California friends and my Rochester future

To catch everyone up to speed in a few very short sentences. Yes, it's been seven days since my last blog. Yes, I have been busy. Yes, I am now 26 years old. Yes, I have to go to a fencing competition in Columbus, Ohio on Thursday.

My trip to California

After Christmas, I participated in a women's foil camp in San Francisco. I spent New Year's Eve in Tahoe catching up on much needed rest and relaxation from the camp. I think I used most of the time to nurse my sore muscles in the hot tub. You have never seen stars until you have been surrounded by snow, sitting in the hot tub at night, and looking up at the Tahoe sky. It was amazing.

After New Year's I spent a few days in SF including my birthday, which was last Saturday. I am finally a few days into the first year of my late twenties. It's an era which will include lots of fencing and traveling. I'm looking forward to it.

My birthday party was an interesting one. I sort of tried to meld a group of mismatched friends together so I can see them all at one time. Some were Stanford kids I met during the Stanford in Moscow program, some were people I knew from the California gubernatorial campaign I worked on, and others were friends from San Francisco.

With this experience I realized that you accumulate lots of friends overtime and not all of them are going to mesh together even if you are all at a great Vietnamese restaurant in San Francisco.

But more importantly, I realized that in six months my life has completely changed. Going back to California was truly an eye opener for me. While my friends were stressed about their jobs and purpose in life, I thought about all the fun things I get to do like fencing, competing, meeting different people, traveling. Not to say one thing is better than the other, but I felt for the first time that I wasn't really missing out on anything.

Of course my Stanford friend asked THE question almost every Stanford grad asks me, "Why did you decide to waste two years of your life?". No joke, that's what he asked.

At first I was a little shocked because I felt that the broad smile on my face would have already answered that question. A few months ago I would have said that I was scared and part of me thought this was the dumbest idea, but this is now and my answer was and is because I LOVE IT. There is no greater joy for me now than what I am doing. Fencing has always been a huge part of me and I am in this moment for good, for better, or for even better, at least for the next year.

I am more worried now about afterwards and what will I do when it's all over but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Today, I spoke to an Olympic sailor that competed in Mexico City at the 1968 Games. I called to invite him to my fundraiser and he started in with, "back in my day I only got $300 and made my own boat. I even got the crew together by myself". I love it. At the end of the conversation I was curious what an ex-Olympian does forty years after they compete. He just plainly answered, of course I still sail and I even build boats.

I think if you do a sport to such an intense degree and you have the opportunity to represent your country in the ultimate competition, the sport never leaves you. It becomes part of you for better or worse-the aches and pains of old injuries and the incredible feeling you get when you walk into an Olympic stadium with thousands of people cheering for you-I own those memories and those feelings. All these things will always be a part of me and for that I am more than thankful. I could be working as an intern somewhere right now but instead I'm traveling the world and chasing a dream.