I recently committed to walk and ruck in the 50 Mile March.
The mission behind it is simple, even if the reality is not.
Every day, veterans lose battles most people never see. Twenty-two servicemen and servicewomen a day die by suicide. Others fight homelessness after spending years protecting freedoms the rest of us take for granted. The March exists to support organizations trying to change that, while also helping build something called The Community for Hope… a future campus designed to help veterans rebuild their lives.
So I’m going to walk fifty miles in a single day with weight on my back.
But the truth is, the training part… the painful, exhausting, “why am I doing this to myself?” part… that’s for me.
PTSD has been my closest companion for nearly thirty-eight years.
I understood the clinical definition long before I understood I was living inside it.
That realization didn’t really happen until I joined The March and started listening to the stories around me. Story after story from people carrying invisible wars inside themselves. And somewhere in those conversations, I realized trauma doesn’t always arrive wearing combat boots.
Sometimes it arrives in hospital rooms.
Sometimes it arrives through loss.
Sometimes it arrives so early in life that you mistake survival mode for personality.
Losing a parent young changes you in ways you don’t fully understand until decades later. The compounded traumas settle into your bones. Some become strengths. Others become demons.
Some taught me how to survive.
Others taught me how to disappear emotionally while standing right in front of people.
That’s part of why I’m doing this. To strengthen the parts of me worth keeping… and finally confront the parts that are not.
When people ask how I got involved with The March, the easy answer is “Lexi.”
Three years ago, an eight-year-old girl qualified for the event, and I volunteered almost immediately. I didn’t even know what my role would be yet. I just knew I needed to help.
Maybe it was because service already ran through so much of my life. A grandfather who served in World War I and quietly carried untreated PTSD for the rest of his days. A brother now nearing three decades in the Air Force. Friends and family members who gave pieces of themselves most people will never fully understand.
And then there was this fearless little girl doing something extraordinary while the rest of us stood around talking about problems.
So I showed up.
What I didn’t realize at the time was why her courage hit me so hard.
I understand it now.
When I was young, my mother and I were inseparable.
She was brilliant and impossible to describe properly unless you knew her. An ER doctor. A pathologist. A mother of five. She could discuss literature while cooking dinner, sing Carpenters songs over the stove, answer medical questions, help with homework, and somehow still make every person around her feel seen.
She was the center of gravity in our home.
And after dinner, when the dishes were done, we’d walk.
Just the two of us.
Those walks became our world.
We talked about life, about people, about kindness, about fear, about what it meant to become a good man someday. At the time, I thought they were just conversations.
I understand now they were lessons.
Because while all of this was happening, she was dying.
Brain cancer.
Multiple open-skull surgeries.
Pain most adults couldn’t imagine carrying with grace.
Yet somehow she still joked with doctors that they should install a zipper in her head to make future surgeries easier.
That was her.
Still fighting.
Still teaching.
Still protecting us from the full weight of what was happening.
I was nine years old when she could no longer take those walks with me.
And I still remember the exact moment I realized it.
Some memories don’t fade with time. They sharpen.
I can still see it clearly.
The colors.
The silence.
The feeling.
Everything.
That’s part of why this matters to me.
Because I know what it feels like to watch the person who makes you feel safe slowly become unrecognizable from pain and illness. I know what it feels like when the foundation beneath a child quietly disappears.
And while I can’t save my mother now, maybe I can help someone else keep theirs a little longer.
Maybe one less child has to experience that kind of loss.
Maybe one veteran decides to stay.
Maybe one family gets another year together.
That matters.
So I’ll walk the fifty miles.
For veterans.
For the organizations trying to help them.
For the people silently carrying things they don’t know how to say out loud.
But mostly… I’ll walk it for the kid I used to be.
And for the man I’m still trying to become.
Because somewhere in all those miles, I know I’ll hear her beside me again.
And I know she’ll walk every step with me.
If this resonated with you, you’re not alone.
