Marion Prigent – Adapting sport and daily life to illness

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Today, I’m hosting Marion Prigent. Marion is a freelance outdoor sports enthusiast who shares her adventures on madamevoyage.fr and also on La Sportive Outdoor magazine. I asked her here today because I wanted her to share her experience with you.

Marion has had autoimmune diseases for many years, which she has learned to manage on a daily basis. And I’ve always been really impressed by her state of mind, her resilience in the face of these illnesses and the fact that she also manages to stay very active. So I decided to invite her to tell us all about it, so that it might help you too if you’re in the same situation.

Introducing Marion

Marion, can you briefly introduce yourself?

I’m 37 and I’ve been living in Haute-Savoie for 5 years now, but I’m originally from Brittany. I lived in Alsace for a few years, which is where we met. And I’ve been self-employed for 8 years part-time and 2 years full-time, so we’ll see why. And I’m still a fan of many outdoor sports, outdoor sports of course!

Speaking of sports, what do you do?

So today, I’m a regular day hiker . Itinerant hiking too, paragliding of course, electric mountain biking and swimming too. And then, on a gentler note, yoga and pilates. And then, of course, there’s winter sports, mainly ski touring and snowshoeing.

Wow, that’s a lot of sport! Have you always been very sporty, or is that something that happened a little later?

Yes, ever since I was a little girl, I’ve always played a lot of sport, both in clubs and outdoors with my parents. We used to go on camping trips every weekend. And we were into water sports (in Brittany, no wonder!). So swimming in the sea, windsurfing and the little sailboats when you were just starting out.

Announcing the disease

Let’s move on to your illnesses. I know it was in 2015, if I’m not mistaken, that you were diagnosed with several autoimmune diseases. Can you tell us more about them? Maybe some of our listeners don’t know what an autoimmune disease is. Can you explain?

Of course I do. Indeed, after a very complicated year at work, I’ve had a number of fainting spells. Colleagues, friends and strangers in the subway took me to the emergency room without me realizing it, because I’d lost consciousness.

As a result, I was hospitalized for a week and was diagnosed with my first autoimmune disease. So, to put it simply, an autoimmune disease is your own body fighting your own body. It’s microorganisms, in fact, attacking another microorganism because they think it’s foreign and doesn’t belong here. That’s it, in a nutshell. Often, it’s triggered by stress, by difficulties, by an emotional shock, so to speak. So what is it? I can’t say, I don’t know. The fact remains that I have Birmer’s disease, and since then I’ve had several others.

How did you take the news at the time?

Listen, since my life had already been altered for a year, very complicated, I was tired and in the end I couldn’t even eat, so I had to drink only soups, only liquid things, fruit juices that I made myself with a juice extractor to keep it healthy, that when I had a diagnosis, I said to myself: “I’m not crazy after all”.

Because at some point, what’s difficult in these cases is that you know me, I’m… always very, very cheerful and when I say I’m not well, you know very well that the next day I’m fine, so it’s never easy when you start saying that you really don’t feel well but you feel that there’s something deeper going on.

But apart from saying that you’re hurting all over and that it’s not easy, the day I was taught that, I said to myself, you know, you only have two choices anyway, you can either sink or rise again, so you know me, I chose to rise again, to keep going in fact.

Asking the right questions

That’s impressive enough. And then you decided to make a lot of changes in your life. Can you tell us more about what you’ve done?

Yes. At the time, I was an events project manager, based in the Alps. And a colleague had a little problem during her maternity leave, I was replacing her, and from one day to the next, I found myself without a job.

So I alerted my entire network. I ended up in Paris for a year. I managed to find a job for a year. Obviously, I wasn’t really in the city I wanted, or in the job I wanted, because I was a bit removed from the hotel and tourism business. But that was where I found myself a bit on the streets, and I had just started my dream job. That’ll teach me to take breaks and think things through before bouncing back, but it was a good learning experience.

