It’s a bit tricky to stay disciplined in the first 2 or 3 weeks after you suddenly stopped going to the office. One little nudge that works for me is to sign up for some activities with fixed schedule.
Two years ago when I changed my job, I had 4 months gap. I usually went to my boxing class at noon and tag rugby training in the evening. Those two activities built a structure for my life. Then I would fit in other things in between. I spent a few hours in the morning watching boxing games, especially those of Vasyl Lomachenko and James Toney. I even made notes about Loma’s combos and tried to apply them in my sparing. The fact that I was not good at all never came in the way that I tried to learn from the best. In the afternoon, I would go in to meet some headhunters or job interviews.
This time I signed up for swimming classes. After so many years floating in a life jacket in the sea, I finally decided now was the time to learn to swim. I got time. Actually I can come to swimming class three times a week.
Besides swimming, I had another important thing on my calendar which had a definite deadline — my Peru trip in two weeks. I haven’t done much planning as I can’t confirm the length of the trip and I was also extremely occupied at my previous job. I was not in a mood to find out which trekking I’d like to do and which restaurant I should check. One of the first few things I did right after I wrapped up my work was to call the airline to change my flights and extend my stay. Then I made a short list for my coming week, including doing research on each city, getting a new camera lens and some new hiking equipment suitable for local weather and my trails, etc.
Among all those logistics, one imperative task I need to get it done was a book called Turn Right at Machu Picchu. This book was recommended by a friend I met in my Mongolia race earlier this year.
Last June over a hundred people flew from Hong Kong, Singapore and some other cities to join this 3-day ultra trail running race in Gobi Desert. A lot of them came with friends and families, but there were also people coming by themselves, like me. Nonetheless, people in this trip were genuinely open and social. It’s like a big outing! Then there was Randall who happened to sit next to me on the coach from Ulaanbaatar airport to our race camp. People just got off the plane and the connecting bus ride would take another 4 hours. Everyone on the bus was talking with people around except Randall. He was reading. In a loud and bumpy bus. I immediately got familiar with two ladies sitting on my right hand side. They were from Singapore. One of them got surprisingly excited when she learned I visited her hometown Morelia in Mexico last year. Between my conversations with those two lovely ladies, I was checking the landscape outside from the window. Our bus was driving from the capital city to the desert on the south. We passed buildings, streets, rivers, grassland, cars, sheep and goats. I also found out an interesting fact that there were a lot of Korean words on the streets of Ulaanbaatar. All those lively characters had my attention. Suddenly, a voice came from my left, “You just can’t sit still? Do you want to switch and sit by the window?”
That’s how my conversation with Randall started. Randall was a big guy from Texas and had worked in Singapore for the last five years. He was a total lone wolf. He never made efforts to talk to people. Even in the following race days, I never saw him joining people at meals in the camp. But once you started to chat with him, he was very talkative and open to share. It turned out Randall travelled a lot, not to those boring and comfortable places, but to exotic and adventurous places, which just fell into my type of travelling. He also joined overseas races regularly over the year. Thinking out loud, I immediately said, “You look so big for an ultra runner.” (Speaking of which, in the next three days I found this muscle guy ran way much faster than me and a lot of other lean runners.) We talked non-stop till we finally made to the camp. He gave me a lot of good ideas including the book Turn Right at Machu Picchu. He recommended me to read this book before I would do the Inca Trail as it will prepare me some historical knowledge to better appreciate the place. I said thank you and downloaded the book in my kindle when I came back to Hong Kong.
Right now I was 1/3 in this book and quite enjoyed it. It’s not a very serious and dry reading. The author Mark Adams was an American journalist who did an exact route following Hiram Binham’s discovery of Machu Picchu in the early 20th century. There were two parallel adventures respectively by Adams and Binham in this book intertwined and jointly led us to the lost Inca civilization.
One irrelevant takeaway from the read was that you can’t take a job as an adventurer. Even seen as one of the most important (or successful) adventurers in the 20th century and supported by some top universities of the United States for his work, Binham can’t pull off his quest for the lost Inca civilization without his rich wife. Most of his trips to South America were sponsored by his father-in-law, along with his house back in US, daily expenses of his families and even the freedom to pick a less-time-consuming job at an university in able to commit more efforts to his adventures.
Before you can become an Indiana Jones, you better work really hard to court the right girl, like what Binham has done.