Mummy Mania
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A House of Tarte Tatin housemate traverse across the Mummy Range, Rocky Mountain National Park and tapping a few 13ers along the way
What is Mummy Mania?
Mummy Mania, also known as Mummy Madness,
How we found the going
Stunning views
Far slower than we had expected - and long.
We didn't see a single person until 3 mi to the car
Personal Reflections on Exercising and Activeness
I've started having a tough time about framing why I move and hope to understand it some more to focus my objectives. I want to spend a little time here to journal a breakdown and see what comes of it on the other end.
Don't get me wrong, it's still lots of fun but it's getting difficulty contextualizing these experiences, which are all so incredible, but starting to blur in terms of excitedness. Perhaps its that it has become less goal oriented and more experience driven.
In the past when I was focused more on running and rugby the kinds of goals you had were:
- Stick to __x__ pace to achieve a sub 1hr45min half marathon,
- Win __x__ tournament by becoming a more explosive, accurate passing, pitch intelligent half-back in Rugby 7s
These goals are measurable and comparable between efforts. And with that, training became more intentional.
Nowadays, I don't sign up for races, nor do I have plans to, and I'm not trying to push certain personal time goals in specific disciplines, which are honestly goals I've not been interested in pursuing. There have been also been many joys of being more experience driven. Unfortunately, being experience driven is becoming a more abstract concept for me understand I am beginning to feel dissatisfied that I don't have a good way to value it - perhaps I need to put goals for future experiences. The dissatisfaction stems from some questions of these questions:
1. What is a good/satisfying experience?
2. Why pursue those experiences?
3. How do we sustainably and continuously enjoy experiences?
We'll start with these 3 questions
Q1. What is a good/satisfying experience?
Below are what I've noticed are patterns of what missions I gravitate towards.
- There's something new and obscure about the mission - a place I haven't been to, a type of route I haven't experienced,
- The idea of the has to mission emotionally excite me, typically because the mission straddles the line of being an interesting idea and, on the other side, being outlandish and a little stupid if I'm being honest,
- I want to be challenged physically - Something weird happened to me on Mt.Whitney for which I flew out for to do, had planned for months in advance, and where I was having a great time while being there, but I came down that mountain feeling dissatisfied because I had honestly had too relaxed of a time out there (I am also aware that I sound like a twat admitting this). I had hoped for a multi-day sufferfest and it ended up being a physically relaxed time. I guess I hate relaxation or my idea of relaxation is pretty fucked up. Just to be clear, I will never take that experience for granted. I also got to spend the weekend with one of my best friends so it was always going to be a fantastic time.
- Having time for personal thought and reflection - I love doing missions with friends. It is so beautiful to be able to share them with others. But, I have had a few incredible experiences where I've done missions on my own, or have had chunks of time on my own, and in those moments it has allowed me to enter deep thought, meditative thought, or connect with a spiritual side of me that I didn't know really existed. Some of the moments when these types of thoughts have occurred have become highlights of entire missions (longs peak comes to mind and feeling Connor's presence).
Q2. Why pursue those experiences?
Mountaineers and climbers, when asked why they summit mountains and climb crazy faces, always answer that it is "because we can." I call bullshit, it feels like a copout answer. There's just gotta something deeper driving this. The need to feel accomplishment, acceptance, respect, or maybe the combo and more?
I'm now in a place where I feel blessed to have the fitness and breadth of knowledge to tackle many objectives and for them to feel within limits before the outdoors objectives become too niche and really silly (although Mummy Mania feels quite silly). I've been rotating between cycling, swimming, and running ~5days a week, getting 3-4 lifts in a week, and doing weekend missions. I've spent time focusing on functional strength for injury prevention when doing cardio with legs and have become fairly disciplined with diet. It's all been quite sustainable and I love that. But it's unfocused. It leaves me with questions like:
* What am I training for?
* How well am I actually performing?
* Am I optimizing how I'm performing?
* How do I actually improve as a athlete?
* What does it even mean to be a better athlete if I don't have discrete ways to measure improvement?