Americorps ended one week ago today. For one week now I have backed up without a ground guide. I have had more than $4.50 per day for food. I have had the liberty of choosing who I spend my time with. I have made my own schedule and worn a different outfit every day. I’d say it’s been a pretty good week. My 10 month commitment with Americorps ended on the fifth, and since then I have spent a few days in OKC seeing all the wonderful friends I left behind and made a quick run down to Texas for a long overdue family visit. The last few days have been back at my parents house packing and unpacking, remembering and forgetting. I leave for my next adventure on Monday and in some ways it just seems like a sixth and final Americorps project, and in some ways it feels like a whole new life. I was looking through a journal a few days ago and came across something I’d written on October 9, 2009, the day I left for Americorps, and I think I’d like to share it:
"In the scope of my meager life, today is rather huge. I am on a plane headed for Dallas. From there I will fly to Cedar Rapids, Iowa where I will be greeted by Americorps staff. I will then board a bus and make the hour drive into Vinton- my home base/starting off point for the next ten months. So when I say that today is huge, I mean that I’m moving. I mean that for the first 24 years of my life I have lived in the same state, never more than a couple hours away from my family, never without some sort of preexisting support system. Leaving for college, graduating, moving to a new house, switching jobs- all of these seemingly large steps had common threads holding them together, providing comfort, making them safe. Within about 3 seconds of taking off from Tulsa the ground had already vanished. It is a drizzly day and the hazy clouds have sucked us into a blurry fog of nothingness. That’s how this whole move feels. Like I’m blind, like all ties are severed and all institutions crumbled and the next phase of life will require the long arduous process of rebuilding everything from scratch. I know I’m ready for it, be can one ever really be prepared? It’s so disorienting. What parts of who I am are innate and which are simply products of my environment? What things do I like out of habit or convenience? What kind of people will I attract in a crowd of complete strangers? I honestly have no idea…but I am about to find out. I am excited about the future laid out before me, but the excitement is strongly tainted with fear and an odd mournful grief. I’m moving, but it feels oddly like I had to kill to my former life in order to grab hold of this one. I had a pretty good life. A decent job, a great house with unbelievably cheap rent, a church that I loved and was well plugged in to, a wonderful group of friends. Nothing was bad…just stale. Stagnant. Static. I know there is more out there. There has to be. I guess I’m just tired of sitting around waiting for life to happen to me, it is way past time for me to get out there and make something happen. I should have made this move two years ago. That would have been the healthy, natural thing to do, but true to form I procrastinated, I wasted time and momentum, I let my life atrophy while mulling around feeling trapped by options. Not that good things haven’t happened. In some regards it was quite productive. I learned to relax, I learned to read, I learned a lot about my basic nature including some truly unattractive aspects that will probably be life long projects. I have gained a lot of knowledge- now it’s time I do something about it. There are so many things about this experience that I am fearful of. Some are practical concerns- is it wise financially? Will I hold up physically? Will I be able to find a job afterward? Some are rather petty but still cause significant anxiety- what if the uniform isn’t comfortable? What if I can’t sleep without my five pillows and memory foam mattress? What if I have to work with kids? All of these are fairly easy to deal with. I can come up with game plans or convince myself I’ll be stronger for them. The ones that wake me up at night aren’t so easy to ignore. I’m so used to my independence, what if I literally can not cope with the lack of alone time? How will my faith hold up in the absence of my church community? What if, once separated from the influence of my familiar people and places, I discover that I am not at all who I thought I was? What if I don’t like the person that I find? I don’t have answers for these ones. I don’t believe there really are any. My future seems so incredibly malleable at present, which isn’t necessarily bad, just uncomfortable. So yes, today is huge. Today I said goodbye to the people, the places, the habits that have been the very framework of my existence. Today, for once, I have overruled my complacency and my uncertainty. I have done something drastic, proactive, ambitious. We will soon land and I will take a deep breath, put on a smile, and begin a new era of my life. I will toss all these concerns to the back dusty corner of my mind and focus my energy on making the very most of the present. I will block out the sorrowful longing for things past and the debilitating anxiety for the future and drink in the countless possibilities of the present. So yes, today I am moving, but more importantly, today I am finally moving forward."
