The Mom Part of the Ironmom

Probably the biggest benefit of being an athlete mom is the net effect it has on the health of your children. I've never required my kids to play any sports, never signed them up for soccer league, never pushed them in any way, yet they see the healthy vibrant lifestyle of my husband and I (and truth be told I'm sure the genetic desire to move one's body is in there somewhere as well) and over the years they have chosen sports of their own to pursue.

Recently, Mackenzie who has traditionally gravitated to solitary activities like kayaking and archery, as well as devoting time to karate, asked me to take him running. So we've gone down to the local track together and he's done laps while I timed and cheered him on, then I do my Crossfit Endurance workout (often laps or sprints or whatnot) and he cheers me on. On alternating days, he has come and swum laps in the pool with me, employing those "genetically gifted" (read: ultra-large) hands and feet of his to good use as paddles. The only problem is that he continually cracks me up by pulling antics like going into buddha-like meditative poses on the bottom of the pool while I'm swimming, thus causing me to crack up and snort water up my nose!

Meanwhile, Asa has taken up what I knew would be the perfect sport for her: water polo! Between her awesome swimming abilities (there are those hands and feet again, after all, plus the trademarked Ironmom shoulders) and her ruthless killer instinct (a character trait that I don't always appreciate mind you), I knew she would love it. And with only 25,000 water polo players in the whole country, it's a sport where you can actually go somewhere if you have some talent, so who knows.

So it was that this last week saw me on the sidelines for the very first time in my 13 years as a mom, cheering on Asa in her first water polo game. Of course at this age level, they spend more time floating around looking confused and trying to figure out where the ball is and where they should be going, but it's all good fun. We got to watch one of the games with the older kids in the program and all I can say is WOW. The level of play improvement in a couple of years is vast, so I think she'll have a fun time growing in this sport if that's what she chooses to pursue.

When Sports Collide

On Monday night I noticed something very peculiar was going on with my swim stroke. I wasn't pulling much water, and when I paid attention I noticed that I have been tucking my thumbs into my hands. I'm pretty sure that this has something to do with the fact that our green belt blocks in karate are all knife-hand blocks, and I have been learning to tuck my thumbs in for the knife-hand a little too well. Now it takes an effort to keep that thumb out on my swim stroke. Weird!

Then Monday I jammed two of the fingers on my left hand at volleyball, today it was two fingers on my right hand. By the 10:00 karate class, I can't make a fist with either hand. Try explaining to your sensei why you can't do almost anything right in class. But turnabout's fair play because I sucked at volleyball due to the fact that my wrists were hurting from the Jiu-Jitsu wrist locks and arm bars we've been learning in karate these days.

If my sports keep colliding into each other like this, I won't be much good for anything at all!

A Trip to Seattle and Some Amazing News

We took a short trip to Seattle this week for my sister's birthday. It was beautiful there, reminding me of what a lovely city Seattle is when it's not raining. The snow-covered Olympics and the glassy blue Lake Washington greeted us as we spent a day wandering around the Woodland Park Zoo. I got to run with my sister - it's great to have a little sis' who is active and fun to hang out with. An hour's run gave us plenty of time to catch up, and was the first time I've run more than 4 or 5 miles since my ankle sprain. I had to walk up the steeper hills due to some lingering tenderness in my Achilles tendon, but otherwise was fine!

While we were there, I got this amazing phone call from the woman in charge of Oregon's FLL Robotics program. She told me that the kids' robotics team (that I've been coaching) was nominated to go to the FLL World Festival! They'll be competing with 84 other teams from all over the world (of the 10,000 FLL teams worldwide) in Atlanta, Georgia in mid-April. This will be just an amazing opportunity for my kids and the rest of the kids on our team as well. We are so excited!

It's not looking like this will be a year of triathlons for me. In fact, it's looking like it will be an extremely light tri season with everything else we've got going on. Maybe that's okay though. The last time I took a season off was 1999 when I was pregnant with my daughter, and after 9 years maybe it's time to have another little break.

Beauty in Motion

This morning I was playing volleyball at our club, and the tall guy on the other side of the net went up for a spike. As I was moving toward the place where the ball was going to rocket at a 120 mph, it suddenly hit the net and ricocheted off in the other direction. As I put a fast-stop on my lunge and turned, I saw out of the corner of my eye two of my teammates in oddly choreographed high-speed motion change directions to deflect the new course of the volleyball. In that blink of an eye, it occurred to me (as it has so many times over the years) what a wonderful machine this human body is - how responsive, how complex, how fundamentally miraculous. If you think about the internal chain of events necessary for even this one small motion - the eyes perceiving the direction and velocity of the ball, the muscles tensed, the brain computing speed and direction and plotting where the ball will land - and then think how quickly your body can change and respond to a whole new set of inputs, well it's pretty humbling. So often in our bodies, we concentrate on what they are doing that's not to our liking. They gain weight, they get wrinkled, they dehydrate, they don't snap back for that workout we wanted to put them through. But we rarely take the time to appreciate the miracle that we've been handed.

Sports give us back the miracle. At least they do for me. When I'm out on my bicycle, I'm often glorying in the sheer beauty of flying along the road under my own steam. When I can still leap or dodge or remember a complex set of moves, it's a wonderful thing to me. That's really the gift of sports in my life.

