I do believe I have been quite properly humbled. I do believe that was an important lesson for me to learn.
I would like to believe that I have never been abrasively outspoken on the subject, however, if I have ever pridefully done so, I will not do so again.
There's nothing worse than a hypocrite, unless its a hypocrite who's been discovered. So, in order to avoid the accusation, I must either change my words or my actions. And since words are said to be the overflow of the heart, it seems I must either change my beliefs or my actions.
For a while I was so thoroughly tempted to change my beliefs and continue in my actions, since that seemed to be the easier course. For a while I was blinded by the surprise discovery of just how pleasant this foot in my mouth could taste.
I cannot claim an impenetrable resolve at this point, but at the very least I have regained the will to realign my life.
I will remove this foot long enough to apologize for any judgement I had so naively cast. I guess I'm not exactly who I thought I was.
What a humbling thought.
Thursday, May 26, 2016
Thursday, February 25, 2016
The Lion and the Zebra
This is a story about a lion who fell in love with a zebra.
Actually that's a lie.
They didn't fall in love. Love had nothing to do with it. Let's take love out of the equation. They fell into animal attraction.
When you think about it, it doesn't seem that unlikely on the part of the lion does it? I mean, lions prey on zebras all the time, so there's obviously something biologically programmed into the lion to make it want to chase after zebras. And there's all those stripes. The stripes help.
But the zebra...the zebra should have known better. The zebra would have seen the lion coming, and everything in that zebra should have been telling it to run away. But maybe this zebra didn't have an internal alarm system. Or maybe this zebra was just tired. Or maybe this zebra was curious. No matter what, the choice to stay was pretty risky. The zebra is definitely risking more in this scenario.
Let's skip ahead to the part where the zebra and the lion recognize what a ridiculous position they're in. They can't just go strolling around the savanna together, and there's nowhere they could go to make the zebra not a zebra, or the lion not a lion.
It seems that eventually they would come to an unspoken impasse. But neither party would be willing to make the ultimatum. The zebra could never ask the lion to give up eating zebras, that would just be unreasonable. And the lion would never stop the zebra from looking for a more species-appropriate mate.
So the story has a very unsatisfying ending. The world is just not ready for lions and zebras to be together. But that's okay, because truthfully the lion and zebra weren't ready either. They weren't thinking. Who could ever imagine a lion with a zebra?
Actually that's a lie.
They didn't fall in love. Love had nothing to do with it. Let's take love out of the equation. They fell into animal attraction.
When you think about it, it doesn't seem that unlikely on the part of the lion does it? I mean, lions prey on zebras all the time, so there's obviously something biologically programmed into the lion to make it want to chase after zebras. And there's all those stripes. The stripes help.
But the zebra...the zebra should have known better. The zebra would have seen the lion coming, and everything in that zebra should have been telling it to run away. But maybe this zebra didn't have an internal alarm system. Or maybe this zebra was just tired. Or maybe this zebra was curious. No matter what, the choice to stay was pretty risky. The zebra is definitely risking more in this scenario.
Let's skip ahead to the part where the zebra and the lion recognize what a ridiculous position they're in. They can't just go strolling around the savanna together, and there's nowhere they could go to make the zebra not a zebra, or the lion not a lion.
It seems that eventually they would come to an unspoken impasse. But neither party would be willing to make the ultimatum. The zebra could never ask the lion to give up eating zebras, that would just be unreasonable. And the lion would never stop the zebra from looking for a more species-appropriate mate.
So the story has a very unsatisfying ending. The world is just not ready for lions and zebras to be together. But that's okay, because truthfully the lion and zebra weren't ready either. They weren't thinking. Who could ever imagine a lion with a zebra?
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
[Insert Title Here]
Exceeding my mistake quota
Lonely people do stupid things
Deja vu from a dream
You can't have 2 terrible, horrible, no good, really bad ideas. That's not allowed.
SURPRISE!
Dear Krista: You're dumb.
That thing my friends think is funny because that shit never happens to me
Il Falcone
The day things got wildly out of hand
The day things got wildly out of hand again
Hey Sugar
I'm preeeeetty sure I didn't learn a lesson
Lonely people do stupid things
Deja vu from a dream
You can't have 2 terrible, horrible, no good, really bad ideas. That's not allowed.
SURPRISE!
Dear Krista: You're dumb.
