A milestone, and lessons of the past

Round one of Chemo is done!  It took a little longer than expected, but by 9:00am the last drops of medicine (or is it poison?) dripped into my veins.  Drops in hemoglobin and platelets required me to take on additional transfusions.  (Sign up to give blood - today!). I was able to unhook from the stand and get in a shower, which I missed yesterday.  I told the nurse I would be fast and she said, "no need, you're off chemo now."  Ah, nice.  I was able to take a long shower, get dressed, and go for a solo walk.  Again, it's hard to describe the simple liberation that comes along with just walking down the hall on your own when you normally have to wear an anchor. The nurses also changed out the dressing that covers the PICC line which felt good.  Early on I had to have a powder seal poured over the insertion site to help stop the bleeding.  They were able to clean all that up finally and apply new bandages.  A fresh start, it feels good.  Now it's time to recover and wait for test results to come back over the next week.

I had a productive day of work and a few more friends reached out that are now hearing the news second hand so I'm still backing up to retell the story.  It's great to reconnect with all of them even if under these circumstances.  (Call an old friend this week).  My sister brought me some lunch and my mom some dinner - family friend Carlie's Turkey Chili - it was excellent.

My visit with Dave on Sunday and a reconnect with another close friend of mine, Steve, has been bringing back memories of our time together adventure racing.  There are so many great stories that came out of these times and for me, life-changing experiences that really transformed me as a person and my life's direction.  I realize how much I still draw on these lessons and now important many of them are in the here and now.  I think there's a treasure's trove of tidbits here, so let's explore and see where the adventure takes us.

Adventure Racing first caught my eye in the early 2000s when a young Brit successfully televised one of the first expedition-style adventure races on TV.  Four-person teams raced up to 300 miles cross country by human-powered means (running, biking, paddling) through the wilderness to different check points and eventually to the finish line.  They navigated the course with maps and compass, raced around the clock, and traversed some awesome terrain.  The event would grow over the next few years into the Eco-Challenge and it made Mark Burnett a revolutionary TV Producer.

I was in my early 30s, living in Connecticut, working at a software start up and just starting our family.  Life was progressing in storybook fashion.  We had a great house, I was making good money, we had kids and a chocolate Lab pup.  But at the same time, there was always a restlessness inside of me.  I had been an athlete all my life, starting with little league through my swimming career that took me all the way through college.  But since leaving college, there was no athletic pursuit in my life other than a few rounds of golf and some recreational volleyball Joanne and I played while we lived in California.  The Eco-Challenge re-lit a fire inside of me and I started to get back into some training to try a triathlon.  It was at that triathlon where I ran back into Dave.  We were swimming teammates (along with his lovely wife Denise)  at Northeastern University in Boston and it turned out that they lived 30 minutes down the road from us in CT.  We began talking about adventure racing as there was now a new series of short 20-mile races popping up across the country and I had tried one with some friends that previous fall.  It was hard and our team was very unprepared, but I was hooked.  I convinced Dave and eventually Steve who worked with me at the software company to join me for a race.  We went to Orchard Beach, NY and placed second in the all-male division in our first event together.  I was hooked.

 Over the winter we sent out proposals for sponsorship to many companies and with a stroke of good luck, the Diageo company came forward with a great offer and Team Guinness was born.  We were funded to travel around the country to participate in eight 20-mile races plus a 24-hour race that would take place near Mt. Hood Oregon.  All these events were now televised on the Outdoor Life Network, and the buzz around adventure racing growing each spring when the new Eco-Challenge aired.

While I had survived a few short races, I knew the effort and knowledge required to get into expedition-style racing was beyond me.  I found a company offering a week-long adventure racing camp in West Virginia that next April and signed up to attend.  It was amazing.  We spent the entire week near the New River Gorge in West Virginia training on map & compass navigation, both in day time and at night.  Mountain biking, white water kayaking and canoe, rope climbing and rappelling.  They covered it all.  Then at the end of the week, the students, formed teams and tried to complete a 100-mile race course.

Wow, to sit down the night that the race started (Friday night at midnight) with the presentation of almost 30 topographical maps and a booklet of instructions for locating the checkpoints at 7:00pm and have only five hours to prepare to march into the wilderness; it was totally overwhelming.  The only way to attack a problem like that is a step at a time.  You can't race 100 miles to the finish line all at once; you take it in appropriate stages.  The only logical step was to read the coordinates for the first check point, plot it on the map as we were taught, plan our optimal route to get from the
start to the first check point, then continue on from there.

 So there it is, our first nugget.  Now that I sit here in a battle against cancer, I think that part of the struggle is wanting to get to the finish line right away.  I want to be cured.  But there are steps along the way and even the best laid plans will go awry at some point (plenty of those stories to share soon).  The only logical approach is to break it down into smaller, achievable steps that march you toward your goal and focus on those discrete steps that can take you there.  Of course you need to have a clear goal in mind in the first place.  Sometimes that's easy, sometimes we struggle to know what we want.  In my case my current goal has been chosen for me.  But once you have something locked in your sites, make a plan, and just get to the first check point.