I am a survivor

When I was in college I found myself to be in the category "chubby" all of a sudden. My whole life up until high school I was as thin as a rail and I actually tried to gain weight most of my childhood. However my metabolism eventually slowed down and my overwhelming caloric intake from the sheer volume and late night nature of my food took its toll so that suddenly my junior and senior year I was developing padding in unwelcome places. Anyway, since I hated going to the gym, my attempt at exercising was always to go "running"*.

*Lizzbot's rhyming dictionary

Running = light jogging mixed in with a good amount of walking and a lot of talking 

Studying = going to different cafes (boba shop, bookstore) and chatting galore

Anyway, one night as I was meeting a friend to go running at our track I encounter a pesky obstacle. The gate was closed. Here's the scene:

Now one option was to go all the way around the top and down to the bottom of the track where there was another entrance but I was already late in meeting my friend and I hadn't brought my cellphone with me to let that person know. So I decided to re-assess the situation. I am a strong believer in "if there's a will there's a way".

I looked down to my left at the green foliage beneath me. Now keep in mind it was around 9 pm (night-time) so it was very dark, but the plants looked like bushes and I calculated them to be about 1-2 feet high. So I decided that I would just hop down, cross over past the protruding gate spokes and get over to the other side.

So I just plopped myself on down when....

Whooosh!

I started dropping MUCH lower than I had anticipated.

Turns out that those "bushes" were actually TREES. Thankfully, a fortuitous part of this incident was the fact that I landed on a random crate. What the heck was a crate doing down there? Who knows?! But it saved my life. When I landed, all I saw in front of me was a smooth cement wall in front of me with no way of climbing up. I must say I panicked for a good 30 seconds or so. I had dropped into an abyss of darkness with no way to contact the outside world. There was no way anyone would be able to find me in the mess of the FOREST I was in.

I yelled out for help, but not a soul could hear me.

Again, fortunately because of that crate I didn't fall too low as to be unable to reach those spokes on the gate. But even so, I had to jump to barely reach and grab them to pull myself up. Thank goodness for adrenaline + my freakish upper body strength (I can do push-ups and even 1 pull-up in my lifetime but cannot for the life of me do sit-ups) because I managed to drag myself up and out. The worst part of it was the spider web conglomeration that I had to pull myself through in order to get out. Yuck! 

Honestly these pictures do not do justice to the dire situation I was in or how even more dangerous (life-threatening) it could have been if the drop was actually even much deeper. Next time you go to UCLA's Drake Stadium, see for yourself!