Well.... Ok, maybe not exactly easy, but I will let you be the judge.Step 1 - Buy an old house and fall head over heels with it
Step 2 - Chuck existing, fairly lucrative and way too safe career, move to VT and enter graduate school in order to learn how to care for said old house properly
Step 3 - Join local fire department dragon boat team on a lark to raise money for charity but mostly for an excuse to have rowdy, splashy fun
Step 4 - Meet your future BFF and long-lost twin (pay no mind that she's darker, shorter and speaks with an accent quite unlike yours, she's definitely kin)
Step 5 - Get told "who are we kidding, you're not an athlete" but join elite dragon boat club with your new BFF anyway, and cross a border 2-3 times a week to do it because you can
Step 6 - Suffer through bikram yoga to train for competition in Hong Kong; make up a new on-your-butt steering style to make sure you don't flip boat in one of busiest harbors in the world; and manage to win world championships with 22 now-sisters-for-life
Step 7 - Ignore naysayers who try to squish your big ideas and start your own dragon boat club with BFF, with huge support from those who truly matter
Step 8 - Earn a spot on Team USA dragon boat team and represent your country (along with BFF no less!!)
Step 9 - Marry your (former) coach and personal trainer
Step 10 - Put in for a shot at coaching a national team - and GET IT. Actually, you get TWO teams. And the best part. WITH YOUR BFF!!
And there you have it. All you have to do is buy an old house.
Ok, so there are a few things I left out but the bottom line is, this week G and I learned that we were selected to coach two USA national teams: the U24 Open (men 18-24) and the U24 Women (women 18-24). We are thrilled, honored, excited, humbled, crazy excited, breathless, happy, super excited and just... WOW. Words cannot express how we are feeling right now. Here we are, as unlikely two friends as ever there could be, who met by chance by a fence in a field by a dilapidated old building (hmm... I'm beginning to sense a theme here), who fell in love with a sport they had never even known existed, who followed their hearts, who learned and watched and soaked up every little thing they could, who paddled and trained and coached and paddled more and trained harder and just went for it. That's the lesson here. You gotta go for it. But if you want to buy and love and care for an old house I highly encourage that too. Because old houses are just as awesome as dragon boats.