Obviously, I think that year was complicated because I didn’t really fit in. Even though I was in the profession I dreamed of doing, I wasn’t in the right place, I wasn’t in the subject I really liked and I wasn’t necessarily with the right people either.

And so, when I found out about it anyway, from one day to the next, I was told, “That’s it, your life’s going to change. You’ll never be able to do the same thing again. You see, you’re tired all the time. Working 80 hours a week in the events business, that’s not going to be possible anymore.”

So I moved back to Alsace, to my parents’ house. And that’s when I learned from my mistakes. I took a break. I had to take a break anyway, because I couldn’t do anything else. I had to regain my strength and accept my illness. I said to myself, “What do I want to do? What do I love in life? What’s fundamental to me?” And I finally asked myself the right questions. And of course, what came back? Travel, outdoor sports, ecology… I said to myself, “What can I do with this?”.

A part-time job to help you bounce back

I have a very good friend who said to me, “But Marion, if you want to regain your confidence, you should work part-time in a sports shop. At least you’d be in your element. So I did just that. I applied and was accepted. Of course, at first I worked in the mountain department, so I was right in my element. I was really happy to be able to help people with hiking and all the other sports I couldn’t do much more at the time. And in fact, it was a very big trigger for me to take up this part-time permanent job, because at the same time, I decided to create a blog and set up my own micro-enterprise.

In fact, it was thanks to my blog, which was originally done just for fun, that my customers found me on my blog to do specialized copywriting in this sector. And that’s how the opportunity arose to change profession.

And then I said to myself, “this is incredible, I’m going to be able to do a job at my own pace from home, in the field I like best, i.e. travel, mountains and outdoor sports”. And so I became a web copywriter and community manager. And since then, I’ve also learned how to create web showcases, because I simply love learning. That’s the work part.

On a personal level, daily life has changed dramatically. I don’t have the same rhythm at all, I get very tired very quickly. My day is cut into several chunks, with lots of breaks so that I can get things done at my own pace.

And then I accelerated it. For two years now, I’ve been 100% self-employed. I’m no longer part-time with the company that taught me so much and gave me such wings. And today, it’s fair to say, I’ m flying with my own wings from every angle!

Adapting your pace to your body

Great. At least you’ve managed to find something that really suits you… It’s mostly a question of rhythm, really, isn’t it? You manage because you work… Well, you work a lot. Well, normally, anyway. But by having the pace that suits you, you’re able to manage your day-to-day life, your illness(es). What about your job?

Yeah exactly, in fact I’ve created the constraints I want, as I like to say.

And now you’ve got quite a bit of hindsight, since it’s been about 10 years since you were diagnosed with this disease. Have you made any more adaptations than you did at the beginning, so that you can really live with it on a daily basis? Are you still learning all the time, or is what you put in place at the start still valid today, and are you really sticking to this rhythm?

Oh, that’s a great question. In 9 years, obviously, a lot of things have changed because I’m thirsty to learn, I’m thirsty to move forward. I used to be a careerist, but I can’t be one any more, because every time I try to become one again… well, it all comes back on me!

I’m having symptoms again, and my illnesses are developing even more. So, every time, we get slapped in the face and have to back off.

So, at some point, I had to learn to accept and choose a long-distance train that would allow me to stay in the car and go a long way, but still at the same speed. Without accelerating and above all to avoid braking. Because that’s really what it’s all about. It’s really, as soon as I do too much, it wakes up.

So, for example, there are lots of sports I don’t do anymore. I used to do a lot of downhill and enduro mountain biking. They were very, well, cardio sports, a bit hard. Today, I can’t do it anymore, it gives me headaches. I can’t do it any more: there are some sports I’ve completely given up in spite of myself, but for the comfort of life. If it takes me two days to recover, there’s no point. As for work, I’m no longer a careerist, I have other priorities in life, which is to live, quite simply, and keep smiling through all life’s trials and tribulations.

