Redrawing the Comfort Zone

Okay, so I have given it some time. My experiences from the mountain are starting to feel more like a part of me, and less like something nebulous, floating around me like a cloud. Although, I have to say that I was more than a little disappointed that I didn't have the profound transformation that I was hoping for. Remember, a few posts ago, when I was talking about Moses going up the mountain and coming back down totally changed? Well, as crazy as that sounds, that was what I was expecting. I wanted to come back home and have it be more than obvious that I had done something incredible, and had been forever altered. I wanted to look at the world, my world, with totally new eyes, and see things differently. I wanted there to be a glow about me that made people wonder what it was that I had experienced. Instead, I came back and it almost felt like nothing had happened. Just that I had gone on a cool vacation, and was now back to resume where I had left off. I wasn't radi...

Tony Bennett may have left his heart in San Francisco, but mine was left in Tanzania. (Same number of syllables, so it fits nicely into the song)... I have been back from Africa for 4 days now, and I am having a problem being totally present in the Twin Cities. My body is here, but my mind and heart keep drifting back to my time on the mountain, in the towns, and on safari. The sights, the smells, the sounds (or total silence), envelope me whenever I close my eyes. I miss it so much already. See, I knew when I started this process, that the trip was going to change me. There was no way that it couldn't. I knew that my body would change, because of the training and the physical challenge of climbing that mountain. I knew that my brain would have to take on challenges that it never had, just to get me up to the summit and back down. I also knew that my heart would expand to take in all of the new things that I would experience. I just didn't realize how much it would alter m...

Okay, well, I guess this is really happening! I leave tomorrow for the first leg of my journey. I get to spend a day in New York, with dear friends, before heading off to Africa. WOW! It is always such a strange experience to have worked so hard for so long, in pursuit of a goal, and then to have it be right around the corner. On the one hand, it feels like it has been a very long time in coming, and I am so ready for my hard work to pay off. I am ready to stand on that summit and know that I earned every step of that journey. I am ready to celebrate the most challenging physical escapade that I have ever tackled. I am ready to experience a whole new country, its culture, and its beauty. But then there is the flip side of that. I have always found it so weird that I start to feel a little bit sad, like I will be losing something when I am no longer "in training" for a major event. The excitement of having it in the future, and seeing the interest on people's faces whe...

Does it ever feel like you are re-learning the same lessons over and over again? Or is it just me? When I look at things that are happening in my life, I have a weird sense of deja vu...same situations just different characters and/or setting. I could have sworn that I already learned this lesson, filed it away in my memory banks, and had it on-call for the next time a similar situation arose. But that doesn't really seem to be the case, and the training I have been doing for the climb has really brought that to the forefront for me. For some things it just feels like a refresher course, a gentle nudge to bring the hard-won lesson out of the memory banks for use in the current situation. For example, the importance of relaxing and unplugging sometimes. Our fearless leader, Jenne, has stressed this often in our conversations and in the training posts that she sends. And I have taken it in, nodded my head in total agreement, and then proceeded to totally blow past it in my own dai...

Just got the information about my itinerary.... OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG !OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG! There is something monumental when you see things in print. I mean, up until now, most of the preparations for my trip have been theoretical. Yes, there have been emails. Yes, there have been some documents exchanged, but the bulk of what I have done has been planning and training. Then, just the other day, I received my itinerary for the trip. The particulars about what time we will be getting up, the way the day will (probably) progress, what will happen when I get off the plane in Tanzania, what-I-need-to-be-sure-to-do-before-I-leave-otherwise-I-will-regret-it-and-possibly-not-be-able-to-complete-the-trek-that-I-have-been-training-for-all-of-these-weeks! When I opened the email and printed out those pages, my stomach leapt. Joy, yes, but also abject terror. This $h*# just got real! Five weeks, FIVE WEEKS, from today I will be touching down in Africa! OMG! Even writing ...

                                              Ode to Burpees 
                                                          I.                                                      HATE.          ...

If you had asked me, years ago, if I considered myself a risk taker, adventuresome person, or someone who does extreme things, I would have emphatically said, no. I never think of myself in that way, or I never did, until now. I am starting to think that there is something inside me that is wanting to push the envelope, harder than I ever have before. That urge started with my first 3 Day, in 2004. I had, up until that time, never considered taking on a physical challenge like that. It never entered my mind.  But I did it. I made up my mind that I could do it, and I did. And then I did it again the next year, and the next, and the next…for 11 years. Then came the 2 day/100 mile Breast Cancer Ride, another out-of-the-box event for me. Not to be swayed from the apparent course I had set for myself, I let a friend's great idea of doing a modified triathlon for the Longest Day event for Alzheimers become my next “thing". Again, out of the box, and kind of crazy. Not like anythin...