The Life We Have | Mortality, Movement & the Richness of Being Alive

So I guess I would just like to start kind of at the beginning like who are you and why are we here? Good question, that's a good question. I'm just a guy, just a fella like everybody else. At the beginning I set a very very modest goal and the goal was this that I would run at least one mile every day until I pass away. Sometimes it's hard, sometimes it's hard. My mind is going to ask my body to do things that my body may not want to do but knows it should. Everybody can talk about why does somebody freestyle or why does somebody a big wave rider and a lot of it is the immediacy that you're drawn into by having no choice but to be completely there. I feel the same way. I'm not climbing El Cab but I've been fighting stage four cancer for 20 years. That might be one of the things that we're talking about here, I don't know. Running for me was a daily pact I made with myself that even with a very sick body and a very limited body in many ways to get as much as I could out of it, to wring every ounce out of it that I've got. Good morning. My body's fighting all the time. Good morning, good morning. You can't see what my lungs look like or my organs, the ones that have been damaged. Hey y'all, good morning, how are you? Just the chances that I'm alive at all in any state at all are very small. I should have died years ago. The last thing you want to like think is that there's mortality when you're young. In 2004 I'm diagnosed and there's an 85% chance I won't live five years. I'm like 20 something years old and go back for Thanksgiving you just get diagnosed with stage four and everybody's like, do you want the big bed? You get to go get the turkey first. In 2011 I had a recurrence in my spine. So I went through chemotherapy again, lost my hair for the third time. There are people that I was friends with like years previously that are just like coming out of the thing like, we need to have a conversation man. And then it's odd because I just haven't died. So I mean I don't want to let everybody down. In 2020 we found cancer again. Wow, multiple tumors on the left side. I guess a week after I'd finished chemotherapy, I started running every day, every single day. I used to like go see my doctor and he would be like, are you having a hard time like getting up the stairs? And I'm like, I ran seven miles this morning. There's no way that someone with one lung should be able to run a six minute mile. I'll do it again tomorrow. I'll do it in TOR. I mean, you'd have to skip me up off the street. Hey buddy, what's going on buddy? Hello Emmett. Come on. Emmett, let's go in the backyard. Come on buddy. Oh, there you go. My mom wanted me to show you all these. This is just from 2020. It's always cool to do a buckle. You only get a buckle, you know, if you do 100K or 100 miler. I can tell my mom I did it. I had a customer come in today and he's a radiologist with Strick. He could tell the way that I said stage four in 2004 and 2005 and I want to tell you about my son, he knew you had to still be alive. I definitely slip into the in-between sometimes. I think when you're hearing me moaning at night, I think, oh my gosh, I think if I do like that, I think, do you leave me for a minute? It's about 12 30. I run downstairs and he's asleep. It's nonstop and you yell no, no, no. You do that a lot. I don't know what's happening there man. Probably talking to myself. There's no way that I'd still be around if it weren't for them. My goodness, how many nights has she slept in the hospital? I don't even know. Couldn't count them. Couldn't count them. And my brother has sacrificed so very much. Sit with me in waiting rooms and in so many chairs where I was getting medicine. But I'm on the tightrope, which we all know I'm walking. The doctors know that I'm walking all the time and I'm wobbling. I'm wobbling and it doesn't take much. I've been trying to think about how bad I'm hurting right now, but I think I'm gonna go. Do whatever you think you can do. Yeah, well, I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go. That's what I mean. That's what I need to do right now. Oh ma, I'm just gonna do them all. Okay, whatever you think you can do. I'm just gonna keep the streak going. Okay. I've got a bunch of new tumors and start chemo tomorrow. So we're doing this two weeks in a row and one week is an off week. Okay. I don't have to remind you that you have a terminal illness, but we're gonna focus on trying to make you feel better. Okay. So he's blowing all the prognoses out of the water from the start. This is what a normal lung looks like. It's full of air. And then on the opposite side, you can see these masses. It's, you know, 80% tumor. That's a tumor. That's a tumor. That's a tumor. That's a tumor. Yeah. I hear very little air moving here. Probably. A little bit better there. That's good. Chemotherapy, just the treatment from cancer is very, very rough. All right, my man, can I get your full name and date of birth? Yeah, Rob