Well, the plane tickets are booked and hotel reservation made! The trip to Utah to do the hike is booked and I am getting so excited and very nervous all at the same time. It feels so real now! Thanks to my wonderful friend for booking everything. She is a frequent traveler so I knew she would have an easier time booking all this stuff than I would!
Getting close to the time has me so excited. This excitement has motivated me. It has got me ready to get back on track with my exercise or at least trying to work it back into my busy life. Hopefully I didn’t make a huge mistake but I ordered an exercise gadget I guess you could call it. It’s from Teeter.com and it’s called the Fit Form Home Gym. It seems like a very versatile piece of equipment that isn’t too big to fit into my apartment. I have a treadmill, but I needed to do more to keep up with strength training. This equipment seems to be able to do a lot of exercises and seems to have a good amount of resistance. With this and the treadmill. I will feel better that I can get in exercise when I can’t make it to the gym.
I think my nervousness is also pushing me to do more exercise. I read some reviews of the hike on my Alltrails app and I am thinking this hike is going to be a bit harder than I remember. In fact, to be honest, I can’t remember actually making the hike all those years ago. I remember being up there and looking out over the valley, but I can’t remember the hike up or down! I was around 20 yrs old back then. I am not a spring chicken any longer and I have had years of weight to make my knees bad. Don’t mistaken my anxiety for any ounce of me giving up. In fact, I have learned to no longer let my anxiety control me. Now I let it motivate me. In fact, anxiety can be a positive thing. In my experience, my anxiety over the last year has helped me. In addition to motivation, it has helped me in other ways. One way is communication. Instead of letting anxiety make me curl up in a ball, it let it help me to open up and talk to people. To not hold in my feelings. When I talk to others then it helps me work through the anxiety and whatever caused it. Another way that anxiety has helped me is it actually helps me to protect myself. I read a blog yesterday by “Don’t Lose Hope”. It was talking about how to help navigate trauma. One of the things they talked about was knowing your body’s reaction to triggers. During therapy I figured out my body responded by me getting a very tight feeling in my chest. Recognizing anxiety is a bit the same. If you recognize that something is giving you anxiety then you better know how to process it and hopefully you can avoid or process whatever it is.
When I think about the hike I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve. It’s that feeling that you know when you wake up that it’s going to be exciting no matter what. I KNOW I will make it up to the Y. I don’t know how easy or hard it will be or how long it will take or how many times I may have to stop, but what I do know is that I WILL make it up to the top. Like my friend said, we have all day. There is no rush. I know that I am in complete control of this journey and nothing will deter me from making it to the top.
My Journey to the Mountain 