28/04/2023
Hi Gregg:
I’m sorry it has taken some years to touch base. But, thanks in large part to you, I’m leading a busy life these days!
As you might recall, I had an issue with canceling a reservation the year I joined you. You were gracious enough to return the payment for my fiance's reservation without asking many questions. I believe I said she was recovering from some sort of surgery.
In reality, my fiance, brother, sister-in-law and nephew had been killed in a single-engine plane crash in Italy six months before our scheduled trip with F5! Needless to say, I was devastated. After the funerals, I didn’t leave the house for two months. I lost my dream job as a partner in a law firm simply by not showing up. I changed my phone number so I didn’t have to deal with the outpouring of sympathy. It was all well-intentioned, but I didn’t have the bandwidth to deal with it.
It was my sister who talked me into keeping my F5! reservation. She finally wore down my resistance by convincing me that the only strategy that was going to return my life to some semblance of normality was to avoid normality at all costs. After all, normality had never been our thing; like me, my late fiance and my brother preferred adrenaline-filled adventures to lazing about a beach sipping cocktails.
Thus did I show up in Oklahoma City that May day a broken man. Determined not to let my darkness infiltrate the group, I threw myself into our chases those first few days. Fake it ‘til you make it, right?
The thing is, by mid-week, I was no longer faking it. The comradery of chasing all those life-affirming funnel clouds (when everyone else was running in the other direction) revived my troubled soul and renewed my faith in mankind. Incredibly, all those blackened skies and grayscale landscapes restored color to my life. And I picked up a few lessons about leadership under duress, Gregg.
I certainly hope that none of your chasers this year has endured a journey to the edge of the abyss. But as we age, life tends to pile on the reasons to stay in bed in the morning. Everybody has issues. If I could tell your potential clients anything, it would be this: Sign up for a chase. Get back in the game. Put yourself in position to allow the winds of change to howl through your soul. The money will seem the most trivial of considerations for a life-affirming adventure of a lifetime!
Erik Padea
Paducah, KY
