Big Plans in the Short Term (1/13/2013 + 1/14/2013)

Welcome to 1/13/2013

Running/workout Log:

I did not run today

I will run tomorrow: 6 miles (to get back into it)

I will run every day for the rest of my life

I did 25 and then 30 pushups today

I did 2 sets of 25 squats

Daily Journal:

I woke up at 10:30

Made a 4 egg, asparagus, onion, and steak scramble

watched dr. who

researched how to start on the non-profit switch

went grocery shopping, car still runs well

bought mostly produce with a half gallon of milk, cereal, and granola for $45.00

ate a grapefruit, and cereal with blueberries for lunch

watched dr. who

made the kids and I buttered noodles with veggies (kale, yellow squash, zucchini, red pepper, green pepper, bell tomatoes, broccoli, onion, ground coriander, ground cardamom, ground cumin, and curry powder) fried in a wok with olive oil

then I ate cereal with blueberries for dessert

played laser tag wars with jack and david

am now typing this and thinking about how I should listen to some music

I will start running every day as long as I can. That’s the goal and I won’t give up on it because I want it and because running is exciting and something that I truly enjoy. Even if it’s hard, that’s kind of the point isn’t it? i mean I always say I’ll do things and I know I’d like to do them but I don’t do them because I let myself get in the way because everything is fine just coasting like I’m so used to doing. STOP COASTING, it’s not a good way to live life. I need to get past the idea that I could just chill back and do a stupid job and be fine for the rest of my life I need to embrace WRA and running as my forms of energy and my forms of motivation. I get so excited talking about running and when I explain what I’m doing with WRA to people I get teary eyed and excited to make a difference I just hope that it shakes out in a good way. I know we’re switching to being a non-profit but that shouldn’t change much in the way of how we will accomplish things it will give us more work to do and hopefully won’t fill our winters with time-consuming logistical stuff. So make sure that I stay focused and driven in this next week and run every day.

I want to turn half of the second half of this journal into a running journal and logger where I re-cap my running and workout achievements from the day and look at what I am going to do the next day. this journal will allow me to meet my goals which include building the business, running everyday, training for the leadville 100, running the leadville 100, eating well, and enjoying every aspect of my life.

DAYBREAK to 1/14/2013

Workout Summary:

55 pushups: morning

50 squats: morning

4 mile run: afternoon: cabin john trail

60 pushups: night

60 squats: night

Workout Projection:

Morning Set

Morning Run

Afternoon Run

Night Set

Food Eaten:

Leftover Veggies, Banana

Greek yogurt, granola, blueberries, black berries

clif bar, bowl of flakes, blueberries, whole milk

sweet potates, chicken (breaded), carrots

Journal:

Worked out, did some more research into articles of incorporation, took a nap, read articles on leadville and other races, decided to do awesome things in DC, sent DC e-mail, sent natalie name form, ran, cold shower, watched dr. who, made sweet potatoes, finished dr. who episode. This is far too short for a journal entry, tomorrow will be filled with wonderment. sweet potato pancakes and excellent salad breakfast things, morning run, delicious lunch, articles of incorporation work and next step, find out what I can do while I wait for processing, afternoon run, chill with the adoptive fam.

I love doing things that scare me or make me feel like I’m stepping over some invisible line which is exactly that, an invisible line. I remember the mountains in Wyoming and getting lost in the car and getting made fun of by those miners for driving the scion back there and then trudging towards the mountain and then climbing off trail and scrambling up the scree to the narrow outcropping where I ate lunch. That whole trip I felt wrong or like I was doing something off or outside of myself and instead of listening I smashed through that barrier and had a badass hike through the bighorn mountain range. Embrace Fear, Because Fear is Just Exhilaration in Disguise.

What a wonderful life, I always get BOTAR and streetlight stuck inn my head. The lyrics are what does it with them, the lyrics are so emotional and charged and strung over perfect instrumentals that there is really no way not to get them stuck in my head. I want to go camping this friday with anna and susie and roman but I have a feeling anna will not be able to make it and Susie will probably opt to go to baltimore with her Peace Corps friends but maybe she will decide to come with us instead she seemed actually on the fence about it and it would awesome to camp with a bunch of east coast friends before leaving for mn. Roman too, we never really spent quality time together or even got to know each other so now that we are it’s like we are discovering this person that is so similar and had so many of the similar experiences but is still different and is still developing different goals and ideas about things that contribute to my world view and allow for me to open my mind through conversations we have. it’s great that we are able to do that and it seems like jack and david are on a similar course to have a similar relationship as me and roman but it could never be the same.

