This is courage.

While I was running yesterday, the overhead TV was showing NBC's special on some of the American Paralympic athletes, and the last person they featured was a 16-year-old swimmer, Marin Morrison. She was a potential Olympic-caliber swimmer when she was diagnosed with brain cancer a few years ago, and has undergone four surgeries, the last of which took place after she had locked in her qualifying times for Beijing, and left her with devastating speech and motor impairments that should have made it impossible for her to swim. Yet despite that, and punishing rounds of chemotherapy, radiation and experimental drugs, she still had the courage and determination to come to the Olympics and complete all her races, even though she is so frail she had to be wheeled to the edge of the pool and helped into the water--she still did it.

Not only does that kind of courage and strength put all my petty daily troubles into perspective, but it tells me that if someone can come back literally from the brink of death, endure what she has, and still find the toughness to finish her Olympic races, then healthy, able-bodied me ought bloody well to be able to get strong enough to swim two miles in a lake by May.