So there you have it, a glimpse into the fretful mind of a somewhat younger me. In some ways that seems like such a different time. I have grown so accustomed to packing up and leaving yet I can still recall the unsettling finality of that foggy morning. I have never liked endings and I think it is just that- the finality. Relationships are frozen in whatever state you left them, lessons are left to be learned by whoever has the wisdom to pay more attention than you did, opportunities are abandoned beneath whatever rocks you failed to upturn. I have lived long enough to know that things will work out, regardless, but as endings come flying in my face I can never help but feel like there are so many areas I have failed to see thru to their full potential. And I hate that. I think that move from Oklahoma may be one of the few instances where I really felt I had exhausted every possible lead. I had gleaned everything I could from the situation, steered myself into a corner, and my fear was the only thing that kept me there so long. Looking back, its interesting to see how those fears panned out…and since I left the option of a shortish post about a thousand words ago, I might as well inform you of how they turned out: Financially: thanks to unexpected windfalls and careful management along the way, a surprisingly solid decision
Physically: there were aches and pains strewn throughout, but overall I feel healthier than when I left
Job: well, the next two months is planned out, but I’m oddly okay with the uncertainty betond that. I think the fact that I had about 5 five job offers along the way reminded me that as long as I keep my integrity and a strong work ethic, something will always work out.
Uniform: mens clothes are actually quite comfortable…except for the boots
Sleeping: yeah, apparently I can sleep anywhere
Kids: this was totally a warranted fear, but I definitely came out stronger from facing it (and boy did I face it). Turns out kids are okay and now I get to proceed like a normal adult instead of running away.
Now for the hard ones. It is difficult to gauge these objectively, but I think I did a fair job identifying what the challenges would be before hand. Redefining and renegotiating my independence and introversion was definitely tough. It was strange to feel such a difference in myself when I had time to be alone and had actual responsibilities to tend to versus when I felt like just one of the many grey shirted peons. Like completely different traits were brought to the forefront. It was hard to see how differently I had to balance things than other (less introverted) people, but it taught me a lot about my preferences and my actual needs. The whole faith thing proved more of an issue than I think I expected. I guess I never actually realized the reality of that whole Bible Belt thing. It was definitely a whole new environment, and not a particularly hospitable one. I was able to attend a church on pretty much every project but I was surprised to see what a different role it came to play. I basically went to which ever was within walking distance. I thought the theological differences would be problematic, but love proved to be the superseding factor. For those two hours a week I wasn’t surrounded by profanity. I didn’t feel judged or like the odd man out. I felt safe, welcome, encouraged. The message I heard from that environment of peace proved far more powerful than any of the sermons preached and for that I am thankful. Now for the final trepidation, the one about losing myself, I’m still not sure I know how to answer, because clearly there is no one to be but me, yet how can I objectively gauge change as opposed to natural progression? There were certainly times where I felt aspects of me were leaving, times when I felt so beaten down that the lighthearted joy felt not only inappropriate but wholly unwelcome. That was hard. I left feeling darker and less positive than when I went, but in just these few days of peace I can already feel the lightness returning. I think perhaps I am stronger than I thought. I’m not sure how to describe it, but perhaps a certainty or confidence that had never been forced to surface before. Sure some unpleasant traits surfaced during the whole experience, but overall I was surprised and pleased by the aspects that seem so deeply ingrained that even if environment is what put them there to start with, they are here to stay. Integrity for instance…I value that one a lot.
(Sooooo, I typed all that on Thursday night and planned to finish it up and post it first thing in the morning. It is now close to midnight on Sunday and I just remembered that in the whirlwind of packing and organizing I never got around to it. Sorry for the lack of conclusion, perhaps it will get added at a later date. I leave in the morning and will likely be computerless for the next few days (thanks a lot fedex) while I wait for my new laptop to be rerouted to my new address, but I promise to post about my new magnificent surroundings as soon as possible!}
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Monday, August 2, 2010
The Sweet Taste of Victory
Don't you just love checking things off lists? Especially big things on lifetime lists, and especially when you realize that you actually rather enjoy them and want to add them right back on the list to do again? Yeah, me too. What I’m trying to say, is that Sunday’s triathlon was AMAZING! 