That thing my friends think is funny because that shit never happens to me
Il Falcone
The day things got wildly out of hand
The day things got wildly out of hand again
Hey Sugar
I'm preeeeetty sure I didn't learn a lesson
Tuesday, February 23, 2016
I am not Titanium
It was never fear.
At the very least it was never fear of anything other than myself. Fear of anything other than the distance remaining before the boundary of my strength gives way to the overwhelming depths of my weakness.
I am not someone who fears their own strength. I am someone who fears their own strength is not enough.
I am not unbendable, unbreakable, uncompromising steel. I am a sheet of hard plastic. I may seem unyielding at first, but after a few tries the stress lines will appear and then quite suddenly I'll break.
I am a piece of hard plastic that secretly wants to snap. I cannot be trusted.
At the very least it was never fear of anything other than myself. Fear of anything other than the distance remaining before the boundary of my strength gives way to the overwhelming depths of my weakness.
I am not someone who fears their own strength. I am someone who fears their own strength is not enough.
I am not unbendable, unbreakable, uncompromising steel. I am a sheet of hard plastic. I may seem unyielding at first, but after a few tries the stress lines will appear and then quite suddenly I'll break.
I am a piece of hard plastic that secretly wants to snap. I cannot be trusted.
Monday, December 21, 2015
You Can Kill a Man.......
I have a terrible horrible no good very bad idea.
It may or may not be about you.
It wasn't a good idea 12 years ago, and it's an even worse idea now.
I could quote Medgar Evers, or the virtuous and invented "V", but they both say the same thing: you cannot kill an idea.
This particular idea has been surprisingly resilient. It is kept alive by two things. Firstly it depends on my mind being void of any other ideas, and secondly it is sustained by a very minimal supply of new fuel, once, or maybe twice a year.
It came bursting into my cerebrum earlier this year, and I think I very nearly forced my idea into life.
Perhaps I should have done. That way I would be left with a mistake, and mistakes are so much easier to forget than ideas.
It may or may not be about you.
It wasn't a good idea 12 years ago, and it's an even worse idea now.
I could quote Medgar Evers, or the virtuous and invented "V", but they both say the same thing: you cannot kill an idea.
This particular idea has been surprisingly resilient. It is kept alive by two things. Firstly it depends on my mind being void of any other ideas, and secondly it is sustained by a very minimal supply of new fuel, once, or maybe twice a year.
It came bursting into my cerebrum earlier this year, and I think I very nearly forced my idea into life.
Perhaps I should have done. That way I would be left with a mistake, and mistakes are so much easier to forget than ideas.
Monday, July 13, 2015
YES!!!!!!!
KRISTA TEN BRINKE IS OFFICIALLY THE 21ST PERSON TO SWIM ACROSS LAKE ERIE!!!!!
Praise God!!! And I mean that!!!
We didn't even have a boat right up until the evening before my swim. Of course Christine and my parents didn't let me know that! Thank goodness for Anita and her husband swooping in to save the day. Their boat wasn't as big as what was initially planned, but without it I couldn't have crossed.
On the morning of July 12th my alarm went off at 3:30am. I put on my bathing suit, and warm clothes and I grabbed the two jugs of my feed I had mixed up the night before. I had a smoothie and an egg, my typical pre-big swim meal. And my last meal until I got across. I wasn't going to try anything weird at this stage in the game. Mom was waiting to drive me to Fort Erie. Dad was up an hour earlier to head to the marina with the boat. My parents love me. I'm very luck to have had them through all this.
I arrived at the Crystal Beach Marina just before 5am and my whole crew was waiting for me, Dad, Paul, Christine, Trin, Dave, Miguel, Anita, and her husband. I can't even begin to express my gratitude for these people. We had to start so earlier because the forecast predicted the currents on Lake Erie will switch direction around noon and would be completely against. The goal was to be almost across before that happened. After my last on-land pee break and a last minute coating of anti-chaffing cream, we were almost ready to go. Something really important I wanted to do before we left was pray with everyone. So we got in a circle and did that, and then I prayed one more time with just mom and dad, cried exactly 3 tears, and then we piled into two boats and started across to Sturgeon Point on the american side of the lake.
