Planning and celebrating milestones brings perspective on life (and work)

A few weeks ago, my wife Carina and I hosted a party at our home in Vancouver to celebrate our milestone birthdays, and welcome our friends and colleagues to our new abode. We are fortunate to have a beautiful view of the ocean, and much of the evening was spent with about 70 people crowded together on our outside deck. During a break in festivities, we thanked our guests for coming and commented on the milestone we had achieved. When Carina spoke, she mentioned that every decade since we turned 40 – we have celebrated with a significant trip that requires both of us to train for months, in one case a year – before we take on the challenge. 

A common, shared purpose

I thought about how those trips we do together -- planning them, training for them, enjoying them and then reminiscing about them years later has been a way for the two of us to stay connected around a common, shared purpose that is separate from the purpose attached to parenting and the tasks of daily work and living. When the trips are done, we haven’t stopped training because that sport or activity becomes part of our everyday lives.

The trips connect to my day-to-day work because I learn so much about motivation, drive and purpose, relating to people, and as importantly, they provide us with a shared experience, which work often doesn’t do. Instead of writing more about what I’ve learned and the details of our travels, I am passing my blog over to Carina -- who better to tell you about the lessons we’ve learned from being on the road together. 

In Carina's words

When Andy and I turned 40, we climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. In many ways, the climb was a replacement for some amazing birthday parties we used to throw when we lived in South Africa. Once we moved to England with three small children and no immediate social circle surrounding us, the birthday parties became a thing of the past. Climbing Kilimanjaro with our South African friends was something we could  look forward to, and was the first of what has become an every decade tradition. 

It also gave Andy and I something to do together, because when you are married to a man with a career that takes the family from South Africa where you were both born and met, to England where you know no one, to Moscow in post-Soviet transformation, back to England where you now know some people, to China in transformation, to remote Perth Australia, the Hague and Vancouver -- having a shared experience becomes essential to staying connected. It turns out that the training we do together in preparation for our trips may as important as the feat of getting to the top of the mountain.

No amount of training is ever quite enough

I have learned that no amount of training fully prepares you for the climb, and that’s likely a good thing, because if you knew how challenging it was really going to be, you might not agree to the trip in the first place. (This might be how Andy feels about some of the work challenges he’s taken on over the course of his career.)

For seven months prior to the climb, every day, Andy and I climbed beside each other – on the steepest incline our treadmills offered. The final ascent of Kilimanjaro takes a single day, but for five days prior, you climb up and down to get acclimatized to the thin air. Whenever you fall asleep mid step because of the lack of oxygen, one of the Sherpa’s taps you lightly on the arm to get you going again. Then, on the sixth day, you wake at midnight to begin the ascent, timed to arrive at the top by sunrise. Six hours up and two hours down, and back to the warmth and comfort of your tent. 

The six hours of climbing to the top of the mountain took everything I had, and maybe a little more. If ever I doubt myself these days, or what I’m capable of, I look at the certificate that comes with the climb – and say to myself, “Bring it on.” When Andy’s job moved us from England to Moscow, my experience climbing the mountain provided me with the strength and belief I could pull up stakes once again, and do this too. Our shared experience at 40 changed my life. Exercise and training has become a deeply entrenched part of my daily life, and to this day, it is something Andy and I continue to do together. 

Still climbing, but this time on a tandem bike .... or tandem kayak

At 50, we biked the route of the Tour de France. For that trip, we began training a year in advance. Living in Perth at the time, we got up every morning and biked 52 kilometers, and on the weekends, cycled triple that distance. 

Again, if I knew what was involved before we headed out, I might not have gone. I have learned that once you’re on the road, you can’t move forward by looking in the rear view mirror. So you dig deep, find strength you didn’t know you had, and peddle on. Andy and I started that adventure on a tandem bike. While Andy sits in the front, I have the GPS, so believe I am the one in charge. I’m sure Andy thinks the front seat provides that same assurance, and since this is his blog, I will let him continue to think that. At some point during that trip, (and I have since forgiven him), Andy bent the frame of the tandem bike, which necessitated us moving to two single bikes -- not what I had trained for.

As we were cycling up Col de la Bonette, a particularly difficult pass and one of Europe’s highest sealed roads, it got to be too much, and I threw down my bike out of a combination of anger and despair. But I wanted to finish what I started, which is one of those life lessons you walk away with when you take on these challenges, so I remounted the bike and peddled on. We were re-joined by our son Conrad on the last 60 kilometers of the Tour de France route, and he rode with us into the heart of Paris, ending the trip at the Arc de Triomphe. It’s at moments like these that you are happy you made the decision to get back on the bike.

A tandem bike or tandem kayak trip every year since

Today, when we’re in the same city, we wake up early and cycle together for 10 km before we head off to our separate responsibilities. We have done a major tandem trip with our friends every year for the past ten. The conversations with pilgrims and the architecture of the Camino, the adventures of the South Island of New Zealand, Montreal to Quebec City and back through the mountains, the fjords of  Norway, waltzing down the Danube, the wine lands of South Australia; the rice and coffee of the Mekong delta in Vietnam; the calderas of the North Island of Japan, the Black Mountains in South Africa; and Chile to Argentina through the Andes. Twin kayaking took us down the Thames, the Swan in Perth, the national Parks of Haida Gwaii.

We came up with the idea for our latest trip to celebrate our 60th birthdays on the flight home from our cycle in the Andes. Almost at the same time, we turned the page of the travel magazines we were reading to an article about kayaking in the Antarctica. We have also been for the past 20 years, no surprise, in a twin kayak.  We will be heading there this December.

Andy has strength and I have endurance, and the combination gets us through tough times and past the finish line. And when the going gets tough, which it inevitably does, I reflect on what my children wrote on the T-shirt they gave me for our first trip at 40: “Never, never give up."