Monday 7/8/24
The humidity was a bear over the weekend. This is the worst time of the year for me, weather-wise. I hate it, to be honest. I'd much rather it be twelve degrees in January.
Yesterday marked 2919 days, or 417 weeks, without a drink.
I did five circuits of stairs in the Monument on both Saturday and Sunday, as well as walking three miles each day and doing 100 push-ups.
The stairs were a test on account of the humidity. Not easy at 88% humidity. They close the Monument when the heat index reaches 87, which I figured was going to be happening early in the day, so I made sure to be there on both days when the Monument opens.
On Saturday I was standing first in line of people waiting to go in. The door to the small museum at the base of the Monument that you have to first pass through before you ascend was locked. A ranger who was on the other side of the rail between the two structures came through the museum and let me in, before locking the door on everyone else, but first saying, by way of explanation, "He trains here." The other day someone came up to me and asked, "Are you the local guy who trains at the Monument?" You'd think I was the Headless Horseman or something, but out in the open. I just said, "Okay."
That word "train" is used a lot by park rangers when they talk about what I do, either to themselves, to me, to tourists. "That guy trains here every day" a ranger will tell a family from Texas.
When I think of training, I think of it as what you do to do something else. What, exactly, am I training to do by going up and down the Monument? You wouldn't train to run a marathon by doing this activity. It is what I do. It's not what I do for something else.
But in thinking about this, I realize that these rangers are on to something. I am training. I am training so that I will be able to endure what I am going through right now. I'm training so that I'll be able to win this war I'm in. A war I must win, because the winning of that war will have an impact far beyond my own life. I'm training for life, so that once the war is won, I'll be able to have a lot of life still of what I deserve.
So I actually really am training when I go up and down the Monument ten times over a weekend in brutal humidity, sweat flying off of me, clothes completely saturated, breathing hard, keeping at it, doing this thing that no one else has eve done in the in the 180-year history of a this structure and these stairs which are in their very real way a part of who I am, what I'm about. They play a role in taking me to where I am going to get. They are integral to my training.
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