking in today or whatever their battle is, they're the same person.
• 26:44
  Polly Mertens: You don't magically become someone else.
• 26:46
  Polly Mertens: You know it takes time to be honest about how that shit occurred.
• 26:51
  Polly Mertens: Like what is the reason, or multiple reasons Could be a lifetime of shit, by the way, that that even became the circumstances that I became addicted and lost control of my own life and self-worth, and then all of the actions that happened.
• 27:06
  Polly Mertens: We've got to unpack all that shit and then we have to heal it all and build actual tools.
• 27:12
  Polly Mertens: I'm like, how am I going to do this differently?
• 27:13
  Polly Mertens: How can I fully evolve?
• 27:17
  Kelly Thrush: So it's taken you seven years or it took you I think it probably took me two to three to really become at peace with it.
• 27:24
  Kelly Thrush: And what's what's ironic is during that journey of learning to love myself Right and to love and to love this part of me him it's one of my favorite speeches that he gives is that the addict part of me?
• 27:43
  Kelly Thrush: You know, I was so ashamed of that man.
• 27:52
  Polly Mertens: It's one of the best skill sets I got.
• 27:53
  Polly Mertens: You know it really, truly is.
• 27:53
  Kelly Thrush: Capitalize on those skills Absolutely.
• 27:54
  Kelly Thrush: Now you got to be careful.
• 27:55
  Kelly Thrush: You got to wield it for good, because you can.
• 27:57
  Kelly Thrush: I can absolutely turn back into the villain of my own story, yeah, but no, that tenacity that addicts have is fantastic.
• 28:07
  Kelly Thrush: You just got to point it in the right direction, right?
• 28:09
  Kelly Thrush: And it took a good two to three years for me to really truly understand that.
• 28:15
  Kelly Thrush: And how I found, or discovered that realization that this is a good thing and you're still a wonderful human being, because of everything that you went through, was when I started to share my story and talk about it with people, because I didn't for a long time.
• 28:36
  Kelly Thrush: And then what I realized was I started sharing some of the things that I went through, or some of my hard parts, and, man, it makes you bond with that person in front of you.
• 28:46
  Kelly Thrush: It was me.
• 28:48
  Kelly Thrush: Being vulnerable in front of them, whoever they are, creates that trust.
• 28:53
  Kelly Thrush: And now, all of a sudden, they're sharing with me and we can both become better because we're talking to each other.
• 28:59
  Kelly Thrush: And then you hear their story and you see a little bit of you know, I'd see a little bit of me in their story and vice versa and realize, man, this person, she's great, but you know she's a wonderful person.
• 29:09
  Kelly Thrush: Wait a minute.
• 29:11
  Kelly Thrush: Her story is a lot like mine, or his story is a lot like mine, and everybody gets better because of that.
• 29:15
  Kelly Thrush: And so the more and more that I share, the more I realize that, you know, there are things that I maybe, I guess, wish didn't happen, but wish is the wrong word Cause it.
• 29:26
  Kelly Thrush: It put me here talking to you today like this, you know.
• 29:30
  Polly Mertens: Exactly yeah, a hundred percent, I never would have if I hadn't gone through those struggles.
• 29:35
  Polly Mertens: Yeah.
• 29:35
  Polly Mertens: You know, and that's true for anybody who gets out the other side and can see straight you know meaning like what is the reality of who I really am and my worthiness in the world and why I'm here Right, and find that love and compassion for their self and then, ultimately, after themselves, the other people and the world that they're living in Right.
• 29:57
  Kelly Thrush: Right.
• 29:57
  Polly Mertens: It's like discovering that piece.
• 29:58
  Polly Mertens: Oh, my God, what an incredible gift that you gave to yourself.
• 30:03
  Kelly Thrush: but then, now that you're giving back to the world, yeah, well, and you know it, just being here and being alive is a gift Totally, and it comes with beautiful moments and it comes with not so beautiful moments, but both of them are gifts, you know.
• 30:21
  Kelly Thrush: I mean they both are.
• 30:22
  Kelly Thrush: You know, it's the.
• 30:23
  Kelly Thrush: We were talking about Buddhism, earlierhism earlier.
• 30:25
  Kelly Thrush: You can't have, you know, light without dark or sunshine without rain.
• 30:28
  Kelly Thrush: I mean they're, they're intermingled exactly.
• 30:31
  Kelly Thrush: If it was just bright outside all the time, you wouldn't appreciate it, because it's no, we don't walk this every day we don't walk around with dark sunglasses on.
• 30:39
  Polly Mertens: We wouldn't even look at the sun.
• 30:40
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, yeah, exactly it's always there, so we're gonna wear our dark sunglasses and turn the other way.
• 30:47
  Kelly Thrush: Yep, yeah so so here you are now seven years later yeah, pretty cool.
• 30:53
  Kelly Thrush: Who to thunk it?
• 30:55
  Polly Mertens: who to thunk it?
• 30:56
  Polly Mertens: Your health is stable.
• 30:57
  Polly Mertens: How are you feeling?
• 30:58
  Kelly Thrush: everything's great.
• 30:59
  Kelly Thrush: No, I feel great.
• 31:00
  Kelly Thrush: I.
• 31:00
  Kelly Thrush: I am healthier now than I probably ever was, you know.
• 31:03
  Kelly Thrush: I mean, you know, call it six years, seven years, before my transplant, I mean I was 300 pounds running, running bars, you know, between beer and cheesesteaks that I had every day, you know, or fried foods, I mean I was, I was a big dude there for a while.
• 31:18
  Kelly Thrush: No, I'm healthier now and, and knowing how lucky I am for that, because there's lots of transplant patients that it doesn't go as well as it did for me, you know I'm on the minimum amount of immunosuppressants that I can possibly be on.
• 31:32
  Kelly Thrush: Right, I am taking the bare minimum amount, which is great, and all my markers look great, you know, and all those things you have to go to the doctor often.
• 31:39
  Kelly Thrush: I know them all by first names.
• 31:40
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, I'm healthier now than I ever have been.
• 31:45
  Polly Mertens: You formed an organization called Gratitude and Grace, the Gratitude and Grace Foundation, which does what Sure.
• 31:52
  Kelly Thrush: So we help support financially, communally, emotionally help support transplant patients and their families, helps support transplant patients and their families, as well as folks in substance abuse recovery as well, and that's been fantastic and really how it all came to be was so overwhelmed with gratitude that I had actually made it to the other side.
• 32:16
  Kelly Thrush: You know, when I woke up from that surgery and I knew I had to give back Now, I had zero idea what that was going to look like.
• 32:24
  Kelly Thrush: In fact, actually, what that was going to look like no-transcript was taking pictures of all these gadgets and things that are sticking out, I mean the tubes and the machines and what the doctors are doing, and putting together a binder for future transplant patients so they could have a little bit of expectation for what's coming, because the doctors can't always explain every single thing that they're doing.
• 32:47
  Kelly Thrush: One, they don't have time.
• 32:48
  Kelly Thrush: Two, I'm not really sure I understood.
• 32:49
  Kelly Thrush: So I wanted to maybe put together a little binder or book so that, from you know, from a patient perspective of what's going on.
• 32:57
  Kelly Thrush: That's cool, um, well, I didn't realize that already exists.
• 32:59
  Kelly Thrush: I didn't realize that at the time.
• 33:00
  Kelly Thrush: Um, but, but that was the first thought that we had, and so as I got healthier and more, uh, emotionally stable, um, and started sharing my story.
• 33:12
  Kelly Thrush: How gratitude and grace came to be was.
• 33:14
  Kelly Thrush: Now Jamie started sharing her story because she has just a traumatic journey, as I did, being on the opposite side of that OR, and she wouldn't talk about her stuff either.
• 33:26
  Kelly Thrush: And so, as we're starting to share, she was telling me things that I had no idea, I was clueless to it, that she was protecting me from because I was in the hospital.
• 33:34
  Kelly Thrush: You know the days or nights that she would come to the hospital and never come to my room and see me, because she was out running down doctors and asking why aren't we doing this and why aren't we doing that and how come he's not on the transplant list yet?
• 33:45
  Kelly Thrush: And advocating for me while we were there, and so some of the things, especially financially, she shielded me from until probably two years later when we talked about it.
• 33:56
  Kelly Thrush: So, for example, after transplant, when I was discharged, I would spend Monday through Friday at my grandmother's house and my mom was there at the time, and so they would take care of me during Monday through Friday.
• 34:10
  Kelly Thrush: Because part of the the agreement, uh, I think for every transplant patient, but but most and especially for me, was you have to sign up and agree that you're going to have 24-hour care for the next two months or whatever it is, after your transplant, before when they discharge you.
• 34:26
  Kelly Thrush: Okay, and if you can't have that organized and set and there's a plan in place, they just won't do the surgery right, like no, not until you get this, it's a plan in place.
• 34:33
  Kelly Thrush: They just won't do the surgery right Like no, not until you get this.
• 34:34
  Kelly Thrush: It's a requirement.
• 34:35
  Kelly Thrush: So Monday through Friday I lived at grandma's with my mom and they were always there.
• 34:39
  Kelly Thrush: Specifically, my mom was always there to help take care of me, and then on the weekends I would come home with Jamie on Saturdays and Sundays.
• 34:46
  Kelly Thrush: Well, what I didn't know was because money was so tight, is Jamie would turn off the electric at the house Monday through Friday.
• 34:55
  Kelly Thrush: She would come to like my grandma's house when she turned off the water so that she could take a shower, or at least a hot shower maybe, and all of those things that she did just to save those pennies.
