Never Too Old For Adventure: Cruel Tanzania Amoeba, Beating Shyness to Antarctica & Over 500 Days of Walking at 73 yrs 005: Cherry Hamrick

 

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 boa