The Quest For 1%: Debriefing June/July 2011

My fellow riskologists,

It’s good to be home. After more than a month long journey that brought me all the way to Africa, Eastern Europe, and Russia, I’m finally sleeping in my own bed again. It’s a feeling I cherish but, as those who follow along on Twitter know, as soon as I’m home, I’m ready to head out again. In fact, I’m already starting to plan the next big adventure.

Oh, and my apologies for the lack of an update in June. As it turns out, the month was too full of amazing adventures to fit one in. Not to worry though; we’ll catch up… right now.

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Welcome to the 1% Club Update for June/July, 2011. This is the place where I discuss the strategies I use and trials I face as I take on some of the biggest challenges of my life.

If you’re new here, you may want to get familiar with The 1% Club first and read a few previous updates to see how things have progressed over the months.

Thanks for being here. I hope you’re able to take some of the lessons I’ve learned and apply them to your own big challenges.

Milestones in June/July

After more than a year of updates, it’s safe to say that this is the most exciting one to date. Three enormous goals were crossed off the list—quite satisfying. Let’s take a look at what happened.

Climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro & Mt. Elbrus

Despite a rocky departure, June marked the beginning of the first of many big adventures for me. This time, though, it took me to the peaks of Mt. Kilimanjaro (19,340 feet) and Mt. Elbrus (18,510 feet), the highest points in both Africa and Europe. It was a lot of work for a good view, but it’s a great start on my quest to join The Seven Summits Club.

Getting to these summits wasn’t without difficulties—poor health and a bad case of altitude sickness on Kilimanjaro and cost overruns and political instability on Elbrus—but they’re complete and, as much as I enjoyed them, I can now shift my attention to the next challenging peak.

There was a part of me that worried if I was prepared enough to climb these mountains, but as they say, worry is only a misuse of your imagination. The climbing I did here at home coupled with my marathon training turned out to be more than adequate.

This is a simple update on a very big goal. You can read the full account of the Mt. Kilimanjaro climb here, and a full report on Mt. Elbrus is coming next week.

To say this was an exciting accomplishment for me is, honestly, an understatement. To see so much planning and hard work come together is incredibly rewarding, and I’m still glowing. At the same time, though, I know this is only the beginning.

To date, I’ve completed 2 of the 7 summits.

Running the Seven Continents

I should also mention that before setting out to climb any mountains on this big trip, I also took a detour to South Africa where I spent four very interesting days on a private game reserve and ran a marathon with about 84 other fun people and a whole lot of wild animals.

This was another big question mark for me after falling sick for nearly a month before departing, and my training had suffered quite a lot as a result. Nevertheless, I finished the race, albeit slowly, and had a great time with no regrets.

You can read the full account of me running with giant wild animals here.

Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned from this whole trip is that things tend to work out if you show up and try. There were many times I felt like the plan I’d set was falling apart and I wondered if I should just cancel the whole thing and try again later. I’m glad I didn’t.

There were challenging moments and many times when I had to abandon the original plan, but with each challenge also came an equal resolve to overcome it. When you want something bad enough, you do what you have to in order to get it.

To date, I’ve completed 2 of 7 worldwide marathons.

Operation: Free Mountaineering Gear

For several months before leaving on this trip, I tried to charm a few mountaineering gear manufacturers into trading some of their gear for unbiased reviews here at Riskology.co.

Even though I received four commitments from four different companies, I was very cautious about calling the plot a success. This is probably a good thing because, in the end, I only received one piece of gear from one company despite a major last-ditch effort to collect. Still, I have to give a big thanks to Big Agnes, who sent me a pair of trekking poles as part of their product testing program.

Though this little campaign was mostly a failure, I’m not ready to throw in the towel just yet. I think that part of the reason it didn’t work out was because I felt some resistance to my own idea of writing reviews—I really didn’t want to do it—so I probably didn’t give it as much effort as I should have.

I have a few more ideas that I’ll test in future campaigns, but this will be the last update on the topic until I write a full piece on finding sponsors.

The Road Ahead

Momentum is a powerful force and one I don’t like to let slip away from me. When one adventure ends, I think it’s best to jump right into the next one. Why wait? Even though I’ve just returned from one big expedition, I’m already starting to think about the next.

Running in Europe

One hiccup during this trip was a three day rest period to recover my health that replaced a marathon I was scheduled to run. It’s a minor disappointment, but one I can live with because Europe is easy to get to, and there are lots of fun marathons to choose from.

I have plenty of frequent flyer miles stockpiled and, naturally, I’m already thinking about how to get back over there. I’ll be making every attempt to get to this sooner rather than later so that I can make use of the training I’ve already recently completed. No reason to lose the momentum.

Climbing Expedition #2

It’s a great feeling to be started and on the way to completing the Seven Summits, but now the easiest and cheapest mountains are done, and I have to start figuring out how to get to some of the harder ones.

Next on the list will most likely be Carstensz Pyramid (16,024 feet) in Indonesia or Aconcagua (22,841 feet) in Argentina. While I’d love to get to one of these before the end of the year, this previous trip came with a few, shall we say “unplanned financial challenges”—so I need to refill the war chest a bit before heading out again. To be fair though, unplanned is not necessarily unexpected when it comes to adventure travel.

Nevertheless, I’ll be looking for ways to complete one of these mountains soon.

$250,000 for Charity

Just as I’ve done for the last two quarters, I made a $600 deposit into my “Save the Whales” fund the other day in order to stay on track to meet my goal of donating $2,400 to charity this year.

Although I can afford to do this, it’s very obvious that I will not be able to raise the full $250,000 that I aim to by myself. That’s why I’ve begun talks with a few small but very important charities about partnering up to raise the money.

This is very exciting and although I’m not ready to announce any details right now, soon we’ll have an opportunity to rally the whole Riskology.co community around a very worthy cause. Stay tuned!

To date, we’ve raised $3,600 toward the goal of $250,000.

The Biggest Risk You’ve Ever Taken

In the last update, I challenged you to share your own story about the biggest risk you’ve ever taken. A few of you decided to participate, and we got some great stories about interesting experiences.

Important: The system I’ve been using to collect reader challenge entries has not been working very well. If you wrote an entry and don’t see it here, send me an email with a link and I’ll revise this update. We’ll have a better solution for future reader challenges.

New Reader Challenge: Happy Accidents

During my recent trip, I ran into a lot of what I like to call “happy accidents”—things that weren’t expected or didn’t go quite right, but ended up being great experiences anyway.

This month, I have another challenge for you. I want to know:

What’s a happy accident you’ve experienced in your own life? What happened? How did it turn out? What did you learn?

If you have your own blog, write about it there and leave a comment here with a link to the article. If you don’t have a blog, leave your story right here in the comments. In next month’s update, I’ll share every story I get with the whole Riskology.co community.

That’s all for now, friends. Until next month,

 

 

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