• 35:07
  Kelly Thrush: You know she would all sorts of different things.
• 35:12
  Kelly Thrush: You know I called it utility bill roulette.
• 35:14
  Kelly Thrush: Like which one did you pay this month Exactly?
• 35:17
  Polly Mertens: Okay.
• 35:17
  Kelly Thrush: We don't have to pay that next month and we'll pay the other one.
• 35:19
  Kelly Thrush: And we did that really I didn't know, but for like a year now we didn't have to turn off utilities and things like that once I got home permanently.
• 35:28
  Kelly Thrush: But we definitely struggled for quite some time because the fact that, well, I mean my income, disappeared overnight, yeah, totally it was gone.
• 35:36
  Polly Mertens: And these things cost a fortune.
• 35:38
  Polly Mertens: Even if you have insurance, it's a fortune.
• 35:42
  Kelly Thrush: Super expensive.
• 35:43
  Kelly Thrush: And then there's the 49 different pills that I was on when I got discharged.
• 35:47
  Kelly Thrush: So I mean there was all sorts of these costs and expenses.
• 35:49
  Kelly Thrush: So once we started sharing again part of that healing process, you start talking about your story.
• 35:55
  Kelly Thrush: The light bulb kind of went off and the seedling of gratitude and grace started to grow on.
• 36:02
  Kelly Thrush: This is how we're going to help people, and there are other organizations here.
• 36:05
  Kelly Thrush: There's one other in Arizona that I can think of that has similar stuff to what we do Not exactly but close.
• 36:11
  Kelly Thrush: But so we will help financially support transplant patients because you can't work.
• 36:18
  Kelly Thrush: You know you're not supposed to go to work for about a year after your surgery.
• 36:21
  Kelly Thrush: You're not supposed to drive for like six months after your surgery and really you can't, you don't, you're not up to it.
• 36:27
  Kelly Thrush: You're just simply trying to get healthy again.
• 36:29
  Kelly Thrush: That is your job.
• 36:30
  Polly Mertens: Right, that is a full time job.
• 36:32
  Kelly Thrush: Correct, eat the right things, exercise the right amount.
• 36:35
  Kelly Thrush: You know all get the proper amount of rest and maybe a little extra.
• 36:43
  Kelly Thrush: That's your job and so you can't go to work.
• 36:44
  Kelly Thrush: You know and help, support, and so now what we do is if there's a transplant patient or their family that is struggling financially, they can go on our website and the very, very top of the first page there's a request financial assistance financially.
• 36:54
  Kelly Thrush: They can go on our website and the very, very top of the first page is a request financial assistance button, uh, and they can click it and then we can help with, depending on what it is but the bills it could be rent to, the mortgage or the electric.
• 37:02
  Kelly Thrush: I mean we, we've been helping now and we're starting to pick up momentum.
• 37:05
  Kelly Thrush: You know we've been doing this now for about a year and a half.
• 37:07
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, over the last probably two or three months.
• 37:11
  Kelly Thrush: We I would say we average two requests a week that we've been doing yeah, yeah.
• 37:21
  Kelly Thrush: Well, word's gotten out to these transplant coordinators and their social workers about what we do and so we've been able to help.
• 37:25
  Kelly Thrush: We helped this.
• 37:26
  Kelly Thrush: One lady wrote us a wonderful email because her electric had gotten turned off and we were able to get it turned back on for her.
• 37:33
  Kelly Thrush: Um, uh, and the email, the letter she wrote us, was just, I mean, it put me in tears.
• 37:39
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, and she wasn't, and we did.
• 37:41
  Kelly Thrush: We were able to do some other things because of sponsors that we had, and I'll give a shout out to orgain, which is a plant-based protein.
• 37:47
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, either drinks or powders or whatever it might be.
• 37:50
  Kelly Thrush: Um, they had sent us, uh, for this purpose.
• 37:53
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, sent us a bunch of samples and different things, a big container and giveaways and all sorts.
• 37:57
  Kelly Thrush: Anyway, this particular lady, her, her transplant team was I don't know what the right word is, but they were getting on her cause she wasn't getting enough protein.
• 38:10
  Polly Mertens: Well, the problem is she can't.
• 38:11
  Kelly Thrush: She can't afford the proper diet.
• 38:13
  Polly Mertens: The proper diet's expensive.
• 38:15
  Kelly Thrush: She can't afford to keep the lights on.
• 38:16
  Kelly Thrush: So we sent her a month's worth of this orgain powder and didn't tell her we were doing it.
• 38:21
  Kelly Thrush: We just sent it to her and you could hear the emotion in her words as she said thank you.
• 38:25
  Kelly Thrush: I mean it's it really is.
• 38:26
  Kelly Thrush: It's been, it's been super, super powerful helping these folks.
• 38:31
  Polly Mertens: It's crazy because they sound like little things and they're everything.
• 38:35
  Polly Mertens: They're everything.
• 38:41
  Polly Mertens: You know when you're the person in it or you and your loved one are the ones in it.
• 38:43
  Polly Mertens: It's fucking.
• 38:43
  Polly Mertens: Everything dude Like.
• 38:44
  Polly Mertens: These.
• 38:44
  Polly Mertens: Small moves are the biggest moves and if people only understood the impact they could have by making a few small moves every week or every month, whatever their emotional or bandwidth is otherwise, resources like it's significantly life-changing for all the humans.
• 38:59
  Polly Mertens: How did you take this organization and pair it or maybe you didn't with ultra running, because you have continued to since we met?
• 39:08
  Polly Mertens: You know you went from the 50 mile.
• 39:10
  Polly Mertens: Now I'm going to do this 30 hour and then you've continued to progress on that journey.
• 39:14
  Polly Mertens: Obviously it's been good for your physical health and your mental health and you've started the organization and you're helping other people, but you've continued on that path.
• 39:22
  Polly Mertens: You haven't gone back to the couch.
• 39:25
  Polly Mertens: No not at all.
• 39:27
  Polly Mertens: You just finished.
• 39:28
  Polly Mertens: What exactly?
• 39:30
  Kelly Thrush: Well, I just finished the Arizona Monster 300.
• 39:32
  Kelly Thrush: That was three, three weeks ago.
• 39:35
  Kelly Thrush: This weekend was 300 300 miles well, if we're going to be tactical, it's 304.4.
• 39:41
  Kelly Thrush: But I mean, who's who's counting?
• 39:43
  Polly Mertens: I'm counting uh, yeah.
• 39:46
  Kelly Thrush: So we finished that.
• 39:46
  Kelly Thrush: That was um, yeah, that was crazy.
• 39:48
  Kelly Thrush: What a journey that was.
• 39:49
  Kelly Thrush: That was amazing about it, that was super hard.
• 39:52
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, well, the way, the way it kind of came up.
• 39:54
  Kelly Thrush: So so, destination trail races for those that are listening, um, they have other 200 plus mile races out there.
• 40:01
  Kelly Thrush: Candace burke is the owner, founder, of destination trail, and so they have other races out there and I've always thought, you know that those, those races are just like.
• 40:11
  Kelly Thrush: How do those?
• 40:11
  Kelly Thrush: How do the guys do it?
• 40:12
  Kelly Thrush: I don't understand how they run those things, you you know.
• 40:16
  Kelly Thrush: But as I have gone further and further in my ultra running journey I have, I have started thinking to myself that those distances might be a little bit more up my alley, because I love hiking, I love being in nature, I love being outside and I like being in the middle of nowhere, right, where it's not.
• 40:36
  Kelly Thrush: I love don't get me wrong I like hiking the trails that are right near the trailhead and the visitor centers there, and they're great, but they also have 4,000 people there, you know, uh, and, and so I really liked the ones where you know you're, you're 10, 15, 20 miles from the nearest, anything, really.
• 40:54
  Kelly Thrush: So this particular race happens to be in my backyard and you know a number, a stretch, a stretch of this trail was I run them every weekend.
• 41:05
  Polly Mertens: Right.
• 41:06
  Kelly Thrush: And so a year and a half ago was when Candace announced that she was thinking about this race and I was sitting downstairs in my recliner and we were getting ready to go somewhere, whatever, and I had I had my phone out sitting on Instagram and her post came up about this and Jamie was walking downstairs and before Jamie even said anything say hey, by the way, when this race happens, I'm doing it and she goes, and she goes what?
• 41:31
  Kelly Thrush: And I said look, it's super long, it's going to be super expensive.
• 41:34
  Kelly Thrush: I don, and she goes, and she goes what?
• 41:35
  Kelly Thrush: And I said look, it's super long, it's gonna be super expensive.
• 41:36
  Kelly Thrush: I don't know if I'm gonna get 20 miles, 50 miles, I'm gonna do the whole thing, but I but it's in my backyard I am doing this race.
• 41:40
  Kelly Thrush: Yep, and she looked at me.
• 41:42
  Kelly Thrush: Who because this is part of the reason jamie's as badass as she is she looks at me, goes.
• 41:46
  Kelly Thrush: All right, we'll figure it out, perfect.
• 41:49
  Kelly Thrush: So, uh, she announced this.
• 41:51
  Kelly Thrush: It was from superior Arizona, which, driving from my house, is about two hours.
• 41:56
  Kelly Thrush: Okay, to Patagonia, arizona, which is about an hour and change south of my house.
• 42:02
  Kelly Thrush: Okay, mostly along the Arizona Trail, not all of it, some of it cut through Tucson, but yeah, for 304 miles, and I signed up the day that it opened, of course, you did yeah the day that it opened I year ago.
