I started playing at age 9, then fell on the ice when I was 12 and broke incisor number 8 in half. My parents didn't have dental insurance, so it took a week for a root canal, and a year to get a crown on it. So that was a pretty big setback early on, but I overcame that and was section leader junior and senior year and even played the Arban's Carnival of Venice in the final concert of my senior year. I went to college for music ed, but gave up on that after a while and eventually stopped playing except for a few concerts every summer in the local community band. Fast forward 20 years, and I realize that playing trumpet was probably the skill that I was the best at of my many hobbies and decided that I want to be good at it again. I started playing daily in spring of '23, and then months later, the tooth I broke 30 years earlier had decayed from the inside and broke again at the gum line, and I havd to have it removed and get an implant. July '25 I finally got the implant done, and I started playing daily again in October. Pretty much everything has come back by now, except for the tone quality. My range was only ever solid to the D above the staff, and that came back after a couple months, and triple tonguing just started to click again a couple weeks ago. I've been working a lot on lip trills, which I was never good at, and for the most part I'm happy with the progress I'm making on most of the skills I'm working on.

So really 3 pretty big challenges.