Dreams Come Alive

The packages started arriving via different shipments last week and I have been gleefully opening them like a little boy on Christmas dawn. They contain all the freeze dried foods and electrolyte drinks that will sustain me during my week-long sojourn in the desert.

This is all very new territory for me. Up till now my approach to nutrition has been to eat and drink anything and everything in moderation without any need to take heed of details. What does one do during periods of strenuous activity? Eat more and drink more. Period. That I have the body age of 18 (according to some machine that measures my muscle to fat ratio) invariably contributed to this laissez faire approach to nutrition.

The closest reminder to pay a wee bit more attention is a particularly unique experience back in 2002 during a Thailand to Singapore bike ride. Towards the end of a 190 km section, I had literally run out of fuel. I wasn’t tired or exhausted; I had simply run out of calories to burn. How bizarre. I even needed someone to tear open a chocolate wrapper for me.

Such was my ignorance then that I thought sports drinks had to be consumed in conservative amounts and so limited myself to a cautious one can a day. Imagine my astonishment where, upon observing what the experienced riders were doing, I saw them guzzling a dozen or so cans over the course of a day’s riding. I could have been on the verge of hyponatremia without even realising it!

Forward to the present and following advice from past runners and experts on the matter, I have ordered a selection of innovative electrolyte drinks for my hydration purposes. It is all very technical, in my humble opinion, but basically there are different drinks to imbibe during, before and after a race. They contain assorted mixtures of compounds and salts and perform a variety of functions which, quite frankly, I vaguely understand. If you wish to find out more, do check out www.scienceinsport.com. What I do know is that they work (according to the plethora of research on the issue and the unequivocal recommendations on ultra marathon running forums on the internet). So for the next couple months I shall be putting the products to the test and ensure that my body finds them agreeable and they do not impact negatively on my constitution. Power up!!

Over several months I had agonised over how best to launch my first ever blog. As was a bad habit of mine, I felt it had to be perfect, clever, witty, original, creative, blah blah blah. As I ran through the myriad of ideas and angles in my head, the hours and days and subsequently, months, flew by and all I had to show was…well, nothing.

Recently a friend and coach impressed upon me the following quote by Da Vinci: “I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough, we must do.” Coming from a man who sketched the design for the first parachute some 500 years ago (by the way, all 85 kilograms of his original contraption was put to the test a few years back and it does fly!), I decided to take the bull by its horns and started putting pen to paper. Or rather, I started tapping on the keyboard. And whatever comes out will be good enough; whatever “good enough” means.

And so now I find myself blogging. There is a certain sense of jubilant celebration, of triumphant achievement, that comes from simply doing it, and putting an end to all that torturous analysing and endless wondering of how it would turn out. After all it is actions that create outcomes, not considerations.

And so it is that there are two key sets of actions to having our dreams come alive. The first is that of a declaration. I find so many people I speak with or coach who have inspiring goals and dreams but refrain from really thinking about them, much less write or talk about them. And the biggest reason is that they have deemed themselves incapable or unrealistic from the outset.

Our identity and belief systems have been built and honed over several years of our existence and strengthened by our daily experiences. And it is these that determine our self talk, our conversations about whether we can or are good enough or whether we should. And so instead of casting our eyes to a future vision of what can be, many scrutinise the past and justify what cannot be. Which is a shame, a downright shame, for many years from now, we will look back in regret at the things we did not do, not the things we did.

So, imagine you have a magic wand…what will your life be like?