Couple sketchy things to note. 1st: we did not have a navigator. Christine has sometimes done this job but because she'll be in the kayak she can't. So the navigator role fell to Dad, who is also in charge of driving the lead boat. The first task was actually finding Sturgeon Point. Since we have to cross into american waters we're not very keen to use the data on our phones in order to load maps etc. (Also since we're in american waters, we're all praying to not get stopped by US coast guard, especially when I jump out and climb onto their shoreline to mark the start of my swim.) We are driving in what we think is the right direction. We are exactly against the waves. This is good because that means they should be exactly behind me as I swim back in this direction. The problem was that we couldn't drive quickly, it was very bumpy. The funny part I found out afterwards is that everyone in the boats was worried about me, whether this was making me feel sick, whether seeing the waves and the immensity of the distance was making me nervous. Meanwhile, I wasn't in the slightest bit concerned about that! I was in the front of the boat, standing, absorbing the waves with my body the way I always do when boating on Lake O. I was worried about Mom and Paul and about whether THEY were feeling sick. But everyone was fine, even after pounding those waves for 45 minutes. At some point I decided that one of the blinking red lights in the distance was Sturgeon Point. I had no proof to back up that claim, Dad wasn't convinced that it coincided with the map, but we kept driving towards it because we didn't have a better plan. Turns out the blinking red light was just to the right of Sturgeon Point and once we could see land Christine could direct us in. That's all God.
The rest still feels pretty surreal to me. I jumped out of the boat once we were like 25m from shore and climbed onto the land. Christine and Dave got the kayak ready, Miguel held the stopwatch, and at exactly 6am said "Go!" From there I can only tell you my half of the story. I have no idea what conversations happened in the boats, I don't know what problems they encountered trying to keep me on track and keep me safe. All I know is that lake Erie was warm, a very comfortable 70 degrees and that the first 3 hours of my swim passed without incident.
Every 30 minutes a water-bottle attached to a rope was tossed in front of my path filled with my Carbo-Pro mixture and I could stop for a minute to drink that, and talk to the crew, or pee, or eat a couple cucumber slices thrown to me from Mom. The waves were big and the wind was strong up until this point, but it was all pushing me where I wanted to go, and I'm wasn't really bothered by them. Christine tells me that I just completed the first 10km of my swim in 3hour and 9 minutes, my fastest 10km yet! On the downside my shoulders felt tight, and I was pretty sick of my feed already. By the 4hr mark I asked for a tylenol and barely had any of my feed. There was never a point in my swim where I felt like giving up, or felt too exhausted to continue. Some people say that's good training, some people say that's God's grace, I say its both. But if I had to pick the moment that was the toughest, that was it, just over halfway, another marathon left to go and really uncomfortable pain. About a week ago I had asked my chiropractor and massage therapist whether they could foresee any problems occurring during my swim. Whether I should be aware of certain pains and know when to stop. They both assured me that I was going to be fine, and that anything that happened wasn't irreparable, we could rehab any injury, and that I shouldn't allow fear of a minor injury stop me from completing the crossing. That moment in the middle of the lake, I was really glad I had that conversation. So I continued and eventually the tylenol kicked in and the pain subsided. Christine wasn't happy about me neglecting to feed though, so just before the 5hr mark she had me take one of the caffeine gels that marathon runners use. "Gel" is a nice word, "thick gasoline" might be closer to the truth.
At exactly 5 hours, Dave hopped in and helped me pick up my stroke count. He swam next to me for almost an hour and when he hopped out just before noon I could see Crystal Beach. I was close. I was told I was only 1km offshore, 1.5km tops. Well great! That's 20-30 minutes! Unfortunately the pier we were aiming for was playing trick on my crew's eyes and we went a little bit off course, enough that 40 minutes came and went without me touching land. But I knew I was close, and that energy gel had kicked in, and I knew that I could swim another hour at least if I HAD to.
But I didn't have to, very soon after that I could see the bottom, the kayak I had been making eye contact with every 15 seconds was now in front of me taking over from the lead boat. I was allowed to sight forward, and I only had a few hundred metres left. I could hear the people before I could see them and I swam until I was in less than 3ft of water, I which point I stood up and stumbled/ran onto the beach. Miguel stopped the clock at 12:52, 6 hours and 52 minutes. Way faster than the 8 hour mark I had dared to hope for.
I would have loved to hug my parents first, but Christine was there in lieu and after that I was just hugging everybody. Mom swam in from where the boats were anchored and this time she cried. My friends had balloons and signs, and some beach strangers congratulated me, and it was everything I could have hoped for and more. We even picnicked on the beach afterwards and thanks to the disgusting caffeine gel, I had SO much energy for the rest of the afternoon.
Today I had another AM Radio follow up interview and the rest of today was spent doing things that didn't involve me lifting my arms above waist height.
