Beginnings...

In the morning hours, Bettina and I meet up with Zoe for a trek to the top of Mt. Olympus. While I don't meet Zeus at the top, the view suffices. It's then that the words from the morning's National Public Radio show "All Things Considered" come to life.

"Despite the headings and allure of some other place whose name I have now forgotten, I stay in Salt Lake. I try to leave but it seems like I have a rubber band attached. What is it that pulls me back? No place is more beautiful than the Salt Lake Valley. Other places are just as beautiful, but when it comes down to a contest, this place wins.

"Beauty is something that needs to be studied over a long period of time, and there needs to be some point of reference - these clouds over these mountains, compared to what? The city itself has the most admirable quality of a ghost town, dry as a bone and empty as a rattle. People are leaving for a better life on the Coast. I, however, wait for the coast to come to me. I get up in the hills behind my house, look out across the entire valley and see it covered by water, as it was only ten thousand years ago. I extend my arm and wave my hand across the inland sea and think, 'Someday my son, all of this will be yours.'" Right now, I can see the truth to Scott Carrier's words.



After a couple more minutes breathing in oxygen and the view, I open the mailbox, crack the cover open on a well-worn brown leather book left atop the mountain. Inside are literally a thousand different stories. Or at least five hundred. Reading gives me the idea to write. It will be a great story, with the words others leave behind in books like this weaving the fabric of the work.

Some of the writings are common and slightly scientific with the date, time and name of the summiteers and little else. Some others, like the one about running face to face with a Western Diamondback en route have a quality of humor that would make most essayists blush. The one I remember most is sad and spooky, though in the tenderest way.

Mr. B has made it to the top of the mountain, his final summit. Soon, Mr. B will be in a long slumber, dreaming of the lions. This isn't a sad story because Mr. B has lived a good life. He knows it and has shared his happiness with others. Like mud, Mr. B soon awaits his return to dust.

Afterwards, we jump a fence, then jump directly into a poorly attended hotel pool. The water's refreshing and much needed before tackling the concrete jungle that awaits.

In the Westminster College parking lot, it's decided. New Hampshire's Live Free or Die license plate has nothing on Wyoming's. The Lone Cowboy riding the bucking bronc, a black silouette on brown mountains and mesa's cannot be beat by the Granite State or any of the other forty-eight states. I stop by the university bookstore, pick up seven used books as Bettina and I get to witness the one true great American right of passage.

On campus, I'm greeted by student RN's in loud green shirts. Kids much too young to be heading off to college mill around, a look on their faces matched with the just realizing understanding Dad slipped them a couple Andrew Jackson's to hold them over before the college cafeteria opens on Monday. And no matter how many Hot Pockets they plan to consume from now until then, there will be plenty of extra bucks to blow on booze, if only they had a fake i.d. Or knew someone older, as just about everyone around them is eighteen as well. On the way to the bookstore, I swing through some social schindig, steal about a half a pineapple in slices and a cup of punch on a hot summer's day. Yes, it's the simple things in life.

Then it hits me. Five years and a couple more days ago, I started coaching these kids what I knew about track and field, but mostly track, at Eastmont Junior High School. Now those kids are either heading off to college or hitting hammer to nail. Hannah and Jake, Cristian and Khloe, all heading off into different directions throughout the west, like dust in the the wind, just waiting to be turned to mud.

High in the Canadian Rockies

After a couple months of building websites and battling out ethical debates in the classroom with my Westminster classmates, the time finally came to make a ski pilgrimage up north with Leif Z, Bettina and a whole crew of Bozeman skiers. My first time heading to Canmore, Alberta was also my first ever NorAm race series. Since then, I've been back three times for World Cup comps. Every time, the trails and town has treated me well. Now, it's pretty special to spend a couple weeks in the less-snowy months and get to know the mountains, the trails and the town a little bit better.




After a four hour run up, over and around Sentinel Pass, the icy cool waters of Lake Louise were a perfect way to end the morning session. More than a couple tourists visiting the environs couldn't believe a crew of us would soak our bodies in the frigid waters for a quarter-hour.





