It's Coming: From Crutches to Half Marathon

Summary: In this special solo episode, Katie officially announces her upcoming book, From Crutches to Half Marathon: A Cognomovement Journey from Childhood Trauma to a Reclaimed Life.

She shares the story behind why she wrote it, who she wrote it for, and what is inside. From the 18 months she spent mostly on crutches and the temporary disability that changed everything, to the forgiveness practice that got her knee straight in two to three weeks, to completing a half marathon just six years later at nearly fifty years old, this is a deeply personal and honest look at what healing from childhood trauma and chronic pain can actually look like.

Katie also opens up about her mom's advanced dementia, the grief of watching someone you love fade away, and how writing this book 15 minutes at a time over several years became one of the most meaningful things she has ever done.

👉 Grab your copy and join the waitlist here: www.katiewrigley.com/book

Key Takeaways

→ The book is called From Crutches to Half Marathon: A Cognomovement Journey from Childhood Trauma to a Reclaimed Life. It is coming very soon.

→ Katie wrote this book for the person looking for a thread of hope to hold onto. Whatever state you are in, it does not have to stay that way.

→ Post-traumatic stress is not a disorder. Katie deliberately avoids the word disorder because it implies permanence that simply is not true. There is so much that can be done.

→ Forgiveness got her knee straight. Within two to three weeks of starting to meditate and practice forgiveness, Katie's housemate noticed she had stopped limping. She had not been able to walk without pain in over a year.

→ Everything you need to heal is already inside you. Her first wellness coach Shannon Lee planted that seed when Katie did not believe it. The book is proof of what became possible when she started to act on it.

→ Big goals happen 15 minutes at a time. Katie wrote the entire book in her morning scribing practice, 15 minutes a day, on a tiny iPad. Consistency over intensity.

→ Beta readers described the book as relatable, gripping and something they could see themselves in. That was exactly what Katie set out to create.

Transcript

Katie Wrigley (00:28)
Welcome back to the Catapult Effect Podcast. I'm your host, Katie Wrigley. I am really excited, per usual, since I realize that I'm always excited when I'm coming on here to talk to you. This episode is particularly exciting to me because I am announcing on this platform for the first time, officially, I think, my upcoming book. It's coming very soon. It's called From Crutches to Half Marathon.

And the subtitle is A Cognitive Movement Journey from Childhood Trauma to a Reclaim Life. And the book is a story about exactly that from my time when I was on crutches and what led to that time. And I was on crutches for around 18 months, on and off, mostly on. It was tough, leading to a knee replacement. That was part of the crutches in there. But then just six years after that, I did a half marathon. And

It's talking about a lot of the things that led to my temporary disability in 2018, as well as what I did to be able to shift out of it and be able to complete a half marathon six years later, and just three and a half years after I was introduced to Cogna Movement. And the book, even though it's about me, I didn't write it for me. I wrote it for you. I wrote it for the person.

Who is trying to find some thread of hope to hold on to? I have lived directly the impact of childhood trauma. And it has legs and it will have long-reaching legs that'll tap into each part of your life. And it creates patterns that work against you. Patterns telling you that there's something wrong with you.

It creates really these beliefs that the patterns go off of. That's a better way to say it.

But I want you to know that there's hope. Because no matter what your state is, chances are there is something that you can do that can make your life easier, that can give you more peace and ease. And I want that for you. When I initially was disabled, my beliefs at the time, I thought the pain was going to last forever. I didn't think I was worth setting boundaries. I thought boundaries are a way to push people away.

I had none. None. That was a big reason that I couldn't heal after the knee replacement, which I go into in pretty good depth in the book.

But it's so easy for your mind to tell you that things are never gonna get better, especially when pain levels are high, when you're facing a scary diagnosis, when you don't know if things can get better. It is absolutely terrifying. And that's how I felt. Like when I first got Tanji when she was eight weeks old and we hobbled because walk would have been way too strong of a word for what we did.

We hobbled to the mailbox. And this was when I was in Colorado. So the mailbox is actually a little bit of a distance away. Like it's nothing for me to get to it here in Maine. But it was probably about a tenth of a mile away. And no, that's not a long distance. But when your body is screaming with pain and you have an eight-week-old puppy, it is a major accomplishment to walk to the mailbox and back. And I remember putting on her little leash.

And having her waddle along beside me and the both of us needed a nap after that. Everything wipes me out at the time. And it's it's almost hard for me to remember being in that state. And I'm not trying to remember to be in that state either. It it seems like it happened to a different person. And that's what happens as you heal trauma, as you get farther and farther away from it. It feels less and less like something that happened to you.

And more like something you heard about or maybe watched in a movie. And that is why I wrote the book, is because there's a lot of messaging out there that's really limiting around trauma. And I hear a lot of people referring it as post-traumatic stress with the last initial beginning with D, which I very rarely do. I'll call it post-traumatic stress or post-traumatic stress injury, because when we use the word disorder, it applies a permanence to it that isn't true.