Schaefer, 72576. Appreciate it. Gradually, you're decreased to just a very small percentage of a human being. Still within our capacity to be able to like filter it through a magical lens. When you go to bed at night in the hospital and you can hear that pump going, that's you and the voice in your head. That voice has a lot of layers. Either I'm funny or I'm cute or I'm athletic. I'm sarcastic. I'm ironic. I'm good at music. You know, I was laying there in the bed, late 20s. Anything I'd ever been good at, I wasn't good at anymore. No hair on my body anywhere. Tubes all over me. Scars on my back. Can't walk, can't move. Anything I'd ever thought about myself, gone. And I'm just a body. I feel like this body laying in a bed with poison being pumped inside of me. And that daggum voice was the same one. I realized that a big part of my voice was connecting to things that were temporary, that could easily be gone. Every day, every day, every day, every day, every day, every day. Be thankful for your body. Be thankful for your mind. Laying there, hooked up to a bunch of poison. I'm still grateful for those days too. Look at that cover of their album. No, no, you gotta scratch that one part and he'll kick. No, it's right here. No, it's like right here. Right there. There it is. There's the spot. Yeah. Three years, three years, two months, 20 days without missing a day of running. They needed to end. How are you? I'm okay. You're okay? I haven't coughed any blood today, which is good. Okay. Emmett threw up right there. Really? Maybe it was like empathic barfing. He misses running so much. Every once in a while, he'll just say, oh, I wish I could run. Uh-oh, he's sick. Yeah, he's gonna throw up. Okay. We knew he'd be here. He knew he'd be here, but he's not going to give up. I don't deny the prognosis. Never have. But I also didn't think three months down the road, I thought about what I could do now. I'm not there yet. I'm here. I'm fully here. Yeah. I sit around scared to death all day, thinking about the YDS and put yourself in a real painful, painful place. One of just fear, just fear. Obviously, death is really something that's kind of close to me now. I would say I'm not afraid, but surely I am. But at the end of the day, I just still stay sick. But man, I've been lucky to still be sick this long. Last night I was eating supper and I was eating some soup, some broccoli and cheese soup. And I looked down at the soup and there was hair all around my bowl. This is my fifth, my fifth time to lose my hair. So that's, that's kind of, yeah, that's just kind of how it is. So anyway. I did hear you scream a little bit last night. I did okay for a while. I did a good enough job throughout the day that it was muted, not nearly muted, but muted enough, muted enough, tolerable. But then it just got so bad. I have seen him go through so much for so many years. We've always told him you need to share your story. The fact that he was finally willing to do so was like a signal to me that he thought it was near the end. Last weekend when he felt so bad and he says Thursday night's my funeral and I get to be there. I think he meant it. Thanks drink. Yeah, it's decaf too. I did like a decaf Americano. So it's hot. I think it'll be okay. There'll be some good music in there somewhere. I'm going to be like in the ground and that thing's just true. That dude's got a bad-ass music. I've been waiting for Mr. Rob Shaver. Thank y'all so much for coming out. I don't really know what to say. A lot of you know the health. My health situation. Many years ago when the doctor told me that I would not have to live the rest of my life on oxygen. I got real lucky that when I went home and looked up one of the best things you can do for your lung is sing. You know, I have so many memories I'll never forget. This is his baby book. So that was the day he was born. When he was two, that kid, he never stopped. He's Superman in all of them. We used to laugh and say that he was a professional high school basketball player because he took it so seriously. Nobody gets to map out their life. We don't get to choose our path. I wouldn't want any other sons. I wouldn't want to not have this burden. This is our life. It's about so much more than just running. It's literally just a choice daily to live deeply and thoroughly and with beautiful effort. Not for results, not for money or fame or lifestyle, but for the richness of being alive. There is beauty all around you. Drink it today, won't step out of time. Any mountain you can climb. When the sky is dark, you think you've lost your way. I got on a CT scan, sitting in the dark room and not moving. And I get off the machine and I said to the guy, man, it's so cool that y'all had that cello music. And he goes, there was no cello playing. I'd be damned if I didn't hear cello. I mean, I heard music, literal music while I was on that machine. I heard like it being played. The music is always playing. Sometimes you have to listen harder to find it, but it's always playing.