It all seems a lifetime ago now. I dearly want to return that I may experience it all anew but to do so now would be to forgo other mountains and other dreams and I cannot do that just yet. I am, as it so happens, already preparing for my next high altitude escapade: Kilimanjaro. I research the subject relentless until my wrists ache and my download limit hits red and I create and recreate lists of gear that I need.
Yesterday it occurred to me as I was readying myself to go to a friend's birthday, my legs not yet sore from my first attempt at the 1000 Steps in the Dandenong Ranges this calendar year, that I might have just edged myself back into training without having even made a conscious effort to do so.
I had recently gone through a particularly unmotivated over-sugared 3 month period where Cadbury Marvelous Creations levened themselves into my mouth on a too frequent a basis and I had stooped to buying both my lunch and breakfast in the work canteen. I was fatigued and fogged and entirely too beholden to crappy processed food.
The conscious decision I did make 3 weeks ago was to break my sugar addiction. I had done it before. I knew the side effects. Headaches. Fatigue. General irritability. I started taking porridge and banana to work for breakfast and homemade soup for lunch. I quickly developed the most frustrating sinus headache right behind the bridge of my nose and my computer seemed to misbehave entirely too often for my liking. Friday this week gone I felt as though I had turned a corner.
I awoke while it was still dark, my head clearer than it had been in months, and found the motivation to do the dusting before I even left the house for work. I came home that evening to vacuum and my usual weekend of housework was already done. In the background, my newly delivered washing machine was humming quietly and my kitchen finally cleared of all the things I had moved out of the laundry earlier that week when the first new washing machine arrived and then departed again, having been damaged before even packaged.
I was even more motivated upon rising Saturday morning, 8 hours of sleep reviving me. The market, brunch, a bargain buy at a local outdoors store that I had popped into on a whim while on my way to another store in search of Kitchen Tea items for my best friend. I returned home long enough to hang the freshly washed sheets and change my clothes before getting back into the car and making the 40 minute journey to the Dandenong Ranges where I proceeded to trounce up the 1000 Steps twice before returning to my car to devour with the utmost pleasure the salted caramel donut that I had purchased from the Tivoli Bakery stall at the market that morning, relishing in its sugary reward. Then I was scooting home again to prepare for a night out at The Aviary in Richmond to celebrate a colleague's 30th birthday.
Today was similarly motivated. I made soup. Lunched with my best friend. Went for an unintended but wholly needed short hill run to remove some of the lactic from yesterday's efforts. I was inspired by a blog I read from the author of a book I had previously devoured in the months leading up to Nepal on the writer's own experience with Mount Everest. I was curious as to her experience preparing for Mount Kilimanjaro, knowing already that she had previously completed Kili along with 5 other great mountains in her Seven Summits pursuit. I had long intended to write about my experience returned from Nepal. It had just fallen to the wayside as I allowed my best friend's new engagement to take centre stage.
As I write I have formed the conclusion that the most important thing about this year is not being her maid of honor. I am certainly grateful for its bestowment and will take my responsibilities seriously to do all I can to make her day the happiest in her life thus far. It would be an injustice to myself, however, to rank her important event before my own. Nepal's greatest lesson taught me that the most important day in my adult life was the day the surgeon stopped my heart to repair the genetic error that restrained me. The physiological damage mostly corrected (not entirely, however, my heart will never work as efficiently as one that never knew genetic adversity as mine did), the psychological damage took much longer and perhaps persists in some capacity even now. I understood early on that I was just not as good as other children on the field, that only those with obvious physical handicap were worse than I was. Asthma or obesity only could I outpace yet there was never anything visibly wrong with me. It did not matter how hard I trained, and I trained very hard during my rowing years, the average lazy teen that chose table tennis as their term sport (because it required the least effort) was fitter than I was. Hell, so were the muso's that were exempt from playing sport at all because their extracurricular timetable was already consumed by orchestra practice.
I am the sum of all of my experiences, however. The curves and planes of my personality as molded by those more formative years in which my physical inadequacy fed into my social insecurity were not wholly undone by my affectionately termed 'patch job'. Nor by the high altitude and impressive vistas of the Himalayas. The person that I found there is stronger than the person that left Australia, of that I'm certain. She trusts in her capacity more now than she ever did. She trusts that Nepal was not the end of her big dreams of big mountains. Her stomach rounded by this now concluded hiatus from personal responsibility and calves pleasantly sore from exertion, she has 7 months before the next one becomes a reality and she's determined that she should enjoy it!
There was no real conscious effort to commence training for Kilimanjaro. Ultimately it came down to a pair of shoes. I possess a keen dislike of the stereotype between women and their shoes - indeed, I feel much the same about pink - but it remains the same. Thursday week I stumbled across the pair of trail shoes that I had been coveting since February in the colour I want (have you got any blacker?) and not that awful pale grey and purple (seriously, how much dirt do you want to show?). I christened them on that family rite of passage, Sugarloaf last weekend and then again yesterday. I started riding again also but not so long ago, as my saddle sore rump should attest. This evening's run just confirms it: I am once again in training. I wholly intend on making last year's attempt look menial by way of comparison. I will never be the fittest person on any of the mountains that I climb but I will be one of the well prepared ones, even in spite of the residual inefficiencies of that most central of organs, my heart.
Right now, however, I must unhand the phone on which I now write if I am to get my 8 hours before the new week greets me. I hope that it will be as uplifting as this one has been.
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