Everyone Can Be An Athlete

When I was a girl and teenager in the 1970’s-80’s I was brainwashed to believe I was not athletic. I was often the last kid picked for sports teams in gym class. Not because I was a social pariah or extremely overweight or in anyway handicapped. No reason except I just couldn’t play–anything. No one showed me how to throw a softball, bounce a basketball, spike a volleyball. I never really learned how to kick, hit or catch any kind of ball. So I shied from a ball coming at me and gym teachers didn’t bother with kids like me. They were happy to let us sit out. That was my experience anyway.

I played my first basketball game a few months ago with some other adults enrolled in a YMCA “Fitness Challenge”.  I really was bad because I had no ball skills or confidence to dribble or make a shot. I warned my teammates not to pass to me. But they did anyway and it was kind of humiliating. I guess because I am tall they thought I might be a good basketball player.

In March this year I bought a basketball after I saw my son struggling to play basketball with some boys at school. He gets picked on sometimes and he’s not interested in sports nor has he had anyone coach him in most sports. Watching him I decided to help  him out. I might not be good, I thought, but I would learn.

One afternoon I took the basketball and just shot baskets by myself for over an hour. I couldn’t believe how much strength that took. I chased the ball a lot. I went the next time with my husband, he’s a very good athlete but he wasn’t so great in basketball. We were almost even.  For once — in any kind of sport –he wasn’t making me look like a fool!

Today I played a half court basketball game at the YMCA with a group of other adults after our trainer workout. I made a couple baskets during the game. Not only that, I felt confident, in a zone, feeling a natural flow in the game.

This was incredible to me. And a bit emotional once I was alone. I can play basketball and I never knew.

Confidence was the key and just courage to try something I hadn’t really given a try before. These are the biggest changes I have made in fitness with myself in the past 6 years.

I might have been convinced I was unathletic in the past but since then some of the stuff I have done:

• run dozens of 5Ks, 10Ks, half marathons, 25Ks, marathons and an ultra marathon.
• Began riding a mountain bike
• Jumped into a pick up soccer game with other adults – I also found I was not bad at that.
• Kayaked solo
• Done high ropes and zip lining
• Completed half a dozen fitness challenges
• Hiked or run almost every nearby nature reserve trail
• Practiced Archery
• Practiced 6 years of martial arts
• Hired a coach (last summer) to work on my swimming technique

So much for being unathletic. I am bragging maybe a bit but MOSTLY I just want people to take a chance and learn new good things about themselves like I have. I am not a super star athlete, Oh God, far from it. I just get it done. I do my best and sometimes like in today’s basketball game, I find out I am not half bad!

Don’t you want to find out something like that? 🙂 I hope you do.

Teenager for 24 Hours – Road Trip With My Daughter

outside Jungle Jim’s World of International Foods

It was about time. I needed a road trip and a real vacation. Let’s be honest, family vacations can be as draining as no vacation. During Spring Break we had one of those traditional drive half way across the U.S. to a beach affairs. It was great. But it was a lot of work before, during and after.

So my teenage daughter came up with the idea. “We have to go to Cincinnati to see “Portugal. The Man”. Right, I know. It took me a while to figure out that the man was not Portuguese and that “the man” was an alternative or indie rock group. But that was months ago. I knew who she meant when she asked and I agreed to take her to Cincinnati for this concert.

My daughter is a guitarist/singer. She’s played and sang a few Portugal.The Man songs at small venues around town, “People Say” and “So American”. I really like those songs and have them on my playlists for running and listening to in the car.

Then she played their new album “Evil Friends” for me and I was totally sold. It’s a really good album! Now I am cranking “Waves”, “Smile”, “Modern Jesus”, Purple, Yellow, Red and Blue”, hell, the whole album!

Now I know this music is way too hip and cool for a 47-year-old soccer mom, but it was fun being teenager for a weekend with Isabel. On the spur of the moment, I booked us a decent hotel  and bought the tickets online for the concert (I think we reveled in finding a cheap hotel – tickets were only $22 each too!). There was some drama and chaos at home just before we departed making our flight all the more sweet! As soon as we drove out of town I felt this incredible sense of freedom and excitement.

Just before entering the freeway to Cincinnati we impulsively stopped at a grocery store and loaded up on junk food (for midnight munchies) and “hippie” drinks. Swept up by Isabel’s adolescent energy we grabbed every weird, random thing we saw: gigantic gummie butterflies, Sour Patch Kids, honey mustard pretzels, etc. $25 later we were on the road.

Hotel was terrific for $69 it was a palace. At first I was not pleased at the location of our room at the top of the staircase overlooking the front desk but the morning after the concert, being able to go down one flight of stairs to pick up a breakfast tray of goodies was a bonus!

 

Honestly doing things on the cheap was a big part of the fun. For dinner before the concert we were looking for a place to get pizza and ended up at a Romano’s Macaroni Grill and ordered appetizers for dinner. Lots of greasy, cheesy foods – impulse was still ruling the day.

 

Isabel was positively bouncing all over place and a few times the mom part of me came out scoldingly warning her to get a grip. Yeah. A lot of good THAT did!

Downtown Cincinnati, by the university where the venue was located was fairly nice but we took a ride through the hood on the way. That’s when the parent part gets heavy. I hate going through the hood. And it seems every time I go to some new city, I ride through the hood. We had a few guys come up to us on the street after we parked panhandling but it was no big deal. I have admit I was uneasy walking back to the car after the show. Isabel of course thought the thrill of danger was part of the fun!

