Cherry Hamrick exudes positivity and resilience. Her mindset is that of adventure. Every corner of her life, whether work, play, family or vacation is treated as an adventure. At sixty-five, she faced her shyness to travel alone to Antarctica. At seventy-two she was seriously ill in Tanzania, with the sickness known as the 'amoeba'. Yet all she wanted was to climb Kilimanjaro and appreciate running in Africa. At seventy-three, she has now recorded a streak of over 500 consecutive days of walking. A splits extraordinaire, avid runner, kayaker, dancer and traveller with a zest for life, challenges and adventures. You will be reaching for a map and guidebook after listening to Cherry!

Zoe Langley-Wathen  00:14

Hello, and welcome back to the HeadRightOut Podcast. If you're here for the very first time, welcome! I hope you're here to stay. My name is Zoe Langley-Wathen, and I am your host, and I'm here to help introduce the idea of doing something that scares you. To push yourself out of your comfort zone a little bit. Today, in order to take us on this resilience journey a little bit more, I am talking to a very special lady indeed. Her name is Cherry, and she's going to be taking us through her journey of living an adventurous life.

Zoe Langley-Wathen  00:48

Now, I have to just say here, a little bit of a thing that has been going on with my internet connection, I think it's mine, I'm not sure. But please, please make some allowances for the quality here. Our connection was unstable, and we had been completely disconnected at the start of our chat. Once we were reconnected, it was it was a bit better, and although there was some occasional latency there in the audio, we decided to run with it. So I will have edited out a lot of the long pauses that you get when you have a delay in a call. But hopefully it doesn't completely detract from the conversation, because it was a wonderful conversation that we had.

Zoe Langley-Wathen  01:26

Cherry shares some awesome advice with us about keeping a positive mindset through tough times, which we all get and how best to deal with those problems and how best to deal with a crisis when it hits, as well. She's a woman of much wisdom and an absolute joy to talk to. So without further ado, let's get into the interview.

Zoe Langley-Wathen  01:56

Okay, hello, everybody and welcome to the HeadRightOut Podcast. And today I have a very special guest and she is tuning in with us all the way from the United States. Her name is Cherry Hamrick, and I have a wonderful introduction to offer you, before we get right into that interview with Cherry.

Zoe Langley-Wathen  02:15

Cherry Hamrick is based in the United States and was a ballet teacher for twenty years before making a career change into becoming a librarian, for twenty-three years. At fifty. She studied for a master's degree, which enabled her to become a library director, at which point she had the joy and satisfaction of being a major part of building a big new library for her community. She loved the construction part of it so much that she says if she could have had a third career, it would have been to become a construction manager. (I absolutely love that already!)

Zoe Langley-Wathen  02:51

Cherry has run on all of the seven continents. She has been in a boat on six of the seven continents. And in addition to working for that master's degree at fifty, she also ran her first marathon. She wore the mantle of race director for twelve years at the library, putting on the Run for Reading and the Jingle Bell 5K for women. She is the vice chair of the Ingham County Parks Board and she's a founding board member of the Friends of Lansing Regional Trails. Although she didn't start marathons until she was fifty, Cherry has now run seven marathons; Bay Shore, Detroit twice (that's running once and race walking it once), Big Sur, China, Chicago and New York. She describes herself as an avid runner, (I'd say!), walker kayaker and has done yoga since she was twelve years old.

Zoe Langley-Wathen  03:50

Cherry has travelled to Antarctica, despite being shy and not knowing anyone and has undertaken a daily lockdown walk with a friend and never stopped. Current total of those walks is now at over two thousand miles and over five hundred days of walking. She even managed to wear a hole in the bottom of her cast boot that she was wearing for a stress fracture. Cherry's biggest challenge was in 2020. On her final continent, the plan was to Safari for five days, do a partial climb of Mount Kilimanjaro for three days, run a half marathon and then fly home (to rest I assume). That was supposed to be for a total of two weeks with travel time included. Let's say that expedition didn't go quite as planned, despite two years of organizing the trip. And I believe there was another cast boot that became an essential part of Cherry's attire due to another stress fracture this time in her foot and a hellish illness contracted in Tanzania that gradually sucked the life from her and I I believe that also forced her to be hospitalized on her return to the US. I sense that this woman is a determined soul. She is also seventy-three years old. Now she went to set foot on Kili. So let's find out what happened.

Zoe Langley-Wathen  05:18

Cherry, welcome to the HeadRightOut Podcast. My goodness me, what a tale. What a whole wealth of tales you have there. What hurdles were you faced with when travelling to Africa, because that sounds like it was your biggest challenge, to date at least and that it threw all sorts of things at you what was going on there?

Cherry Hamrick  05:39

It certainly did. The best part of the whole adventure was through the whole thing, all three of us that were on the trip had such a good attitude, which I appreciated from the girls. Not everybody rides in an ambulance in Tanzania, and not everybody experiences coming down the mountain the same way you went up. They were so, so wonderful about just embracing what was happening. I mean, that's part of travel and life, things change quickly, and you have to figure it out.

Zoe Langley-Wathen  06:13

So what caused you to be in the ambulance?

Cherry Hamrick  06:16

I had somehow, I have a theory, but I'm not sure how, come in contact with the water there. I thought I was really careful. But I think maybe during the tent shower, I was looking up to pull the chain maybe and got some water in my mouth. I don't know. But I got an amoeba is what the doctor there called it and just had (not real pleasant) constant diarrhea, and just no appetite. I tried to cover it up. I didn't want anybody to worry. And I took some anti-diarrhea medicine, which helped the first few days so I could keep going on safari. When it was time to climb, the guide said "how are you feeling" and I said, "well, I've had a little diarrhea." So to be fair, he didn't understand the severity of my problem. But starting up Mount Kilimanjaro, really weak, very dehydrated and wearing an aircast that came up, but I'm pretty determined. And I just wanted to... I was there to climb that mountain.

Cherry Hamrick  07:20

So our guide was wonderful, he helped me, hauled me up over things. My foot was really getting moved around in the cast because the ground is so different. So my foot hurt a lot and when we got to that first camp, because I read a lot about it, I was so excited to actually be in a camp on Mount Kilimanjaro. That was such a thrill. I just knew I didn't have the strength or the ability. The next day was twice as long and I just knew I couldn't manage. So we had to come back down the next morning and there was an ambulance waiting for me, and they took me to a clinic to get some medicine and that helped. I don't know how much y