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.