I am exhausted, but not as exhausted as I would have predicated, and very very content. Not everyone gets one of these moments in their life, and its not like I didn't work hard for it. But I never could have had that "running up onto the beach moment" without the group of people who helped me all along the way, and I hope that one day I'll get to be part of someone else living out one of their dreams.
I'm excited to get back to a more relaxed-paced life. I'm excited to spend more time with family and friends and less time with my significant other(s): the pool/the canal. I have no intentions of tackling another Great Lake, just in case anyone is asking, Christine would like me to, but I think I'll chase after some other dreams now.
And so I think the moral of the story probably is: Be careful what you put on your Bucketlist.
Praise God!!! And I mean that!!!
We didn't even have a boat right up until the evening before my swim. Of course Christine and my parents didn't let me know that! Thank goodness for Anita and her husband swooping in to save the day. Their boat wasn't as big as what was initially planned, but without it I couldn't have crossed.
On the morning of July 12th my alarm went off at 3:30am. I put on my bathing suit, and warm clothes and I grabbed the two jugs of my feed I had mixed up the night before. I had a smoothie and an egg, my typical pre-big swim meal. And my last meal until I got across. I wasn't going to try anything weird at this stage in the game. Mom was waiting to drive me to Fort Erie. Dad was up an hour earlier to head to the marina with the boat. My parents love me. I'm very luck to have had them through all this.
I arrived at the Crystal Beach Marina just before 5am and my whole crew was waiting for me, Dad, Paul, Christine, Trin, Dave, Miguel, Anita, and her husband. I can't even begin to express my gratitude for these people. We had to start so earlier because the forecast predicted the currents on Lake Erie will switch direction around noon and would be completely against. The goal was to be almost across before that happened. After my last on-land pee break and a last minute coating of anti-chaffing cream, we were almost ready to go. Something really important I wanted to do before we left was pray with everyone. So we got in a circle and did that, and then I prayed one more time with just mom and dad, cried exactly 3 tears, and then we piled into two boats and started across to Sturgeon Point on the american side of the lake.
Couple sketchy things to note. 1st: we did not have a navigator. Christine has sometimes done this job but because she'll be in the kayak she can't. So the navigator role fell to Dad, who is also in charge of driving the lead boat. The first task was actually finding Sturgeon Point. Since we have to cross into american waters we're not very keen to use the data on our phones in order to load maps etc. (Also since we're in american waters, we're all praying to not get stopped by US coast guard, especially when I jump out and climb onto their shoreline to mark the start of my swim.) We are driving in what we think is the right direction. We are exactly against the waves. This is good because that means they should be exactly behind me as I swim back in this direction. The problem was that we couldn't drive quickly, it was very bumpy. The funny part I found out afterwards is that everyone in the boats was worried about me, whether this was making me feel sick, whether seeing the waves and the immensity of the distance was making me nervous. Meanwhile, I wasn't in the slightest bit concerned about that! I was in the front of the boat, standing, absorbing the waves with my body the way I always do when boating on Lake O. I was worried about Mom and Paul and about whether THEY were feeling sick. But everyone was fine, even after pounding those waves for 45 minutes. At some point I decided that one of the blinking red lights in the distance was Sturgeon Point. I had no proof to back up that claim, Dad wasn't convinced that it coincided with the map, but we kept driving towards it because we didn't have a better plan. Turns out the blinking red light was just to the right of Sturgeon Point and once we could see land Christine could direct us in. That's all God.
The rest still feels pretty surreal to me. I jumped out of the boat once we were like 25m from shore and climbed onto the land. Christine and Dave got the kayak ready, Miguel held the stopwatch, and at exactly 6am said "Go!" From there I can only tell you my half of the story. I have no idea what conversations happened in the boats, I don't know what problems they encountered trying to keep me on track and keep me safe. All I know is that lake Erie was warm, a very comfortable 70 degrees and that the first 3 hours of my swim passed without incident.
