Do What Makes the Better Story

Once upon a time, I came up with the phrase "Do what makes the better story." When faced with a decision, this is often what comes to my mind. It's not necessarily a rule that I follow EVERY time. For example, when faced with the choice of going out to the bars at night and drinking my money away until 1 or 2 in the morning versus going home and going to bed at a reasonable time so I can get up for work in the morning, the decision is often clear (gotta make that money, ya know?). That may not be the best example, but it's one that I get every now and then.

However, when I'm faced with a decision that involves the outdoors and what I'm going to do with a portion of my summer, as well as a lot of my time (A LOT of my time...) leading up to that particular point in the summer, the decision gets much harder. The going outdoors part? Easy. Sign me up! The consumption of time and resources... Really gets one thinking. But for a canoe race? 1000 miles long in the wilderness of the Yukon and Alaska??

It started with an innocent post from a co-worker on Facebook with a link to the Yukon 1000 website, mentioning how cool something like that would be to do, and it quickly went from "Oh, that sounds pretty neat," to "Huh... Wanna toss in an application? Sure, why not? Let's see what happens," to "Holy s**t, we got accepted?! Are we actually gonna do this?!?!" (The answer to which is "You bet your sweet ass, we're gonna do this!")

Needless to say, Blake and I went through a whirlwind of emotions trying to figure out if we were actually going to commit to this. Like, being accepted to it alone was cool! Even if we didn't decide we were able to commit to it, we could still say that we were once selected to be a part of a 1000 mile canoe race! But that's not enough... "Do what makes the better story" crept across my mind, as I'm sure something to the same effect crept across Blake's mind. To brag about getting an acceptance email would be about as satisfying as getting accepted to an Ivy League school and not going, but bragging that they said you could go anyways. Okay, maybe that's not the best comparison? Maybe it is? We're not that nerdy (sending love to all you nerds reading this, we all appreciate you 😊). But actually, though, not worth it to brag about something we didn't actually do...

So anyways, as you may have guessed... WE'RE DOING THE THING! We're gonna go for a (really long) paddle way up there on the Yukon River. This is an incredible opportunity to be challenged, to join an incredible community, to try something new, and to go on a grand adventure. After all, when faced with the phrase "Do what makes the better story," were we really gonna do anything else but say yes?