• 42:15
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, the day that it opened I signed up, which was a year ago of course you did yeah, and the appeal was what.
• 42:22
  Polly Mertens: What did you anticipate would happen on this 300 mile?
• 42:26
  Kelly Thrush: journey.
• 42:27
  Kelly Thrush: So the the appeal, I think, was um wow.
• 42:32
  Kelly Thrush: I don't remember what I was thinking at the time.
• 42:34
  Polly Mertens: I can tell you what I'm thinking now.
• 42:36
  Polly Mertens: I'm just kidding, well yeah no, that's fair um that's fair.
• 42:39
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, I think the thing is is that I one?
• 42:42
  Kelly Thrush: It was, or is, I think still, 300 is the longest trail race that's out there, the longest distance.
• 42:50
  Kelly Thrush: So that was pretty cool.
• 42:51
  Kelly Thrush: It's the inaugural year, which is pretty cool.
• 42:53
  Kelly Thrush: It's in Arizona.
• 42:54
  Kelly Thrush: I'm an Arizona kid, yeah you know.
• 42:56
  Kelly Thrush: So all those things, and I really wanted to see if I could you know, I wanted to.
• 43:01
  Kelly Thrush: I don't know if I can do this and and let's, let's give it a shot.
• 43:04
  Kelly Thrush: You know, um, and I think one of the things that I I really talked about with a good buddy of mine who helped me train and get ready for this race um, you know, as we're getting closer and the butterflies are starting to kick in, as we're getting closer to the race, I said, look, here's the thing.
• 43:19
  Kelly Thrush: One of the things I think I have going for me is that anytime we go, do these crazy adventures, or I'm out in nature for a 20-mile, let's climb up this ridge, and it doesn't matter the distance or how hard it's been or how long I've been out there.
• 43:32
  Kelly Thrush: As soon as I get back to the truck I wish I was still out there as soon as I get back, I'm like I should have stayed out a little longer, I should have enjoyed that summit some more, I should have taken another path back, or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 43:45
  Kelly Thrush: And so this race, I'm like, well, I'm about to get what I wish for, because you made it to that aid station, which is 45 miles away through this canyon, in the middle of the night and you're going to sleep for an hour maybe and then you're going to go do it again for another 45 miles and we're going to rinse and repeat for the next week and do that, and so I was looking forward to that piece going into the race.
• 44:09
  Kelly Thrush: So I think that was part of the appeal Now on the back and we can talk about the race itself.
• 44:17
  Kelly Thrush: But what I have have learned now, what, what makes me want to do it again?
• 44:23
  Kelly Thrush: Because I will.
• 44:24
  Polly Mertens: I mean, I told you earlier I'd go do another 250 miler right now, if I could.
• 44:31
  Kelly Thrush: Now, my feet are still a bit beat up, so they, they.
• 44:33
  Kelly Thrush: They will not let me today, um, but I think what I learned is the, the emotional clarity that came with stripping away every layer of who I am till I finally got to that Just the word I've been using is raw core of myself.
• 44:53
  Kelly Thrush: The only way I can think that I can get there is by pushing for multiple days over multiple miles, over super hard terrain, up and over mountains is the only way that I think I can get to that emotional place where you're just, it's just you and that's it.
• 45:15
  Kelly Thrush: There, you and that's it.
• 45:16
  Kelly Thrush: There's no fluff, there's no, there's no projection of the persona that I want you to see.
• 45:23
  Kelly Thrush: It's just me and the emotions that you feel, and I don't know how to get there a different way.
• 45:30
  Polly Mertens: And that's why I like these.
• 45:32
  Polly Mertens: Multi-day things are very different than the single day.
• 45:37
  Polly Mertens: So anyone who's been, is listening to this, who's done races, whatever marathons or even ultras, where you know you start, even if you start in the dark, and you finish in the dark, or start it as the sun comes up, finishes the sun setting, whatever the dynamic is.
• 45:50
  Polly Mertens: That is an experience and it's epic and we, we love it, we love those people and we want people to be doing that all day long.
• 45:57
  Polly Mertens: All humans are capable of doing that.
• 45:59
  Polly Mertens: In my never to be humble opinion, once you go all night long and continue to keep moving, something changes and, like you're saying, the peeling back of the layers.
• 46:10
  Polly Mertens: Right, there's this traditional way that we operate in the world every day is, you know, when the sun rises, we get up and then we go to work and we do some things, and then, when the sun sets, we go to bed and then we do it again, and we do it again, and we do it again.
• 46:22
  Polly Mertens: It's called the story of our life accumulating days, months and years.
• 46:27
  Polly Mertens: And that's kind of how most people live, but in nature that's not how the wildlife lives, and in the dawn of humanity that's not really how they lived either.
• 46:37
  Polly Mertens: So there's something really primal about that.
• 46:40
  Polly Mertens: When you're out in the nighttime and so that first night you sort of are having this like huh, I'm still moving, this is quite remarkable and it's very liberating, right.
• 46:51
  Polly Mertens: It's this great adventure, You're on this grand adventure and then usually somewhere around the second day, whether it's at sunrise or whatever the thing is a little different for everybody.
• 46:59
  Polly Mertens: You know, probably some suffering is creeping in, and maybe even creeped in before this.
• 47:04
  Kelly Thrush: No, it was day two.
• 47:05
  Kelly Thrush: It was day two If you're trained.
• 47:06
  Polly Mertens: Ideally it's day two.
• 47:07
  Polly Mertens: Some things, some wheels might start falling off the bus at this point.
• 47:11
  Polly Mertens: Part of that is exhaustion, you know, mental fatigue, focus, all of the things that are required to make good decisions, and then part of it is just the miles are piling up.
• 47:23
  Polly Mertens: This is still a human body and the human body is built a certain way in Western America in the year 2025, right, so some shit's going to hurt, but then the miracle really happens when you start working through that, right.
• 47:36
  Polly Mertens: So you've sort of let go of all your stories and all these preconceived ideas, and I know that the race didn't go as planned in your head.
• 47:45
  Kelly Thrush: Right.
• 47:45
  Polly Mertens: It never does, by the way, and I love that the most about all of this I never know what the fuck's going to happen and, frankly, bring it on, that's always even better going to happen and, frankly, bring it on, that's always even better.
• 47:57
  Polly Mertens: Um, but in that, like peeling back of the layers and as the days start to, or the miles start to, mount, you know.
• 48:01
  Polly Mertens: Now you're on day one.
• 48:02
  Polly Mertens: You're having a few issues, you're obviously working through them still relatively intelligently, or your crew's helping you or whatever.
• 48:08
  Polly Mertens: Was it most of your feet that were the problem?
• 48:11
  Polly Mertens: Child?
• 48:12
  Kelly Thrush: the physical problem was feet, yeah, and and they, they really started.
• 48:15
  Kelly Thrush: They started hurting.
• 48:16
  Kelly Thrush: Probably mile 70 to 80 is when they started to hurt.
• 48:20
  Kelly Thrush: Um, they didn't get super bad until well.
• 48:24
  Kelly Thrush: I mean, they were super bad in the middle, but when they really started to affect my mental capacities, uh, was we, were?
• 48:30
  Kelly Thrush: We were pushing 240 or 250 miles.
• 48:33
  Kelly Thrush: Where now I'm?
• 48:33
  Kelly Thrush: I'm starting to slow down and wondering if I can do this because my feet hurt so bad.
• 48:37
  Kelly Thrush: But no, I mean, you nailed it the first day.
• 48:41
  Kelly Thrush: I mean the first day like was great.
• 48:44
  Kelly Thrush: We're out on the trails and look at this gorgeous rainy canyon and we're up and down and I'm meeting new people and all the fast runners are passing me because they're fast and they're going through, and it was fantastic.
• 48:54
  Kelly Thrush: and there's there's people everywhere yeah that first aid station night, the first sleep station, um, you know, I got there, probably two in the morning or whatever time.
• 49:05
  Kelly Thrush: It was about an hour and a half past where I wanted to get there.
• 49:09
  Kelly Thrush: Um, it was packed I mean there's so many people.
• 49:12
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, uh, now I didn't get to sleep very much because I was kind of tucked behind these rocks and you know all that different stuff, but it was super cold the first three nights.
• 49:22
  Kelly Thrush: I I want to keep this, this plan that I had spent hours writing, you know, trying to keep my paces and where I wanted to be.
• 49:38
  Kelly Thrush: Okay, we're going to be an hour and a half short of our rest than we wanted it to be, but I built in some cushion into that rest.
• 49:44
  Kelly Thrush: It'll be fine.
• 49:45
  Kelly Thrush: Day two, as we're now out of this aid station at 6 AM.
• 49:50
  Kelly Thrush: So right when the sun came up, I was brush my teeth and head out the door.
• 49:53
  Kelly Thrush: And then what I didn't think of or look at or put into my equations was the terrain.
• 50:00
  Kelly Thrush: You know, there was a never ending climb coming out of Gila River Basin and onto this plateau, and I don't know how far that climb was.
• 50:09
  Kelly Thrush: It felt like forever you know, but I finally crestedsted it.
• 50:14
  Kelly Thrush: Probably it took me about five hours, four hours, whatever it was, to actually make it out of that.
• 50:19
  Kelly Thrush: It wasn't really a canyon, but you were climbing non-stop, yeah, non-stop.
• 50:24
  Kelly Thrush: It's not super steep but it's up, you know well for five hours no, true, well, there you go, uh.
• 50:30
  Kelly Thrush: And so that was when I was now at that point, really inside my own head.
