My Extreme Bucket List

I have never been a very daring person. I've always been a play-it-safe kind of girl. I am afraid of heights. I suffer from varying degrees of social anxiety. I feel like I epitomize the description Bilbo gives of himself at the beginning of The Hobbit movie:  I was entirely respectable. And nothing unexpected ever happened. (This is one of many reasons I feel like a hobbit...though I think that will be a later post).

Well, all that changed last summer. June 6, to be exact. That was the day I boarded a perfectly good airplane and jumped out of it. Granted, I had a parachute (and a very attractive man) strapped to my back. But skydiving awakened something in me...some part of me that I had never known existed.

A part that wanted to be extreme.

A part that wanted to do daring things, unexpected things, dangerous things...like:

1. Run a marathon. 
I always hated running in school...probably because I run like I'm pulling a plow. I hated running laps and doing the mile and all of that. I didn't go out for track or anything. But since I got into college, I've done a few 5Ks and have really enjoyed them. I've agreed to run a 10K in April (got to start training for that one), and I think it would be a real interesting challenge to run a marathon (or maybe a half). A fun one, though, like the Disney Princess Half-Marathon or the Lambeau Field Marathon...one where I'd get a cool t-shirt.

2. Hike the Appalachian Trail.
Maybe not all of it...but a significant portion of it. I showed my students a National Geographic video about it last year, and I found the whole idea to be very romantic and exciting. I don't know how far I'd get. I've never done any serious hiking, so it might be a stretch for me. Maybe the summer after my marathon...

3. Hang glide.
My fear of heights is slowly being tamed by doing things up high. Now, I know I will never be able to bungee jump or BASE jump, because I don't like the sensation of falling and then being ripped back up, but hang gliding looks like a lot of fun. Especially over some tropical place.

4. Rock climb.
In my head, I'm thinking about the cliffs in the Southwestern United States...all that red rock and those beautiful views. But I know my upper body strength is basically non-existent. This one would require some crazy training. And a really good guide. And a really big net in case I fall.

5. Swim the English Channel.
Hey, if I'm going to build up my upper body strength to the point where I can climb crazy high mountains, I might as well just go swim the 20 miles from Dover to Calais. 

Part of me thinks I should just take like five years and train for all of this and do it all and get it out of the way. Only problem? I can't exactly practice rock climbing, hang gliding, and salt water swimming in Central Illinois.

Still working out the kinks.

Stay gold!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Being Kinda "Knotty"

Image
I have a confession to make. I'm about to bore you to tears. Okay, maybe not literally, but I'm writing about something I find terribly exciting, and there are those of you, dear readers, who may not agree. So I'm giving you an out. Right now, just stop reading. Is anyone still there? Good. Because we're about to get "knotty." I love to knit. There, I said it. If I could do nothing but knit, read, write, and drink tea, I'd be a very contented person. Not exciting, just contented. I've been knitting for a few years now. I wish I could say I learned from my grandmother or something that sounds much better than "I learned from Youtube." Actually, that doesn't sound too bad--Youtube is pretty indispensable when it comes to knitting. You can watch videos of all the stitches, which makes it easier to catch on sometimes. Up until recently, though, my knitting has not been varied. I knit scarves (the essential beginner project). I've
Read more

Who do you think you are?

How much do you know about where you came from?  I'm talking big picture here, not what you know about your home town or state. Genealogically.  Most of us know stories that have been passed down. We know that our grandmother's family has Irish roots, for example, and that our several-greats-grandfather fought in the continental army or that our great-grandmother's cousin just disappeared and there was never any trace of him after the Crash of '29. But how much do we really  know about our ancestors?  I am a bit of a genealogy nut--most of my family seems to be--and I have an ancestry.com account, which has proved most interesting to peruse. But all I know are names and some dates--I don't know anything about the kind of people they were, what they liked or disliked. They had children--were they good parents? Did she have a special recipe that she made at Christmas? Did he have a hobby like whittling or playing the guitar? Were there places she alwa
Read more

Questions: Round 1

In my last post, I asked for questions from my readers. I didn't have ridiculously high expectations--not because I don't have faith in my readers!!! But I know that if I read somebody's blog and they invited me to ask questions, I would be very hesitant to do so. Nobody wants to be first. Nobody wants to think that the blogger (me) is sitting there, laughing out loud at the questions and judging the asker. I get it. I promise I understand. I only had one intrepid reader who gave me some fodder for my blog posts, which is fine. I actually was not surprised by the fact that this reader gave me so many questions to answer. Of course, to understand why, one must go back to our time at ISU when she was working a late shift at the Info Desk in the student center and I was sitting in our dorm room when a Facebook chat window popped up, begging for some kind of question/answer quiz she could take before she died of boredom. Add to that hours and hours of Sporcle quizzes (hence
Read more