Over the last month and a half I have swam 4,375 yards, biked 73 miles, and ran 18 miles. That sounds like a rather exorbitant amount of “exercise” to me, but I have always wanted to do a triathlon, and I figured it was the sort of thing you sort of need to prepare for. The race was in Monticello, about an hour and half from Vinton, so me, Bob and Erin drove down the night before and stayed with some of the wonderful people we had met on our project in Hopkinton. The mornings before big events are always rather nerve racking, but this seemed particularly so. We dropped our bikes at the first transition area the night before, but we still had to leave around 6:15 to get all our transition things set up and catch a bus to the starting point. I laid out my towel, filled my water bottles, rolled up my socks to make them easier to slip onto wet feet, and had my helmet ready to go. Over the course of my training I had set a few goals for myself. Namely: Finish- that one was immutable. One way or another I was crossing that finish line. Once I was confident that this could happen, I decided I needed some sort of easy, attainable time goal and 2 hours seemed like plenty. Over the last couple weeks, however, when I started adding up my training times, not accounting for transitions and fatigue, it looked like it would be cutting it pretty close. At that point I decided I needed an easier secondary goal so I decided I just wanted to be in the top half of the finishers. I must be more accustomed to ranking myself academically as opposed to athletically, because when I got there and looked around at the physiques my fellow racers reality slapped me in the face that suddenly seemed absurdly ambitious. That led to my final goal: pass four people. I am happy to say that I achieved three of the four goals with flying colors. I finished, I finished in 1:54:07, and I passed 18 people in the process. I placed 141 out of 177, putting me squarely in the bottom fourth, but I have a theory on that—since this was the first ever Camp Courageous Triathlon, it seems plausible that the people who would have heard about it and/or been interested were mostly people who were already into tri’s . But that is just a theory. (Oh, and a note on the passing goal, I’m pretty certain I passed a few people in the swim portion, but I was much too busy attempting to breath to mess with counting, and I feel a little bad about counting the 12 year old I passed on the bike, but I defiantly passed him, and there were two guys that I only passed due my excellent drink while you run skills and they promptly repassed me as soon as they returned to their pace, but hey, I did technically pass them.) So here’s how the whole thing felt. The swim was scary. They let you seed yourself (so I headed straight for the back of the line) and they waited 5 seconds between each individual. That was really nice and cut down a lot on the dreaded “kicked in the face” scenario. Between the nerves and the adrenaline and the asthma and the not being able to see two inches into the water, I pretty much couldn’t breathe. I have been really proud of myself for the progress I’ve made in my side breathing, but the open water really threw me and I could only make it a few breathes before needing to stay up longer to get my bearings straight. I ended up side stroking for about half of the 500 yards (yeah, I know, real cool) but my 11:43 swim time is actually about a minute and a half faster than I think my practice swims were. I spent over three minutes in the first transition. I figured trying to get my breathing under control and my feet actually dry was worth an extra minute or so. About a quarter mile in, I tried to down shift and suddenly I couldn’t pedal. That was more than a bit disconcerting, but after clumsily swerving around for a few yards and nearly taking out a volunteer, the chain popped back into place and didn’t give me any more trouble for the rest of the race (16 miles in all). My bike time was 1:06:06, about 8 minutes faster than my last practice time, and it felt great. It was fairly flat (hmm, a flat road in Iowa, weird) and curved thru lovely fields and tiny towns. It was a beautiful day and you could see for miles and there was no place else I’d rather be. But then came the run. The bike to run transition has a pretty bad reputation as your leg muscles try to adjust to their new task. Sure enough, my feet felt like large, wobbly chunks of lead and my knees and hips like rusty hinges for the first half mile or so. Oh, but let me back up for a second. When I hopped of the bike in second transition, after a few seriously wobbly steps and some not so discrete laughing from the volunteers, my legs just couldn’t stop moving so I just tossed my bike on a rack and kept running thru the transition area. That led to a T time of 36 seconds which was, drumroll please….the overall third fastest transition time!!!! Yep, pretty much a pro. Ok, back to running. The course was an out an back run down the same road you had just biked in on. It was completely straight, with no shade, and you just ran to a sign then turned around. I’ve always been a fan of loop routes myself, but I don’t think I’d actually realized the