• 50:36
  Kelly Thrush: Here's where it gets real Correct.
• 50:39
  Kelly Thrush: And I was inside my own head because I'd written this plan and I and there's, and day two was supposed to be my big day.
• 50:44
  Kelly Thrush: I was going to do a hundred K at 20 minute miles, and here's where we're going to be, and we're going to be there at midnight and you know, I had it all dialed up and my crew had their assignments, they knew what I was doing and all this stuff.
• 50:56
  Kelly Thrush: So I text once I climbed out of this thing, uh, I text my crew at whatever time in the morning it was and said, hey, we're gonna, you got, we're gonna have to make adjustments.
• 51:02
  Kelly Thrush: I don't know what that's gonna look like, but there is zero possibility.
• 51:05
  Kelly Thrush: I'm gonna keep the paces that I put on paper.
• 51:08
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, and I'm and I am, I'm so far inside my own head at that point that that's all I can think about is having to make up the time and I'm going to have to just skip this next aid station and blah, blah, blah.
• 51:19
  Kelly Thrush: So two of my crew and I could not have picked a better team to help support me through this.
• 51:26
  Kelly Thrush: I mean, they were second to none.
• 51:28
  Kelly Thrush: You know, jamie's the crew captain and all four of my pacers are all experienced ultra runners, and two of them piped in almost immediately and said what are you talking about?
• 51:39
  Kelly Thrush: Your job is to make it to the next aid station.
• 51:41
  Kelly Thrush: We'll handle the rest Like we've got this.
• 51:44
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, relax Get out of your own head.
• 51:46
  Kelly Thrush: The only focus you have is getting to.
• 51:48
  Kelly Thrush: At that point it was tortilla aid station, that's it.
• 51:51
  Kelly Thrush: That's all you got to do.
• 51:51
  Kelly Thrush: And then I want you to leave with enough time that you're not, you know, getting kicked out Like that's all you have to do.
• 51:57
  Kelly Thrush: And it took a couple of those texts for me really again to surrender and release those expectations to where.
• 52:04
  Kelly Thrush: Okay, they got it.
• 52:07
  Polly Mertens: I'll just leave them to it.
• 52:08
  Polly Mertens: They're going to do what they're going to do, and my job is to get here, Uh, and it it did.
• 52:13
  Kelly Thrush: It took a little bit of weight off my shoulders and my thinking, you know, because I'm the back of the packer Because you're making yourself crazy.
• 52:19
  Kelly Thrush: I was, well, and I'm the back of the packer, and so cutoffs are a real thing, you know, sure.
• 52:24
  Polly Mertens: It's a legit thing in any race.
• 52:25
  Polly Mertens: In any race, that's a reality.
• 52:36
  Kelly Thrush: But you can make it 10 times worse by making yourself crazy in the process.
• 52:37
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, I really, yeah, yeah, and I was, I was ruminating for hours, climbing out of that thing, knowing that you know, I'm looking at my watch going.
• 52:41
  Kelly Thrush: We got, we got to pick up the pace and I'm doing like 25 minute miles instead of 20 minute miles.
• 52:44
  Kelly Thrush: And if you start doing the math, very well, if I'm well, five minutes longer than one minute a while, that means I'm 20 minutes late every hour and blah, blah, blah.
• 52:50
  Kelly Thrush: You know, uh, and then that's gonna put, and then that's going to put you two hours behind here.
• 52:53
  Kelly Thrush: And if you're two hours behind here, then you know, and just, and the reason.
• 52:56
  Polly Mertens: I'm laughing is, of course, because I've done this and anybody who has done ultra running has made themselves crazy as a fucking jaybird out in the middle of nowhere talking to themselves.
• 53:04
  Polly Mertens: Sometimes we're whipping out our spreadsheet that we have with all our magic ideas about how this is all going to go perfect, or we're taking our phone out, we're calculating minute miles, and all these.
• 53:15
  Polly Mertens: We're so hilarious, aren't we?
• 53:17
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, this is when we're still in our old story Correct, right, that old identity of we have control.
• 53:23
  Polly Mertens: Things are going to go a certain way.
• 53:25
  Polly Mertens: I'm a certain person.
• 53:27
  Polly Mertens: This is how the world works.
• 53:28
  Polly Mertens: People have expectations of me, my crew, my pacers, whatever I have expectations of me.
• 53:32
  Polly Mertens: All of the stories that we tell ourselves.
• 53:34
  Polly Mertens: And that's the cage, really.
• 53:37
  Polly Mertens: At some point, you opened the door to the cage and stepped out of the cage.
• 53:42
  Kelly Thrush: I did, yeah, and so it took a couple of days still, you know, because there was a point on night number two Sorry, I didn't think about it where I was, night number two, where we were actually starting to chase cutoffs a little bit Right, um, because the first half of these, the first three days, um, cutoffs were.
• 54:03
  Kelly Thrush: I mean, they were, they were gracious, but they were still pretty tight, you know, considering, you know, the distance and the terrain we're going.
• 54:08
  Polly Mertens: I think the race directors do that on purpose and also the climbing was mostly upfront right.
• 54:14
  Kelly Thrush: Correct the big the you, that on purpose.
• 54:15
  Kelly Thrush: And also the climbing was mostly up front right, correct the big, the big chunk was in the first half.
• 54:17
  Kelly Thrush: Um, now, there was plenty of elevation afterwards, but but the big chunk of it more than half of it, I think, was was in the first half of this race, like two thirds or whatever it was.
• 54:24
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, and so that second night I at this point too, I had now teamed up with some people still can't have any crew yet, you know well, you can, you can have crew, but you can have pacers.
• 54:34
  Kelly Thrush: And so that second overnight I teamed up with a couple of guys.
• 54:38
  Kelly Thrush: One of them, his name was Tom, he's from Australia, and you know, we kind of came out of that aid station at dusk and we have.
• 54:48
  Kelly Thrush: I don't remember how far we had to get to the next big station, but probably 35 miles or something like that.
• 54:57
  Kelly Thrush: And so just basically, yeah, until the next morning.
• 54:58
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, we were going all night long because it was eight o'clock or nine o'clock when we left, finally left that, that aid station or whatever.
• 55:02
  Kelly Thrush: And so we teamed up and he said hey, do you want to?
• 55:06
  Kelly Thrush: You want to?
• 55:06
  Kelly Thrush: You know, rock this together, cause it's easier when you're with other people in the heck yeah Cause then you can talk and you just met this person, so you can they share their story and you can share my story and you talk, and that makes the miles sort of tick by.
• 55:18
  Kelly Thrush: And so there's a couple, three, four of us that were really going, but the one that aid station in that night was the middle of the night.
• 55:25
  Kelly Thrush: It's called them R&R, which was refuel and ramen stations, or ramen and refuel, because they were in the middle of nowhere, right?
• 55:40
  Kelly Thrush: So there's no big party, it is quiet, it is.
• 55:41
  Kelly Thrush: Here's some pasta that you can eat.
• 55:42
  Kelly Thrush: Um, this particular one actually had personal pan made or hand pizzas.
• 55:44
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, they were delicious, by the way, um, and so we got to this one, but it was we're now pushing, like we're only getting there an hour and a half ahead of the cutoff, like we gotta, we gotta push a little bit, and what i't?
• 55:55
  Kelly Thrush: This was the one part of the course that I had never been on before.
• 55:58
  Kelly Thrush: You know, being that this course was in my backyard, I literally trained on every section, except I wasn't able to do this one because it was in the middle of nowhere and logistically trying to figure that out was tough.
• 56:09
  Kelly Thrush: So as we were coming into this, it was middle of the night, so I couldn?
• 56:15
  Kelly Thrush: Uh.
• 56:15
  Kelly Thrush: So as we were coming into this, it was middle of the night, so I couldn't tell you really what it looks like.
• 56:17
  Kelly Thrush: But all I know is that you're in this sort of canyon area, hilly area it's called the black hills and you can see headlamps everywhere, at all 360 degrees you can see headlamps.
• 56:27
  Kelly Thrush: So I have no idea where we're going.
• 56:28
  Kelly Thrush: You know like are we, is the aid station over here, or is it over here, or?
• 56:32
  Kelly Thrush: And then you have to climb this you know pretty good size mountain or hill or whatever it was before.
• 56:38
  Kelly Thrush: Then you dip down back into the aid station and then the next day climb back out.
• 56:42
  Kelly Thrush: But we had to hurry and we were suffering pretty good because sleep deprivation is starting to kick in.
• 56:46
  Kelly Thrush: So we were able to get to that aid station about an hour and a half or maybe two hours before the actual cutoff when you have to be out of the aid station so we had some time to sit, we ate some pizzas.
• 56:57
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, I didn't.
• 56:58
  Kelly Thrush: I don't think I actually slept at that aid station, but I was able to sit down under a blanket next to a fire, warm up a little bit.
• 57:04
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, tom actually did sleep for a little while, uh, and then we woke him up and we headed out, uh, and then that third day, uh was kind of where the way I've described it, maybe you can put this into words better Time and space dissolved.
• 57:23
  Polly Mertens: Yep.
• 57:23
  Polly Mertens: They ceased to exist 100%.
• 57:25
  Kelly Thrush: They weren't there at all.
• 57:26
  Kelly Thrush: It was.
• 57:27
  Kelly Thrush: The only thing is just move forward.
• 57:29
  Kelly Thrush: You know, that afternoon I now have my pacer, my first pacer.
