Florida Halloweenathon

National Geographic Adventure

One of the greatest magazines of all time is National Geographic and I loved when National Geographic Adventure was published.  I have not seen it on the newstands, but its website is one of my homepages on my computer.  I dream of being involved in all kinds of adventure.  We need adventure to remind us that sobriety is a journey and a fantastic adventure. 



http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/trips/americas-best-adventures/photo-gallery/

Problems do not exist today...only opportunities.

This morning I was overwhelmed with all the challenges and problems I need to deal with in the next few weeks and just got started.  I had a friend drive me to the library so that I could get some work done while my Jeep was being repaired.  Then, I realized that I had left my mobile phone at her house.  I had no phone, no numbers, no way to go anywhere and needed to be available for many people.  So, I decided to run back to her house.  It was no further than any other run I had made.  I ran.  Now, I did not want to, but it was the best part of my day.

Acceptance...but racism too?

I am told in recovery that I simply had to stop fighting everyone and everything - but even racism, and with racism, I include homosexuality, misogyny and all other forms of hate.  But then I understood that, yes, even hate I had to stop fighting...The Power of Peace and Love conquers all.  When I am disturbed, I lose.  When I accept, I can move forward and change.

Athletics

I am not a great athlete.  I am not even a good athlete.  However, I am an athlete.  I work out and train every day and take my training seriously.  This year I am running 11 full and half marathons, several other 5k, 10k and 15k races and regularly surf, cycle, kayak and other activities.  I am now learning to do kiteboarding.  last week I am went windsurfing.  I may not be a great athlete or even a good athlete, but I am an athlete and I am proud of my effort and focus to do the best I can.  That is why sobriety is an adventure for me.

Perseverance and Gratitude.

We say that a grateful alcoholic or addict will not drink or drug; he would never even consider it.  I am so grateful that I am grateful.  If I look at my life objectively or comparatively, I would hate so much of it.  Nothing is really as I would have planned it or even wanted it.  Yet, I have learned that whatever it is sober, it is good and I am free to choose my attitude under any and all circumstances.  October, being the month of perseverance, I welcome the feeling of persevering and overcoming great odds.  Yet, God has a great sense of humor and great sense of timing. When I pray for perseverance, I actually receive more events, more challenges and more obstacles to overcome. 

This morning I ran 9 miles and did 1 hour of weight training - then abs workout.  I am emotionally and physically drained.  I am so tired.  I laughed and cried.  These are conditions of my endorphins off the charts.  I am so grateful that I have the ability to see the good in all things and to see suffering as optional.

I am so much better for the pain that I endure than the pleasure that I enjoy

Abundance

I am grateful for everything. If I am not grateful for what I have, why would I expect the Universe to give me more.

Adventure

Adventure...My goal is to do something outrageous every day.

The Climber - Alex Honnold

The Climber

Alex Honnold aced a record-breaking, climb-till-you-drop week in Yosemite.

Perhaps the most impressive detail buried in 25-year-old Alex Honnold's ridiculously large adventure in Yosemite this July was the eight-hour drive the Californian made to Los Angeles at the very end. At that point, he’d been up for 36 hours straight—spending a day first doing interviews and shooting a climbing video. And then, at 8 p.m., he and partner Shawn Leary climbed 3,000-foot El Capitan for 24 hours straight, summitting three times and breaking the speed record for consecutive ascents.
All told, Honnold and Leary had scaled more than 8,000 vertical feet, and hiked down another 9,000 for trips back to the valley. Honnold then scarfed dinner, took a shower, and hit the road, driving south to see his girlfriend. He’d been up 42 hours all told. “I didn’t even know I could do something like that,” he says of that two-day stretch. “I really pushed some limits that time.” That time.
Just a week earlier, Honnold had managed to scale the walls of both iconic Half Dome and El Cap, solo, in just over 11 hours, crushing the speed records for El Cap and the two routes consecutively—what’s known as the solo linkup. That outing, which left the climbing world slack-jawed with its audacity, was, as Honnold puts it, “just kind of fun.” Which begs the question: What can this kid climb if he really works at something? Probably anything.