Does trauma make physiological changes in your brain? Yep. Does it make changes in your body? Yep. And there's something that you can do about it. There's a lot actually that you can do about it. There's so many different methods. But I haven't seen anything still to this day that's as comprehensive as cogna movement. And the more I do it and the more people that are working with me to do it, the more often I'm hearing that this is a go to.

For people. And I hear a lot. gosh, I can tell when I haven't done a session for a few days because I just start feeling icky again and crap just starts to pile up. And then I do a session and I feel so much better again. I've heard that so many times. And I love, love, love, love hearing that. And it's true. I usually keep a daily habit.

But sometimes if life's going pretty well, it's not something that's a focus. But right now, there's a lot that I've been carrying in my nervous system. And I talk about a little bit about it in the book. And one of the things that happened that I talk about in the book is my mom's cognitive decline. That happened a little over five years ago now, within the first year that I moved to Maine. And I go into great detail in the story. And at this point in time in 2026.

She has advanced dementia. And if you've ever dealt with someone who's declining from dementia, it's a different type of grief because you still get to have the person that you love. They're still there. But they act a little different. And in my mom's case, she also looks a little different. She's a lot smaller than she used to be. But she's still my mom. I still love her. And there's also a grieving process for the mom that she isn't anymore, the one I grew up with.

She's she's very different from that person. And while it is very hard to watch, there's some beauty in it as well. When she was at her most powerful, she and I clashed because we are so much alike. And when I said that to my dad, he's You guys aren't like alike. It's like, yeah, except the things that like we're annoyed about with ourselves, we both have.

So it was like someone constantly holding the mirror. Like anytime I was around her, I was accidentally holding the mirror of the stuff she didn't like about herself. And when she was around me, she was accidentally holding the mirror of stuff I didn't like about myself. And so we would tend to bick her within a couple of days of being around each other and get on each other's nerves really quick. And all of that is gone now. I get to just sit with her, be with her, and be in whatever reality she has on any given day.

And finding those pieces of enjoyment, that's been something that's been really powerful that I wouldn't have been able to see. And I had been thinking earlier as I was thinking about the book and I was thinking about the work that I'm continuing to do, like growing a business, also not easy. And the fact that growing the business, working in the business full time, correlated in the exact month that my mom had a cognitive decline, that's been a synchronicity I haven't really been able to get away from yet. But

Going back to the book, there's a lot of details in there. And I'm providing you tools throughout the book to help you start to put it into action. I wanted to create this book for you, like I said, to go deep into some of these areas of healing so you can help yourself on your healing journey, whether you've started a journey or not, wherever you are in the journey. The feedback that we've had from beta readers about this book is that they really love it. They feel themselves in the story.

And they found that it was really relatable. So I'm really, really excited to release it. I don't have a release date yet, but I do have a place where you can sign up. So I'm going to put that in the show notes. You can go to katyrigley.com slash book and you can hop on the wait list. And it's also going to give you a quick little outline of what you can expect in the book, going into more detail than what I've shared here. And what I want you to get out of the book.

When I know you can get out of it is hope for yourself and know that whatever state you're in, it doesn't have to stay the way it is. And that there are things that you can do. And you may be shocked by how much is already inside of you that you weren't even aware that you had. That was definitely the case with me. And in the book, I talk about my friend Shannon, who was my first wellness coach that I worked with, Shannon Lee. And we're still in touch today.

And she had planted a seed that I already had everything that I needed within me to heal. And at that point in time, I was told I was gonna need three different surgeries to lower the pain in my body. One for my neck where I had a herniated disc, one for my knee because it wasn't fully straight. Again, I hadn't been able to fully extend it from the knee replacement, and one for my back because I really wasn't good at skydiving and knocked the crap out of myself.

But it wasn't just the skydiving. The the deeper reasons for pain were was the childhood trauma and a lot of the bullying that I also dealt with for a lot of my childhood from a toxic relationship of someone that's within vicinity of the family. I'm gonna leave their identity anonymous because that part isn't important. What's important is healing from that.

I wanted to give you a little bit of the inside of how I came to write the book. And again, like I didn't write it for me. Well, I kind of wrote it for me, but really I wrote it for you. For me, it was to

Get it off my bucket list. So when I was disabled, one of the things that Shannon taught me, that was what I was going to tell you. Okay. So Shannon had planted a seed at the time that I already had everything within me that I needed. And she didn't think I was going to need surgery. And I thought she was crazy. And then I started listening to what she told me to do. And weirdly enough, I was trying to prove her wrong. I go into detail about this in the book. I was trying to prove her wrong. and

Within two to three weeks, I'm not sure when, because I actually didn't notice our brains are weird like that. But my housemate noticed that I wasn't limping anymore. It's like, what the hell? All I'd done was started to meditate and started to practice forgiveness for the people that I was like rip shit pissed at at the time. And somehow forgiveness got my knee straight, just straight. I was able to walk normally without pain for the first time.

