A poster-sized display of pictures Nancy Richards took during a January 2009 trip she and her family made to the summit of East Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro hangs from an exercise room wall at the 55-year-old’s Madras farmhouse.

Her coffee table is littered with photo albums from trips she’s made, from Australia for a drive across the continent’s northern frontier to California to run a marathon.

Each trip is part of Richards’ “60 Things to Do Before 60 Years” list that she scribbled down on legal paper about six years ago. She’s marked off 21 of these items so far and is determined to complete the list before her 60th birthday in April 2017.

“There’s something about putting it down on paper,” Richards said of the list, which she put together after reading an article in The Bulletin’s “U Magazine.”

Working on this list has taken Richards to six states, four countries and three continents. It’s also forced Richards to push her boundaries, take better care of her health, meet new people and re-engage with her community.

Making the list

Richards took a quick inventory of her life after an ice skating trip left her exhausted for days in January 2007.

“I realized that if I was going to keep up with my grandkids, I was going to have to make some changes,” Richards said. She admitted she led a sedentary lifestyle and wasn’t in the best physical shape; her 50th birthday was less than five months away.

Hoping to start the change, Richards set some goals for herself that included running a 5K race that spring. But she didn’t write the goals down on paper or commit herself to following them until she read an article about woman who had done the same (See “Six paragraphs,” Page D3).

“(The article) just encouraged me to do something,” Richards said. “It was the right time to be inspired, I guess.”

When people reach a certain age, they usually switch from thinking about “This is how old I am and this is what I’ve done” to “This is how much time I’ve got left and this is what I want to do,” said Tim Malone, a psychiatric social worker with Deschutes County Mental Health.

“It’s fairly common to run into people (at this point in their lives) who start making lists of things they want to do,” Malone said. These lists are often called “bucket lists,” he added, after a 2007 movie starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman called “The Bucket List” — and feature a list of things to do before someone “kicks the bucket.”

“That’s a very positive thing,” Malone said, who has his own mental bucket list. “Goals in general is very motivational. They keep us active, keep us engaged and keep us going.”

But while composing bucket lists is fairly common, Malone said, Richards’ case is exceptional. Some of the things on her list required months of planning and a considerable financial cost, while others, the ones that proved to be the most challenging for Richards to check off, didn’t require her to travel more than 30 minutes away from where she lives.

Checking things off

In addition to the trips she’s made to Tanzania and Australia, Richards’ quest to mark items off her list has taken her to British Columbia’s Knight Inlet to go sea kayaking and look at grizzly bears, above the Arctic Circle to see the Northern Lights from Alaska’s Bettleman Lodge, to northern Arizona for a hike at the Grand Canyon and to the East Coast for her husband’s first trip to Washington, D.C., and a quick jog in Central Park.

She also has plans to visit the Galapagos Islands and Machu Picchu in South America and go zorbing, or ride inside a plastic ball down a hill, in New Zealand. Any one of these adventures would be a proud feather in the most experienced of traveler’s caps, but traveling is nothing new for Richards.

She spent a year of high school studying abroad in Australia and has been back to the continent about every five years since then to see her friends. She combined the trip to Washington, D.C., with a visit to her son’s family — he’s lived in the area for five or six years — and met up with a friend from Australia when she went to New York City for the jog in Central Park.

“When I made this list, I split it into a fun side and a self- improvement side,” she said.

The “fun side” of Richards’ list, which has check marks next to 12 of its 30 items, includes her travels around the globe, future ski lessons and plans to spend the night in a snow cave. The fun side also included climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, which Richards said was her most-challenging experience, and running a marathon with her family, which was Richards’ most satisfying experience because it motivated her to try a dozen similar events.

But the activities Richards has completed on the “self-improvement” side of her list — attending an opera, volunteering with a local soup kitchen, joining a club and taking a yoga class — are the ones that have pushed her comfort zone the most.

Meeting the challenge

While Richards is an accomplished traveler and a physically active baby boomer, she admits she’s a bit asocial and likes to limit interactions to a tight circle of family members and longtime friends. Working on the list will change this, she said.

“I’m trying to encourage myself to step out of my comfort zone,” said Richards, who hopes doing activities outside of her daily routine, especially ones involving groups of people, like taking a class or volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, will help her reach this final goal.

And so far Richards has been successful in this quest.

“(The people I go running with) are friendly and supportive,” Richards said, hinting at why she’s continued distance running since she marked off “Competing in the Madras Aquatic Center’s triathlon” in September 2008 and “Running a marathon” in December 2009. “You just can’t help but visit (with these people), talk to them and schedule runs with them.”

Richards has a similar relationship with two people she met while swimming at the MAC pool. In November 2011, these two friends helped Richards check off “Join a club” when they formed a three person adult swim team and arranged for a coach to meet them there twice a week.

“That was when we made a commitment to each other to actually be there (each time),” she said.

She said this commitment and the knowledge that two people will be upset if she fails to show up at the pool at an appointed time has held her accountable, and ensures she gets some amount of exercise week after week. It’s just like writing a list of goals on a piece of paper, she said.

Six paragraphs

Bunny Thompson, a freelance writer who writes for The Bulletin’s special projects department, interviewed then-Bend resident Nancy Knoble for an article about how she climbed Argentina’s Mount Aconcagua — the Western Hemisphere’s highest point — to raise awareness about breast cancer, for a February 2007 article that ran in The Bulletin’s “U Magazine.”

This article contained six paragraphs about how Knoble put together a list of 60 things she wanted to do before her 60th birthday. This story inspired Madras resident Nancy Richards to come up with a list of her own. We’ve included those six paragraphs below:

Not one to let time slip past unchaperoned, (Knoble) started a list in her journal called “60 by 60.”

“It’s a list of 60 things I want to accomplish by age 60,” Knoble said. She’s checked off several important boxes on her list, including climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, which she and (her business partner Don Harker) completed last year.

So with about a year to go before turning 60, what’s on the list?

“I want to read the book ‘Don Quixote,’ improve my Spanish, visit China and learn to use my GPS, among other things,” she said.

Will there be a “70 by 70” list?

“You bet!” she said. “Life is short. Even if you live to be 100, life is still short.”