speaking of perfection …
*
Remember Closer to Fine, the 80’s classic by the Indigo Girls?
Life gets a whole lot easier once you realize you’ll never make it to perfection. The best you’ll ever do is get closer to fine, which is pretty damn good if you ask me. It’s like that curve in math that is rapidly approacing zero (but never actually gets there because it’s mathematically impossible).
Closer to Fine
by, The Indigo GirlsI’m trying to tell you something about my life
Maybe give me insight between black and white
And the best thing you’ve ever done for me
Is to help me take my life less seriously
It’s only life after all
YeahWell darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable
And lightness has a call that’s hard to hear
I wrap my fear around me like a blanket
I sailed my ship of safety till I sank it
I’m crawling on your shoresI went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains
There’s more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
And the less I seek my source for some definitive
(the less I seek my source)
The closer I am to fine
The closer I am to fineAnd I went to see the doctor of philosophy
With a poster of rasputin and a beard down to his knee
He never did marry or see a b-grade movie
He graded my performance, he said he could see through me
I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind
Got my paper and I was freeI went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains
There’s more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
The less I seek my source for some definitive
(the less I seek my source)
The closer I am to fine
The closer I am to fineI stopped by the bar at 3 a.m.
To seek solace in a bottle or possibly a friend
And I woke up with a headache like my head against a board
Twice as cloudy as I’d been the night before
And I went in seeking clarity.I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountains
Yeah we go to the doctor, we go to the mountains
We look to the children, we drink from the fountains
Yeah we go to the bible, we go through the workout
We read up on revival and we stand up for the lookout
There’s more than one answer to these questions
Pointing me in a crooked line
The less I seek my source for some definitive
(the less I seek my source)
The closer I am to fine
The closer I am to fine
4/27/2006
an on-line case for cleverness
Like most bloggers, I have favorite sites I visit every day [Fat Charlie's Diary, pencil shavings, flashes of panic, my friend Sage's yoga blog] which creates a feeling of community (in my mind only, perhaps … uh, that’s a little scary if you think about it - not unlike hearing “voices”). Normally, I don’t have the time to cruise around and window shop - blogshop? - for ideas. My techie husband keeps me up-to-date on the latest internet fads (i.e. Snakes on a blog) and I do make the necessary professional rounds of visiting letsrun, dyestat, fastwomen, and (occasionally) Runner’s World to check out the running buzz. I never haunt the women/mom/Martha Stewart wanna-be web pages, because most of the bloggers in this category are liars. Nobody’s children (or lives) are that perfect, no matter how many made-from-scratch cakes you bake or how many sweaters you knit. I wish people would just tell the truth, instead of presenting their on-line case for cleverness or beauty or perfection.
So, when I stumbled upon this website after Googling “postcard art,” I thought … hooray! someone is after the truth.
What kind of secret-revealing post-card might you send?
4/25/2006
NO cigar
Oh, yeah, and here’s the ultimate reason why I never did/never could use performance-enhancing drugs:
I recall being in drug testing one time after a major race (where I’d finished, yet again, in the “no cigar” place - 4th) and a competitor in front of me was complaining that she’d been accused of taking drugs because she’d had such a huge, sudden drop in her times … and, possibly, because she looked rather manly after having been a beauty in college. You know the signs: larger forehead, facial hair, lowered voice (often you’ll see steroid-users wearing braces as adults to keep their human growth hormone (HGH) jaws from expanding - and, I assume, separating all their teeth (?). Anyway, she was fuming and cussing, “How dare they say that?!” etc. and, in retrospect, methinks she was protesting too much. At the time, I commiserated with her, saying, “Yeah, its crazy to think of taking drugs and risking infertility. I can’t wait to be a mom; who knows what that stuff will do to your reproductive organs.” To which she responded quickly, TOO quickly, “Oh, I don’t want kids.” As if she’d already calculated and dismissed those risks.