Every 30 minutes a water-bottle attached to a rope was tossed in front of my path filled with my Carbo-Pro mixture and I could stop for a minute to drink that, and talk to the crew, or pee, or eat a couple cucumber slices thrown to me from Mom. The waves were big and the wind was strong up until this point, but it was all pushing me where I wanted to go, and I'm wasn't really bothered by them. Christine tells me that I just completed the first 10km of my swim in 3hour and 9 minutes, my fastest 10km yet! On the downside my shoulders felt tight, and I was pretty sick of my feed already. By the 4hr mark I asked for a tylenol and barely had any of my feed. There was never a point in my swim where I felt like giving up, or felt too exhausted to continue. Some people say that's good training, some people say that's God's grace, I say its both. But if I had to pick the moment that was the toughest, that was it, just over halfway, another marathon left to go and really uncomfortable pain. About a week ago I had asked my chiropractor and massage therapist whether they could foresee any problems occurring during my swim. Whether I should be aware of certain pains and know when to stop. They both assured me that I was going to be fine, and that anything that happened wasn't irreparable, we could rehab any injury, and that I shouldn't allow fear of a minor injury stop me from completing the crossing. That moment in the middle of the lake, I was really glad I had that conversation. So I continued and eventually the tylenol kicked in and the pain subsided. Christine wasn't happy about me neglecting to feed though, so just before the 5hr mark she had me take one of the caffeine gels that marathon runners use. "Gel" is a nice word, "thick gasoline" might be closer to the truth.
At exactly 5 hours, Dave hopped in and helped me pick up my stroke count. He swam next to me for almost an hour and when he hopped out just before noon I could see Crystal Beach. I was close. I was told I was only 1km offshore, 1.5km tops. Well great! That's 20-30 minutes! Unfortunately the pier we were aiming for was playing trick on my crew's eyes and we went a little bit off course, enough that 40 minutes came and went without me touching land. But I knew I was close, and that energy gel had kicked in, and I knew that I could swim another hour at least if I HAD to.
But I didn't have to, very soon after that I could see the bottom, the kayak I had been making eye contact with every 15 seconds was now in front of me taking over from the lead boat. I was allowed to sight forward, and I only had a few hundred metres left. I could hear the people before I could see them and I swam until I was in less than 3ft of water, I which point I stood up and stumbled/ran onto the beach. Miguel stopped the clock at 12:52, 6 hours and 52 minutes. Way faster than the 8 hour mark I had dared to hope for.
I would have loved to hug my parents first, but Christine was there in lieu and after that I was just hugging everybody. Mom swam in from where the boats were anchored and this time she cried. My friends had balloons and signs, and some beach strangers congratulated me, and it was everything I could have hoped for and more. We even picnicked on the beach afterwards and thanks to the disgusting caffeine gel, I had SO much energy for the rest of the afternoon.
Today I had another AM Radio follow up interview and the rest of today was spent doing things that didn't involve me lifting my arms above waist height.
I am exhausted, but not as exhausted as I would have predicated, and very very content. Not everyone gets one of these moments in their life, and its not like I didn't work hard for it. But I never could have had that "running up onto the beach moment" without the group of people who helped me all along the way, and I hope that one day I'll get to be part of someone else living out one of their dreams.
I'm excited to get back to a more relaxed-paced life. I'm excited to spend more time with family and friends and less time with my significant other(s): the pool/the canal. I have no intentions of tackling another Great Lake, just in case anyone is asking, Christine would like me to, but I think I'll chase after some other dreams now.
And so I think the moral of the story probably is: Be careful what you put on your Bucketlist.
Friday, July 10, 2015
Training Journal #26
I am so close. Christine is feeling good about Sunday. We may be having a really early start but I don't care. Let's do it. I haven't really allowed myself to think about what it will feel like if I don't make it, and I'm not about to start now. But there's a quote someone shared with me right at the beginning of my training that I just fell in love with and especially now that I'm 2 days out, it feels appropriate.
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt
No matter what happens I am thankful for this journey. I am thankful for the people I've met, trained beside and been inspired by. I'm thankful for the personal growth its caused in me. I'm thankful for the incredible support I've felt from my friends and family, even my family overseas. Whether or not I make it across, whether or not God and Lake Erie allow me to make it across, I still have all that, and that's fantastic.
That being said, I'd really like to make it across, and I'm going to give it my all.
K.
P.S. Did I mention I was on the radio today? :P
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt
No matter what happens I am thankful for this journey. I am thankful for the people I've met, trained beside and been inspired by. I'm thankful for the personal growth its caused in me. I'm thankful for the incredible support I've felt from my friends and family, even my family overseas. Whether or not I make it across, whether or not God and Lake Erie allow me to make it across, I still have all that, and that's fantastic.
That being said, I'd really like to make it across, and I'm going to give it my all.
K.
P.S. Did I mention I was on the radio today? :P
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