Last winter during one of our many life-threatening but character-building blizzards, I was struggling through deep snow and howling winds on my way to the firewood supply.

As everything started to fade to black – it turned out my stocking cap was slipping down over my eyes – I thought about Charlie Wittmack climbing Mount Everest.

This is a little bit like a guppy in a bowl imagining that it’s a great white shark, but, hey, I was almost 20 yards from the house.

So a few days after that, I sent Wittmack an e-mail, asking for his thoughts about Iowa winters.

He wrote back: “The day I reached the summit of Everest the temperatures were nearly 70 below and the winds were gusting to around 40 mph. Many of the climbers returned from the summit without fingers or toes. (However,) the only time I’ve ever received serious frostbite was in Iowa while riding my bicycle to the law school in Iowa City.”

This was nice to hear, because if you kind of squint your eyes and blur the first couple of sentences and just focus on the third, Wittmack was saying that all of us are heroic every time we get through an Iowa winter. Also, it justified two of my key decisions: Don’t apply to law school and don’t buy a time share too high up on Mount Everest.

But now that Wittmack is using the Northern Hemisphere as his own personal elliptical machine, it might be time to stop pretending that I have anything in common with him.

He swam down the River Thames to warm up, then added the English Channel. Now he’s bicycling across Europe and Asia. Before he comes home, he’ll stroll up to the peak of Everest again, just for old times’ sake.

It makes you wonder if Charlie has a firm grasp on the size of the world, or if he looks at a map and says, “Gee, if I can touch Belgium and Turkey at the same time with my hand, it must not be very far.”

The guy has enough determination for an entire football team. In overtime.

But, you know, that’s just one unusually driven man, and he’s younger than I am, and, tragically, I was born with no buoyancy, so there’s certainly nothing to feel bad about.

Then Mike Earley, age 66, hops on his bicycle and rides it across the United States.

Very annoying … I mean, inspiring.

We’ve all noticed that retired people don’t act the way they used to, and this is a good thing. Travel, golf, volunteer work – there are plenty of things to do rather than sit on a bench in front of the hardware store.

Besides, we don’t have hardware stores anymore. Or benches.

But now it’s starting to look as if the competition never stops, and the dreams are getting bigger.

If Earley can ride a bike for two months, it puts my weekend bike rides right on the edge of pathetic. He’s out there braving bad weather and logging trucks, climbing mountain ranges and pushing himself to the limit. In the meantime, we’re at home complaining about the humidity between the office and the car.

It’s more evidence that the “bucket list” concept has really taken over – you itemize the things you want to do before “kicking the bucket.”

But that can quickly turn into another form of competition. With troublemakers like Wittmack and Earley running around, not only does a person feel inadequate, but his dreams start to look a little puny, too.

So I reviewed my own bucket list:

1. Find an arrowhead.

2. Learn to whistle.

Just writing them down made me feel better. Though it’s not an extensive list, it’s probably all I’ll have time for. I’ll also be spending a lot of my retirement hours eating doughnuts; if I understand correctly, that’s the key to greater buoyancy.