I'm so thrilled to start sharing that gift again with others. We had our first information meeting for Team in Training this week, and getting to meet some of the people who will be on my triathlon team was really exciting. When I think about being able to help people meet their goals, cross a finish line they didn't think they could make, open up a whole new world of fun and appreciation of what their body and mind can do, it's something I am looking forward to. But I'm also really nervous. These folks will be depending on me. Organizational skills are not my strong suit. I'll be responsible for getting them to a point where they can swim a mile in an open body of water. This week is going to be a very tough one to get through as I try to get everything organized. Fortunately, I've got an awesome team of assistant coaches (experts on the bike and run respectively) to help me out. But ultimately, the success of these people is my responsibility. With the kids robotics team State Championship tournament also looking up next weekend, time will be short and I may not be blogging again until it's all over.

Until then, I'll be falling farther behind on reading my favorite blogs, watching presidential debates (thankfully I'm recording them) and even finishing a sudoku puzzle here or there. Life will get crazy and then it will smooth out again for awhile. It always does.

Welcome To My Three-Ring Circus

In ring #1, we have Robin the triathlete. She did a time trial last night with some of her teammates and they did a brick run afterwards (while cyclists going home looked at them like they were nuts), and then she gave them a ride home. The back of her minivan looks like a bomb went off in a bike store: wheels, trainers, shoes, helmets (some of which are not hers). Although she brought her bike in when she got home last night at 9:00 pm, it's now 9:30 in the morning and she's just realized that she has to put up the backseat in order to carpool everyone to Karate class by 10:00 am. She is frantically carrying biking gear into the garage and dumping it willy nilly.

In ring #2, we have Robin the homeschooling mom. Note: this is the same Robin that's in ring #1. She's busy making sure the kids are fed, they have their karate gis on, belts tied correctly, waterbottles in hand, and a bag with clothes to change into after karate. She also needs to bring along cloth grocery bags for shopping at Trader Joe's afterwards, and make sure she has playdate arrangements for the kids' afternoon, as well as time to shlep kid#2 to her horseback riding lesson shortly after lunch.

In ring#3, we have Robin yet again. This time it's Robin the urban homesteader and environmentalist. This is why she's carpooling to karate (when the weather is not so rainy, she'll be busy loading kids onto bicycles and making sure they have helmets, sunglasses, gloves, etc.). She's busy letting the adult chickens out of their coop for the morning, making sure the baby chickens have food and water. Oops, carrying all the biking gear into the garage has caused all the baby chickens (which currently live in a cage in the garage until it's warm enough for them to go outside for the day) to go nuts, so now that she's filling their feeder, they're busy popping up out of the cage and flapping around. She grabs a chicken with one hand and stuffs it back into the cage, then another, making mental note that they are now able to fly quite well, and moving cycling gear out of the way with her toes at the same time.

Usually, the three rings of my life run more or less seamlessly. I'm doing one thing or another, taking the kids someplace and then running or biking, or I'm home with the kids doing their stuff, or we're taking care of the animals together, or my hubby's home and that's when I exercise or whatever. But some days every ring has to be going at the same time, and there's just not enough of Robin to go around. This morning was just one of those times! And don't even get me going on what it felt like to have to complete dozens of punches in a torturous position known as Shiko Dachi while the sensei walked around with a bopper hitting you in the stomach and arms and shoulders to make sure everything is solid (it wasn't, my legs were quivering like jelly on a plate.)

Luckily, tomorrow is our day off from everything: all activities, places to be, things to do will cease. I will stay home, try to get the house straightened out, and dye easter eggs with the kids. Oh yeah, and bike. And run. And do it all again.

Feeling Blue Today

Blue belted, that is. I got my belt yesterday in karate class. I was really nervous for the test because we had to do this kata: Basai Dai and had essentially just learned the last few moves in the two weeks prior to the test. Of course, I remembered that just fine and messed up on my first block, probably the easiest thing on the whole test! It's a great lesson though in staying focused, not letting your problems or mistakes overwhelm you, and carrying on. I find that so many of the things I learn from doing triathlons help me in my martial arts practice and vice versa. They complement each other very nicely (except for the fact that I could barely swim this week, because I did my moves so strongly for the test that every muscle in my shoulders has turned into giant knots.)

I took this photo as part of my Flickr 365 Days of Self-Portraits challenge. A group of us from a parenting board are doing it together and it's been fun and challenging. I'll probably write more on that later as it has definitely been enlightening to look at yourself so often and from so many different angles. Very introspective experience.

Now Here's A Quandary

My alma mater, the Oregon Ducks, are advancing to the basketball semifinals in St. Louis. They've won more games than any Oregon squad since my mother was in diapers (literally) and of course the entire town is erupting in Green & Gold hysteria.

Now my husband is a pilot and airplane mechanic, working with corporate jets. These high-speed conveyances are typically owned by businesses and business owners around town, the kinds that have a spare million or two to drop on an airplane, and of course many of them are serious Duck fanatics, which means... you guessed it... many of them are flying to St. Louis. If the Ducks keep advancing, my husband the pilot will continue to be absent for much of the remainder of the month.

So, do I cheer for the Ducks or not? That, my friends, is the question.