During the summer of 2020, I was working as a Project Manager in Mexico when I suffered an
intracerebral hemorrhage, also known as a stroke, caused by bleeding within the brain.
In the height of the Covid pandemic, I was rushed to the hospital, where the bleeding stopped
without surgery, but my recovery was slow. In the months that followed, I suffered from
severe anxiety, nerve pain, and depression. As a 49-year-old, I was terrified of what the future held for me.
Despite these challenges, I remained committed to regaining my health and returning to a normal
life. As part of my recovery process, I decided to start running again, something that I used to
love as a teenager and while serving in the military.
I decided to set a goal for myself - complete a 100-mile ultramarathon within one year of my stroke.
The magic of crazy goals is they create opportunities for you to explore yourself in expanded dimensions
and truly allow you to investigate who you are as a human. I had never run an ultra-marathon, and without
the experience of surviving my stroke, I would not have had the courage to explore the possibility.
The truth is, I would have been too afraid to fail, and too undisciplined to put in the miles necessary to
even contemplate an event like this. - Kent Bragg
