UCC 2012 Session: Long Term Athlete Development

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A new home

My blog has found a new home at www.carolanneblack.com/blog

Please come for a visit.

My first half marathon

It was in Paris Ontario and I had run a total of 10 kilometers in one go as training before the race. It was fall and the cows, chewing their cuds, watched the hoards of runners loping past – probably the once a year they see so many. A lone black and white barn cat sat on the top rung of a fence, eyeing the crowd.

Near the very back of the pack you could find me, not knowing I was so slow that my friend and Dad would be slightly worried by the time I came around the bend toward the finish line.

In the end I got third place. It’s too bad they don’t give a medal for third last in your age bracket.

I ran almost the entire race with a woman in her sixties.  We went up and down the gently hilly country roads, crunching red and brown leaves as they rustled and were swept across our path.

To keep you going in a marathon, there are water and gatorade stations periodically along the route.  In this first of many half marathons, I had my own special gatorade station.

That day my dad drove the hour or so from London to see me. He was late for the race and I didn’t know he had arrived. He parked his enormous maroon Buick along the side of the road, about halfway through the course. I was surprised to see an arm waving at me from what looked like his car as I ran towards it.  As I came up beside the car, he scrambled, spilling Gatorade on himself, to be my own one-customer-only Gatorade station. A styrofoam cup of pink liquid was thrust at me through the car window.  It was like having my own roadside team in a NASCAR race, only totally endearing and somewhat embarrassing. There are some things you learn to forgive in your parents, or learn to appreciate in them once years have passed since you were a teenager.

This ad-hoc replenishing station was, of course, not allowed, but no one was going to accuse someone as slow as me of cheating.

By the time I crossed the finish line the small crowd of onlookers had evaporated and it was nearly only my friend and my dad waiting for me.  I was almost the slowest runner in the whole race and my dad beamed and beamed.

A little bit of happiness

http://www.freefoto.com/preview/11-16-30/Mail-Box-Post-Box

Friends are always wonderful, but sometimes when you move away and miss them the most, they come bounding up in your face like a happy puppy, making you wonder why you thought it was reasonable to leave them in the first place.

Today I got a package in the mail.  It was the size of a small shoe box and the return address was for a friend who lives on Cape Breton Island.  My friend had emailed me a couple of weeks ago asking for my new address and saying she had a surprise for me.

Tim and I wondered what it was and at our stage in life, finally concluded it must be a wedding invitation.  Then we got the box.

This spring my friend and I had gone shopping and she, thankfully, kept me from buying an expensive dress I fell in love with, but as a graduate student, couldn’t really afford.  At the end of summer, she found the same dress still in the store and by then it was on sale.  She bought the pretty dress for me and mailed it to Ottawa!

Aren’t friends lovely?  I miss you, Nova Scotia.

By the by, I’m wearing the dress right now.

We all want more

photo by just.Luc on Flickr

I went head-to-head with an economist.  It was one of those conversations I hope someday to handle with a little grace.  He argued that people always want more and I argued that many of us are trying to live more simply.  It’s hard not to agree with him, but to avoid total despair I tend to cling to the relatively few instances of people trying to minimize their impacts on the environment.

Thinking of the world like an economist scares me.  For example, it was explained to me that we must choose what to do with forests. If this generation chooses to conserve forests for the next generation, then the next generation will have the same choice and so on until some generation decides we can live without forests. He told me an economic model suggests we should invest a certain amount of the profits from extracting a resource into developing one that can replace the one we use up.

I don’t see how that can work with a forest, but the concept is this: as long as the investment in replacement science is sufficient, there will be a new resource by the time the forest is gone.

I guess my definition of resource is a little different from his, since I believe that we use forests as a resource whether we cut them down or not. They provide us with oxygen, wildlife, and the opportunity to disappear into the natural world.

The problem now is that there are enough people on the planet to be able to consume all the forests of the world.  I can’t believe it’s possible to live without forests and I can’t believe people always want more.  We can’t always want more because there won’t always be more to want.

Despite my hard-headedness on this issues, about a week later, I realized the damn economist is right.

I spent today at a meeting in a lovely hotel meeting room. On break, I walked outside. The hotel is on the Ottawa River and there is a trail down by the water. It’s a wet and cloudy and drippy day, with little wind and lots of fall in the air. As I walked along the trail, I tried to block out the sounds of the nearby highways and the views of concrete structures and buildings and focus on the bird and animal sounds.

A chipmunk was stuffing his cheeks with maple seeds, sending keys fluttering down over my head. Looking into a wooded area, I saw robins, starlings, and a woodpecker looking for his lunch in a tree branch.

It struck me that I want more of that. I need more of that. Nature is regenerative. I want more natural places for myself and my friends and I want more wild places for my children.

Some of us seem to be fighting so hard to minimize our environmental impacts.  Maybe that’s not the key.  Maybe the key is to understand that we do always want more.  In that case, we should maximize our environmental footprint.  Just make sure it’s the kind that grows the forests.