• 57:35
  Kelly Thrush: The trek was with me, thank goodness, because now I'm starting to be in some dark head spaces.
• 57:42
  Kelly Thrush: And this is that afternoon.
• 57:44
  Kelly Thrush: Evening is when the hallucinations started kicking in, because I, at that point, probably only had an hour and a half sleep in those three, maybe two hours in those three days, and I didn't sleep the night before this race.
• 57:55
  Kelly Thrush: I mean, let's be honest, you know.
• 57:56
  Kelly Thrush: I mean we didn't start till 11 AM and we had to drive to superior.
• 57:59
  Kelly Thrush: I got up at 5 AM.
• 58:00
  Kelly Thrush: I mean I maybe had four hours night before.
• 58:02
  Kelly Thrush: Um, so yeah, sleep deprivation started to kick in and that's when your eyes start playing tricks on you.
• 58:08
  Kelly Thrush: Um, what was cool about that experience is I was still consciously aware enough to know that what my eyes were showing me is not real.
• 58:18
  Kelly Thrush: You know, the only time that I got startled one of my favorite stories is when I almost stepped on a snake climbing up.
• 58:25
  Kelly Thrush: Mount Lemond, which was the big climb Right.
• 58:29
  Kelly Thrush: That was the six thousand feet and twelve miles on these just back bushwhacking trails and fire roads that we had to be on.
• 58:36
  Kelly Thrush: But Christian was out in front, I was.
• 58:39
  Kelly Thrush: Second.
• 58:39
  Kelly Thrush: We picked up another guy named Robbie, who we'd met right there, and Robbie's a big part of the reason I finished as well.
• 58:44
  Kelly Thrush: We spent 200 miles together.
• 58:46
  Kelly Thrush: We finished the whole thing together.
• 58:47
  Kelly Thrush: We met on the trail that night for that afternoon.
• 58:52
  Kelly Thrush: So anyway, so we're coming up this hill and we're kind of cresting to the left around this ridgeline, and as I turned to step, you know, making that left-hand turn, I jumped and the first thing that rolls through my mind is why is there a three foot long yellow corn snake in the middle of the trail on Mount Lemmon?
• 59:05
  Kelly Thrush: They don't live here, and that was the first thing, and I'm looking down at this.
• 59:09
  Kelly Thrush: It was, it was three feet long, was kind of a, a maze yellow and it's slithering, I mean it's, it's moving.
• 59:15
  Kelly Thrush: And then I hear them giggling and I went that that's not a snake, is it?
• 59:21
  Kelly Thrush: It was, it was an agave leaf, which for those it's a cactus that lives up in that area, but it was three foot long.
• 59:28
  Kelly Thrush: It was on the trail, but I'm staring at this thing while they're telling me what it is and it's, it's moving, like I can see it moving, and that was my first for real hallucination that, uh, the trek, uh.
• 59:40
  Kelly Thrush: The next one came not too too much later, you know, not even a mile down the trail.
• 59:45
  Kelly Thrush: It came, uh, and this was a very fun one.
• 59:49
  Kelly Thrush: So I need you to imagine a disney costume, character muppet thing, right, like it, like a mickey mouse style costume, right?
• 59:58
  Kelly Thrush: However, this particular lady, she was a woman, uh, she had a bumblebee butt, complete with, you know, a good stinger, uh, but the top half half of her was a beekeepers outfit, complete with the, the helmet, and she was bending over to pick something up.
• 1:00:14
  Kelly Thrush: And I'm staring at this thing across the way, going, that's not, there's no way that there's a bumblebee Muppet thing in the middle of Mount Lemon.
• 1:00:26
  Kelly Thrush: And so then, so I tapped Christian on the shoulder and said right, here's what we're going to do.
• 1:00:28
  Kelly Thrush: I'm going to tell you what I see and then you're going to tell me what it actually is.
• 1:00:34
  Kelly Thrush: So I described this to tell you what I see and then you're going to tell me what it actually is.
• 1:00:37
  Kelly Thrush: So I described this to him and he very deadpan, you know, kind of looked at me, goes yeah, man, that's a snake, or that's a snake, yeah, man, that's a tree stump, yeah.
• 1:00:41
  Kelly Thrush: And then so let's go.
• 1:00:42
  Kelly Thrush: And so we just kept on trucking after that.
• 1:00:46
  Kelly Thrush: So then I saw all sorts of fun stuff.
• 1:00:47
  Kelly Thrush: I saw a tiki guy kind of standing behind, like this guy, that was praying.
• 1:00:50
  Kelly Thrush: I saw a ninja that was pulling on a branch at one point.
• 1:00:55
  Kelly Thrush: The weird one, the weird one the weird one.
• 1:00:59
  Polly Mertens: They were all weird.
• 1:01:00
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, the weirder one, or the more real one, I suppose, were the auditory hallucinations.
• 1:01:07
  Kelly Thrush: I could hear people talking just off the trail.
• 1:01:11
  Kelly Thrush: I couldn't understand their conversation, I couldn't hear their words, but it was people chatting often, and you pause for a sec because the first thing you do when you hear somebody behind you you stop like, oh, there's somebody and there was nobody there.
• 1:01:24
  Kelly Thrush: Okay, so then we just kept on going.
• 1:01:26
  Kelly Thrush: Those ones were very real, like it took a second, you know, I knew that there was not a ninja pulling down this branch, totally um, or, or a beekeeper, uh, but the auditory ones were interesting you know, these kind of things are part of it and we tell these stories and we laugh about it, but it can scare the hell out of people and it's actually a big reason that a lot of people don't want to do this kind of stuff is they don't they think they're going to be terrified.
• 1:01:51
  Polly Mertens: So this shows the value of having pacers with you or trail partners to slog along rather than in the dark, and especially at the nighttime or in the times where you're hallucinating, it can be dangerous.
• 1:02:06
  Polly Mertens: So, to be honest, this is a dangerous sport.
• 1:02:09
  Polly Mertens: We choose it anyway willingly.
• 1:02:11
  Polly Mertens: We choose it anyway willingly.
• 1:02:12
  Polly Mertens: But then you can be strategic and intelligent about having people around to make sure that you are safe and you don't make a wrong turn or a bad decision because of some of these things or just really being depleted.
• 1:02:25
  Kelly Thrush: Well, I think that's a good point, and your trail buddies, they're there and they're in the same boat as you.
• 1:02:31
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, absolutely, and it does.
• 1:02:33
  Kelly Thrush: The camaraderie that I had with the people that I met out there is gosh fantastic, you know and because you're all.
• 1:02:44
  Kelly Thrush: It's that shared suffering you hear is talked about often and you're, in that moment, sharing that same suffering, as you're both have this goal in mind.
• 1:02:50
  Kelly Thrush: You've never met before.
• 1:02:51
  Kelly Thrush: I met three or four different Australians that I shared some miles with people from phoenix and ohio and I mean all over, right, uh.
• 1:02:59
  Kelly Thrush: Then now we're great and we text and we see each other on strava or instagram or whatever it is, and we text back and forth, or they're running.
• 1:03:05
  Kelly Thrush: You know a couple of them are doing coca-dona this weekend or this week, um, which is great, because now I'm going to cheer for them.
• 1:03:12
  Kelly Thrush: You know from all the down here, but it's, it's, it's amazing.
• 1:03:15
  Kelly Thrush: The people that you meet so that you can be safe while you're out there and not and realize that it's no, it's not a snake, it's OK, it's an agave, it's fine.
• 1:03:25
  Kelly Thrush: You know or no, there's no ninjas in the forest.
• 1:03:29
  Kelly Thrush: You know, it's just, it's just your eyes playing tricks on you you know, it's just.
• 1:03:36
  Polly Mertens: It's just your eyes playing tricks on you.
• 1:03:37
  Polly Mertens: One of the biggest things I learned early on, and why I'm still drawn to the sport, is you learn so much about taking care of yourself, I mean, and I love how everything strips away and you have that single focus of keep moving forward.
• 1:03:47
  Polly Mertens: So it's like hydrate, nutrition, stay warm, stay, keep moving forward.
• 1:03:53
  Polly Mertens: Something happens, deal with it.
• 1:03:56
  Polly Mertens: Something happens, deal with it again, deal with it again.
• 1:03:59
  Polly Mertens: You're problem solving.
• 1:04:00
  Polly Mertens: You're just learning all these skills that otherwise in your everyday life you would never learn.
• 1:04:06
  Polly Mertens: You would never be pushed to this place.
• 1:04:08
  Polly Mertens: That's so damn challenging and nobody can resolve it except for you Like that kind of empowerment to me is freaking priceless agreed, yeah, well, and I think too, what that also does is, um, do you can?
• 1:04:23
  Kelly Thrush: then, like I try to describe, I?
• 1:04:26
  Kelly Thrush: I was amazed at how my body responded, you know, because we've all been on those one mile runs that are just awful.
• 1:04:34
  Kelly Thrush: And you go, I'm not doing this today.
• 1:04:37
  Kelly Thrush: And your body says, you're right, we're not doing this today.
• 1:04:44
  Kelly Thrush: Versus, specifically, in my case, with my feet.
• 1:04:46
  Kelly Thrush: I literally had a conversation with them on the second to last day when they are battered and bruised, and and I had this um, uh, they were so swollen, you know, over the course this, this 300 miles, that my crew actually bought me three new pairs of shoes throughout the week.
• 1:05:02
  Kelly Thrush: They were each a size bigger whoa, so that my feet would fit, wow, into the shoes.
• 1:05:08
  Kelly Thrush: And by dane that thursday, so that would have been the 10th.