psychological effects of the anticlimactic out and back. Almost as bad as a treadmill. Regardless, I ran the 5k in 32:29, only slightly slower than my normal running pace, and I was able to run the whole way. I assumed I would be absolutely dead by the end. I assumed I would fighting back pain and just willing myself to finish. Not so. I was still smiling and sure, I was totally exhausted, but in a healthy way not the “wow, everything in my body thinks I shouldn’t have just done that” way. That’s the response I’m used to, so this was a nice and welcome surprise. Bob and Erin also did great and we are all pretty proud of ourselves for actually going thru with it. I saved one of the best parts for last. In case you felt bad about not being there to cheer for us, don’t worry, that part was covered. Somehow we pulled some strings to get permission to take the van that far so at 6 in the morning, four of our teammates and one teammate’s roommate piled in the van with some highly encouraging posters and showed up to cheer us on. It was so great to have them standing at the finish line cheering us on and witnessing such an awesome personal achievement. It really meant a lot. It also meant that we all got to go back to Hopkinton for a lovely lunch with some of the people we had worked with. We ate pizza in the gym that had formerly been our home and caught up on all the small town happenings including the recent damn break and subsequent flood. It was so good to see them. We drove home and I spent the rest of the day working on a mural. Each team gets a chunk of wall for them to represent themselves and we chose to immortalize our beloved dashboard buddies.
It's not quite done yet, but for just a couple days of work it's coming along quite nicely. It was actually rather fun to be painting again. It’s been so long, and after working on it pretty much all afternoon yesterday and all day today I’m having some serious flashbacks to my college days. I kind of miss it. At the beginning of the year we did a physical training baseline test involving push-ups, sit-ups, and a mile run. Today we repeated it for comparison and, despite yesterday’s exertion, I still dropped almost half a minute from my run time. It was a nice close to great and challenging few days. Tomorrow we have our last one day service project (I get to do trail work), the next day is graduation rehearsal and awards banquet, and by noon on Thursday it will all be over. Surreal. Alright, well, thanks for making it to the end of a really long post with lots of numbers that you probably didn’t care about.
Over the last month and a half I have swam 4,375 yards, biked 73 miles, and ran 18 miles. That sounds like a rather exorbitant amount of “exercise” to me, but I have always wanted to do a triathlon, and I figured it was the sort of thing you sort of need to prepare for. The race was in Monticello, about an hour and half from Vinton, so me, Bob and Erin drove down the night before and stayed with some of the wonderful people we had met on our project in Hopkinton. The mornings before big events are always rather nerve racking, but this seemed particularly so. We dropped our bikes at the first transition area the night before, but we still had to leave around 6:15 to get all our transition things set up and catch a bus to the starting point. I laid out my towel, filled my water bottles, rolled up my socks to make them easier to slip onto wet feet, and had my helmet ready to go. Over the course of my training I had set a few goals for myself. Namely: Finish- that one was immutable. One way or another I was crossing that finish line. Once I was confident that this could happen, I decided I needed some sort of easy, attainable time goal and 2 hours seemed like plenty. Over the last couple weeks, however, when I started adding up my training times, not accounting for transitions and fatigue, it looked like it would be cutting it pretty close. At that point I decided I needed an easier secondary goal so I decided I just wanted to be in the top half of the finishers. I must be more accustomed to ranking myself academically as opposed to athletically, because when I got there and looked around at the physiques my fellow racers reality slapped me in the face that suddenly seemed absurdly ambitious. That led to my final goal: pass four people. I am happy to say that I achieved three of the four goals with flying colors. I finished, I finished in 1:54:07, and I passed 18 people in the process. I placed 141 out of 177, putting me squarely in the bottom fourth, but I have a theory on that—since this was the first ever Camp Courageous Triathlon, it seems plausible that the people who would have heard about it and/or been interested were mostly people who were already into tri’s . But that is just a theory. (Oh, and a note on the passing goal, I’m pretty certain I passed a few people in the swim portion, but I was much too busy attempting to breath to mess with counting, and I feel a little bad about counting the 12 year old I passed on the bike, but I defiantly passed him, and there were two guys that I only passed due my excellent drink while you run skills and they promptly repassed me as soon as they returned to