An old beggar man

photo by Sr. Samolo on Flickr

There is an old gentleman in an electric wheelchair who occupies a corner on one of the main streets of Ottawa on weekday mornings. I walk past him everyday. He has a grey beard  down to his chest – the kind that makes his mouth disapper when he puts his lips together.

As I head to work, he tips his head to me, in this totally charming and old-fashioned manner. His clothes are old and worn. He’s missing the index finger on his left hand. His right hand holds an empty coffee cup.

Someone has often stopped to talk with him. He seems to be a part of the community. And in this area, the community is well-dressed government workers who don’t appear to talk to one another. But they do talk to this old beggar.

I can’t take credit for finally getting up the courage to talk with him myself. I didn’t. But this morning, as I walked by and said good morning, he mentioned that it is a beautiful day. I slowed and stopped and agreed. That’s all it took. We introduced ourselves and had a nice chat. He’s been at home, from 6am until the morning rush of workers subsides, on that street corner for the last 15 years.

I feel great. It’s wonderful to make a new friend.

Santa’s land: Zealand Falls at Christmas

As part of our christmas vacation Tim and I drove to New Hampshire so I could visit and he could meet the family and mountains I have spent most of my summer vacations with. It was also a new outdoors experience for both of us: it was the first time we hiked in the Appalachians in winter.

 

In summer the trails are rocky, windy and often steep. You spend most of your time stepping from one big rock to the next, in a world of greens, grays and browns. With two feet of snow on the ground, clouds in the sky and a couple of inches weighing down the branches of a mostly evergreen forest, we hiked into a world of near complete whiteness. We started in on a Sunday and passed about eight hikers on their way out. They were nice enough to have broken trail (flattened down the thick snow) for us and then left. I felt we had entered Santa’s world, that we might cross paths or if we hurried around the next corner we could get a glimpse of red as he went out of view.

 

 

 

The woods below the hut are their own barrier from wind. The only noises we heard, besides my chattering, were the infrequent creaking of old trees, until all of a sudden, near a large inhabited beaver pond, there was the knock-knock-knocking of a beautiful woodpecker. He was about 6 inches tall, black, with white stripes and a little bit of red on the back of his head. We found out later that bugs overwinter under the bark of trees and we watched as he moved along branches, sending bits of bark falling down on us, in search of a meal. At the same time we heard the chicka-dee-dee-dee of chickadees and a bunch of them danced between the trees. For a few moments the sleeping forest came to life.

You can’t see Zealand Falls Hut from the trail. Past the beaver pond you hike up a short steep section that comes up right below and to the side of the hut, so you don’t know you’re there until you are on the doorstep. We stopped and looked out from the porch at the mountains and the valley for about 30 seconds, then went inside to get warm.

There are 36 bunks at Zealand and in the summer there is a crew of about 4 people who live there and cook dinner and breakfast for guests. In the winter there is one caretaker who looks after the hut and lights a wood stove once a day at 4pm. We got there at about 3:30 and, ignorant of the 4pm fire rule, were shocked to find it was just as cold in the hut as out. Fortunately, we could use the kitchen and we promptly set to boiling water for hot chocolate.

One rule of hiking is that the clothes you have sweated in while hiking will make you extremely cold once you stop, no matter how many layers you put on top. We had to convince ourselves (me being particularly wimpy) to take off all our clothes and put dry ones back on. With lots of yipping and jumping around we managed it. In the process I looked down at my already small chest and realized my breasts had decided to work their way as far into my body as possible. Some of Tim’s most cherished parts, of course, did likewise.

I had been scorned earlier that day when I insisted we pack my fluffy baby blue slippers to the hut, but the wooden floors suck the heat from your body, delivering it to the bottomless nothing of freezing rock and winter below. The slippers were the best thing I brought.

Tim and I were the only visitors to the hut. In the summer the hut fills up and it can be ever so slightly less than peaceful. I’ve even been there as a kid, with about 15 other members of my family. But there were times in our three days when I wished we could have a full hut just for the body heat. Except that Tim and I realized the possibility of physically abusing the people who dared to sit at the two closest spots to the wood stove. Even with boiling hot chocolate and chili, plenty of layers and winter hats on, we huddled on either side of a long picnic style wooden table as close to the stove as possible.

When it was time for bed we headed to the unheated, unlit bunk room. Between us we had one winter sleeping bag and one 3-season. Even for Tim, who is usually my personal furnace and, defying belief, doesn’t mind my cold feet against his warm legs at night, it was too cold for the 3-season. We packed the 3-season partly inside the winter sleeping bag and made one slightly extended sleeping bag. I should mention at this point that I am a little claustrophobic. The two of us were going to share one sleeping bag. There was a lot of moving in unison, little adjustments and for my part deep controlled breaths, but I managed to make it all night, without ever totally panicking. Tim was on the colder side of the sleeping bag and between him being cold and me feeling confined, neither of us slept much all night.