Adapting your sport

It’s a great lesson for everyone! And in sports, you’ve already adapted your practice by choosing the sports you do. You do sports that are gentler, in fact. And how do you manage that? Because I always have the impression that you’re doing a thousand things over and over again. It always amazes me to be able to do all that when I’m ill. Do you really adapt your daily routine according to how you feel during the day? Are you saying that you’re going to do fairly short things each time? But at the same time, I see that you’re also going to be roaming around. In fact, how do you really adapt to the sport?

Yes, for example, when you go paragliding, there are two ways of doing it, well there are many more ways of doing paragliding, but the two that I do are local flying, i.e. taking a shuttle to the take-off point on foot and doing several flights, or rando-flying, i.e. walking for several hours to get to a point, and then flying.

Personally, I prefer to do less, but to do what I really enjoy, which is hiking and flying. That’s the main reason I took up paragliding in the first place, because it made me dream to see those people taking off while I was up there having to walk back down. I said to myself, one day I want to do this.

And I did it when I was already ill. I learned to paraglide when I was already ill. But then again, paragliding is something you can dream of crossing, flying for hours on end . But I can’t. It hurts everywhere after a while. And it’s not a question of physical condition, because I do a lot of sport during the week. It’s just that my body can’t take it.

So it’s all the same. I adapt my flying to my body. So, rather than flying for 5 hours, I only fly for a maximum of 2. After that, I’m very tired. Rather than do 4 flights in a day, I prefer to do a hike plus a single flight. That’s a concrete example of my flying.

You’ve really learned to listen to yourself, to your body, and to adapt everything according to the messages it sends you?

Exactly. Hiking, you see, I hike a lot on my own because my pace is lower than average, at least compared to the Savoyard who generally walks a lot. When I go to Brittany, there’s generally no problem. But I can actually walk a lot of kilometers, so roaming isn’t a problem. On the other hand, I walk much more slowly than the sporty people I’m supposed to be, given the number of hours I exercise.

You’re still very athletic, it’s just that you’re forced to put in a little less intensity. Which in itself isn’t a problem. I mean, you get to do a lot of things, you get to go through the landscapes you like, so it doesn’t really matter if you put in an hour more or an hour less.

Exactly, you have to accept it. In fact, there are two choices: either you do it, or you don’t. And if you want to do it, you have to learn to adapt. And if you want to do it, you have to learn to adapt.

The most important thing is what you do with it

That’s really interesting, thank you so much for the testimonial. What’s more, listening to you, I’m thinking that it applies to a lot of things in the end. Whether we’re sick or not, I think that sometimes we don’t listen to our bodies enough and we tend to try to silence them on certain signals. You don’t have a choice, so you listen to it, but in a way it’s a good thing to listen to it, so I think it could help a lot of people. And do you have a message you’d like to pass on to other women in the same situation as you?

You know, most people think that as soon as they have a problem, they stop everything. We say “I can’t do this anymore“. And there are also a lot of people who get in our way and say “well, you know, now that you’ve got this, it’s dead anyway”.

But in fact, we have to imagine that people are telling us this because they might not be able to do it or get past it. But we’re different! When things like that happen to us, we have a strength we never imagined we had deep down.

So you have to listen to yourself. You have to listen to yourself and, last but not least, you have to tell yourself that everyone has worries in their lives, more or less difficult, with greater or lesser intensity, but you can never compare yourself and your pain. What’s really important is what you do with it. What we decide to do with what happens to us.

Yes, indeed. Yes, it’s true that we can never compare ourselves. And we’re all bound to have some unpleasant things happen to us at some point in our lives. So yes, moving forward without comparing ourselves to others seems like a good course of action. Well, Marion, where can we find you online? You’re very active, so our listeners will be able to follow you.

On madamevoyage.fr everywhere, on Instagram, on my website, my travel blog, voilà!

Thank you so much for taking the time to share this story. These are not necessarily obvious subjects. I know you like to talk about them and I think that helps you already, I imagine, but it also helps a lot of other people. So thank you very much for taking this time and see you soon!