their pace, but hey, I did technically pass them.) So here’s how the whole thing felt. The swim was scary. They let you seed yourself (so I headed straight for the back of the line) and they waited 5 seconds between each individual. That was really nice and cut down a lot on the dreaded “kicked in the face” scenario. Between the nerves and the adrenaline and the asthma and the not being able to see two inches into the water, I pretty much couldn’t breathe. I have been really proud of myself for the progress I’ve made in my side breathing, but the open water really threw me and I could only make it a few breathes before needing to stay up longer to get my bearings straight. I ended up side stroking for about half of the 500 yards (yeah, I know, real cool) but my 11:43 swim time is actually about a minute and a half faster than I think my practice swims were. I spent over three minutes in the first transition. I figured trying to get my breathing under control and my feet actually dry was worth an extra minute or so. About a quarter mile in, I tried to down shift and suddenly I couldn’t pedal. That was more than a bit disconcerting, but after clumsily swerving around for a few yards and nearly taking out a volunteer, the chain popped back into place and didn’t give me any more trouble for the rest of the race (16 miles in all). My bike time was 1:06:06, about 8 minutes faster than my last practice time, and it felt great. It was fairly flat (hmm, a flat road in Iowa, weird) and curved thru lovely fields and tiny towns. It was a beautiful day and you could see for miles and there was no place else I’d rather be. But then came the run. The bike to run transition has a pretty bad reputation as your leg muscles try to adjust to their new task. Sure enough, my feet felt like large, wobbly chunks of lead and my knees and hips like rusty hinges for the first half mile or so. Oh, but let me back up for a second. When I hopped of the bike in second transition, after a few seriously wobbly steps and some not so discrete laughing from the volunteers, my legs just couldn’t stop moving so I just tossed my bike on a rack and kept running thru the transition area. That led to a T time of 36 seconds which was, drumroll please….the overall third fastest transition time!!!! Yep, pretty much a pro. Ok, back to running. The course was an out an back run down the same road you had just biked in on. It was completely straight, with no shade, and you just ran to a sign then turned around. I’ve always been a fan of loop routes myself, but I don’t think I’d actually realized the psychological effects of the anticlimactic out and back. Almost as bad as a treadmill. Regardless, I ran the 5k in 32:29, only slightly slower than my normal running pace, and I was able to run the whole way. I assumed I would be absolutely dead by the end. I assumed I would fighting back pain and just willing myself to finish. Not so. I was still smiling and sure, I was totally exhausted, but in a healthy way not the “wow, everything in my body thinks I shouldn’t have just done that” way. That’s the response I’m used to, so this was a nice and welcome surprise. Bob and Erin also did great and we are all pretty proud of ourselves for actually going thru with it. I saved one of the best parts for last. In case you felt bad about not being there to cheer for us, don’t worry, that part was covered. Somehow we pulled some strings to get permission to take the van that far so at 6 in the morning, four of our teammates and one teammate’s roommate piled in the van with some highly encouraging posters and showed up to cheer us on. It was so great to have them standing at the finish line cheering us on and witnessing such an awesome personal achievement. It really meant a lot. It also meant that we all got to go back to Hopkinton for a lovely lunch with some of the people we had worked with. We ate pizza in the gym that had formerly been our home and caught up on all the small town happenings including the recent damn break and subsequent flood. It was so good to see them. We drove home and I spent the rest of the day working on a mural. Each team gets a chunk of wall for them to represent themselves and we chose to immortalize our beloved dashboard buddies.
It's not quite done yet, but for just a couple days of work it's coming along quite nicely. It was actually rather fun to be painting again. It’s been so long, and after working on it pretty much all afternoon yesterday and all day today I’m having some serious flashbacks to my college days. I kind of miss it. At the beginning of the year we did a physical training baseline test involving push-ups, sit-ups, and a mile run. Today we repeated it for comparison and, despite yesterday’s exertion, I still dropped almost half a minute from my run time. It was a nice close to great and challenging few days. Tomorrow we have our last one day service project (I get to do trail work), the next day is graduation rehearsal and awards banquet, and by noon on Thursday it will all be over. Surreal. Alright, well, thanks for making it to the end of a really long post with lots of numbers that you probably didn’t care about.
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