Maybe it's my love of baseball that connects my aunt Helen and me. She has always kept me _________ in her experiences of playing baseball back in the 1940s. I would listen to these _________ over and over. She used to say, “Go after what you want. Don't be ashamed of failing. Real _________comes from never trying.^”

In 1943, she was one of the young women who _________ for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball league. She _________ what it would be like to win a championship for her hometown! She imagined a long narrow pointed flag _________ at the baseball field, and on it the name Helen would be there for all to _________ .

About a week later, Aunt Helen received a _________ from the leaders of the girl's baseball league in Chicago! Aunt Helen _________ it open and learned that she had been invited to the league's main tryouts!

But as the days went by, Aunt Helen became __________ about traveling to Chicago alone. What if she went all that way and __________ ? When the day of the tryouts __________ , she was too afraid to go.

Aunt Helen has spent the rest of her life wondering what would have happened __________ she had gone to those tryouts. Because of this, she never missed another __________ in her life. She learned that every dream is worth __________ ， even if you catch only a few of them.

It was a cold May morning when I received an interesting email from an old high school friend inviting me to join a 10-day all-girls surf trip. I knew I had to say ________.

The trip seemed simple enough. Ten ________ aged 30 to 45, all complete strangers, meeting on the coast of Portugal to try something new: ________in the Atlantic Ocean.

I have always loved traveling, so I was ________ to send an email to my boss asking for time ________ to make the trip. I met my ________ surfing companion on the grass of the hotel lawn in a small surf town called Ericeira. Although we had our different ________ and backgrounds, we were all united in a lasting desire to ________ ourselves, learn, tackle and grow.

________by our amazing coaches, together, we faced the waves. Sometimes, it poured with rain, and the waves __________ around us, but we were still out there. And with every slip and fall, words of __________ from our coaches filled the air. Honestly, I probably spent most of my days frozen to the bone, but that didn’t matter because learning a new skill taught me the humility (谦逊) that can come from doing __________ at something new, and the pride that develops when you finally __________ to grasp something you’ve been working on.

While surfing might not be my calling, trying it out __________ me to take more risks in life, to __________ my comfort zone and to never stop believing in myself. You never know what you’re capable of if you don’t go out there and try.

As a child, I was very shy. I wanted to be successful, but lacked confidence. When I discovered ________, I found something I was good at. I began to be ________ by my friends and this gave me the desire to climb harder and higher mountains. I discovered that nothing was impossible if I could find the ________ to try.

Both individual determination and teamwork are ________ to success when climbing. You need to rely on the ________ of your team and share in the achievement. But personal focus and determination to keep ________ despite any difficulty is an important ________ to team success.

My greatest achievement in climbing is being the first ever to ________ the 5, 000-foot Troll Wall in Norway, whose rock face is the ________ and most vertical(垂直) in Europe. A stone which drops from the summit will touch nothing until it ________ on the valley floor one mile below.

________ our climb, the experts in Europe had said it was impossible to climb the Troll Wall. But with three companions, I decided to try. It took ten days to make the climb and we slept on ledges(岩石架) no more than a foot wide. But I ________.

Afterwards, I said to myself, “If I can do that, I can do anything.” Some years ________, I succeeded in climbing Mount Everest—the highest mountain in the world.

________ to me is not hanging on a rope on the side of a mountain, but is just one field where adventurous people can constantly ________ themselves. If we look at every day as an adventure, we can challenge ourselves and continue to grow throughout our life. That is the final adventure.