Lisa Garr: Becoming Aware

Lisa Garr: I’ve always been a very hardworking person. I had two very hardworking parents and they instilled in me a very good work ethic. When I was in my twenties, I started a company in the entertainment industry – filling audiences for television shows. A total niche business and I still run it today.

Here I am, working my butt of, sleeping on my office floor, waking up the next morning, doing my day job and starting my company by night. It was really full-on. There wasn’t a lot of time for a relationship in my life, plus the industry tends to have strong competition and infidelity and I was getting caught up in that. I was dating this one guy, Jon, who was not in the industry. He was an accountant and a mountain biker. Maybe needless to say, I wasn’t treating the relationship as a priority in life. And everything in life is relationship, but I didn’t get that. We had broken up because we couldn’t be in this relationship any longer. I was second overall in a California mountain bike series and he said to me that he would still support me in the last race.

So I am in the final lap of this race, it was a 108 degrees, over 5,000 feet of climbing, several loops totaling 26 miles, and in the last loop, right before a long descend, I knew that I could overtake the girl ahead of me before the switchbacks so that I could win the series. It felt like a relief and a shock to me and I think I let go at that moment. That was also the moment that I passed out while I was riding – I was on the bike, on top of the hill and I completely blacked out. I fell hard and I must have hit my head hard because my helmet was cracked in 13 places and my jersey was completely ripped. I fell a long way.