June 25, 2021 – The twenty-second official Friday Night BeerBlog

Well, it’s Friday morning and sometimes these things just get away from us. I won’t make excuses on why I’m scrambling this morning to get a blog ready. It’s amazing how weeks can just get all kinds of crazy. I even had a podcast all ready to go Wednesday, but just didn’t get it uploaded. We just have to accept these setbacks and readjust, cause in the end we’re all doing the best we can.

I have no idea if this podcast will make it out tonight or if I have to wait until Saturday or even Sunday because y’all….I’m going to eastern Kentucky to do an adventure race this weekend. A high school friend of mine has just started doing them and months ago I told her that if she came to Kentucky to do one, that I would join her. Well, in true Julie Dutton Stewart fashion, she called me on it.

We are doing a 3-woman team race in an all women’s adventure race in Greenbo State Park near Grayson. At first I was like, Okay, whatever. But as we’ve gotten closer to the race day, it has become more real. And I don’t mean more real in the sense that I’m scared or have fear about doing the race, but more real in the sense that my true admin side has taken over. That admin side that I haven’t had to employ in the last few years. And it’s rusty. Very, very rusty.

I have never done an adventure race, so a week ago I started watching videos, studying gear lists, gathering supplies, getting my SIL’s mountain bike all tuned up, learning how to read a compass and plot UTM points. I’m checking and double-checking my gear list. So when I say I don’t know where time this week has gone, well, there it is.

I leave to head there in a couple of hours and I absolutely don’t know what to expect. But I think I’ve put in the work to make sure that whatever the situation, I’ll be able to handle it. And this leads me to the point of tonight’s blog, which actually just came to me…

Jumping into something where we want to be successful (or in this case, live to see another day) requires more than just showing up to do it. If you want to do it well or take pleasure in it, it takes prep. It takes good prep. You have to put in the work up front in order to have any kind of expectations for the end. It’s like the old saying, you can’t get by on pure talent or hard work beats talent every time. Something like that.

Just because you are a good runner doesn’t mean you are going to win all the races you enter. The runner that trains well and smart will more than likely beat the good, yet unprepared runner every time.

I worked with Muhammad Ali once and we were able to have a 1:1 conversation about sports training. He said, “The hardest part of everything I did was the training. The fights were the easy part.” If you can push through the hard work you have to put in up front, no one will stop you on game day – no matter what kind of game-day you face.

That being said, it’s time to load the car and get this train moving.

Wish me luck. Regardless, it is going to be fun. And I will be able to say that I’ve done this in my lifetime, even if I decide not to do it again. And I am all about those bucket list items.

Cheers – LLM

PS – I’ll have pics from the adventure race – hopefully. My camera’s forward facing camera stopped working this week and I haven’t had time to deal with it – so rear facing photos will have to do. I guess I’ll end up being in a lot of them.

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