Ready or Not

Event week is finally here and as usual I am a bundle of nerves. Actually I am vacillating between fear and peace, between doubt and faith, between panic and “whatever.” The bottom line is I have done what I can to prepare and that is all I can do. That is something Tom Flanagan told me a couple of years back when I was about to have a nervous breakdown due to the weather preventing a lot of my training. He said, “All you can do is all you can do.”

I suppose one thing that threw me into this latest tizzy has been the forced deviations from last year’s model. In Chicot III, I was so strong for so long that I felt like I had found the formula and I would follow it to a “t.” I couldn’t follow the formula.

I was in an extremely good place physically and mentally until I suffered that fall last February and another one a few weeks ago. Then things just came apart both in my body as well as inside my brain. I know I sound like I whiner, but I am. I always become doubtful, fearful, anxious as the event draws near.

This happens even in training. If I have something really big on the agenda, I will nerve up as the big one approaches. Sometimes I develop diarrhea before a long training run. With nerves like that, who needs trouble?

Despite my own self-doubts, God has tried to comfort me in several ways and I suppose it would not be right to resist that, it would be sacrilegious. He did it at church with the pastor’s message and the prayers and the encouragements from the people. He did it after church through nature, through reflection, through reading. He has done it through friends. He has done it through Jeff. He has done it through the cats. So I am trying not to resist but to enjoy, to anticipate, to have good feelings.

Justin Nunnery, the boat captain of the crew called yesterday. It was good to hear his voice. He has taken care of several things for us as he lives in that area and has done some of the legwork with South Shore Cottages from whom I will rent a boat and a room the night before and from where we will launch the swim. I told him that we will pray and then just go out and have fun. That’s the plan. That’s the hope. I want everyone to have fun.

I also found out a few days ago that the old gang is coming back. For the longest time I thought Randy Beets and Robin Bond would not be at this edition of the Chicot Challenge. That caused me some severe sadness, especially while I re-watched a lot of the old footage of the past swims. While watching these videos, I was struck with nostalgia and with how happy the crew seemed. I miss a lot of that while I am face down in the water. Sometimes I think my swim is causing torture for everyone involved.

Anyway, as we used to say on the schoolyard, “Ready or not, here I come.” Saturday morning at approximately 6:15 am, I will swim off the boat ramp at South Shore Cottages and begin what I hope and pray is a fine adventure for everyone on the boat and in a kayak. A couple of people from the Diabetes Foundation of Mississippi, Bethany Theilman and Irena McLean, as well as some friends from Centerville Baptist Church are supposed to be at the finish, at the boat ramp of the Lake Chicot State Park. I don’t want to let them down.

Maybe herein lies some of the appeal of endurance athletics. I recently read somewhere that someone called these things, “Life in a day.” That works for me. There is the birth of the dream, the gestation of that dream into action, training, and planning. Then there is the event itself, the beginning of the journey, struggles along the way, and at last victory, the finish. The conclusion for this event will be sort of like heaven, the re-uniting of friends, the celebration of an accomplishment, the end of struggle, and the beginning of rest.

I’m not nervous anymore. 

I can’t wait.