4 a.m…
still before dawn, while everyone else is fast asleep.
Rubbing my sleepy eyes, I go to the fridge, crack five raw eggs into a cup, and down the whole thing in one go. (Burp…)
Huh?
Ah, this is that scene from the movie “Rocky,” the first one. (laughs)
Plenty of people around my age probably remember it.
Rocky, a going-nowhere four-round club fighter, suddenly gets picked as the champion’s challenger.
A guy who’d lived his whole life doing dirty work just “to survive,” “to get by” — deciding to “start over” — building his body as a boxer from scratch, facing himself all over again, pushing through brutal training on his own, and walking into the championship fight…
Anyone, if they take it on seriously, can open up a future.
That movie honestly made me cry so much…
The hero of that movie is Rocky, but the hero of my life is me!
And today too, I just keep running down the road of my own challenge to myself.
There’s now less than a year left until next year’s Peking to Paris Motor Challenge.
My cancer isn’t a simple one to operate on, and if I actually have the surgery, it just barely won’t leave enough time to be ready by next year.
My previous doctor had already given up on my case… so after talking it over with a new one, it turns out the first step has to be “hormone therapy,” using medication to shrink the cancer.
Hormone therapy is known to cause weight gain, apparently.
As if I didn’t already… put on weight easily ← that one’s down to my age.
As if I didn’t already… eat a lot ← that one’s entirely on me. (laughs)
I actually need to think carefully about the weight limit on my luggage for Peking to Paris, and now “I myself might be over the weight limit”? Come on.
It’s fine! There’s still plenty I can do.
That’s it! I’ll start walking, starting today!
They say sticking with it matters more than anything, and that you should follow through on what you say you’ll do…
I’d love to call this a proper “declaration,” but well… doing it my own relaxed way is probably more like me. (laughs)
So, with that — off I go!
