Hey there! I’ll admit that my blogging has been pretty sporadic lately, and there hasn’t been much about the Race itself, besides the two route changes that have happened in the last few months.
So it’s time for a long-overdue update. First of all, if you’ve been following along with me through this unexpected journey I’ve been on since being sent home from training camp in July, thank you. I really appreciate your support. It’s been a long road, and I definitely went through a span of a few months where I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go at all – it would have been so easy just to give up and move on with my life. But I stuck it out, and I’m glad I did.
Now as you may remember, when I left training camp eight months ago, AIM told me that I could go on the Race in July if I did a few things first. (Which I am intentionally keeping between myself and AIM for now – it was nothing extreme but I’d still rather not broadcast it all over the internet. Shoot me a private message if you’d like to know more.) Once I did this and any necessary paperwork went through, I was good to go as far as coming back to training camp in May.
Yesterday I got an email from the AIM interview coordinator, telling me that everything had been approved. This means that I am officially going to training camp with the U Squad!
(Now, there is still a disclaimer regarding training camp that AIM has the right to send a racer home if they don’t feel they are ready, but I’m not too worried about that. Dwelling on it wouldn’t do me any good, and besides, a lot has changed since May.)
Since I’ve been on three different July squads within the last two months (I tackled this in a previous post), I haven’t had as much time to get to know the U Squad, but from what I know they seem pretty awesome. There are 47 days until Training Camp and I seriously can’t wait.
Now, a few other things to address quickly:
Launch: 85 days away. (What?!) I’ll fly to Atlanta on either June 27th or 28th, depending on whether or not I have a team leadership role. We’ll spend a few days there for some final training, and then fly to South Africa as a squad.
Route: In case you missed it, my route is as follows: South Africa, Swaziland, Mozambique, India, Nepal, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Hopefully I don’t forget all of my Spanish by the time I get to Central America.
Fundraising: I currently am at nearly 75% of my funding, but I am not going to start actively fundraising again until I return from Training Camp in May. Since I halted my fundraising when I got sent home last time, this will give me the exact same amount of time to be fully funded as I would have had if I had launched in September.
Other stuff: I’ll be launching a video blog next week (hopefully) called World Race Wednesday. It’ll be weekly installments that I hope to continue throughout the Race. I’ll be posting the videos here as well as on YouTube.
