Though some traditional sports were played during grade school, success and enjoyment in those were quite elusive.  My early life consisted of skipping so many flat rocks into rivers and lakes, one might think that I was trying to fill them in. All of this skipping produced a low, side arm throw that could glide a rock nicely along the water, but was positively awful for throwing out any base runner. Plus, I just didn’t like playing baseball, or basketball.

Coaches in small private grade schools, almost always a dad of one of the players, want to win. Unfortunately, the easiest way to win is to concentrate on coaching and playing the good kids, thus predetermining one’s athletic trajectory at an early age. Professional sports are overly represented by people who’s birthday puts them at the  older end of their grade school classes. Unless one believes that the gravitational tugs of various little specks in the sky make changes to a baby during childbirth, a young child’s success relative to their peers that often follow them to adulthood, is often the product of coaches who want to win. This is a powerful reason for such a statistical occurrence. For me, a real interest in training and competing in sports didn’t start until post-college adulthood.

Motorsports quickly gave way to road cycling, mountain biking, orienteering and trail running. These sports seem to be connected in some way, as there is a lot of overlap in the people who participate. After well over a decade of participating in these individually, the sport of “Adventure Racing” magically combined each of these skills into one neat little package. It seemed to start gaining traction across the country a little over twenty years ago. Though adventure racing throws in the addition of paddling, our family had been doing that all of our lives. It was a match made in heaven for me.

Having started orienteering in the early to mid 1980’s had given me the skills to make me the navigator on almost any team. Again, working to get better at what I was already good at was paying off.

It turned out that training for these kinds of sports can be done in conjunction with life and in very inventive ways. Efficiency!! In addition, the friendships that can be forged by people doing hard things together can sometimes bring more enjoyment than one might have bargained for.

Six Team Alpine Shop members, about to split up into three teams and do a race down the Missouri River.

On a long work project in New Orleans, one summer, I found myself in a fitness pickle, which turned out to be a happiness pickle as well. Though the music and nightlife are quite impressive, the terrain of New Orleans is either flat pavement, or water. I quickly found that running, just for the sake of running, without the wilderness to enjoy and explore, or friends to chatter with, turned fitness into a chore. Maintaining the level of ability that our race team had achieved was mentally unsustainable; willpower, standing by itself, isn’t worth much in the long run. It took months to figure out a way to make it work. Eventually, devising a system where a kayak could be towed behind my bicycle and then get everything packed up into a single watercraft, opened up the wilderness and some excitement. It’s good to be an amphibian in the wetlands. To round it out, finding weekly bicycle races circling around the downtown basketball arena to compete in provided an excitement and a certain amount of nervousness to look forward to.

Imagine that, a little nervousness to look forward to. A little is good, too much is… well…too much could drive one to quit. 

Below is a video of my amphibious rig coming back down the Mississippi.

Paddling back down to New Orleans on the Mississipp. Video made by Buddy Pondrom (budblues).

The sport of adventure racing was a lot of fun, most of the time, and not fun at all, some of the time. The trick was being able to take the bad with the good; much like life.

It seemed that every team I was a part of was a bit leaderless and rag tag. We liked it, and remained that way even after being sponsored by an outdoors outfitting store named Alpine Shop. Leaders, chains of command, these are the things that are connected to one’s day job. They are what companies and clients must pay you to do, because it turns things into a chore and takes time away from what one would rather be doing. 

Team Alpine Shop began doing very well in the late 2000’s. A fine line began to appear for me, the one that separates an enjoyable hobby from the drudgery of work. Finishing well and winning many races, along with capturing the National points championship in 2009 and Checkpoint Tracker Nationals in 2013, ended up turning ourselves into nervous wrecks. None of us came from a youth filled with above average  success in sports. We might all have suffered from imposter syndrome. All of a sudden, we felt like winning was expected of us. We didn’t want to get found out that we weren’t actually that good. That meant that an awful lot of preparation went into covering for not being very good; like, training.

Castlewood Eight Hour, two months after my ALS diagnosis.

A Surprisingly Enjoyable Endeavor- 2016 Castlewood Race Report

‘You are only as good as your last performance’ has always been a vague feeling of mine. Perhaps it’s an insecurity, but it keeps you motivated. I enjoy trying hard to win in any competition, for isn’t that the fun of it all? The point of it? One does not need to win, in order to enjoy the trying. I have also found that the joy of wins and successes, as viewed as a product, fades very quickly. Rather than waste much time basking in successes or lamenting in failures, (there was an abundance of failures) it was more fulfilling to just start thinking about preparing for the next challenge.

Before every serious adventure race would be a big meeting explaining how the race was going to be run and possible hazards to look out for. During one such meeting, some advice given for paddling down a very, very, very small river was, “if you fall out of your boat, stand up, dust yourself off, and get back in”. Often, a banquet was provided afterwards, where all the racers could intermingle. It was nice. Though they were ‘the enemy’, we were also friends. The heavy hitters seemed to always magically reappear, no matter how far, remote or backwater the location was.

After a race was over, one of the heavy hitters, the Russian, would bow his head and say, “respect”, to the people who might have beaten him. He certainly was not beaten all of the time. His English was more than good enough to chatter about as I did, but I liked his conservation of words.

My father tried hard and was a very successful man, at the things he decided to pour himself into. I think I learned that trait from him, along with being careful to question why it is, that you pour yourself into something. Outside of the necessities of his work, he enjoyed dabbling in simple things that weren’t meant to impress. My mother also was also successful and a trier, though less choosy about the activities she worked in; she was more about predetermined duties, traditions she felt compelled to continue and going with the flow of others.

With all of our work and efforts, failures and successes, what had I learned? What had we learned? Perhaps we found how the endeavors that one focuses on, slowly changes a person, probably most powerfully by shaping one’s social group. Evolution has inclined our minds to value social interactions in incredibly complicated ways. Family, friends, team, town or nation, oftentimes compete with each other. We tend not to notice just how complicated all of our social cues are, once we are sufficiently immersed in what is happening.

The end