Junauro Landgrebe: Personal Achievement - Mt. Washington Hike

    Took the boys up Mt. Washington for an overnight trip this past August.  Had to skip it the year before since I was still recovering from a ruptured achilles tendon in January 2013.  We had superb weather and it was a great experience as it marked what I consider the final chapter on the road to full rehabilitation for my ruptured achilles.  Furthermore, I love being outdoors especially with my two boys and was very happy to have the opportunity to get away from things for a day.

    The trip began at 6 am with the three of us piling into the car after I asked the boys if they had everything.  Packing took place the night before and the boys typically do a great job gathering everything they personally need for trips like this.  I don’t even think twice about it since they’re both Boy Scouts and have done these trips numerous times.  So the next morning we drove off after one final check.  Both boys fell asleep and it was around 8 after making a quick pitstop that Jake said in despair, “Dad, did you pack my hiking boots?”  to which I responded, “No. You didn’t put them in the car like I asked you to?”  Two hours into an almost 4 hour car drive to the trailhead and my oldest has flip flops to hike up Mt. Washington!  I was annoyed to put it mildly…

    That’s when the gps came to the rescue and I was able to find a Walmart on route.  We stopped, bought boots, and continued driving to the trailhead….whew!!  We arrived at the Pinkham Visitor Center later than planned around 10:30 am.  When we got out of the car I said, “get your boots on and grab your packs.”  It was at that time that Jordan (my youngest) said, “dad, where are my boots, didn’t you put them in the car?”  To which I said, “are you bleepin kidding me??”  He forgot his boots too!!  I was so mad at that point and was debating whether or not to scrap the trip altogether.  Within a minute or so, I angrily told the two of them to find out how much boots cost at the visitor center and to see if they even had Jordan’s size.  As I waited for them to return I searched the gps and found another Walmart 19 miles away.  To my surprise they returned with some good news:  the visitor center has a boot loaner program allowing hikers to try out high end boots for free -  I couldn’t believe it!!  My mood changed from disbelief and anger to relief and excitement as we geared up and hit the trail.
 
    We began our ascent from the Pinkham Visitor Center on Tuckerman’s Ravine trail.  We climbed 1,700 feet in 2.5 miles and arrived at the Hermit’s Lake campsite where we dropped our packs at one of the 12 lean tos.  We continued hiking the remaining 2 miles up Eagles Head trail and summited Mt. Washington around 4 pm. 

 (1000 feet to go…almost to the summit!!)

 (At the summit!)

    The trip turned out to be a great success despite the initial hiccups.   I really love being outdoors with my boys and it dawned on me that these trips may become fewer and fewer as the boys get older.  I hope this isn’t the case but they’re getting busier and busier every summer.  The initial difficulties with the boys forgetting their hiking boots helped remind me that a problem is just something that requires mindful consideration and patience to find a solution.  The boys found a solution to not bringing their hiking boots and hopefully realize that they need to be more attentive even when they’re tired.  I realize that they’re still young and need some help keeping organized.  Overall, I feel like I handled the problem reasonably well considering the circumstances.  Furthermore, martial arts has helped me find balance and react less emotionally when things get difficult.  Something I’m grateful to have gained.

    One of the bigger aspects of the trip was the sense of accomplishment I feel being able to hike up Mt. Washington after going through a very long recovery with my achilles.  I’ve never had an injury take 9 months to fully recover.  Some people give up doing active things like martial arts and strenuous hikes after sustaining an injury like this.  I feel great about pushing myself through the obstacles, doing all the physical therapy, and getting back into the dojo.  The mastery program has been an integral part of my recovery and the hike up Mt. Washington was truly a great personal goal I feel very proud accomplishing.  I wasn’t sure I would return to karate after the injury, but can say doing so significantly helped me recover both physically and mentally. 

Olivias FINAL post (maybe) 8/18

So I reading Savor. Almost done with it in fact. And let me tell you, hat is one of the driest books I've ever rad. I mean, It is really difficult to get thru, and I love to read. Tough, to be honest I prefer fantasy and fiction in general, and this is far from that. I don’t find the subject of food and healthy eating to be particularly engaging in the first place, but I feel that this book was almost written in such a way as to deter any but the most dedicated and diligent writers. But once I get around my feelings for this book, I can find interesting facts and tidbits in it. Little things that allow me to be able to concentrate on it, and comprehend what it’s trying to tell me. So those are my thoughts on Savor.

