It's December but my skin is being lightly kissed by the Spanish sun, that helps. Helping heal me because something has given me the dreaded Montezuma's Revenge here on the Canary Islands. My stomach has declared war on the rest of my body and my head ached like eleven Peterbilt trucks smashed into it. That doesn't matter much today.
Today is two years in the making for me, a decade of dreaming for Charlie and the magnitude of reality for Ben. They came to me two years prior to help train them to row across the Atlantic. 3,000 miles of brute force and the only propulsion comes in human form. They would be seasick, heating nothing but dehydrated meals, going number two in a cute pink bucket and only have the other for company and clarity.
We trained and trained, they became my older brothers. I learned more about life, business, fundraising, brotherhood, parenting, stress, sacrifice, charity and the absolute physical limit than I did rowing during my two years. There were T-shirts, hoodies, hats, beanies, jackets and parties to celebrate them. There will be a full length documentary about them, I went off on a Grand Tour of Europe after seeing them off. So much life came from it all.
I'll remember this hug the most. Charlie had become one of my best friends during training, there are many things to talk about during two hour rows on the erg and I think we covered most. Everything from theology to creating our own Saturday Night Live skits. This hug was the culmination of two years of five in the morning wake ups, a stinky vegan sweating through everything, getting hit by a car on his bike, I was bit by a dog, moving house, events and more events, more training than we can remember, it had finally arrived.
I was proud of my friends, of my brothers. Kobe Bryant's favorite part of basketball was actually training not the five championships. I think we suffered from the same disorder. We loved it. Today we still meet up twice a week to train, it's more relaxed now but it's become a part of our lives. Pursuit is everything, you'll learn that when your ass goes numb and your eyelids are salted shut from the sweat after 30,000 meters on the erg.
Go after something.
-Jackson