At the top of Sentinel Pass, Bettina decided to try her best imitation of the white tailed ptarmigan flying over the mountain meadows.




Losing the arm brace has allowed me to get back into the running groove as well. It feels good to move via foot... and via rollerskis again.



Until the next time. +

Pioneer Days

In Utah, this weekend is Pioneer Day. The Mormon pioneers were one of many groups of settlers that traveled West in the 1800’s. The 24th of July marks the day when Brigham and his brigade looked down Emigration Canyon onto the Great Salt Lake and proclaimed. "This is the place." Luckily for these pioneers, they found a freshwater stream to go along with a lake that's five times saltier than the sea.

In Utah, July 24th is kind of a big deal. So after climbing Mount Timponogos from the early morning through to the afternoon, I made my way down to celebrate with some friends at the S Bar Ranch in Birdseye, Utah. Open air, a field of horses, a herd of cattle, a plethora of ATVs, and apple pie and there is little doubt one is in America.




After turning in the medical books for the year, Bettina made an American reappearance last week. I tried telling her I got a great deal on this little former sheephearder house but after one night it was back to the city we went.



I never would have thought I'd see a Audi Q7 (msrp 59450) towing hay. I guess that's just how some newby Park City ranchers roll.



Judging by the hardpan clay dirt underneath, I'd say Park City Mountain is being a little overambitious, a little misleading with its ski report these days.



After seven weeks of constant use, my surgeon said the time was right to rid myself of the sling and to start getting the range of motion and the strength back in my right arm. During this time, I've been banking long hours, low in intensity, high in the mountains. Here, my old college roommate Colby Frazier joined me for trek up Mount Olympus in the Wasatch Range.

For me, the grad summer school days are just about at an end, and its off for a little training vacation to Alberta, Canada next week.

Much Respect

Still looking up at that mountain, chopping it down with the side of my hand. Big congrats are in order for both the In The Arena roster athletes and ITA Team New Hampshire for the performances over the week at the toughest World Championship Trials in the World, the USA Track & Field National Championships on historic Hayward Field. I look forward to watching Mr. Hazle and Ziola in Daegu. If not in person, then at least on the flat screen. Much respect.

Summer Camp: Westminster College Style

While school's just getting out for the kids in the classroom, I'm halfway through the summer semester, working on getting a little learning on these next few months and a little closer to earning my master's degree. And one of the summer endeavors - Intro to Teaching Writing - well, it might as well be an extension of the ITA spring days. The class has some reading and theory about the various modes of teaching writing. And you know there's some real lively class debates about the merits of social constructionism versus current-traditionalism as the ideal primary mode of teaching writing. But the real coup de grace of the class comes in our actual teaching. For three days, select students from three inner-city junior high school in Salt Lake City will be getting the real college experience - from dorms to dining hall to classroom instruction. Except, instead of having tenured professors giving the lecturers, it will be me and my classmates. Here's my first little piece I wrote for the class on how I hoped to use my In The Arena experience to effectively connect and teach junior highers who were previously labeled academically unable. Read on, if interested.

###

Skiers and Dreamers, to acquire excellence, must start young. There is, from my experience, no other way. What does this have to do with schooling and writing and teaching, you say? Read on, and in my rambling writing might become less grey.

For two summers of my youth, I did the Westminster MPC summer school gig. Then, I left Zion and headed back West. During this time, I kept the day job. Instead of summer school, though, I picked up a little something on the side – coaching junior high cross-country and track.

Before I jumped into coaching, I read up. I felt a duty to be an asset, not a thorn in these youngster’s development. I remembered my own early days of athletics, running into teammates overcome with fear of failing in competition, hiding out under the bathroom bleachers. I felt with my inexperience in coaching, reaching these kids, making them see competition as something in the words of the late great Steve Prefontaine – the opportunity “to make something beautiful when we run” instead of being near paralyzed by the fear of failure. I knew before I ever set foot on the track as a coach this was my greatest challenge, this would be my Moby Dick. Instead of reading books on training physiology, it was more psychology centered.

