A Part of the Club

I've been reading about the Explorers Club lately. Seems that these guys are the most intense people out there who have gone the farthest and studied the most. The list of members includes people like Sir Edmund Hillary (Honorary Chair), John Glenn, and some others, including a guy (his name escapes me at the moment, who sailed nearly 5,000 miles on a bamboo raft--just to prove he could. I would love to become a member of a group like this. Sadly though the chances of that happening are slim. You have to do something really cool to get invited to join, and the membership dues are probably steep to say the least. Being a part of an elite group has always been a goal that I'd like to achieve and I'm not picky about which one I want to be a part of.

A couple of weeks ago Brad picked up two massive tires from an old tire depot (I'm not really sure where, but I'm sure there are these 'depots' everywhere, since you see tires all over the place if you look hard enough). One weighs in at an estimated 500 pounds. Large, but small in comparison to the other behemoth that he picked up, the 1000 pound monster. That's not its official name, but for this story it will suffice. Pictured below is a shot of me flipping the smaller of the two, a task in itself, but not entirely grueling to get it flipped over. The monster on the other hand, offers much more of a challenge.

Monday night Brad got together what we'll call, The Brain Trust (Hankins, Morchat, myself, and Tillery), to hold the first-annual-monthly-tire-flip-off (again this name isn't official, rather what I propose we call it). The goal of the FAMTFO, 10 flips of the 1000 lb. tire in 5 minutes.

Rain made the ground that evening quite slick, so doing it either on the grass, or concrete was out of the question. This was a problem since both of those surfaces offered the most grip available, but neither were in any condition to be lifting hefty objects on. So, we made due and used the gravel parking spaces in the Tillery backyard. Not ideal, since rocks tend to slip and move when pressure is applied, but still doable. The tire was rolled into position, and the contest was begun (hopefully Danny will finish uploading the video so we can get going on that stuff soon).

Brad made quick work on the ten flips he proposed to do, finishing in about 2.5 minutes. Jeff also finished 10 flips without much trouble in something like 3:40, Danny being the uber-man-freak he is, got it done in an unbelievable 2:13 or something like that. Woah.

Me on the other hand, I had a bit more, lets say, challenging time flipping the monster tire. My first flip worked a bit better than I had thought it would. The second and third came with reletive ease (there isn't much ease to be found when tire flipping, wow that sentence sounds like it should have come from the mouth of someone from West Virginia or something), and then the fourth flip too happened with only minor toughness. Flip five however never happend. Have I mentioned that tire flipping is really hard? It is. I got four flips, and then just couldn't deliever on the final push. I got the tire up a couple more times, resting the entire weight on my biceps (which are brusied pretty badly from the whole exercise), but as soon as I tried to push the tire over the top, like Stallone dominating every other trucker in the movie 'Over the Top', it just wouldn't move since my feet were slipping on the loose gravel.

Four flips. At the time I was glad that I had at least gotten the tire over a few times. But the more I thought about the event, the more I realized that I should have been able to do more, and probably been able to do the entire 10 flips, or at least half of them anyway. Especially when I started thinking of names like 'The 1000 lb. Club', or '1000 Pounders', both lame, but go with me here, to denote the fact that you had flipped that monster tire 10 times. It ate at me all day Tuesday, and into Wednesday morning. I worked out and then got 5 flips done, an improvement espescially since it was done after an hour of lifting weights, but still not the 10 I really wanted to accomplish.

Being a part of this elite group is the new goal that I'd like to achieve. And it'll happen. I still want to travel the world, but the chances that I'll ever be the first to scale a mountain, or step foot on Mars are nearly impossible. Thinking about all of this membership stuff has led me to the realization that some clubs might be out of reach, but this one, the '1000 Pounders', is a membership that one day soon, I'll be a part of.

Watching What I Become

When I was at my heaviest I never thought of myself as fat. I guess that's one of the funny things about how we see ourselves, in a low point we often treat ourselves like we know we should be treated on the inside, but on the outside we sometimes can't portray that same respect. I'll explain.

At 370 pounds I knew that my inside's weren't that of a fat person. I would walk through the mall and see someone who was really overweight and think, "Woah, that guy's fat." Or, "Geeze lady, go to the gym." Terrible, I know. I think a lot of that stemmed from the fact that I was still in my very early 20's and the brevity of the weight I carried around hadn't really started to affect me in everyday life. I could still go out and play frisbee with my friends, or play basketball three nights a week. It was my way of saying, I'm just destined to be large. So on the inside, I saw myself as being much more in shape than what the normal person walking down the street would notice.

Slowly but surely what I see in my head, and what I notice in mirrors, or windows (yes, I often look at myself in the windows of buildings that I pass by, just to check) when I look in them is getting closer and closer. No more is there a fear of seeing a picture of myself and thinking, "Oh God, please don't let this be as bad as I think it's going to be. There is a calm self assurance there, and I really believe that is from the self confidence that knowing who you are inside and out has brought.

This next week we're heading to Arkansas to do a bit of backcountry camping. I'm excited to see what I can do with a 50+ pound pack on my back for 4.5 days, and if I can make it to the end of this cave we're talking about going to explore. That and seeing Bigfoot. http://www.gcbro.com/ardb1.htm, this site helps to explain a bit of the mentality that we're heading into this weekend with. It should be sweet.

More to come later.