—By Ryan Bradley

IN MY OWN WORDS

By Alex Honnold

“Oh, I Could Do That”
I was out climbing with a friend of mine and we got to talking about this old film we both love, Masters of Stone V. In it, there's footage of Dean Potter doing the solo linkup, and it was, like, the coolest thing I'd ever seen when I was 15. I got to thinking, Oh, I could probably do that this season. I didn't exactly know how, but I figured it couldn't be that bad.
Early Start
I hiked up to Half Dome the night before, slept at the base, chatted with these two Swedish dudes who'd done it that day, then went to sleep. I woke up at 4:45 a.m., got up ten minutes before light and just started climbing. I was up there romping. I don't know how quickly I did it. Two hours and nine minutes? Yeah. Pretty fast.
“Nothing About This Was Super Extreme”
By the time I hiked down Half Dome, my friends were just getting out of bed. It was maybe 8 a.m. I had stashed a mountain bike at Muir Lake, which saved me a little bit of effort. I biked back to my van, made myself breakfast, and drove to El Cap. Nothing about this was super extreme. I took a pack and food and headlamp and jacket because I really had no idea how long it would take. I'd never soloed El Cap before.
Some Final Cramming
It's 3,000 feet. In my life I'd done three or four pitches, but this is 30. I'd read in books how to rope solo, but I wasn't totally sure what I'd be getting into.
Unintentional Speed
I sort of realized an hour into it that I was just going to crush the speed record. I checked my timer and was like, Oh man, that is pretty quick. So I stopped to eat. I wasn't really gunning for speed, I was just hoping to do the linkup because I thought it would be so cool.
Heroism
The Pancake Flake above the Great Roof was this long involved process. At the end I was like, Man, that's enough of that. It’s super exposed, 2,300 feet off the ground, and a really clean, sheer part of the wall. Up there I was like, This is crazy. You get through it with a layback, where, with counter-pressure, you’re pulling back against the side of the crack and your body is open—it's a very exposed style of climbing. If your foot slips you could fall off the wall. I’m up there, facing outward, the Valley 2,300 feet below and thinking, This is heroic.
A Quick Snack and Chat
In the last couple hundred feet I ran into some climbing parties. I'm sure they were like, What the f***!? They'd been up there for four or five days. I stopped and chatted with them for a bit. Also, honestly, my arms were getting a little tired. So I shared some of my Goldfish with this chick on belay.
A Bigger ClimbThe solo linkup I came up with spur the moment, but the triple was monumental. Three times. Twenty-three hours. We were going speed route—actually moving continuously for a full 16 hours, which is kind of tiring, you know? That actually kind of pushed us. And having to hike down El Cap three times is sort of a lot of work.

Step Aside, Dean
I rewatched Masters of Stone recently and, I don't know. Some of the magic is gone.

The foregoing is an excerpt from National Geographic Adventure - http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/adventurers-of-the-year/alex-honnold-2010/ 

We are either a miracle or a tragedy

Sunrise

A sunrise run.

Dreams are real; Dreams never die...Steve Jobs died yesterday.

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

Video of the Commencement address.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.

Never Give Up

Never Give Up! This is the tag on my license plate and this is something that I need to tell myself frequently, sometimes daily.  It is through perseverance that we find out who we are and it is the inability to persevere that so often causes someone to relapse or leave recovery...Alcoholics and addicts have a false solution to their problems and it is to give up. 

The greatest gift of recovery is the miracle that happens when we do not give up.  The first thing I ever heard in sobriety was "Never give up just before the miracle happens."  How often did I give up anyway?  How often did I lose hope or faith or patience or perseverance?  How often did I not trust that things would work out the way that they were supposed to if I only do my part?

Today, I know that all things, good and bad, will pass. I know that I can walk through anything. I know that God will not give me more than we can handle together.  I know that I am not alone.  I know that anything is possible. I know never to give up.

October 3, 1924 - Day of Hope

This morning I left Atlanta and drove back to Florida.  I heard that today in 1924, Franklin Delano Roosevelt made his first trip to Warm Springs, Georgia for treatment for his polo.  He would visit these springs 41 more times and it is there where he died.  It is here where he discovered and went on to inspire hope:

When the world says, "Give up,"
Hope whispers, "Try it one more time."
- Anonymous

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.
- Albert Einstein

To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.
- Pearl S. Buck

Hope is like peace. It is not a gift from God.
It is a gift only we can give one another.
- Elie Wiesel

October - Atlanta 13.1 Marathon - Month of Perseverance

Today, I ran the Atlanta 13.1 Half Marathon for my cause "Run for GUA Africa"  Check it out at www.runforguaafrica.com. My goal for 2011 is to raise $11,000 by running 11 marathons and getting 1,000 to donate $11 each.    The last time I was in Atlanta, I was to face the darkest and most difficult 2-3 years of my life.  My life seemed over...I was newly sober and full of fear.  For the past 5 years, I have walked a singular path and I am better for it.  Anyone who has the courage to face the truth about themselves may find that their lives will become richer and bolder than they ever dreamed possible.  This has been my experience.