We’ve had some unique experiences in our lives and I mean real unique. the house burning down is an experience which I think sparked the whole idea of putting feelings aside and not worrying about them because why worry about negative thoughts if you can just eliminate them from your life and i am still struggling with that idea and whether or not it’s a reasonable thing to do because I do that all the time and whenever I reflect or try to reason with some of my past actions I end up wallowing in them and it’s not productive but if I just know that I grew from those experiences but don’t think about them ever then I can move forward with my life and I think that is a productive way to live. Moving forward is the only direction to go. It’s not even that I’ve had that many bad experiences, I have had so few its crazy but sometimes I amplify those thoughts by thinking them so I need to remember that I am a new person and I am a new person everyday that I know, everything can change in a matter of hours, minutes, seconds. and because of that ability to change which I know I possess I just have to instill the right mindset before and during I set out for new activities or expereinces in which I will be able to embrace whatever is going on at the moment and ignore any and all negative htoughts while focusing on meeting new people and extracting their life stories or tackling a new experience with absolutely no fear. I know I did that skiing I ran that double black diamond with no fear and it was pure exhiliration which is the feeling that I want to feel as often as possible and that means embracing fear because when fear is embraced no matter the situation it brings on a feeling of intense focus and happiness bordering on giddiness which is the greatest feeling in the world. it goes for anything feared, embrace it and it will be awesome.

Ski-kend in the Keweenaw

Time to take a 30 minute break from working to type as much as I possibly can before 11 o’clock when I’m heading to work at Bordertown coffee shop with Liz. I want to talk about this weekend and I’ll have to break it down somehow because so much happened, so much good times were had, it’s hard to really squeeze it all into such a short medium as even typing tends to be. I want to just word vomit the stories and ideas but I also need it to be readable. I want to talk about Liz and our changing relationship while also touching on skiing a world class world renowned mountain, Mt. Bohemia. But I’ll start with the driving, quite a bit of driving.

Driving has always been more than just a means of transportation for me. I have found driving to be the time that I can connect with people and have meaningful one on one conversations in an intimate and sometimes physically uncomfortable environment. Before I talk about the driving itself I’d like to touch on the where of our trip. We traveled from the twin cities up to Duluth and from there across the south shoreline of lake superior through Wisconsin and into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. We traveled north into the UP, winding our way up until we reached the Keweenaw peninsula within the Upper Peninsula. Peninsulaception. WOMP WOMP WOOMMP. A lot changed as we drove north: the trees, the roads, the sky, and the landscape but one thing stood out to me more than the others, the snow. The farther north we got the more drastic the height of snow banks and drifts on the side of the road. Once we were fully in the Keweenaw peninsula, the snow banks were around 6 or 7 feet tall. At some points there were unplowed side streets going off into the woods, the stop sign itself resting on the top of the snow, the poles were completely buried. Adjusting to the snow was more difficult than adjusting to the cold because the twin cities were experiencing similar temperatures before we headed up.

Relationship building through driving, by Nick Ryan, has been a major theme throughout my life. My brother and I have become a lot closer due to driving insane distances in ludicrously short periods of time. I’ve found that the subsequent bond which forms from extended periods of time in close proximity while moving towards an agreeable end destination is more of a rule than a coincidence. This rule applied itself to Liz and I on our eight hour drive to and from the UP. Our relationship has gone through quite a few permutations over the year and a half we’ve known each other. Our current relationship is of the dating variety. Spending a whole weekend doing something physical which we both enjoy immensely was amazing.

Despite being used to the cold, it was still a shock to enter a motel room at the Eagle Harbor Inn to air similar in temperature to the outside air. When the we realized the room had a floor heater hiding out next to the bed, it was like discovering gold at the end of the rainbow. The next great motel discovery came in the form of a full room the Inn had converted into a private sauna for guests. Of course we took full advantage of the sauna every day after our excursions to the mountain.

Intense relaxation in the form of a sauna was welcome due to intense physical exercise from skiing all day. A little background on Mount Bohemia: the mountain is world renowned for it’s glade skiing (skiing in and around trees). The inherently dangerous nature of glade skiing prompted large “no beginners allowed” signs posted on all trail maps. Besides glade skiing, Mt. Bohemia also has mostly black or double black diamond runs; unique for being completely un-groomed as are all runs at Mt. Bohemia. We didn’t experience the usual constant stream of snow which generally accompanies a trip to the Keweenaw Peninsula and because of that the ski runs became less powdered as the weekend progressed. Due to the lack of snow, paired with the nature of skiing short and steep runs, unintentional moguls formed as skiers and boarders cut the same paths down the runs. My choices devolved into: ski moguls down a clear run or ski through trees down a glade run. The glade skiing was extremely fun and I quickly realized that the only safe option was complete fearlessness, quick reaction, and relaxation.