Now…the concert was as extremely loud, crowded, hot events go, terrifically stimulating but I am a bit too old for this kind of thing. Yes, after back surgery and in my old age, standing for hours close to gigantic speakers takes a toll on me but Isabel was loving every minute of it. The crowd was polite too and here I was one of just a few “old” people I spotted. The rest of the people there looked to be college age or thereabouts.

On the way back to the hotel around midnight with my GPS dying  we went through a different part of the hood. Back at the hotel we flopped on the King sized bed, spread out the candies and chugged down a liter of water. At least I remembered to brush my teeth.

I was awake at 5:30 a.m. when some hotel guests were quietly checking out. I don’t even mean that sarcastically. I am a light sleeper. We had the complimentary waffles and breakfast bar for breakfast and checked out. Conveniently we were staying close to Jungle Jim’s gigantic grocery store and IKEA so it was mom time – shopping. I have to make a whole new post about Jungle Jim’s. We shopped half the day, had lunch at IKEA and then hit the road home.

Good times. I will be doing another road trip with my son this coming week to Chillicothe, Ohio. His interest is in history so we will be going to see Tecumseh! and visiting the Hopewell Culture National Park. Short, sweet trips like this give both my kids special individual attention and it’s really fun too.

 

 

 

A New Direction After ‘Post Race Blues’

Finally, after five months of some of the most grueling race training I am free to change things up.

Freedom, sweet freedom to explore new things! To slow down and speed up. A sorely needed change of pace.  It doesn’t mean I am not going to be as active like before – in fact I am probably just as active, but in a different way.

A new mountain bike to take on the trails!

One day, when I was on a 20 mile run while training for my first ultra marathon I began to think “Wow. I bet I could cover this distance a lot faster and easier on a bike.”

Shortly after that my husband proposed we get his and hers mountain bikes for our 22nd wedding anniversary. Seemed like fate. So I gave him the thumbs up. Now I have a mountain bike to tour the trails with when I don’t feel like running for hours and hours.

But that’s not all. I signed up again for The Fitness Challenge (I believe it’s my 6th time doing it) at the YMCA. I meet twice a week with a trainer who puts our small group through an hour long workout of burpees, planks, sprints, weights, jumping this and jumping that, basketball and everything HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training). On my own I fill up the week’s workouts with hiking, spinning (cycling), running and weights.

Variety for me is the key. It’s the only way I don’t just get burnt out!

Training for the marathon and the ultra marathon for five months after not having run for a year tested me in a lot of ways, mentally and physically. I felt like crying sometimes when I had to go out in very cold weather to run for hours. Because I am a slow runner, I get double punishment, twice the time on the hoof. I was BURNT OUT! I really had to WANT this very badly to keep going.

Last months I got through the races intact. But the week after my ultra marathon I felt something I hadn’t expected: depressed. Yes, like post-partum blues (which I never experienced). I had ‘post marathon and ultra marathon blues’. Not exactly disappointed. Deflated is a better word.

I think it was having put so much preparation and sacrifice and suffering into both those events and not having felt they were the most spectacular life changing events ever left me feeling perplexed.

What I think that feeling meant is that there are more mountains to climb and challenges ahead but I am not sure what form they will take so I should try everything that appeals to me.

Would I do another ultra or marathon though? HELL YES!  I am already signed up for the Air Force Marathon in September and contemplating the super spooky “Run with Scissors” ultra in October. Marathons and ultra marathons come in all flavors – all different challenges.

What they do have in common is that they take a lot of time to prep your body to handle their many miles and challenges. With that much invested in a race changing up activities and “resting” for a month or two seems smart to me.

Taking Back My Body

Somewhere among all the chatter and magazines articles, webpages and Instagram pics my goal of making health and happiness the primary focus of exercise got skewed.

Judgement. We all pass judgement on ourselves and others and hear other people pass judgement on us. I was beginning to listen to other people’s judgements and ideals. I began to feed into their goals of “a perfect body”. A aesthetically pleasing body. That made me a little confused about my approach to health and fitness.

The bottom line is that there are different kinds of fitness minded people. Those who get into fitness to look good, those who are focused on performance in a sport and those who get fit to enjoy life more. Maybe some people are a combination of all three or just one or two.

But I am into fitness mostly to feel good. What I mean about feeling good is actually feeling good – being able to run up a flight of stairs without dying, take a long walk, jump into a pick up basketball or soccer game, play with my kids or other fitness minded friends.

If in the pursuit of being fit I happen to look good too, that’s a bonus. It’s not my primary goal. Or wasn’t until I started looking at sources in the media with names like fitness girls and forums about bodybuilding.

Then I felt flabby and out of shape when in reality I am in pretty good shape.

How I look has not just been my concern it seems it’s been a lot of peoples’ concern from friends, my husband, strangers at the gym, etc. No one should have to feel like they need to be held to someone else’s standard of beauty or perfection.

I’ve been making progress with toning and weightloss and I am happy with it. I won’t place severe restrictions on my diet or daily schedule to work towards someone else’s idea of perfection. But reality gets skewed by opinions of other people and some of the standards out there are really not reasonable for most people.

Bodybuilders and fit models focus on a lifestyle designed exclusively for that kind of success. More power to them but I eat birthday cake! And I like it.

I like lifting weights and running races, playing soccer, swimming and hiking trails – whatever the spirit moves in me. I even just got a new mountain bike.

Fitness has to be play for me or I will give it up. And who’s body is it anyway? Mine. Even if I committed to following a strict diet and doing WODs that gave me no joy or satisfaction, I will never be perfect and I am okay with that.

Fun people, fitness is for life. It has to be sustainable over a lifetime.