I don't know why but this has been on my mind quite a bit lately; my greatest defeat.
I used to vacation once a year in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It was a guy's weekend where my closest pal and I, usually accompanied by at least one or two other dudes, would go for a few days of beer drinking, campfires, music, laser tag, and other assorted shenanigans. We had a few staple destinations on these trips such as the local five & dime where time seemed to stop in 1988. It was a great place to buy A-Team paraphernalia and other weird crap. We would almost always go to "Devil's Slide" too.
Devil's Slide is a former logging zone where the loggers would let logs slide down the side of a cliff into the waiting Lake Superior below. After thousands of logs, the earth wore away into a sandy ravine pitched at a dangerous angle. Years later the "fun" came from people running down the slide and then trudging back up.
The few times I did this I felt like my heart was going to pound out of my chest -- not on the way down but on the arduous trek back up.
In 1997 I became a changed man. I lost over a hundred pounds; shed a lot of my self-doubt and hang-ups. I worked out a few times a week and somewhere in the back of my mind Devil's Slide loomed as a symbol for me to conquer. Every time I went down Devil's Slide my friends would be waiting for me at the top for a half hour or longer, having scaled the heights in a fraction of the time it took for me to get my fat ass back up the incline.
No more, I said. The next time will be different!
My new lean frame did me well going down Devil's Slide, running like a wild man as gravity pulled me down towards the icy Lake Superior. I could hardly wait to prove myself, turning around almost immediately and sprinting back up.
My sprint quickly turned into a brisk walk and soon after that a crawl. Despite all of my hopes, I fell victim to Devil's Slide once again. My companions zoomed up the cliff side, leaving me to pant and struggle my way up, as slow as ever.
Once I finally made it topside I collapsed in a heap, feeling like I had just gone five rounds with my inner demons and the demons won.
I was never the same after that.