• 1:05:12
  Kelly Thrush: So we've now been out there six days, or coming up.
• 1:05:15
  Kelly Thrush: On the sixth day I couldn't put my gaiters on my shoes right, which are the things you put over your shoes to help keep sand out of them, because they wouldn't fit.
• 1:05:23
  Kelly Thrush: I couldn't fit them on there and I couldn't tie my shoes properly.
• 1:05:27
  Kelly Thrush: Also, like I couldn't tie them tight, they were just loosely snugged on there, and so that last day I actually had a mental conversation with my feet and said look, here we go.
• 1:05:39
  Kelly Thrush: Fellas, I apologize to you and this is going to hurt.
• 1:05:43
  Kelly Thrush: However, you will function today and you will operate as you do normally.
• 1:05:49
  Kelly Thrush: You will do all the normal motions you will, you know, as you, as you were going.
• 1:05:53
  Kelly Thrush: You know midfoot, I mean all the normal motions you will, you know as you were going.
• 1:05:55
  Kelly Thrush: You know midfoot, I mean all the different things that we talk and we talked for, you know, two or three minutes, and I said all I need you to do is to get to the Casablanca, which was the last aid station.
• 1:06:05
  Kelly Thrush: You have to get there by Thursday evening.
• 1:06:09
  Kelly Thrush: That's it.
• 1:06:09
  Kelly Thrush: Once you do that goal, do whatever you want, I don't really care, but that's all you have to do is get there.
• 1:06:15
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, and it worked and they and they did.
• 1:06:18
  Kelly Thrush: Now I'm I've can't run really since then.
• 1:06:22
  Kelly Thrush: My feet are still battered and bruised.
• 1:06:23
  Kelly Thrush: I actually have a doctor, another doctor's appointment on Monday morning with a podiatrist.
• 1:06:28
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, because there's still some issues going on with them, but they were able to achieve the goal that day, even though it hurt, you know, um, because I asked them to or commanded them to one of the one of the two, depending on whose perspective.
• 1:06:43
  Polly Mertens: Exactly, and there'll be moments in these things where you don't feel anything.
• 1:06:49
  Polly Mertens: And there's other moments in these things where you feel everything.
• 1:06:52
  Polly Mertens: It's the most bizarre thing and you're like, okay, I guess this is what we're doing for the next hour or whatever the hell it is, and then the pendulum will swing again.
• 1:07:02
  Polly Mertens: But I think the most incredible experience I'm hoping you're going to share as we start to kind of wrap up our time together is really what was happening to you mentally and emotionally.
• 1:07:14
  Polly Mertens: So physically, people are not going to be able to comprehend this race, as much as we could talk about it for days on end, all the details, unless they get their butt off the sofa and they get up into the mountains and on the trails and just start experiencing nature firsthand.
• 1:07:30
  Polly Mertens: It's like going to Mars.
• 1:07:33
  Kelly Thrush: Right.
• 1:07:34
  Polly Mertens: But it's available to all of us and, by the way, it's also free in most places to do this.
• 1:07:39
  Polly Mertens: So we beg of them to just start and do anything.
• 1:07:42
  Polly Mertens: But for you I want to know, like, for your mental and emotional journey on this race course, this particular experience that you had?
• 1:07:53
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, you overcame endless amounts of suffering.
• 1:07:59
  Polly Mertens: I mean, it's not even stuff that we can comprehend.
• 1:08:01
  Polly Mertens: Like I said, people just can't even grasp this.
• 1:08:03
  Polly Mertens: Over and over and over, you got up and rose again and again and again.
• 1:08:09
  Polly Mertens: It's kind of like your sobriety journey.
• 1:08:10
  Polly Mertens: It's kind of like being a transplant recipient.
• 1:08:13
  Polly Mertens: You continue to rise.
• 1:08:15
  Polly Mertens: What in the hell was going on in your?
• 1:08:18
  Polly Mertens: Do you even remember?
• 1:08:22
  Kelly Thrush: Oh yeah, Maybe not all of it the hell was going on in your.
• 1:08:23
  Polly Mertens: do you even remember?
• 1:08:24
  Polly Mertens: Oh yeah, no, maybe not all of it.
• 1:08:24
  Polly Mertens: I mean, were you even present in the reality when you could see you were going to finish the race?
• 1:08:28
  Polly Mertens: Did you have even awareness?
• 1:08:29
  Polly Mertens: Or had you just had your brain left the building?
• 1:08:32
  Kelly Thrush: No, no, I was, I was aware.
• 1:08:33
  Kelly Thrush: Um, so, the first time that I had those thoughts that I, that I think I allowed myself to have those thoughts was at the top of Mount Lemon.
• 1:08:45
  Kelly Thrush: It was after and in the middle of night.
• 1:08:47
  Kelly Thrush: Number three, going into day four, was we made the top of Mount Lemon with time to spare, right, so we now had I don't remember exactly, but we had time to spare.
• 1:08:57
  Kelly Thrush: We didn't have to rush and we talked about it earlier.
• 1:09:00
  Kelly Thrush: That was the point in the race where the cutoffs start to get even more generous, right, because once coming down from there, uh, when we got to mount lemon and and I it was middle of the night, so it was cream I ate two, uh, impossible burgers and took my shoes off and went to bed.
• 1:09:17
  Kelly Thrush: When we got up and we were headed out down the mountain now with a big group of us we're probably eight of us at that point that all were heading out at the same time.
• 1:09:24
  Kelly Thrush: That was the first time I went.
• 1:09:26
  Kelly Thrush: I'm gonna do this thing, you know, like, like this, this is going to happen.
• 1:09:31
  Kelly Thrush: I just have to keep doing what I'm doing and if I do that, I'm going to finish a day early.
• 1:09:35
  Kelly Thrush: You know, those kind of things like I have plenty of of.
• 1:09:38
  Kelly Thrush: My body feels great.
• 1:09:40
  Kelly Thrush: My feet don't, but my body feels good.
• 1:09:41
  Kelly Thrush: Mentally.
• 1:09:42
  Kelly Thrush: I feel good, um and again, because that time and space had kind of dissolved.
• 1:09:47
  Kelly Thrush: I just have to get to the next aid station, that's it exactly and it doesn't matter that it's 30 miles away, it doesn't matter that it's going to take us 10 hours to get there.
• 1:09:55
  Kelly Thrush: None of that even came up in my thoughts.
• 1:09:59
  Kelly Thrush: It was just get to the next aid station and then you get to have another burger or a quesadilla or a pizza and sit and eat and joke around with everybody and you know bond in that moment, and then we're going to get up and we're going to go do it some more.
• 1:10:10
  Kelly Thrush: So that was the first time that that happened Towards the end.
• 1:10:15
  Kelly Thrush: So there were three thirds of this race.
• 1:10:18
  Kelly Thrush: The first one was getting to that first aid station before you can have crew, which was 105 miles, which actually was, ironically, a third.
• 1:10:27
  Kelly Thrush: That one was tough because I was by myself, I was in my own head, I didn't have somebody that I was with, crew wise, or even I mean I had made friends, but not close friends, you know.
• 1:10:37
  Kelly Thrush: So I was by myself a lot of that chunk.
• 1:10:39
  Kelly Thrush: The second third was getting through Tucson, very, very different, you know.
• 1:10:44
  Kelly Thrush: We got down off the mountain.
• 1:10:45
  Kelly Thrush: Now we're on paved bike path for 40 miles or whatever it was, which, again, I use that a lot of times.
• 1:10:52
  Kelly Thrush: I use that same section as my commute to work, you know.
• 1:10:56
  Kelly Thrush: So I know it in and out.
• 1:10:57
  Kelly Thrush: But that was that second section.
• 1:10:59
  Kelly Thrush: And so that particular day that I don't remember what day it was, um Tuesday, I think uh was tough because we needed to get to what was called Gabe Z, uh, which was going to be the beginning of that third, third um by the end of that night.
• 1:11:12
  Kelly Thrush: And so we left at eight in the morning and we had to go 40 miles, uh, before we were going to quit for the night.
• 1:11:18
  Kelly Thrush: That was the hell or high water and it was hot.
• 1:11:22
  Kelly Thrush: So remember I said it was super, super cold.
• 1:11:24
  Kelly Thrush: Those last three days were pushing a hundred degrees, it was totally exposed, no shade Right.
• 1:11:29
  Kelly Thrush: And so we made it to that Gabe Z, that's when.
• 1:11:34
  Kelly Thrush: That's when those layers were pretty well stripped.
• 1:11:37
  Kelly Thrush: My feet are now trash.
• 1:11:39
  Kelly Thrush: I'm now whatever it was was five days in.
• 1:11:42
  Kelly Thrush: I'm exhausted at that point and because we had pushed, now I'm still moving great, I'm still in good spirits.
• 1:11:49
  Kelly Thrush: You know, for the most part.
• 1:11:50
  Kelly Thrush: I mean, like you said, the pendulum swings.
• 1:11:52
  Kelly Thrush: I have my moments, but what's great is that when you're in other people, hopefully everybody's pendulum's at a different point as they're swinging.
• 1:11:59
  Kelly Thrush: So my moment is his crappy, you know good one, and vice versa.
• 1:12:02
  Kelly Thrush: Right, yeah.
• 1:12:03
  Kelly Thrush: And then your pacer, hopefully, is there to have all good moments you know Right, exactly.
• 1:12:15
  Kelly Thrush: Hopefully, and so we have this.
• 1:12:16
  Kelly Thrush: Now.
