A happy talent....

Man! Long time between posts but really, this was a summer for doing stuff not writing about it. Finally bought a new bike - a sweet little Specialized - and put in mega-miles (well, for me). Rode long, rode short. Rode through pine barrens and cornfields. Rode along hilly western MA resort roads and flat Cape Cod beach roads. Rode alone, rode with my sweetie, rode with my best friend, and rode with my new triathlete friend.

This summer and this bike helped me remember something forgotten in a long gone childhood: that sweet and breezy feeling we all experience when we first learn how to ride a bike and then, with that new independence, just go, go, go, squeezing every second out of shimmery, bright, hot summer...wherever we want (kind of), whenever we want (sort of). Anyway, this past fabulous summer there was a whole lot of "Hey, you wanna ride today?" answered with "Yup. Let's go!" Housework, weeding? Who cares?

So...I turned 50 this summer and recaptured what it feels like to be 7 (kind of, sort of).

And How We Play It Is Everything: A Tribute to A Friend

Just like on the playing field (one hopes), playing the game of life successfully requires a deep knowledge of the rules: how to apply them, when to apply them, which bend of the rules is allowed by honor, which is required by grace.

The finest players also know that you play the hand you are dealt, that the only thing that always pays off is hard work (talent can get you only so far), that unexpected obstacles in the course of play are best handled squarely, without panic, but that you can only do that if you have prepared well.

To whit: one of my dearest friends (she of the longest standing friendship in my life) has been dealt a blow in the last month - a diagnosis of cancer. In another time, if I had been asked to speculate about how she would approach something like this, I would have guessed that she, as one of the great practitioners of life, would have handled it with grace, grit, determination, spirit, and a deep faith in self that comes from an inner strength built over years of hard work.

Alas, I do not have to guess.

But I would have been right because that's exactly how she's tackling this one.

Did it!

It took me four days but I made it to the bleachers and ran the circuit four times. Felt way better than I thought it would after six weeks off. Got to thinking about - not for the first time - the four different types of people out there: those who think they can, those who know they can, those who don't know but will try anyway, and those who quit. Luckily, I was running with a woman who came under category three. She ended up doing more than she thought she could. I opted for sanity and finished when I knew I had completed a good workout but would pay (in a bad bursitis-y kind of way) if I pushed it farther. Perhaps I am becoming a thinking athlete finally?

Inertia: the tendency of a body at rest to become a blob

Thus ends the sixth week in a row in which I haven't worked out - as in "with an eye towards fitness" worked out. I had lots of good reasons to stop for a bit - very bad back issues, house renovations, etc. - but suddenly no reason to start again seems good enough. I don't think I've gone this long without working out since I was 15.

Be it resolved: starting Monday, that good-looking new set of bleachers on campus is my new jungle gym.

Two people, two cats, one household

Life has taken its latest happy twist: my sweetie and I decided to meld households, so he and his cat - the formerly feral and fearlessly orange Mademoiselle Zoey - have moved in with me and the graceful grey but no-longer genial Oliver. I think it's going to be pretty smooth sailing once all the boxes are gone and the cats have decided their hierarchy. Although, right now, I would lay odds we will find a place in this small house for all 265 of S's coats before the fur stops flying. I know that animals have ways of figuring these things out, I just don't know if an 18 year-old deaf cat who's had the run of this house and a 1 year-old high energy cat who has only lived indoors for seven months are playing by the same set of rules.

But this I do know (and it's something I never doubted): having S here is a really good thing. It has to be said: I am a handy woman to have around. In the four years since buying this house I have taught myself to change electrical switches and outlets, installed a sink and a toilet, learned to love nail guns and miter saws, dug up and moved nearly a ton of sand (seriously!) one wheelbarrow at a time, designed and built a walk-in closet, and painted nearly every room in the house. Still, he moves in and within a week - bada bing!

The lawn is mowed (something that has always waited until everything else was done).

The garage is cleaned and organized for the first time since I moved in.

The garden bed near the garage that I have been fighting with for four years is cleaned out of all the miserable rose roots and daylily roots I couldn't conquer.

Even better: I get to see the face I love the most in the world every day (and cute as it is, I'm not talking about the one above!).

It Was All Worth It

There are some things - laws of nature, if you will - we know to be true even if we can't prove them. Little ones like: if you carry an umbrella with you, it won't rain. Or: a watched pot won't boil. And big ones like: the only wasted love is the love that we keep to ourselves. Certainly I don't apply that last law willy-nilly but to me, giving from the heart just never feels wrong, whether it takes the form of a somehow-still-new love for my sweetie, the tried-and-true love of being an involved sister, friend and daughter, or the necessarily constrained love proferred while coaching. The corollary I accept going in is that love is to be given without guarantee that it will be reciprocated the way I want or any way at all. Nearly always I'm paid back a thousandfold, sometimes not, but it rarely seems a bad investment anyway.

The very hardest thing about coaching at the college where I work was that most of the students who populate the program are either undisciplined athletes or non-athletes. Great kids, to be sure, but by and large not athletes. I worked so hard not only at teaching them how to row but also at imparting the joy that can be found in training our bodies, how to think about sport, and the thrill of competing to win. And while I know I taught them how to row, I've never believed I got much farther than that.

After I resigned as their coach, I emailed my athletes hoping they would respect my decision and not hold against me the fact that I quit in the middle of the year, but not much more than that. What happened was so unexpected and so gratifying, it took my breath away: more than one of my rowers (and one former rower) has emailed me to tell me I taught them "what it means to be an athlete"(emphasis mine).

Learning this from them has absolutely blown me away. I can think of no higher compliment nor any greater return on the love that flowed from me to them all these years.

Monogamy is overrated

An old love has come back into my life and, frankly, it's got me re-thinking my whole approach. It's volleyball. It's bad volleyball and I have to run the games while I play the one night we get together at my local Y (which means I kind of have to hold back that killer instinct), but it's still volleyball - the great sport love of my life that came along after my great love for tennis but before my great love for rowing. Basically, I'm a serial monogamist.

Okay, I've lectured and been lectured to about the value of adding other activities to the mix but have I listened? Um...sort of. I always lift weights no matter what sport I'm playing, so that is technically cross-training but in spirit only, because I can go years - years! - alternating between weightlifting and the one sport I am in love with at the time. And this last year, because life intruded, I've been limited pretty much to fitness classes. Actually the same class, three times a week, the same three days of the week. It's too repetitive and I think my body has finally rebelled (as in I now have bursitis and a couple other chronic aches and pains).

I've wanted to add another activity for the last couple of years but yoga (the only other thing I can find regularly) just doesn't hold my attention for long. And I did, in fact, dabble with cycling briefly and then had a technical glitch (about which see my entry on 9/27), but other opportunities have been limited in my area until now. Anyway - and to the point of the title above - doing something else with my body in addition to the same old-same old feels good. It seems to have the lasting effect of actually make me feel, well, bouncier. So here's my new plan: committed polygamy (aka cross training!).

Sometimes you've got to change the rules

Well, I have completely changed the rules by which I will be playing at life...for now anyway: I've quit my coaching job at school. It really was time. Regardless of whether or not I had given it my best effort (and I did), the fact, is my heart was no longer in it. And, for me at least, if you cannot coach (or compete) with heart, you shouldn't be doing it. Come to think of it, that probably applies to pretty much everything in life. I'm not ruling out doing some freelance coaching here and there, so the coach moniker stays in my profile, but the regular gig is done. Free at last, free at last...!

At any rate, the plan is to use the gobs of time that have now opened up in my year to get back in racing shape (and race!), blog more and garden my heart out.