In a year and a half. And she had my attention after that. And you'll hear a lot of how that and that story unfolds in the book. So, all right. So glad I remembered that when I was still recording. That's gonna be a funny little glip. Here I am, real life, unedited. This is me. Don't always have the words. Anyway.

I wrote the book because one of the things that Shannon had recommended was to make a bucket list of all the places I wanted to go and all the things that I wanted to do in this life. And so I put a whole bunch of stuff down thinking, I don't know that I'm ever gonna be able to do any of these things. But she said, just give it a shot. The brain is an amazing thing. You'll be shocked at what happens. And so there were two things. There was actually a lot of things that I put on the bucket list, and I've I've knocked off some of the travel destinations.

Alaska and Norway were on there. Those have been knocked off now. Check, check. And I also put do a half marathon. Check. Did that in 2024. And write a book. These were all things I put on my bucket list. And I had been told a lot because of a lot of the crazy drama that I was bringing into my life when I was still going off the rails. Again, you're gonna understand at a whole deep level the level I went to of self destruction. Like

My friend Ryan was one of the beta readers, and he was like, You are like Olympic level self-destruction. And I can laugh about it because I've forgiven myself for that. But oof, yeah, I did a bang up job of it. Again, you can hear all about that in the book. And I share it because I know that I'm not the only one that's been as self-destructive as I was. I mean, I had people around me self-destructing themselves right along with me. So I know that there were other people who have had similar paths.

And I had been told so many times before I met Shannon that I should write a book. I should write a book. Like some people mention, like my ridiculous dating woes that I've had in the past, like lots of different options for books. And there's lots of other books in me. I don't know what the next one's gonna be, but I got some ideas. But let's get this first one out the door first, shall we? But it came little by little. So it wasn't like I sat down a couple weekends and knocked it out. I actually wrote it really slowly and I set the

deadline for myself that I wanted to write the book by the time I was 50. And for the most part I did. I still had a little bit of wrapping up to do in the last couple months of 2024 before we we hung up the year. And I remember like saying, okay, I need to finish this so that I can really say that I finished this in this year, even if I didn't completely finish by the time I turned 50, it was, it was close enough that I I counted as a win. It was a couple months off the deadline, but I made it and I did it.

And it felt really good to accomplish that. But it was conscious stream of consciousness writing. So there was a lot of a repetition because I was writing it 15 minutes at a time. That was about the time that I had. I took it in my journaling in the morning. If you've listened to me at all, you know I love doing Hal Elrod's miracle mornings and scribing is one of the practices in there. And so I took that time of scribing and just wrote my book.

15 minutes at a time on my teeny tiny little mini iPad and knocked it out. Like some of the keys don't even have you can't even see the letters on them anymore because I've used the keyboard so much. And then when I had bigger chunks of time on the weekend and I was feeling more creative, I'd write some more. But it was bits and pieces. And it wasn't until I got introduced to Master Book Builders, who is the incredible husband-wife team of Tom Collins and Yvonne DeVita.

And I met them through a mastermind I had been in called Boss Academy. And Yvonne and Tom. And Yvonne, like Tom does the design and he's so good. I'm so excited for you to see this book. It's just amazing. And when he first showed me the print preview, like or not the print preview, the the digital preview, I was like, my God, it's so real. It was so real. And Yvonne is incredible as an editor.

Like she turned that repetitious stream of consciousness writing into a book, a book that people can see themselves in, a book that helps you understand a little bit more about me and what helped me get into this work. And I'm so grateful to the two of them because without them, this book like it wouldn't be able to have the impact that it can now have because of them. And I am

Both terrified and really, really excited to bring it to the public. And I won't lie, when it went out to beta readers, I totally felt like I was standing on stage fuck naked and letting the world see me. And it was a little daunting. But then when I got the positive feedback coming back, I was like, my God. Like I was, I was blown away. I was so humbled and just just really, really happy that it hit the mark that I wanted it to hit.

That people could feel themselves in it. They felt it was relatable. They were grabbed into the narrative. They really liked it. And I'm very, very excited to release it into the world. So if you want to know when the book is coming out, I encourage you to go hop on the wait list. It's katyrrigley.com/slash book. I'll put the link in the show notes for you. And hop on. You'll get an email from me. So if you don't see it, check your spam folder. But you'll get an email from me.

That'll tell you that you're in. And then if you also want to join me for the book launch, I I don't have a time yet, so or day. So you may not be able to commit to it. But if you're interested, you can reply back to the that email and say, Yeah, I'd like to join. And it's that simple. So that's all I wanted to share with you today is my upcoming book. I'm so excited. It's coming out pretty soon. We finished the last editing last week. And then Tom is doing his design magic again. And then I get to see it print proof.

And then it's going to be out the door. really, really, really excited. Thank you for joining me again today. And until next episode, please be well.