Another competitor once said to me, in her prime, “I don’t need kids. I have my dogs and my running. I don’t need anything else.” But later, when I saw her in her 40’s at a talk we were both giving for a shoe store opening - after I had my first child (and was, no doubt, beaming with love!), this same woman said, “I wish I had children.” But it was too late. Ouch. You see, an athletic career is so short - soooooo short - but when you’re in it, when you’re caught up in the utter ambition of this singular achievement, you lose all perspective. I’m sure it happens in other professions, but the consequences are not as permanent. So many female distance runners can’t and don’t have children because of a choice they made in their foolish 20’s. For them, it’s no cigar for life.
side effects:
In females, the excessive concentrations cause male characteristics to develop and interfere with normal female functions. The drugs can:
* Stimulate hair growth on the face and body
* Suppress or interfere with menstrual cycle, possibly leading to infertility
* Thicken the vocal cords, which causes the voice to deepen, possibly permanently
* If pregnant, interfere with the developing fetus
4/24/2006
more on crooks and criminals …
“Good on you, Joan. Pressure does get results sometimes. Witness Beckie Scott of Canada in XC skiing, she won the bronze and then eventually moved up to Gold when Gold and Silver tested positive. I think that “athletes” who cheat should be CRIMINALLY charged, they are in effect stealing from the other athletes. We all know that Regina Jacobs won all kinds of money that as far as I see it she STOLE from those behind her. Same for Ben Johnson, the sums he STOLE run into the hundreds of thousands. At least, here in Canada, something was done.”
Comment by George Muenz — 4/24/2006 @ 11:19 am
p.s. I bet some flunky from the IOC or USOC will give you grief for posting the Olympic rings on your blog. I think you should re-post that graphic with one ring missing to show that it is not complete as a result of the drug use that is covered up.
Beckie Scott with her honestly-won GOLD medal!
4/19/2006
Dear Mr. Pineau,
Dear Mr. Pineau,
I am writing to help in the effort to convince the Denver Federal Court to allow the release of the database of USOC doping records from 1984-2000. I believe the release is vitally important to the integrity and survival of the sport of Track and Field in this country.
I could speak at length on the personal ramifications of this near-criminal drug cover-up. I tried out for 4 Olympic teams over 16 years and finally managed to achieve my dream with a 3rd place finish in the 1996 10,000m Olympic trials, thus making my first and only Olympic team. Since that time, I have learned that two of my competitors (in other distance events) tested positive for drugs and that for all of those 16 years they STOLE world and Olympic team spots away from deserving, clean athletes. Regina Jacobs and Mary Slaney reaped every possible benefit from our sport - and raped the rest of us in the process. Now, I come to realize there may have been even more cheaters ahead of me. More rapists. Why should they be allowed to bask in the glory - false though it is - of being Olympians when who knows how many young men and women … ALL those 4th place finishers (like I was in 1992) … were never able to realize their dream. It is beyond shameful.
Track and field, all sports for that matter, is about dreaming. You dream about running faster, and jumping higher, and throwing farther. You dream about making an Olympic team on every single run. If you take away that dream (and give it to dirty cheaters) then you are left with a bunch of business-men and women who are in the sport ONLY for the money. Not for the dream. How are these crooks any different from the bums at Enron?
I now coach a youth running club in Chapel Hill, NC and I want to be able to encourage each boy and girl that running is a pure sport - the Olympics, a noble pursuit - worth their time and dream energy. But if this drug MESS doesn’t get cleaned up once and for all, if the USOC doesn’t do the right thing and release the truth … the truth, dammit … then a whole generation of track and field athletes will be lost. They will quit, in disgust, after college.
I am not bitter. This is not a personal plea. This is about the sport I love, have loved my entire life. I want to see its rightful heirs - clean and true - take their crowns. If I could, I would throw syringes at every one of the drug-using, money-grubbing, glory-raping bums whose positive drug tests were covered up from 1984 to 2000.
It’s time to do the right thing and set the record straight.
-joan nesbit mabe
us olympian 1996
4/18/2006
stirring the pot
4/13/2006
Asparagus! (a Stalk-umentary)
You know how you read about some festival, or lecture, or music on the lawn that you really should go to, really do want to go to, but never get around to it? Or how you might hear of an exhibit or a play that’s awesome but when you actually go to buy the tickets the show is sold out or ended its run? Well, since having children this has happened to me more times than I care to admit. In my quotidian routine of driving the kids to and from (and to and from!) school, food, laundry, cleaning, homework, dinner, bath, bed - rinse and repeat - I exist in a personal drought despite the refreshing, cultural waters all around me.