In coaching the seventh and eighth graders I wanted to build self-efficacy. I wanted to build within them the belief that they will be able to better handle whatever the future throws at them. My reasons for doing this were selfish. If I could connect with thirteen and fourteen year olds and get them to change their perception of their ability I would be reconstructing within myself these same beliefs.

The coach Jumbo Elliott liked to tell his troops at Villanova to “keep running until you can smell the roses.” That is, to get to a point of conditioning and callusing that strenuous physical exercise becomes more than sidestiches, soreness and six a.m. morning runs. When I read Hemingway write about writing, the man had to keep writing until he found his muse. He had a devotion to his craft. He had to head to the cafés and write, and write daily. Somedays he’d write 2,500 words, all for naught. But he still had to write them. The daily experience would finally awaken an explosion of interest and the writer would capture this with pen hitting paper. These are lines we’ve read then carry with us always. For me, one of these passages came from Norman McLean’s last lines of A River Runs Through It.

Eventually all things merge together and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops, under the rocks are words and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by these waters.

I felt the most important responsibility a coach has is building the team and environment the team inhabits. From here the athlete can chase peak experiences in the competition arena or come out for sport to be part of a social club that happens to exercise. A coach, in my opinion, cannot build another’s desire or toughness or resolve. But the coach can aid the athlete in cultivating these skills and help the channel it. When Bill Bowerman said, “Tigers are tigers” I believe he was expressing a similar sentiment.

So how do I help build the Cascade exercise-as-a-way-of-life movement? By tweaking what I see as the prevailing, and antiquated, American definition of success and failure in sports. Most people interpret winning as a standard for success. Instead, imagine if success - and its ancillary doppelganger, failure – became a psychological state, not an objective one. Success and failure no longer need express themselves merely in win-loss outcomes. Rather, performance becomes a series of process goals leading to personal accomplishment. No longer is anything less than winning a threat, a threat that increases a young athlete’s fear of failure.

“An avoidance of failure is a self- perpetuating process that serves to exacerbate the tendency to avoid failure, leading to more mistakes and failures,” is how a peer-reviewed article titled “Why Young Athletes Fear Failure: Consequences of Failure” puts it. To me, this says those who fear failure the most are also the most likely to experience it the most. And that’s not ideal. I feel writing is the same way, only instead of expressing oneself kinetically, it’s through words.

The normal reaction to threats, real or imagined, is fear. I wanted the young Cascade Mountain Lions to be part of a team burdened by simplistic definitions of success or of failure. I told myself, then the team, we will hold ourselves to a higher, more enlightened standard. The budding athletes will not toe the line in an emotional state defined by words like apprehensive or scared. With writing, it’s the same way. We all need the latitude to express ourselves and build up within us the capacity to not be confronted with a stimulus and see it endangering our values and goals. Instead, to help the three schools we have the opportunity to meet with and work with later this month, and help them get just that little bit closer to bask in the expressive beauty of writing.

In Motion

After an extended tour of duty at the ITA's western-most outpost, it was time to hit the open roads for Park City, Utah and a summer stint of grad school at Westminster College.



Before leaving the Evergreen State behind, though, I had an appointment with the surgeon. Apparently, I'd been skiing the last part of the season with a shoulder in serious need of repair. Dr. Rossi ably sewed back up my shoulder. If my shoulder was a timepiece, it would have been sewn up from the 11 O'Clock to 7 O'Clock position. Now, I get to wear this instant conversation starter 24hours a day for six more weeks. At least Stein Erikson doesn't seem to mind. Being in Park City works great for this, as I can hike up the still snowy mountains, then download on the lifts back to where I began. Probably only endurance-minded athletes would be stoked to ride chairlifts down the mountain.



Clarence Clearwater may have never seen the good side of a city until he saw it from a riverboat. I think the same can be said for the view of the city from a mountain top. The air is cleaner, the blues are bluer, and the sound of silence is startling.



The leaves, they are a changing. Stay tuned for more updates through the summer months.

Just a Day at the Track: Lake Chelan Edition