Courage 101

Courage is about learning to harness fear, channeling it into positive energy to overcome whatever challenge lies ahead.  Courage is about doing something you’re afraid to do—not because it’s wrong or evil but because it requires extending your limits, going into the unknown, or even transcending what was thought to be possible.

Tomorrow morning will be the first practice for the 2012-2013 Wolf Pack Swimming & Diving team.  It’s natural (and probably prudent) to have anxiety about the beginning of the season.  But it’s vital to channel that fear into positive thoughts about the fulfilling journey ahead.  This little girl learning to ski jump epitomizes the kind of courage our team strives for:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebtGRvP3ILg

The little girl’s fist-pumping shadow at the end is the priceless award for being courageous.

Team Adventures

Over the weekend we had several team adventures to kick off the season.  On Friday afternoon, a group of student-athletes hiked up to the N.  The N, written with rocks spray-painted white by Nevada students, is legible from airplanes and reached by a short but humorously steep and slippery hike.  On Saturday, swimmers and divers hung out at Sand Harbor Beach at Lake Tahoe.  The combination of mountains and beach are spectacular and the collection of team members made for some great laughs.  Here are some highlights:

Near the N - see Reno in the background. 

1.  Guinea What:   Michelle Forman is definitely fit as proven by her ability to demonstrate guinea fowl “language” (a sort of screeching cluck) as we scrambled up the steepest part of our hike to the N.  When she first enumerated the animals (including rabbits and goats) on her family’s farm, I assumed guineas were rodents, as in the furry, tail-less mammals in pet stores.  I was mildly surprised that guinea pigs had such a central position on a farm, and only realized that an avian guinea exists when she spoke about their eggs and ability to kill snakes.  Thank you for the zoology lesson, Michelle.

2.  From lizards to magicians:  Swimming back from the Tahoe rocks, a conversation between Rachel O’Conner and Leslie Foley reminded me of the telephone game from fourth grade recess:

Rachel:  “Erin scrambles up those rocks like a magician!”

Leslie:  “Like what?”

Rachel:  “Remember you said Erin scrambles up those rocks like a magician right before you gave Abby a butt boost.”

Leslie:  “Magician?  I said ‘like a lizard’!”

Rachel:   “Oh, I thought you said wizard!”

LIZARD=WIZARD=MAGICIAN ??

Ashley:  WHERE ARE YOU GUYS?

3.  Determination:  Melanie Larson and Ashley Kunz finally made it to the beach after parking miles away, climbing over rocks, evading the guards, and making multiple phone calls.  The Hahl twins, Michelle and Megan, made to the beach a bit faster by simply riding the shuttle.

Squint to see Leslie standing between the boulders on the left to give Luiza a hand.

5.  Erin gets hosed:  Steve was slightly confused when Erin Fuss suddenly flung herself head first off the rocks.  After all, Erin had just pronounced, “I would never do a flip off this thing.”  From my stance on the shore, it looked like Erin was having zoological issues (see guineas above) and confusing mammals and birds.  What could have been a swan dive was alarmingly cow-like as she plummeted with her arms and legs extended directly toward the water.  The distinctive sound of stomach flesh on water earned her the typical “OOOOOHHHH” from the beachgoers, but she emerged from the water laughing.  Apparently she had slipped – not flipped.

6.  Legal Issues:  Nikki Jackson leaned down to spray paint a rock in the N and then jerked up her head:  “Is this legal?  I am 18…”  

7.  Alysse “Most Likely to Have Been a Leming in a Past Life” Ploussard:  She defied gravity in her ability to scale huge slick boulders and showed no hesitation in leaping into the water from the highest ledges.  If her boulder jumping is any indication of racing courage, it’ll be fun to watch Alysse compete this year.

8.  With a tremendous genetic advantage, Gabby Guieb won the tanning award.  Raquel Teran-Sanchez lathered Leslie like corn on the cob to win the friends-don’t-let-friends-tan award. 

Tahoe.  Saturday, August 25.

Tahoe.  Saturday, August 25.

Overall, the adventures gave Steve and me more opportunities to learn names (sorry, Kaelie!) and the team a chance to enjoy the last weekend before school starts.

Performance Nutrition Canine-Style

Bo Steketee.

  Mind Up! generally relates to the cerebral and emotional aspects of athletics.  An important part of developing an optimal mindset for sports is understanding that life beyond athletics exists.  In other words, having interests outside of a specific sport actually helps enhance athletic performance in that sport.   

My two rescue dogs provide me constant entertainment away from the pool deck.  Annie’s unique personality and special needs will be documented in a future entry.  Today’s blog will focus on my male dog whose recent dietary preferences make a swimmer’s appetite appear mild.

Bo, a 7-year old pitt bull-lab-chow-sharpei, should not be hungry.  After all, he is rarely subjected to dog food.  Instead, he sups on “dog-sagna” (whole wheat penne, tomatoes, and cottage cheese) or macaroni salad (whole wheat macaroni, tuna fish, and carrots).  He enjoys eggs with cheddar for breakfast, and if he has to eat kibble Steve adds milk to turn the meal into a palatable doggie cereal.

Altitude supposedly suppresses the appetite, but Bo has shown no such decrease in hunger since moving to 5,000 feet above sea level in Reno, Nevada.  Instead, he has become obsessed with horse manure.

Several miles from our house there is a lovely park with a playground, paved walking path, dense green grass, and dirt trail for horses.  We know the dirt trail is for horses because of the yellow signs picturing equines and because of the clumps of manure dappling the path.  Bo gobbles those clumps with an enthusiasm reminiscent of Augustus Gloop in the edible garden of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.  Straining at the end of his leash, Bo laps up dollops of excrement so quickly that he coughs flecks of manure through his nostrils.  His ability to snatch a bite of poop on the fly puts him on par with the best triathletes grabbing an emergency snack at an aid station.