On more than one occasion I chose falling down over smashing into trees but on our last day I ended up getting the best of both falling down and smashing into one tree in particular. I was cutting left from an open run into a glade of trees. There were paths cut by previous skiers I was following into the glade. As I wound my way between trees I found myself going too fast and at the same time I had run out of options for cutting between trees. This is where I decided to stop so I could figure out my next move but in the process of stopping my right ski caught a deep patch of powder and I was thrown forward horizontally. At the apex of my lay out my left shoulder contacted a large tree and my right side hip contracted up towards my shoulder to absorb the impact. I shout as this happens and crumple against the tree in a heap. Of course, I immediately stand up and start bending left, right, touching my toes, and back in order to fully exacerbate a back injury if that had been the case. The adrenaline faded as I took deep breaths and cleared my head. I put my right ski back on, as it had disengaged from my boot in the fall, and continue down through the glade and up to the connected yurts acting as a ski lodge.

Liz and I sat at a table while I assessed the injuries to my right side. My left shoulder felt fine but that is thanks to my right side’s ability to act as shock absorption. My side wasn’t built as a suspension for my shoulder and because of this I believe I either broke or bruised a rib and in the best case scenario I only bruised my side. In my assessment I tried to determine whether I could ski any more. My main goal was to differentiate between whether I could actually ski without hurting myself further or if I would only hurt myself further. In the end Liz and I skied one more run and my side proved too painful to continue.

The weekend was an enormous success despite and also a little bit because of my injury. Getting a little hurt doing something new makes me feel like I really threw myself into the experience and maybe pushed past my physical limits. Pushing past limits and not dying is a great way to figure out where those limitations lie and how to better surpass them in the future. Coming off of this injury with a fear of glade skiing would be a huge mistake. One of my biggest abstract fears is allowing an isolated, non-repeating experience to influence my ability to enjoy life. I believe that in order to prevent that fear from coming to fruition I must never lose my ability to act stupidly. The stupidity to ignore the dangerous combination of fear and logic to do something I’ve never done before or something I have done which proved dangerous.

Reflections: Day 4: Gambler’s Point – Pokegama Dam

I attribute Nick’s absence from blogging to his trip up to a place called Mount Bohemia on the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan. I’m not sure what downhill skiing is, a font? Whatever it may be it removed Nick from the ability to blog for a weekend, and for this I am truly sorry. He’s back and filling in the gaps, starting with the Mississippi post he so callously ignored last Friday.

This day displayed the beauty of the upper river perfectly. The sun heated our bodies and opened our minds to thought. Something I had begun to realize was that I was not eating enough food. I could feel myself losing weight which I couldn’t afford to lose, already being extremely skinny from a strenuous running season. This thought will have to be brought up to the group later.

Duck hunting was a constant theme of our entire trip. We followed the duck seasons as they opened in almost all the states we passed through. Some of us wore blaze orange hats to better display our humanity to the hunters and avoid a trip ending accident. There are duck blinds all along the river which are built by the state and put into a lottery for hunters to enter and win certain blinds which can then be used for the season. As I had mentioned earlier, we were doing a good amount of fishing. The strategy for fishing was to power paddle ahead of the group as far as we could, fish until everyone caught up and passed us and then bound ahead once again. This strategy was labor intensive, requiring long periods of paddling hard with short periods of fishing. During one such fishing break, Liz caught a large Northern Pike.

We arrived at the Pokegama dam in Grand Rapids, MN just before sunset and after making a wrong turn onto a lake. This wrong turn kept us on the water long enough to see trees, colors, smokestacks and the sunset reflected off of the water. I had been paddling with Sarah all day and due to the long day Anna and Sarah swapped duffing seats and I paddled the rest of the way with Anna. I spoke with Anna about childhood experiences and previous river trips. Anna talked about a trip she did on the Yukon River with her brother Tim where he met his wife.

We got into camp and began our massive camp setup. I filleted the pike which was actually the first time I had ever filleted a fish. I had seen it done many times before and understood the concepts behind it: cut out the meat and cut off the extra stuff. I convinced everyone that I knew exactly how to do it and went about executing my interpretation of gutting and filleting a fish. Breaded and fried pike was a delicious addition to a broccoli and cheese soup.