Our general discomfort helped us get out of bed in the morning, when the hut was the coldest it would be all day. We had boiling water and oatmeal with raisins and peanut butter for breakfast. We had planned a long hiking day and thought we could get an early start, but the lethargy of the cold made us get out the door at 11. In fact, we were only able to talk ourselves into going outside by reasoning that it was just as cold inside and that the only way to warm up was to hike. But leaving so late meant we only had a little over five hours of daylight. On the other hand we were, under no circumstances, going to make the mistake of returning to the hut before the 4pm lighting of the wood stove, when we could bow down and pray to the god of fire, wood and cast iron.

That day we hiked the full five hours, almost nonstop. In the White Mountains of New Hampshire there are 48 that stand over 4000 feet and hiking them all is an accomplishment many in my family have achieved. Tim and I hiked up from the hut to Zeacliff, a fantastic lookout (though a little foggy that day). I’ve had lunch on that cliff many times, but it was so cold we only stopped for a few moments before heading for the peak of Tim’s first 4000 footer: Mt. Zealand. The top is just over 4000 feet and covered in trees. There is no lookout. Tim got excited about what we call ’bagging 4000 footers’ and was hoping to hit at least one more while we were already up there. The nearest mountain was Guyot, but the trail was un-broken and would have required the snowshoes we had left near Zeacliff because the trails up to that point only had a couple of inches of fresh snow since they were last packed down. Breaking trail is exhausting enough with snowshoes, forget 2 feet of snow that we would sink into with every step.

We hiked back down, past the hut and to an altitude where we could stop hiking for a few minutes without freezing. We hadn’t even stopped for a proper lunch that day. Sitting in the snow was cold and stopping for more than a minute or so made feet and hands start to freeze, even when we tried to do it in protected areas with low winds. Up top, where the trees are smaller, and typically more widely spaced, we got buffeted by wind and had our hoods tied down over our heads so that we could only hear each other properly if we looked right at each other and spoke like we did while visiting my grandmother. When the sun started to set we made our way back to our pre-warmed home.

Both evenings we played cribbage, chatted and read books with the friendly caretaker, Kate. We shared treats and on our second night Kate made an apple pie for her birthday, which she happily shared with us. I told her I had worked at the AMC for the summer 3 years ago. I asked casually if she had heard of Red Mac. She said she had. I said: ”I’m his great grand daughter.” Her face lit up. This was a juicy piece of gossip, I’m sure. We took turns telling Tim our versions of the Carter Notch Hut ghost story, which differed only slightly.

That night Kate lent us an extra winter sleeping bag. (I knew my heritage was good for something!) We still shared one bunk, but this time we were both warm, and didn’t have to move as one. We even put boiling water in a water bottle in the bottom of my sleeping bag, since I wouldn’t have direct access to Tim’s legs.

The next day it was a little easier to get out of bed. We said goodbye to Kate and headed into the woods toward the car. It was a lovely hike out, but I had my mind mostly on the car. I have a general loathing for cars: they are dangerous, polluting, noisy machines that make people crazy and fat. But all 6.5 miles I kept dreaming about the seat warmer in our rental.

We spent the next night back in civilization with my cousin. Something had gone wrong with her thermostat that evening and, between the old wood stove and the much newer gas heating system, the farmhouse got up to over 80 degrees. She  apologized for making it so uncomfortable. I, personally, have never been more content.

 

On a sunny country road

It was a sunny spring afternoon and she was lying in the middle of an Ontario country road.  She had been hit and her partner was near her, shouting, afraid to venture too close to his love, because traffic was flying by.  I came across them as I was driving home from university.  I stopped my car, blocking traffic, and got out.  She only had one working leg and was using it to try to push herself off the terrifying track of pavement.  She wasn’t getting far.

A man in his fifties, going the other way, pulled over and got out.  He walked toward her, briefly seeing me.  He grabbed her by the head and throat and gave one hard jerk.  She was out of her misery, her partner left with his loss.  The man tossed the body in the ditch and got back in his car, without a word.

I continued on my way, but I never forgot that pair of ducks.

Here goes.

photo by János Fehér

I went to trivia once in the last year.  It was last fall and I was with two friends.  Some of their friends joined us later in the evening.  A quiet man about ten years older than me sat down on my left.  We didn’t say much to one another for a while, focusing instead on drawing a blank for each new trivia question.  Between rounds we shook hands and introduced ourselves.  He was visiting Dalhousie and had, that evening, delivered a free public lecture.  I asked him what he does.  The lecture was on the topic of a recent book, but his daily work was as the managing editor at one of Canada’s big newspapers.

Struck by this chance to talk writing with an expert, I told him my dream of being a writer.  His whole countenance changed as he absorbed my excitement.  I worried I would bother him with my inexperienced ramblings and questions, but he seemed totally charmed and offered advice.

“Start writing”, he said.  “Write for the school newspaper.  And start a blog.  Cite and link to other people’s work.  People will read what you wrote to see what you were saying about their work.”

Almost a year later, we’re still in touch and I did start writing for the school newspaper (http://dalgazette.com/category/opinions/science-column/).  Now it’s on to the next step – the first post of my new blog.  Here goes.