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Part two of my extra-special Bodhi challenge, which is just like my first one but with yet more duuuuuuuude and an extra dose of West Coast. If you missed it you can read the backstory on it here, as I am just that lazy and I have two more episodes of Planet Earth II to watch. Fuck. This show was so good I lived in front of my television for a week. I even have the score on my phone. What a nerd. Challenge! Goal 1: Get to the Spiritual Side of it: Two challenges ago I started doing meditation and Wim Hof breathing exercises, preferably in the morning, either combined with or alternating with yoga. By the end of last challenge I got pretty good at it. I probably won't win any prizes, if there is even such a thing for meditation, but I find it helps me with anxiety and so I shall keep it up this challenge. I couldn't find any photos of Bohdi meditating so this photo of Patrick Swayze concentrating very hard on something just out of frame will have to do. He's so shiny. Goal 2: Get that Surf Body: Arrrrgh. This went... a little off the rails last challenge and I've gained back about 6 pounds. I just weighed myself yesterday and shark week is bearing down on me like a train, so some of that may be water, but mostly it's that my TIR* is just way too high, so I have to keep an eye on that. With that said, I have made some serious gains in the gym in the last 3 weeks - my thrusters (WHY are all crossfit moves so suggestive?) are now at 70 pounds for sets of 10; I'm still at 85 pounds with my (ahem) snatch, but I can now do a 65 pound snatch/overhead press combo, and I logged 99 miles on my bike last week (39 of which were a very hilly event ride that went really well; I did 39 miles in three hours 12 minutes, which considering the hilly course was great). So some of that weight may be gains. One can hope ;-) I have also discovered that I cannot do two workouts a day if I want to get anything else in my life done, because all I want to do between workouts is sleep. Goal 3: Traveling on the money, going where the waves are: From Bohdi 1: "I had plans for an ambitious cross country road trip this spring, but I changed my mind, and now I think I am going to go to Belize to go snorkeling, because it will be cheaper and shorter (like a week instead of a month) and I found out that there's a chance to see whale sharks there, which I'm kind of obsessed with. So goal #3 is to save up the money for that trip, even if it means selling everything I own that's not bicycle-related or my cat." Ha! I am nothing if not changeable, because I have revised that travel plan AGAIN. There were a ton of weird moving parts to the Belize trip, and it turned out I did NOT have enough flyer miles and would have to buy about $200 worth of miles, and I had to hit a certain time window to catch the migration of the whale sharks, and at a certain point I just said fuck it and I took a section of my original, epically over-ambitious road trip idea, and built a trip around that. So I'm going to California! This is not my photo, as I've only been to California once and that was to San Francisco for a week, so I didn't actually see anything outside the city. So I cashed in ALL my frequent flier miles today and got a ticket to Los Angeles for eleven dollars, and I'm going to Redwoods, Yosemite, Big Sur and the Channel Islands for 12 days. VERY excited. I cranked my ebay side business up again and over the last week and a half I made about $200 to put towards the trip, which is amazing ( I had some old hard drives left over from projects that made up about 80% of that money when I sold them) and I'm hoping I can make at least that much again from other stuff before I go. Between that, the flyer miles, a bunch of hotel points, and an air bnb gift certificate I got for christmas I'm hoping to cover at least half the trip expenses. Best of all I leave on the 18th, which is right as this challenge ends, so it feels like all my nutritional work and gym work and whatever will be building towards me being in really good shape for the trip, so I can hike, kayak, snorkel, wrestle great white sharks, whatever, and not be held back by my physical condition. I had a lot of different things the last half of the last challenge that got me really jazzed up and reinforced my Walter Mitty-esque goals to take more chances and start moving towards the life I really want to build for myself. Planet Earth II came out and blew my mind and got me really excited about filmmaking again; I had enough downtime to clear my own headspace to start thinking about projects I want to finish or do; a friend of mine started a really great podcast that made me want to start mine up again; another close friend who has a congenital defect in his foot ran a tough mudder and just beat it all to pieces. I also had a friend who's only 54 have a (mild) heart attack (likely brought on by a lifetime of eating doritos on the couch, sadly) and another who's much healthier but is still only 50 was suddenly hospitalized because his liver shut down for no reason anyone can seem to figure out. All of those things really got me revved up and so I am super ready for this challenge. THE FIRE IS LIT *Taco Ingestion Ratio.