I also need to write about how my mending a relationship is going, so might as well do that now. I am trying to improve my relationship with my brother. Everyone tells me that I am super hard on him, and mean to him, and I’ve sometimes been able to recognize that, but mostly I just treat him without a second thought to it, just doing what I feel is natural. For this I’ve had several repercussions by my parents who don’t like me treating him like that or speaking to him in that voice. It also hurts him a lot, and makes him sometimes very wary of me. This is really bad, because though I don’t realize I’m hurting him a lot, I am. I want my treatment of him to get better, which is why I’m trying to improve my relationship with him. It is and always will be a work in progress, but I feel that over the course of the year my treatment of him has gotten significantly better.

In addition, I got to talk about my acts of kindness. I’ve been doing at least three a day, but I’ve fallen behind on logging them. It’s not that I’ve had tons of stuff happening, it’s just that I’ve been forgetting to write them down. So I’ve got to work on that. See if I can remember any and write them down, as well as writing down my current ones. But I have without fail been doing them. In fact, theres this one that Ive done every day for the entire school year. See, on a regular school day, I'm veeeery crabby in the morning. But this year, I made it a constant act of kindness to my family to be cheerful and happy in the morning. And I DID IT EVERY SINGLE MORNING. I am very proud of myself, because it also helps me exercise self control, and I appreciate anything that helps me become better at controlling myself..

Jake's Final Blog Post

I do not expect every one of you to read this fully, for it is a long post, but I would appreciate it if you did. Thanks!

Well, the final day of the mastery program is upon us. Tomorrow will be August 16th, 2014, which is one year after I recorded my first good deed. One year after I wrote my first blogpost, my first goal, and recorded my first sparring minutes. As sensei tells us, how awesome would it be to say, "I got my black belt, but from 8 years of intense training, and a year long mastery program with these requirements.."

Most of you who have done the requirements should now realize, you have done ALL of those push-ups. You have done ALL of those good turns. YOU have done ALL of what it takes to complete this program. And I congratulate you.

I wanted to thank each and every one of you for taking part in this with me, this experience has truly been eye opening, and I am extremely glad that I was able to complete this with you guys.

Now I would like to summarize my good deeds. Every week, I had to perform 20 good deeds, no matter how big or how small. At the beginning of this program, I was merely doing these good deeds without intent, just knowing that I had to complete them in order to fulfill the requirements of the mastery program. However about 2 months into it, I had discovered how happy these good deeds actually made people. One time, I held a door for a family of 5, and the father shook my hand saying I was being a great influence on my generation in the community. I was shocked. After that moment, I began doing these good deeds from my heart, realizing that not just me, but anyone can make a difference by lending a hand, holding a door, and much more. Now not every week was exactly 20. Some weeks it went down to 17, for various reasons. When this happened, I made it my weekly goal to make up those lost good deeds along with the other 20 I had to complete, no excuses. By doing this I was able to keep up my good deeds throughout the year, and now I am proud to say that I have completed 1000 good deeds over the course of this year.

The hardest part of this program in my opinion, was the physical requirements. Now most of you would wonder, really? This is karate it's mainly physical! Yes, this is true, but I have horrible organizational skills, or should I say "had". Having to do 100 push-ups AND sit-ups, 14 pull-ups, 28 squats, and all of my forms 3 times a week or more, is very hard to suddenly fit into your schedule. I very quickly learned that I had to get with it, or else I would have a huge debt of exercises to complete. So thus, my organizational and scheduling skills increased quickly. Now I know that all of you know the numbers, but for documentation sake, I am incredibly proud of myself in that I was able to do 36,500 push-ups AND sit-ups, 5000 pull-ups, and 10,000 squats throughout this year, along with 150 repetitions of each learned form.

Righting one wrong was an interesting experience. It was awkward, it felt off, and it was difficult. If some of you don't know, talking to your ex can be a very weird situation. Not only does it make you feel weird as you talk to him/her, but it just doesn't feel right. At the end of our conversation, everything felt right, because I was able to apologize and own up to my mistakes, of which she accepted my apology fully.

Together, my father and I were able to raise over 400 dollars for the Alabama project, but unfortunately were not able to participate last year. I hope to join the other participants this year, because I have heard so many great things about it.

In my recent blog posts, I had profiled 3 living heroes. Those individuals were Nicholas Vujicic, Dave Grohl, and Shaun White. I won't go into detail, but I had described why each of them were living heroes to me, and how they had impacted the world.

Earlier in the year, I had achieved my 3 personal victories. They are also in blog posts, but not as recent. I again won't go into detail, so if you want to see those, you can scroll down the numerous blog posts of this program to find them.

At the moment I am reading Zen in the Martial Arts, which is the required reading for the program, and I will complete it by tomorrow. So far I find it incredibly educational, but not in a bad way. I am already beginning to internalize some of the lessons from the book to be used in my own daily life.

