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.

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.