Me

Okay, well obviously not me, but what she looks like is how I am feeling after closing in on five straight days of actually managing to get to the gym and work out hard. And this after having a pretty damn good week last week too (workout-wise, that is). What's coolest? I feel good. I mean, normally after two weeks like this, my back hurts, my hip hurts and my neck hurts. But not this time. I cannot figure out what I am doing right or how to keep it going but I am not backing off until I have to.

Play: Builds Strong Bones...and Brains.

Life is not all play. As adults we know and accept this, even while we recognize its importance in balancing out our stressful lives. I'm having a good time (when I'm not flat out exhausted from working, coaching, trying to stay fit and trying to be a good sister and friend) reading the book "Play" by Stuart Brown and will comment on it at some point. But, in the meantime, I'm intrigued that yet another article appeared in the New York Times regarding play and its important role in child development. Find the article here.

After 27 good years together, it's time to move on

It's happened. It's over and I'll just have to deal with it. My awesome, at-the-time-crazy-expensive, 27 year-old-bike saw it's last day, last week.

I loved that bike. Sure, being as old as it was, it was heavy, but that just meant it took the downhills super fast. And sure, I had to tighten the gear lever every time I wanted to shift gears, but that just made me shift less and build up my legs more. The biggest bummer is that I was just starting to explore and understand the value of cycling as a serious training tool for rowing (legs and lungs, baby). And now, this.

I'll have to put myself out there in a market I don't know and haven't seen in 27 years...searching again for "the one". It's both exciting and daunting, but can it ever be the same with a new stream-lined model? Should I buy a bike for the athlete I am now and anticipate another long-term, hard-driving relationship? Or should I plan on changing bikes once or twice between now and the time I am in my mid-seventies? Can one bike adapt to both Kelleys?

For the answer to these questions and more, stay tuned!

Mid-season blues

Well, it's been a heck of a couple of weeks since I last blogged but, the crew season is well underway and with it comes a serious lack of extra time and energy...which plays out as laundry piling up, cereal for dinner, and not much time for blogging.

But any way its Friday and I am nearly half way through the season and things are going well. I have two great assistant coaches and we have a bunch of really great kids and so - can't complain. Except....

We've hit that inevitable point in the season when somebody decides to push the teammate envelope. As in "I can show up whenever I like and still be a teammate". As in "I can dog half the workouts and still be a teammate". As in "I can be rude to the underclassmen and still be a teammate". Errrrr.

I hate having the conversation that has to come, but I hate worse what this kid is doing to the team.

"What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open." (Muriel Rukeyser)

This has been bugging me for two weeks solid. On August 17th the New York Times ran a series of articles called"Saving the World's Women." I read them online - all of them - and it was sobering stuff. To the left of the articles was a repeating series of six facts, the same six next to every article. Some of the stats were upbeat, most were desolate, none of them were attributed. I don't know if they accompanied the hard copy, so here's a link to one of the online articles so you can see what I mean (scroll down a little way and look to the left): http://http//www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.html?scp=1&sq=saving%20the%20world%27s%20women&st=cse

Here's what stuck with me. One of the screens read: "1 percent of the world's landowners are women." If that's right, then only 67,000,000 women around the world own land.

There are 1,163,000,000 people in Europe and North America alone. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that women are a nice clean half of that total (maybe there are more, maybe there are less, but work with me) and that half of them are children (likely inaccurate, but again, work with me). That leaves, in far less than half of the world, just under 300,000,000 women old enough to own land. And if only, oh, one quarter of them can afford to own real estate, that's 73,000,000 women. What am I missing? How can only 67 million around the world be landowners?

Far worse: "130 million women around the world have been subjected to genital cutting." Which means that around the world almost twice as many women are tortured - by this method alone - than own land.

No getting around it, life is a contact sport and people are getting hurt.

Impara l'arte e mettila da parte

I was reading about flow again the other day in preparation for the upcoming crew season and thought about the Italian phrase above. It translates roughly to: learn the art then put it aside.

Having had relatively few (in other words two) quantifiable flow moments in sport myself - after a lifetime as an athlete - I find this a fascinating subject. Because those two moments stand out still as the most fun I've had while competing, I start out every season hoping that the athletes I coach will find themselves living a few seconds where everything comes together and they lose themselves in what they are doing. Or maybe fully experience what they are doing is a better way of putting it. The problem is that to be in that "zone", you really must be doing and not thinking (or at least not thinking about exactly how to do what you are doing). And, of course how you get to that point is the hard part because it takes a LOT of practice to have learned your art well enough to set it aside.

I do think I've figured out my biggest problem though. Once I get to the point where the skill or sport is ingrained enough for me to be reasonably successful and possibly approach a flow moment my mind wanders. As in: What shall I cook for dinner? Should I wallpaper or paint the hallway? Why on earth would anybody buy those platform shoes I saw in Allure? You get my drift....

Promote world peace: play more!

I am no expert on play, by which I mean I don't study it for a living. But...I took some courses on play as a freshman studying physical education and read some of the scholarly works of one of the great researchers in play, Johan Huizinga (deadly stuff which turned me off of the idea of becoming an academic in the field of human movement). And I have been coaching all of my adult life, which means I do think about sport and play a bit. So, you know, almost an expert.

Anyway, what I most remember about play from school is this: animals have to play...humans included. And it's not just about "all work and no play...." Play, at every stage of life, teaches animals all kinds of important things they need to know about being wolves or elephants or humans; it is a key element of appropriate physical and mental developmental. One of the most important aspects of play is that it teaches young wolves, elephants AND humans how to be successful members of their respective societies. Some researchers have found, in fact, that many people who commit murder apparently had no experience with constructive play as children. It's likely they missed some important lesson about hierarchy, submission and the consequences of acting on violent urges.

So, it makes me wonder: Are we spending enough time playing? Would the world be a better place if we played more often? Or better yet, set aside our differences and played with groups we don't normally interact with like these two did: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHj82otCi7U&NR=1 ?

Competitiveness: nature or nurture?

I’ll admit it: I spend a LOT of time watching the NCAA basketball tournaments (mostly the men). I can’t get over the quality of the play, the high level of skill, the speed of the game. Do you watch this tournament? How can you not love it? I mean come on people, these are kids playing high pressure ball (and, just for the sake of fun, let’s not get into the money-making machine that is Div. I basketball…the players didn’t make it this way). Can you imagine what it takes to become part of a team like that? The dedication? The hours on the court and in the weight room? And then, to win it all, go on a seven game winning streak with millions of people watching?

But here’s my question (and trust me as a Div. III coach from a very small school, I spend a lot of time thinking about it): are competitors born or made?

Coming from a family of competitors, I’m tempted to say they are born. And I’ve pretty much surrounded myself with friends who are competitive, although not always in the sports realm. So although I’ve read about people, hitherto non-competitive individuals, who get turned onto a sport and find a killer instinct, I think they are a rare and special breed and I don’t know any.

How does a coach (me) turn non-competitors (the majority of the athletes I've coached so far) into competitors? Or am I attempting the impossible? Where do all of the fabulous athletes in this tournament - and the great athletes who never get this kind of exposure - get their competitiveness from?