The cool thing about taking pictures now is you don’t have to wait to get them developed and the date is on the top so you always know when it was taken. It is so fun to go back and look at pictures of my kids and grandkids of things we did together. As I look through them, some of them I identify as in the favorite category. This picture is one of my favorites because of what it represents. My boys Sam and Seth had been doing Triathlons together for some time so I decided to do one with them in Sunriver near Bend. It was an Olympic distance tri and consisted of a one-mile swim in Cultus lake, a 25-mile bicycle ride with some big hills, and a 10K, 6.2-mile run. I had been riding my bicycle a lot and I had run a lot in years past, but I didn’t swim much and wasn’t even sure that I could swim a mile. I started swimming three days a week at the pool in Albany with Seth and I was really slow, but I kept swimming and once a week I would swim a mile. It would take me an hour to swim it, but I was pretty sure that as I kept swimming I would get faster, but that didn’t happen.

I had to swim with a wet suit on because of the temperature of the water so I found a place that rented wet suits in Portland and rented one. The cool thing about wet suits is that you float in them. I practiced swimming in it at Foster Reservoir and discovered that it was easy to roll over on my back and take a rest whenever I needed one because I floated like a cork. In the race, there were 500-plus participants and I came in second to last on the swim. I beat an old lady. I couldn’t get the wet suit off after I got out of the water and I was rolling around in the parking lot where my biclycle was waiting for me trying to get it off. Patty said I looked like a big walrus rolling around. I finally got it off and took off on my bicycle. I actually moved up about a hundred places on the bike ride and then held my own on the running portion. My boys finished the race and then ran back and met me and finished with me. I felt very honored as their father when they did that.

I have as a guideline on my goal setting each year to do something really, really hard, and also to do something that I have never done before. That was the hardest thing I have ever done and I had never done it before. This year I am going to row my drift boat out one mile in Cook Inlet up in Alaska, catch a limit of halibut and row back. I don’t know how hard it will be but it will be scary for sure.