• 1:12:16
  Kelly Thrush: There's a hundred K between the Gabe Z and that last aid station Casa Blanca is what it was called uh, there's 100k little over.
• 1:12:19
  Kelly Thrush: It's like 67 miles or whatever, um, between those two.
• 1:12:23
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, that was tough, um, and that's when those layers started getting stripped.
• 1:12:29
  Kelly Thrush: Um, we had a stretch that that day it was hot.
• 1:12:32
  Kelly Thrush: There were five of us, um, I caught back up with tom the australian and his pacer, marco, and then there was our crew.
• 1:12:38
  Kelly Thrush: There was a stretch of I don't know how how many miles we did, but it was probably an hour, hour and a half where none of us really talked.
• 1:12:45
  Kelly Thrush: We were just, you know, marching through the desert at a decent clip.
• 1:12:51
  Kelly Thrush: It was relatively, relatively flat for the most part during this stretch, and we were trying to get to that next aid station because it was super hot and we heard they had ice, so we were trying to get there, you know, um, but that's when the layers were starting to to.
• 1:13:04
  Kelly Thrush: Really, I'm now getting to the core of this thing, and so what, what happened was, at the end of that night, we're trying to get what was called oak tree, which is in the middle there, uh, and now we're in the foothills of some of the mountains that are down below, so we're in grasslands, kind of oak, ironically forest, and it's rolling hills, and this might be my favorite story.
• 1:13:28
  Kelly Thrush: It's on a short list, if it's not.
• 1:13:31
  Kelly Thrush: So we're getting through this stretch of these foothills here and it's dark I don't know what time of night it was, but it was dark and had been for hours and we have to make this climb and it's about three, two, I don't know two or three miles worth of climbing out of this little valley that we were in, and again, not a steep climb, but it's a vertical, not stopping here's hills, and you're just climbing for the next hours, or whatever it was.
• 1:14:01
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, and at this point my feet are now affecting me and which means now it's affecting my, my team that I'm with, because they're not going as fast, because I'm not going as fast.
• 1:14:11
  Kelly Thrush: You know, um, my, my pacer, jeff, he was like well, I'm with him, so it doesn't bother me at all, but the other guys that I'm with, they're, you know, they want to stay with you, but at the same time they have their own race.
• 1:14:21
  Kelly Thrush: You know those mental questions to rise.
• 1:14:24
  Kelly Thrush: So, anyway, so we're coming up through and I, I made a conscious decision that no, no, no, we're going to push this last uphill section.
• 1:14:33
  Kelly Thrush: You know we're going to go at a good clip.
• 1:14:41
  Kelly Thrush: It hurts, I know it hurts, but we're going.
• 1:14:42
  Kelly Thrush: So we're making this climb and just towards the end of this climb, jamie called me just to say goodnight, you know, whatever time it was, because she had to work the next day, I think, and I said I'm going to call you back.
• 1:14:50
  Kelly Thrush: We're going to be at the top of this thing in 0.15.
• 1:14:53
  Kelly Thrush: I'm out of breath.
• 1:14:54
  Kelly Thrush: I'll call you back in.
• 1:14:55
  Kelly Thrush: However long it takes me to go a quarter mile, I'll call you back so we make it to the top.
• 1:15:00
  Kelly Thrush: I call her back and it was a two-minute, not even a one-minute phone call and she's saying I just want to tell you goodnight and that I love you and you're doing great.
• 1:15:08
  Kelly Thrush: And then the very last thing she said when she hung up was I am so proud of you, man, I lost it.
• 1:15:14
  Kelly Thrush: I'm tearing up right now.
• 1:15:15
  Kelly Thrush: I did up right now.
• 1:15:16
  Kelly Thrush: Um, I, I did, I start, my lips started quivering and I, I just started.
• 1:15:19
  Kelly Thrush: I couldn't help it because all those layers are gone and you're sleep deprived and you're exhausted and you're 200 and whatever miles.
• 1:15:29
  Kelly Thrush: I'm into this thing.
• 1:15:30
  Kelly Thrush: I can't help it, and so what I really wanted to do was hide it from the two fellows that I'm with, you know, because we're tough guys in the middle of the desert.
• 1:15:40
  Kelly Thrush: I'm like what are you talking about, man?
• 1:15:42
  Kelly Thrush: This?
• 1:15:43
  Polly Mertens: is what it's about.
• 1:15:45
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, just let this happen and realize how much more I love Jamie because I did this race.
• 1:15:54
  Polly Mertens: And again, I wouldn't have gotten there and yourself.
• 1:15:58
  Polly Mertens: True, but in that moment it was her, but she was reflecting back to you the reality of what you were saying, or should be saying to yourself yeah, having pride in what you're accomplishing.
• 1:16:14
  Polly Mertens: That's what good partners and good friends do.
• 1:16:18
  Polly Mertens: They reflect back your own damn truth.
• 1:16:21
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, they just have the balls to say it, because sometimes you don't.
• 1:16:24
  Polly Mertens: So she called you on it, so that's so good, because that's why it rung such a chord.
• 1:16:29
  Polly Mertens: If it was superficial and it didn't really resonate, it would have just kind of bounced off.
• 1:16:33
  Polly Mertens: You know we all have those kind of relationships.
• 1:16:34
  Kelly Thrush: Oh sure, were you looking to go?
• 1:16:35
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, yeah, were you looking to go?
• 1:16:40
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, yeah, whatever, yeah, she just went right at it.
• 1:16:42
  Kelly Thrush: No, and it and it and it did.
• 1:16:42
  Kelly Thrush: It struck that chord, uh, and now I'm talking to them about it and, and that made the miles go by a little faster too, till we got to this aid station, and that next morning well, it wasn't next morning, it was like two hours later, uh, when we left that aid station was when I had the conversation with my feet like we're gonna go see jamie Casablanca and we have to hurry to get there and this is how this is gonna go today.
• 1:17:02
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, and they did it, and so that was, that was probably my, my favorite moment, uh, of this journey.
• 1:17:08
  Kelly Thrush: Now, the, the, the um, last two miles coming into the finish line were pretty amazing as well.
• 1:17:15
  Kelly Thrush: I mean, you know, uh, it was daytime, you know we hiked through the night.
• 1:17:18
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, we had 16 miles to go.
• 1:17:20
  Kelly Thrush: Molly is now pacing us, and now she has.
• 1:17:23
  Kelly Thrush: Now she's responsible for a whole little crew.
• 1:17:25
  Kelly Thrush: We picked up another runner, and Mike is his name, and so she's in charge of all of us, I think, because they're like, oh good, he has a pacer, we're not going to get lost and she's like exactly around me, um, but so what happened, uh?
• 1:17:39
  Kelly Thrush: jamie texted our little group, uh, when I crossed the 300 mile mark and we're now four miles from the finish.
• 1:17:46
  Kelly Thrush: Right, and we're on this.
• 1:17:47
  Kelly Thrush: I think we weren't quite to the little road that we had to take, which is like two miles long.
• 1:17:52
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, but I'm in, just I'm in mode, we're, we're going to the finish and I'm we're cruising along, well, cruising along, uh, and uh, uh jamie, you have no concept of time and speed anyway.
• 1:18:05
  Kelly Thrush: So, whatever, didn't matter, we're just, we're just moving yep, my, my sole focus is to get to that road, because I know the road signifies we're done with this thing, right.
• 1:18:13
  Kelly Thrush: And so jamie texted 300 miles and that was it okay, cool.
• 1:18:18
  Kelly Thrush: Oh hey, 300 miles, we passed it all right, we're good, didn't I mean just brushed it off.
• 1:18:22
  Kelly Thrush: And then Molly, a few minutes later, she looks back at me.
• 1:18:25
  Kelly Thrush: She goes that's 300 miles.
• 1:18:26
  Kelly Thrush: I'm like yeah, I know.
• 1:18:26
  Kelly Thrush: And she goes this is not a big deal.
• 1:18:29
  Kelly Thrush: And I'm like no, it's a bit, no, it is a big deal.
• 1:18:34
  Kelly Thrush: I mean, here come the waterworks again, when we got to a mile from the finish line.
• 1:18:40
  Kelly Thrush: Man, you can see the pictures.
• 1:18:42
  Kelly Thrush: I posted them online.
• 1:18:43
  Kelly Thrush: You know like my lips quivering, you know like I can't wait.
• 1:18:47
  Kelly Thrush: And then I start.
• 1:18:47
  Kelly Thrush: As you come around the corner, you can see the gate and the finish line and the whole thing.
• 1:18:51
  Kelly Thrush: The cowbells are going and I can see it's not just my crew there, like one of my best friends, growing uh, who has just gotten into photography, has his big old telescope lens out and he's, and I can hear him yelling for me.
• 1:19:05
  Kelly Thrush: And then I see, like a bunch of my run club and we're still an hour and a half away from tucson at eight o'clock in the morning on a friday, like people have jobs.
• 1:19:12
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, they're there, you know, to cheer me on and I, you know there's this group of people that are are here supporting me and man it just that, was it my dad's there you know our youngest is there.
• 1:19:25
  Kelly Thrush: Um, it was amazing, uh it, just it.
• 1:19:27
  Kelly Thrush: It was, uh, it was amazing that it's a memory, that it one I'll never forget, but it absolutely changed me as a person since I've done that race it.
• 1:19:38
  Polly Mertens: It was 1000%.
• 1:19:40
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, because you evolved right Like you're.
• 1:19:42
  Polly Mertens: This is, this process is an evolution.