Bo and his "snack."

We have tried to walk directly in the center of the path to avoid the manure, but a 70-pound pitt mix has remarkable strength when it comes to lunging for an entire mound of his new-found, favorite delicacy.  We have tried asking Bo to “drop it” – but pitt mixes become deaf when focused on eating.  We have not tried – and will not try—to pry open Bo’s jaws to remove a clump of manure.  After watching Bo joyfully chomp an avocado pit I accidentally flung across the kitchen while making dinner, I have no desire to compete with the power of his mandible.  What goes in Bo’s mouth, stays in Bo’s mouth…forever. 

By the end of the walk, Bo is in food coma, walking slowly, deliberately licking the bits of manure strung on his whiskers like rotten pearls.  He clambers into the Prius for the drive home during which his thick tail happily thumps on the backseat as he blesses us with his fragrant dog breath.

    

Altius

If I were to ever get a tattoo, I’d get citius, altius, fortius tattooed across my forehead.  The phrase means faster, higher, stronger and is the motto of the Olympic Games.  Notably, it is not fast, high, strong – a simple string of adjectives describing a current state.  And the Olympic motto is not fastest, highest, strongest – a set of superlatives fit for a world record.  No, the motto is citius, altius, fortius because the Olympics are about constantly striving for improvement:  channeling passion and precision to go faster; climbing over obstacles and disappointments to climb higher; developing discipline and determination to finish stronger.

On Saturday I thought about the Olympic motto – particularly the higher part—when I was riding the cable tram up to Squaw Valley, the site of the 1960 Winter Olympics.  At 8200 feet, Squaw Valley is more of a Big Chief Mountain Range than a valley.  It took $80,000,000 to prepare the site for the Olympic Games which included 685 athletes representing 30 nations. 

Staring place for the tram. 

Tram station at the top of Squaw Valley (8300 ft).

Higher:  View from the cable tram.

The state-of-the-art organization of the Squaw Valley Olympics epitomized the Olympic ideal of constantly pushing the limits of mankind.  The 1960 Games marked the first use of artificial ice in the skating rinks.  The artificial ice was created in a refrigeration plant capable of cooling 4800 homes.  Besides artificial ice, the 1960 Games introduced electronic scoring.  IBM built a scoring center (which looked more like a coffee hut) from which event results were produced in French and English within two minutes after an event.  Going beyond electronic results, CBS used instant replay for the first time after a skier was accused of missing a gate in the slalom competition.  Squaw Valley introduced the idea of an Olympic village and is the only time all of the athletes ate together under a single roof.  It is also the only Games for which Walt Disney himself designed the Opening Ceremonies which involved 2,000 white doves (released by event organizers) and a blizzard (released by God).

Higher - another view from the tram.

As for the athletics, speed skating and biathlon were introduced and bobsled was cancelled.  Airplane corner, an icy 90 degree turn in the women’s downhill ski course, claimed 14 of the 27 participants.  The Olympic museum in the building with the cable tram had black and white footage of crash after crash.  Despite knowing the danger, every participant attempted the course and eventually a 19-year-old Bavarian named Heidi Beibl took first place over the favored American.

Steve and me.

In a sport with another type of pain, Kalevi Hamalainen from Finland won the gold in the 50 km cross-country skiing in 2 hours 59 minutes.  With the scarcity of oxygen in the Sierra Nevada, that’s an impressive feat of endurance.  The fact that his coach forgot to tell him that he was entered in the race until right before it started makes Hamalainen’s determination even more glorious.  Knowing the determination of his athlete, maybe the coach intentionally "forgot" so that Hamalainen could focus on the 15 km and 30 km races that preceded the 50 km.

At any rate, my journey up to Squaw Valley made citius, altius, fortius with its powerful –er suffix seem more beautiful than ever.

Citius, altius, fortius - Olympic Rings at the top of the tram.

In this age of hyperactive social media where your every move might be captured and then posted online for strangers all over the world to critique, it’s easy to become self-conscious.  It’s easy to sacrifice being in the moment for finding the perfect pose for a Twitpic and it’s unfortunately common to trade unapologetic, hysterical laughter for a controlled giggle that won’t look so maniacal on a Youtube video.

However, Leslie Foley, a senior on the Nevada swimming and diving team, slams self-consciousness to the mat.  At a recent team get-together she not only threw back her head and laughed but she served herself another slab of chocolate-chocolate cake after doing so:  “After all this laughing, I better have some more cake.”  

Now, I don’t recommend that athletes go crazy with chocolate-chocolate cake, but I would suggest that they follow Leslie’s lead when it comes to posture.  It seems that most girls suffer from a sudden increase of gravity whenever it’s time for a group photo.  A camera comes out and suddenly 15 girls sink into a Betty Boop-esque squat and seemingly have to grip each other’s shoulders to prevent falling completely to the floor.  Leslie, however, has the leg strength and mental fortitude to resist the surge in gravity caused by the sudden threat of being captured on camera for someone’s Facebook page or Twitter.  Leslie, all six feet of her, stands way up.  And in resisting the obsession with looking cool, she looks awesome.

So ladies, throw back your head and laugh.  Eat some chocolate-chocolate cake (though not too much depending on your athletic season).  And stand up…not just in pictures but wherever you go through life.

Exhibit 1:  Sudden increase in gravity?  Very low invisible ceiling?  Choreographed Seated Chair Yoga pose?

Exhibit 2:  There's Leslie in the back..posture of a champion.

Exhibit 3:  Two Olympic gold medalists, swimmer Missy Franklin and gymnast Shawn Johnson, taking pride in their respective heights.