And finally, I have had to maintain a public journal (this blog) for the year. Updated at least once a week. At the beginning of the program, I did not do well with this at all. It was to the point where sensei eventually emailed all of us, telling us to step up our game, with no excuses to not blog. From then on I got a little better at being on time, yet there was still some holes in my performance. I would miss a week, or two occasionally, which was not acceptable. In the last 5 months, I believe I was able to maintain my blogging consistently, besides the 3 weeks in july when I was at camp. Now I find that blogging is a great source for letting out emotion and anything on your mind if you are willing to share it to the world.

Again, I wanted to thank each and every participant of this program for joining me on this journey. I was challenged greatly but also had tremendous amounts of fun at the same time. As the last day of the program approaches, I congratulate all of you, we made it.

- Jake Landgrebe

Living hero 8/9

Britney Gengel was a kind, caring, and loving student at Lynn University. She traveled to Haiti in 2010 to work for an aide group, and felt very passionate about the children there. Hours before her death, she texted her parents, saying that she would like to open a orphanage there, to even more help the orphans living there. Hours later, a giant earthquake hit Haiti, killing hundreds. For thirty three days, Britney’s family  waited for news, and finally, they got it. Britney was dead. After grieving, the Gengles decided to make sure Britney’s memory would never be forgotten. With Brit in mind, her parents created the be like Brit foundation, a foundation to raise money to build an orphanage for kids at Haiti. The building was finally completed in 2012, thanks to all the donations sent in by millions of people. It houses 33 boys and 33 girls.

So this entire thing, I felt was really amazing, and I believe that Brit’s parents deserve to be named Living heroes because of it. To go from grieving or your daughter to building in orphanage in her honor, well that’s pretty amazing.

Jake Living Hero Blog Post 3

My 3rd and final living hero is Shaun White. Shaun was born in San Diego, California on September 3rd, 1986. Before I get into all of his life achievements, I want to say that Shaun White was dedicated to the point that nothing could alter his passion for snowboarding/skateboarding. He was born with a Tetralogy of Fallot, which is a congenial heart defect. White had to go through 2 open heart surgeries before he was the age of 1. At the age of 6, which took after his older brother and switched from skiing to snowboarding. Immediately he began to rise through the levels of competition and advancement in his skill, and while he was snowboarding he was also skateboarding. By the age of 9 he met Tony Hawk. Tony took him under his wing and by 17 Shaun was a pro at skateboarding. With his snowboarding, he had received his first sponsorship by the age of 7, and to this day he has 25 medals hanging from his neck. He has 2 gold from the olympics, 13 gold, 3 silver, and 2  bronze from the winter x games, and 2 gold, 2 silver, and 1 bronze from the x games. Shaun inspired me to pursue my passion of snowboarding, and now I consider myself a decently skilled snowboarder. I may not be able to ride every rail at the terrain park, but I know how to get myself around. I remember whenever I thought of the winter olympic games, I thought of Shaun. I consider Shaun a living hero because he was able to stay dedicated to something he was passionate about and now has proof of his success in medals and skill.

Jake Living Hero Blog Post 2

My second living hero is a man named Dave Grohl. If some of you do not know much about him, Dave Grohl is the lead singer/guitarist in the Foo Fighters, and was originally the drummer of Nirvana. Dave was born in Warren, Ohio on January 14th, 1969. I believe he is a living hero because during his time in Nirvana, the lead singer Kurt Cobain committed suicide and had further broken up the band. Every band member was in pieces for a long time, except for Dave. What Dave did, was began writing music, and creating songs, to overcome the mental obstacle of the absence of his dear friend Kurt. Now, Dave is very successful. He has left his mark on the world of how anyone can come out of the dark and be incredibly successful afterwards. And not only did he leave his mark on the world, but he inspired me to become a better musician with the course of musical education I have chosen.

update 8/5

LOTS OF STUFF IS HAPPENING!
 So this is a super duper mega exciting week! Like I cant even contain my excitement I might even explode! So anyways, yesterday I got my hair dyed, which is a SUPER big thing! I have ben talking about getting it done for about a year niw, and have devoted countless hours to surfing th web and chasing good dyeing ideas. I finally setteled on an even shorter cut, with jagged edges, and a blue to red streak. I LOVE IT!!! it makes me sososososo very happy. In addition to that I might be going to comic con next week, so I'm flipping out over that. I mean, I'm a huuuuge geek, and John Barrowman, captain Jack from Doctor Who, ya that dude, will BE THERE! In PERSON!! Like whaaaaat!!!!!! Anyway, in addition to that I've got camp for the next two weeks, at Walnut hill. Its a pretty chill camp, and I like it a lot. Ummmmm, yeah, I believe that's all for the moment, but its all so freaking exciting!