• 1:19:44
  Polly Mertens: We talk about it as a like breaking down, but we don't really mean breaking down, we mean peeling back Right.
• 1:19:50
  Polly Mertens: It's really an evolution, an opportunity for growth, stripping away all the unnecessary, not even real, false senses of self identity, whatever, constraints, restrictions, ideas, limitations, whatever to find who am I really, what am I doing?
• 1:20:09
  Polly Mertens: How did I even do this?
• 1:20:10
  Polly Mertens: I have no freaking idea.
• 1:20:11
  Polly Mertens: Who am I right now?
• 1:20:12
  Polly Mertens: No idea, right, but it's so incredibly beautiful.
• 1:20:18
  Kelly Thrush: How did people got to witness?
• 1:20:19
  Polly Mertens: that.
• 1:20:20
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, and so many people did, and that I was able to share it with them.
• 1:20:24
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, all these people that support me, oh yeah.
• 1:20:27
  Kelly Thrush: You'll continue to.
• 1:20:28
  Kelly Thrush: Well, and during the race, you know, I had a moment of clarity, to quote the rooms, during the race there was multiple people that came to visit me because I'm a local, you know.
• 1:20:41
  Kelly Thrush: So there's all sorts of people that came while I was in tucson, uh, and I had a conversation with, you know, the person that was next to me, and I said and I kind of smiled and I remember the context of the conversation, but my response was god, it's a, it is amazing, how many people are out here cheering me on.
• 1:20:57
  Kelly Thrush: And and she smiled and very sincerely, as a compliment, went, really, it's amazing, meaning like, of course, you have this many people cheering you on.
• 1:21:07
  Kelly Thrush: And my response was yeah, it's amazing Because I look back to eight years ago when I had destroyed, or tried to destroy, every relationship that I had, and somehow or another eight years later, here I am with these text messages and hugs and people that are taking a week off of work to come help me reach a goal.
• 1:21:31
  Kelly Thrush: Exactly, that is good stuff right there, those relationships and friendships that I have somehow cultivated Right, which is amazing.
• 1:21:43
  Polly Mertens: Well, hopefully, hopefully you have full recognition.
• 1:21:47
  Polly Mertens: I'm sure you're still in the process of actually like fully recognizing.
• 1:21:51
  Polly Mertens: It's going to take a while for it all to continue to download, but but the I am worthy what?
• 1:22:00
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah.
• 1:22:03
  Polly Mertens: Because that was the deepest, darkest.
• 1:22:04
  Polly Mertens: I'm not worthy of getting sober, getting this organ having a life, getting all of these opportunities, having this girlfriend, now wife, having this community, starting to write all of the.
• 1:22:14
  Polly Mertens: Am I worthy, I'm not worthy questions.
• 1:22:18
  Kelly Thrush: Yep.
• 1:22:19
  Polly Mertens: We're just answered.
• 1:22:20
  Kelly Thrush: Yeah, very much so, and continue to answer was fuck, yeah, yeah.
• 1:22:25
  Polly Mertens: And what are you going to do with it?
• 1:22:26
  Kelly Thrush: Yep, that's the whole.
• 1:22:27
  Kelly Thrush: That's that's the key to it is what?
• 1:22:29
  Kelly Thrush: What?
• 1:22:29
  Kelly Thrush: Okay, yeah, the answer is absolutely like, unquestionably.
• 1:22:33
  Kelly Thrush: But now, what do you?
• 1:22:35
  Kelly Thrush: Do you know, and how do you?
• 1:22:37
  Kelly Thrush: How do you bring other people?
• 1:22:39
  Kelly Thrush: How do you become that beacon that attracts other people that are either, uh, in addiction or new to sobriety, or going through their transplant which is why I like doing some of these things is so that you know you can be an example.
• 1:22:50
  Kelly Thrush: I can be an example of no man.
• 1:22:53
  Kelly Thrush: The kind of life that you have on the other side of this is just, it's dumbfounding you know the kind of life you know that you can have incomprehensible, yeah it just is, and so hopefully that's the biggest thing is having a positive impact on folks that need it, and even some that don't, maybe, but just having a positive impact on people.
• 1:23:13
  Polly Mertens: Everybody needs it, yeah some are asleep and are not going to hear it or see it.
• 1:23:18
  Polly Mertens: That's fine.
• 1:23:18
  Polly Mertens: We can't wake up everybody, but everybody needs it.
• 1:23:22
  Kelly Thrush: Yep, everybody.
• 1:23:23
  Kelly Thrush: And having the ones that don't think so right, the ones that say I'm not worthy of it, you know, grabbing them spiritually by the hand and guiding them through when they need that little extra love and support, exactly.
• 1:23:43
  Polly Mertens: I can't even fathom what's going to happen next with you.
• 1:23:45
  Polly Mertens: I have no idea.
• 1:23:46
  Kelly Thrush: I don't know either.
• 1:23:46
  Kelly Thrush: I can't wait though.
• 1:23:49
  Polly Mertens: Whatever it is, I'm totally in.
• 1:23:51
  Polly Mertens: What are we doing?
• 1:23:52
  Polly Mertens: Let's go Exactly, exactly, wow, so beautiful, so beautiful.
• 1:23:58
  Polly Mertens: The story is amazing and really it's because you're amazing and you are a beautiful human.
• 1:24:03
  Polly Mertens: You're on the path, dude, full 1000% on the path.
• 1:24:09
  Polly Mertens: Like it's so incredible.
• 1:24:12
  Kelly Thrush: It's good stuff.
• 1:24:13
  Polly Mertens: It's good stuff.
• 1:24:14
  Polly Mertens: It's good stuff.
• 1:24:15
  Polly Mertens: I hope that people are inspired by this story, in whatever capacity it speaks to them.
• 1:24:20
  Polly Mertens: You just never know who's listening and you know what's going on with them or a loved one, or whatever the dynamic might be.
• 1:24:26
  Polly Mertens: But I believe you always have to start at home.
• 1:24:28
  Polly Mertens: So you know you wouldn't be able to have the impact with hundreds and eventually thousands of people on with your nonprofit and with the course of action that you're taking to help others, if you hadn't first resolved this oh for sure, really owned your physical body, your emotional body, your spiritual body in your life right yeah, absolutely it does.
• 1:24:49
  Kelly Thrush: It starts within you know, I can't I can't love anybody else if I don't love myself, exactly, exactly just can't do it.
• 1:24:58
  Polly Mertens: Keep loving yourself, because we love you.
• 1:25:00
  Polly Mertens: How are people going to be able to find you if they want to continue to oh?
• 1:25:03
  Kelly Thrush: gosh.
• 1:25:04
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, so well, first we'll start with the foundation gratitude and grace foundationorg.
• 1:25:08
  Kelly Thrush: Okay, uh, it's how you find that?
• 1:25:10
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, it's a 501c3.
• 1:25:12
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, we are always looking for donors, so anybody donate and sponsors and sponsors uh, we look for those.
• 1:25:19
  Kelly Thrush: We have all sorts of events.
• 1:25:20
  Kelly Thrush: We're going to have another team for el tour de tucson.
• 1:25:22
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, if there's any cyclists out there that want to do that's a big bike race in november.
• 1:25:26
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, christian, who's one of my, was one of my pacers.
• 1:25:30
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, he's running the mammoth, okay, uh, um, sally mccray's race, uh, in september.
• 1:25:37
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, he's going to run that on behalf of gratitude, anditude and Grace.
• 1:25:40
  Kelly Thrush: He's raising some money.
• 1:25:40
  Kelly Thrush: We got all sorts of different things that we do and events.
• 1:25:44
  Kelly Thrush: So there's all sorts of different ways volunteers or sponsors or donors or whatever.
• 1:25:48
  Kelly Thrush: So, go there first and then Instagram is pretty easy for me it's just keep going, is my handle, so just underscore, keep underscore, going.
• 1:26:02
  Kelly Thrush: Underscore is how you find that and you can find me.
• 1:26:03
  Kelly Thrush: Uh, you can just Google and go from there and there's all sorts of different ways to listen to my story and uh, yeah, and emailing and especially if folks need something, need someone, yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm a phone call away, easy to get ahold of.
• 1:26:16
  Kelly Thrush: We'll walk you through whatever we got to walk you through.
• 1:26:19
  Polly Mertens: Yeah, there's nothing we can't handle.
• 1:26:21
  Polly Mertens: That's what people need to remember.
• 1:26:23
  Polly Mertens: I mean you're a shining, freaking example of that.
• 1:26:29
  Polly Mertens: Thank you, nothing you can't handle right.
• 1:26:31
  Polly Mertens: It's incredible.
• 1:26:32
  Polly Mertens: All right, dude.
• 1:26:35
  Kelly Thrush: I'm proud to call you friend, right back at you.
• 1:26:36
  Kelly Thrush: Can't wait till we get to see each other again.
• 1:26:39
  Polly Mertens: I know I was just thinking about Tucson.
• 1:26:40
  Polly Mertens: I might have to take a look at that bike ride.
• 1:26:42
  Kelly Thrush: Come on down.
• 1:26:44
  Polly Mertens: Love it, love it All.
• 1:26:45
  Polly Mertens: Right, everybody.
• 1:26:45
  Polly Mertens: That's it for us today.
• 1:26:47
  Polly Mertens: Remember what I always say how your life feels is more important than how it looks.
• 1:26:51
  Polly Mertens: This, dude's a testament to that.
• 1:26:53
  Polly Mertens: 1000%, and that's a wrap.
• 1:26:56
  Polly Mertens: We'll see you next time.