Dreaming Big

I’ve always dreamed big. I tell people all the time, “When I win the nobel in literature,” or “When I get a piece in the National Portrait Gallery,” or, “When I get my five-star food truck.” It’s not because I think I can do these things (if anything my nature leans towards laziness and ice cream in bed while watching bad Netflix princess-of-made-up-countries romcoms), it’s because I’ll always be a romantic at heart, and that means I’m a dreamer. And do like the concept of trying hard, because trying means learning, exploring, developing as a person. I do like to strive.

So it makes sense then, that when I first went to El Potrero Chico and met filmmaker Kai Axmacher, I immediately joked: “Let’s climb Sendero Luminoso.”

The giant, El Toro.

Sendero Luminoso is 15 pitches long with 2 pitches of 12d. If you’re not familiar climbing jargon, what I mean by that is that the route is big. And hard. Sendero Luminoso was, in fact, way too hard for me. At that point, I had only ever successfully climbed routes up to12a (though I had managed to struggle my way up one 12d in Wyoming once). So when I said, “Let’s climb Sendero Luminoso,” I wasn’t being serious. I was just dreaming big.

But then adidas TERREX launched United By Summits. The campaign encouraged people to pitch a dream summit, and if you were chosen, you’d get support in trying to achieve it. I applied - and wonder of all wonders, a panel of ridiculously accomplished athletes and community leaders chose my hairbrained pie-in-the-sky dream. And that was it.

Kai and I returned to Mexico and stayed for three months, working on the route. We took footage of the whole ride, and after we were done, we made a film with the support of adidas TERREX. It’s called, Luminoso.

It’s a bit of a love letter to the sport - to the process, the joy, the pain, the people (my god, the people!) - and a love letter to trying hard. To dreaming big.

And it’s me getting to tell a story in a completely different medium. As it turns out, I like writing for films.

The film is below. I hope you enjoy it as much as I loved experiencing it. It really was a dream come true.