Three Cups of Tea and a Treadmill

My new treadmill has given me vertigo. I assume it's the elevation.

After walking a mere 45 minutes, I have "traveled" only 1.5 miles--roughly half the distance I'd cover in the same amount of time outdoors in fair weather. Still, as I sit and write this with my legs elevated by my coffee table, I feel my muscles twitching, waking up as if they have been asleep for ages--the Ice Age known as a typical Wisconsin winter.

Outside, my neighborhood is still as death, slowly disappearing beneath yet another white blanket; but inside I can finally feel alive again. The relief is overwhelming, as is the dizziness I find unexpectedly as I step off the ungainly behemoth taking up a quarter of my poor dining room. Its towering blackness and smell of new plastic provides sharp contrast to the warm hues of my plank table and antique wooden chests. Yet despite its glaring incongruity with my furnishings, when I look at it I see a lifeboat; a modern-day version of Sterling North's canvas canoe which spent at least a year occupying the center of the North family home in Edgerton, Wisonsin, not so many years ago.

Since a trip to the Columbus Fireman's Park was out of the question this evening, I traveled with Greg Mortenson to the peak of K2. Well, almost. We made it within 600 metres of the peak before finding it necessary to turn back to save a friend suffering from a near-fatal brush with pulmonary edema. On the arduous journey down, Greg becomes lost and finds himself--literally and metaphorically--in the mountain village of Korphe, Pakistan. It is here that Greg discovers his life's calling when he discovers that the village has no school for its children.

As Greg struggles to navigate the ravines and avalanches of fundraising (now back in California) I march onward to the entrancing beat of Phil Thornton and Hossam Ramzy's "Immortal Egypt." Occasionally, a song carries a pace close enough to my own that I can match it precisely by increasing or decreasing my speed in small increments. A rhythm for my workout. A current for my canoe. A rope for my ascent.


Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.

Greg Mortenson and students from one of the new girls' schools in Pakistan.

"Image courtesy Greg Mortenson, Central Asia Institute"