Life as a Tiger

As I prepare for another sports holiday journey, one thing that will be done is to empty all the money boxes. One is a metal money box where we pop the odd sheet of paper money when we are on a good week. This is a tin with a slot at the top so you can’t take a knife to it to go shopping. The other store is a large bottle that we place every £2 coin that arrives in our purse or pockets by whatever means. The tin generally helps with some of the hotel bills and the bottle will usually buy us a few meals whilst we are away. 

We are not wealthy people but we look forward to our holidays that we look at as a chance to think how glad we are to be alive and happy. Most of our trips involve going to compete in a triathlon somewhere. This time it will be Gdynia in Poland. It’s an Ironman 70.3.  My husband and I both love maps and are always dreaming about different places and we are mostly agreed on the kind places we hope to see. Neither of us has ever been to Poland, so that will be completely new. Gdynia was occupied by the Germans during the war with horrendous consequences. We are going to drive there; it will be a full two day journey and we are looking forward to it tremendously.  

We have a five night stay in Gdynia itself and hope to learn a little about the city and Gdansk since the cities are close, almost like Brighton and Hove. We are both looking forward to swimming in the Baltic Sea for the first time during our event and seeing some of what we have been told is very pretty countryside on the bike ride and running through the old town to get to the finish line and the end of another triathlon adventure. 

We are breaking the trip with a two night stop in Dresden that was also scarred by WWII but by the British bombing raids. The city centre of Dresden has been on the bucket list quite a while, it has been totally rebuilt using the old plans. Actually we only have one whole day to check out the city, because we will arrive on the first evening and leave early after the two night of the stopover. We will work hard to squeeze as much in as possible can in that time. On our return journey we want to take a quick look at Berlin. 

My husband Steve and I are also best friends and have a lot of things in common. A major attitude is voiced in a well known motivational quote that has several variations but the base line is that ‘It is better to live one year as a Tiger than a 100 years as a Sheep.’  Steve and I both have very good reasons for feeling that you should live everyday as if it is your last. 

 

My best friend from my post school teenage years and I had great fun when we were young. That was in the early days of Rock & Roll and we would jive for hours on end, even in our kitchen’s at home, where both sets of parents were happy that we were happy to enjoy ourselves indoors and for free. We went to the movies every week sometimes twice, and were both nuts about the young Elvis Presley. We would regularly ride our bikes (Paid for on a weekly scheme out of our low wages)  the ten miles to Brighton on our days off work, just to play the juke box or hang around the stage door of the Hippodrome to collect autographs of the stars playing there that week. 

My friend married a sailor and they had two children. She discovered later that she had Cancer of the womb and her husband responded to that news by taking her back to her mother, like a discarded toy, saying he could not look after her. He divorced her while she lay dying at her parent’s home. She was 27. 

Early in our married life, a friend and business partner of my husband was murdered by his wife’s lover. He was I think 29. He had always talked about working hard and retiring early and would often grumble about Steve’s much easier going attitude to work and life, and not losing the one within the other. It mad him so mad when Steve would take an afternoon off to go water skiing. 

Another friend and business associate of about the same age drank himself to death before he was 30 years old. He was such a funny bloke and always claimed to have something wrong with him, something he joked about until he did have something wrong that he had brought upon himself which was so  hard to watch. He would often say that he wanted his headstone in the graveyard to read ‘I Told You I Was ill.’ He left his wife and a pretty little girl without their young, handsome, witty husband and Daddy. 

These events, all happening in a quite close time frame left a lasting mark upon us both. We think about our friends every day, the pain never leaves you. 

Every day when I wake up, I think how fortunate I am to have survived so long in this world that we see today, full of hate instead of love. So hand in hand with my best friend/husband/coach, we will step forward and embrace each new day and each new experience. Spending more that we should of course, pushing on into old age. We are still having great fun doing our sport of triathlon that gives us both such pleasure. Even though it needs stamina and strength both of which are fading with age, but it is a mental challenge too, actually it can be pretty spiritual pushing on, as you move out of your comfort zone and into and area where it is just sheer force of will and the shouts of the crowd that keep you going when your body it totally whacked.

 

All the photos today show how much we both enjoyed my celebration of living to 75 by doing 75 mini triathlons from June 1st to my birthday on August 14th 2014