Climb for Hospice

When we were quite a bit younger, Ali and I were in the Ladner Stingrays Swim Club. Not only did we have swim meets on the weekends and swim practices in the evenings, we also had the most evil thing in the entire world: 7am before-school swims.

That’s right. We had to get up at 6:30, and go to the Ladner OUTDOOR pool. I will never, ever forget the feeling of stepping onto that cold, nubbly concrete deck, and looking into that water just knowing that I had to jump in there.

They told me that the pool was “heated”, and one could certainly ascertain that by simply looking at the water through the mist of the morning, and seeing the streams of teasing “steam” coming off it. I believed them. I actually believed them. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I’d be all wrapped up in my comfy jammies (with my bathing suit underneath, of course), and would sometimes even have a warm blanket draped around my shoulders. My feet, bare and feeling the cold of the deck, tried to tell me to run. They knew that it was cold! But noooo. My stupid brain said that I had to get into the pool.

To have to get all the comfy layers off to jump into a massive bath of cold water was not at all easy. To this day I simply cannot handle getting into cold water. I get all panicky and freaked out, and begin flailing in the water as I try desperately to doggy paddle and cry at the same time.

The ONLY thing that made the morning bearable was the fact that my mother was (and still is) an inventive, intelligent woman. She knew that her children wouldn’t want to wake up and go swimming! Did she want to fight with three grumpy, snarly kids when she herself was half-asleep? No!

To wake her children up on those 7am swim mornings, my mother would gently place a small chocolate macaroon on our tongues as we slept. She’d stay with us until we woke up, happily to the taste of chocolate, and then she’d hand us another macaroon and softly tell us that we needed to get up and get ready to go. And we would.

To this day, the taste of chocolate & coconut reminds me of my mom. It makes me smile. It reminds me that even though I may have to do something I don’t want to do, I can make it sorta’ fun if I get creative with it. My mom actually made it possible for us to look forward to those 7am swims. Genius, isn’t it?

And so, that’s why I am bringing a bag of chocolate macaroons with me on my Kili climb. I’ll have them tucked away beside my sleeping bag, and when I am woken the morning, I will grab a macaroon and be happy, even for a brief moment, before I get my cold clothes on and trudge up a mountain.

Gotta’ say, I love the fact that I can turn even the most strenuous of physical activities into an excuse to eat chocolate. Thanks mom! xo