CN Tower Climb

On Saturday October 23rd, 2010 me and a bunch of my friends participated in the 2010 CN Tower climb for United Way. I got $40 worth of donations from people from school. While asking people for money, I learned some things. Before when people asked me for donations, I would usually say, "Oh, I don't have money," "I already donated," or "Laterrrrr." All of these were lies. Now that I was the person asking for money, I realized what kind of a jerk I was. People who are not fortunate enough like me are relying for people like me to help them...but I'm too selfish to donate $1? One thing that pissed me off was when people were throwing the money at me, especially pennies. Excuse me, I'm not a hobo and I have a hand where you can put the money in. Anyways, I got enough change to get the money.

At first, I decided to sign up for the climb because a friend was begging me to. I really didn't want to go. I was already having lack of sleep, and waking up at 6 on a saturday to go climb some stupid tower? No thanks. I actually thought that it wasn't going to be so hard...just a couple of stairs. I was wrong. Very wrong. There were 144 flights of stairs. Originally I thought there was only 62. By the time me and my friend got to the 62, we asked someone, "How many flights are there?":

"There are 144."

That actually shattered our motivation of climbing. Eventually we got up and didn't die.

I think that the climb can reflect to our life. It can relate to how we try to achieve our goals:

1. First we go into it knowing the problems we would face:

• I knew I was going to die while going up the stairs. I'm so unfit that I have trouble going up to the 3rd floor at church.

2. With knowing the problems we are going to face, we either start, or give up:

• I could've said no to the climb, but I did it anyway.

3. We face challenges:

• breathing problems, smelly Indian man in front of us, leg pain, friends yelling at us to come up faster.

4. We need help along the way:

• my friend beside me was having more trouble than I thought. She looked like she was going to faint. I guess we all need a little motivation from other people that we can do it.
• we need that reminder that "we're almost there" "one more!!" kind of comments.

5. We keep on going, or give up:

• When I heard that there were 144 flights on the 62nd flight, I actually wanted to give up. We weren't even half way there. What other choice did we have? It was either up, or down.

6. We achieve our goal:

• With the many problems and challenges we go through, it is more rewarding at the end. I felt so great that I climbed the CN tower. I could check off the "climb CN tower" on my bucket list.

It was pretty fun to tell the truth. There were a variety of people who participated from 10 year olds to an old grandpa (he was so cute). If I was asked next year to do it though, I'll have to think about that. :)