Reading · Ali on the Run Newsletter

September 26, 2023.

Anniversaries, generally speaking, don’t mean a lot or do a lot to me. I’ve come to see them as just days on the calendar.

In 2023, my first day of chemotherapy was scheduled for September 26.

It felt particularly cruel, given that September 26 was my [former?] wedding anniversary, and my marriage had just ended. My soon-to-be ex and I were still living together, and the significance of the day, obviously, went unacknowledged. We’d thrown a hell of a party on September 26, 2015. And now, eight years later, the recurring date was deleted from my Google Calendar, and replaced with a day at the Dartmouth cancer center. (Was maybe not the funnest time to be Ali Feller!)

It was probably best that I was very, very preoccupied that day. Instead of being sad about one thing, I was sad about a different thing!

Now, it’s just another day, and it’s really, truly fine. (Time heals, pinky promise.)

In general, I do OK with non-celebratory anniversaries and significant dates across the board.

Not this week, though!

I woke up on Tuesday and I just started crying. I was not expecting this!

Nothing specific set me off. I just woke up and the day felt so heavy.

I cried — hard at first, and, eventually, more intermittently — for hours.

It was May 12, which isn’t a great day in The History of Ali Feller.

May 12, 2023.

May 12, 2023, was the day I remember as The First Worst Day of My Life. I knew more hard days were ahead, but this was the day when it all started to fall apart.

I cried for the emotions from that day. The ones I’ve dealt with, and the ones I most definitely haven’t.

I cried for how much has changed. Some for the better. Some less so.

I cried for how heavy everything still feels, three years later. Some areas are much lighter. Others press down on me, daily, until it feels like I might completely crumble.

May 12 isn’t marked on my calendar. It’s not a date I want to remember. But it’s impossible to let this one just pass by.

This is my now-annual Big, Shitty Week.

May 20, 2023. The day after I got my first diagnosis. We cried, and then we ran, and then we cried a little more.

This is the week when my world fell apart in 2023, and it’s the week when it fell apart again in 2025.

I joke that “Nothing good happens on the Friday before the Brooklyn Half Marathon.”

May 16, 2025.

It was the Friday before the Brooklyn Half in 2023 when I got my first breast cancer diagnosis, and it was the Friday before the Brooklyn Half in 2025 when I got my second, worse, diagnosis. I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing both times the pathology reports from my respective biopsies popped up in the MyDH portal I’d been refreshing obsessively for days. (At a cafe across from Katie Couric’s apartment on the Upper East Side, having a chocolate croissant for breakfast with Mary Wittenberg; out for a walk near my house while Cousin Jackie ran up ahead. Both times right around 10 AM.)

May 17, 2024. Hugging my friend Jess at my live show with Emma Coburn. I was so, so sick.

At the 2024 Brooklyn Half, I was still in active treatment for my first cancer diagnosis, and my Crohn’s was flaring terribly at the time. I spent the entire weekend running for the bathroom. I cried a ton then, too. I was a mess. (Close Friends, was that the year I had an epic meltdown in the lobby at the hotel in Brooklyn and then panic-booked myself at the Mandarin Oriental for a night because I was convinced that would calm me down? It was, right? Awesome, good times, solid financial decisions.)

And so, yet again, it feels particularly cruel that this year, I’ll be spending The Friday Before the Brooklyn Half back at Dartmouth.

I have allergies and they’ve been unkind this season, so it’s probably that. But if I feel so much as a twinge or the tiniest shortness of breath now, I’m on high alert. I’ve been having some ~awareness~ in my chest for a few weeks now (not pain at all, just a feeling I notice, hard to describe), so I alerted my medical team and they’re bringing me in for a CT scan.

On The Friday Before the [Damn] Brooklyn Half.

At 10 AM.

I am, unsurprisingly, wholly optimistic that we’re going to break this shitty cycle. That I’ll be called (behind my back) a hypochondriac, and that the radiologists will laugh and laugh about the dramatic, paranoid girl with the pollen problem! I’m honestly not concerned, but OK fine, I’m always at least a little concerned at this point in my life.

May 17, 2023.

Good luck to everyone running the Brooklyn Half on Saturday! I genuinely hope you have an awesome time. No shade to this race! (Actually, literally, there’s like no shade in this race.) I hope you have a ton of fun shuffling out to Coney Island and I hope it’s a great day and I hope no one gets any bad news today!!!

The Friday Before the Brooklyn Half

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