October 7 is the day Stacey Li Collver would have turned 59, and I keep meaning to write something for it every year but often find myself staring at a blinking cursor instead. So here is the attempt, on what would be her birthday.
She died in September 2018. I (Stacey’s friend Felix) am 51 now, which is just about the same age she was when she passed. She left us just a few weeks before her 51st birthday. I think about that number more than I’d like to admit.
Stacey was four feet ten inches tall and, by every measure that mattered, an athletic beast. She managed a climbing gym in the Bay Area and started the local SheClimbs chapter, hauling herself up walls that made people twice her size look like they were on their first date with gravity. She found out she had lymphangioleiomyomatosis after feeling out of breath on a Yosemite climb. A doctor on the trip looked at her the way you look at someone standing in a puddle and told her she needed to get checked. She did. The diagnosis was rare and progressive. The only cure was a lung transplant, and in 2005 she got a double transplant. Fourteen more years followed. Only half of all lung transplant recipients make it past five.
But I’m getting ahead of the story. Because the story, really, is about numbers.
In 2009 she did 2009 push-ups and 2009 crunches. Then she posted online: “After doing 2009 push-ups and crunches last year, I decided to raise my goal to 10,000 of each in 2010.” Ten thousand. I remember thinking 10,000 is quite a lot of any exercise, unless we are talking about daily steps.
By 2011 she had moved on to pull-ups, and she dragged me into it. I’m not exactly sure how she was keeping track of them, but for myself—a mechanical engineer who had more than once proclaimed “Microsoft Excel is my favorite software program”—I created a spreadsheet. For pull-ups. To catch up with her by the end of the year, I needed to hit 121 pull-ups in one day and 151 in another, and by the last month of the year she checked in on me every few days with the calm, unhurried energy of a woman who was well on the way to her 2011 before the year’s end and was merely being thorough. I finished by December 11. I was proud of myself for about an hour.

In 2012 she built the “2012 in 2012” group and expanded the menu: weighted pull-ups, push-ups, dips, calf-raises, crunches, squats, bench presses. In 2013 she created the “2013 in 2013” Facebook group, and it grew to 48 members, most of them fellow LAM patients affectionately dubbed LAMMIES. Some of those people lived on oxygen around the clock. Some had lung function as low as 18 percent. They posted their goals anyway. They cheered each other’s victories, even the small ones. I wrote more about her years ago in Remembering Stacey, but the group archives are the truest record of who she became.
Stacey told the group, “Don’t let oxygen cords stop you, or an upcoming transplant. The strength and skills you learn now will be valuable in your survival after transplant.” And: “Waiting for transplant is the hardest part! … doing the exercises gave me a sense of purpose, and a sense of achievement. It was one of the things that kept me from falling into depression.”
She was honest about her own situation. “Although my lung function is only 55%, my health has been pretty stable for two years, so I have had the opportunity to really train my muscles. Being on oxygen or undergoing a lung transplant is psychologically and physically a harder challenge than any healthy person can have. So be yourselves and set your own fitness goals that are appropriate for you!”
I remember her 2013 goal list, which she shared with everyone, and which ended with: “Eat enough to not lose weight doing all of the above!” I laughed so hard I had to sit down. That was Stacey. She could be doing 2013 of anything and still end her list with a joke about calories.
Then came New Year’s Day 2013. She decided to do all 2013 push-ups in a single day and called me to join her. It ended up taking literally all day, as recounted in this post on my blog. I told her afterward, “Never again. Next year if you decide to do that again, you’re on your own!” as though she were the one who had ever roped anyone into anything sensible.
She never tried doing 2000+ push-ups in one day again. But near the end of 2013 she did 863 squats in a day, surprising even herself, and she did some of them at the laundromat, where she shrugged off whatever people thought.
“I guess my legs are stronger than I thought, and it was just a matter of determination and proper mindset,” she reported.
She was generous with encouragement. A friend had fallen off the fitness wagon for years, and Stacey wrote: “I fell off the wagon for years, too. But it is possible to get back in shape.” And to the group at large: “My intention is to give you hope for what is possible after transplant and even while legally disabled. I still have weak lungs like many of you, but I work with it and around it, and enjoy doing what I can.”
She also said, “It’s just a matter of not caring if people think you are weird.” I think that might be the most important sentence she ever wrote.
I keep wondering how she would take the changes happening in the world today. Some of them would astonish her. Some might worry her. Some would probably make her shake her head and say, “Well, that’s new” followed by a hearty laugh. But she would have stayed optimistic about all of it, because optimism was not something she performed. It was simply the ground she stood on.
Her transplanted lungs gave her fourteen years. That is extraordinary by the numbers that matter in transplant medicine. And it was still not enough. She was nearly 51 when she died, and I am 51 now, and the math of that sits with me every October 7.
I still do pull-ups. I still set goals each year, and I still keep a spreadsheet—or at least a Training Log fed with data contained within MySQL tables. It is a small thing. It is not 2013 push-ups in a day. But it is hers, and it is mine, and that is enough.
Have any memories you’d like to share about Stacey on this site? Please leave a comment below and I (Felix, the webmaster) will be in touch!