One such event that occurs in nearby Durham, NC is the Full Frame Documentary film festival. Every year I think THIS is going to be the year I make it over there. And every year this amazing four-day film-lover’s smorgasboard comes and goes without my even sampling a morsel … not a sip. It took my 12 year-old daughter to get my tail out the door. When she saw the flyer for it, she said, “Mommy, this looks like something you’d like (damn straight!); why don’t we go?” Well, I can’t possibly, I thought. It’s on a school day. Who will meet the school bus? How can I? I can’t just drop everything and go to the movies in the middle of the day, can I? Huh!? I didn’t SAY all this, of course, but Sarah jane could sense my hesitation (my silent pity party) when I did say, “Do some research and let me know if you find one you want to see.” Ha! I might as well have said, “We’ll see” which always means, “You’ll forget about it, so I won’t have to say NO.” But SJ didn’t forget about it. Oh, no. She found a documentary about asparagus farmers in Oceana County, Michigan that was showing at 12:30pm on a Friday along with a short called, Kings of Christmas that looked interesting.
She called my bluff. SO, I called in a favor for someone to pick up Lizzie from pre-school; I had my husband meet Rosie’s school bus; and I checked Sarah jane out of middle school early that day with the excuse, “enrichment appointment.” Zooming down the highway, skipping school and my mom life, I felt like Thelma and Louise with my daughter/girl friend. We bought, maybe, the last two tickets to the show (because, as it turns out, this was a world premiere for Asparagus! a Stalk-umentary) and I managed to smuggle in two Hershey bars. I spent the next 90 minutes drenched in culture and an overwhelming feeling that I can only describe as an embarrassment of riches.
Asparagus! (a Stalk-umentary)
4/11/2006
thees ees snowgood
6 different faces of a work-out
In any given work-out, there are several ways to “turn” it to focus on different aspects of your training. Think of a cube. Imagine the cube has a different color for each face. Red, blue, green, etc. for a total of six different faces of the same cube.
For example: The cube = 8-10 X 300m …. also, done as 2 sets of 4-5 X 300m
The 6 faces:
1.) raw speed. Run the 300’s at your top sprinting speed with FULL recovery - waaayyyy faster than race pace. The recovery would be very slow and long (what I call the “Kimmy shuffle,” so named for a friend of mine who barely lifted her knees on these sprint recoveries) in order to bring your maixmum heart rate down below 100 before the next interval. This kind of full anaerobic effort takes longer to recover from in your training week. Raw speed work-outs help you sprint off the starting line and kick at the finish. Distance runners don’t need many work-outs in this “face.”
2.) speed endurance. Run the 300’s fast, but not sprinting - usually done at goal mile pace. The recovery jog is easy but not the Kimmy suffle. If your heart rate was at 180 on the raw speed “face,” it shoud be between 140-160 on the speed endurance 300’s. Recover enough to allow you to keep the times consistent on the 300m. Speed endurace work-outs teach you to maintain form and pace during a distance race.
3.) limited recovery. Run the 300’s fast, but don’t let your heart rate come back down fully before you start the next interval. You will not feel comfortable in this “face” of the cube - that’s the point. Limited recovery work-outs teach you to take pain. As you learn to take more pain, you can progress from 2 sets of 4-5 X 300m to 8-10 X 300m, straight through, with 100 jog (or “float”) recovery. I will often time the whole set to keep me honest on those floats (intervals + recovery; i.e. for 4 X 300m with 100 jog, that would be a full 1,500m timed).
4.) distance - you can incorporate this work-out in the middle of a distance run. After 3-4 miles, do 10 X 1 minute fartlek (60 seconds for 300m is 5:20 mile pace) with 1 minute recovery between each; then contiinue running 3-4 miles for a total of 10-12 miles. The one minute on/one minute off should be a natural feeling in the middle of a distance run … like inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, etc.
5.) taper - I often use 300m downhills in a taper phase. If you run downhill, I have been told, you only use 60% of your energy … so you can have nice leg turnover and that good, fast feeling you need before a race without the actual effort (and subsequent fatigue) of 8-10 X 300m on the track. The downhill should be gradual (you don’t want sore quads from “braking”) and the uphill jog recovery should be quite easy/gentle. *Also, you may use 300’s on the track as a taper work-out. Run them at 10k pace, as extended strides, with easy 200m jog recovery.
6.) relative ease. This is a difficult “face” to explain. I seldom repeat a work-out in a season, but when I do it is so that I will feel the relative ease of the work-out compared to the last time I did it. I may run the exact same times for the 300’s as I did 6-8 weeks earlier, but the perceived effort is much easier. It was relatively easier than the last time I did it. This “face” is crucial to race confidence as you head into your peak.
p.s. of course, you can always do 300m UPhill repeats for strength, but I consider hills a different cube altogether.
