The Grand Master

The Grand Master

Have you ever had “The Teacher”? The person that has not only mastered the subject, but can teach and share the subject flawlessly with others?  And yet the mastery of the subject does not end with the subject but has then flowed into all aspects of life?  If you have met such a teacher you probably know it at some level and are thankful for it everyday.  That is what I found in the Grand Master. 

The Grand Master is the person I met when I had truly dedicated myself to mountain biking.  I had moved to New Hampshire with Matt to study birds and race mountain bikes.  When Matt told me it was time to go riding after an eight hour day of hiking the hills of the White Mountains, I got on my bike.  When we had our one-day off bird research we raced our bikes.  I ate five full meals a day, and a tub of Ben and Jerry’s every night and still lost weight that summer.  Then Matt took me to the Wednesday night ride. 

The Wednesday night ride was “the ride” of Plymouth.  The riders consisted of very fast people.  Cat 1 roadies, expert to pro mountain bikers and crazy fast locals from the ski resort ski coaches to the local mailman.  And one guy who worked construction and was the former NORBA New England Mountain Bike Champion, Chip Miller.  Everyone called him the Grand Master.  I had no business on that ride at all.

I went the first week and got my legs ripped off.  What does that mean?  It means you go on a group ride and the pace picks up to such a degree that your legs sear in a sea of lactic acid pain that is almost unimaginable to me now.  Now the group (or pack as cyclist refer to it) moves along quickly with a fresh fast guy driving the pace at the front and then resting in the pack out of the wind. The pack operates similarly to a pack of geese flying in formation. If you share a similar fitness to those you are riding with it is fun and comfortable with efforts thrown in when you decide you want to work hard.  When you are with a group of people much faster than you, you struggle to stay with the pack.  Sticking with the pack you can almost get sucked along with the group, protected from the wind.  As soon as you lose the pack, you realize they are moving faster than you could ever move alone.  This is called getting dropped. When you get dropped, you have two hopes:

1. Someone is behind you and will help you get back to the group eventually (maybe they will stop and regroup at the next stop sign)  or show you the way home.
2. You know the way home.  

There is a third scenario you never want to find yourself in (and yes I have).  You are the first person to get dropped.  You may never see the group again and you never want to go back to the ride because the shame is too great. You also may not know the way home.

On my first Wednesday night ride I was in one to all of those situations throughout the evening sucking beyond your wildest imagings of suck.  But throughout the ride I would see this smiling face, and twinkling eyes of the man everyone called the Grand Master.  “Catch this guys wheel now Karen.” he might advise in his perfect New England accent. He would sometimes push my bike up to the group to make sure I stayed in the draft of the pack reducing my work load by 30 – 50%.  The Grand Master would always be around smiling and encouraging me no matter how much I sucked and at the end of the ride he would tell me how great I had done (when in fact I had sucked, but had worked very hard) and every Wednesday would tell me to come back.  Now I realize the Grand Master was working twice as hard as he needed to be in order to keep me in the group.  And in cycling where your worth is often measured by how fast you were during the ride, he was sacrificing his speed to help me stay with group.

Now there was the Grand Master, and then there was Rhino Bikeworks, the local bike shop. I was poor, really poor.  I was a student with student loans, I was doing bird research with Matt and being Canadians it always took awhile for our paperwork to clear and our pay to start in the US. Matt and I were partly racing because the races paid cash and it would cover our groceries. Rhino Bikeworks would take my bike in and fix it for no charge and give me deals on my bike parts. They kept my poor old mountain bike limping along that entire summer. Eventually they would find all of my sponsorship connections.

Then there were the other students of the Grand Masters, the guys (Ben, Tyler, Avery and Buck).  They would invite Matt along to ride and would kindly include me as well even though I was about half their speed.  We would go on long mountain bike rides over terrain I had never imagined a bike could maneuver.  They would show me how to move my bike over rocks and roots and laugh with me and not at me and somehow never made me feel inadequate (which I was).

I think it is uncommon to feel so accepted in a group, or see so much kindness and encouragement.  I have since thought back on those days because they changed my life.  And though at the time I thought everyone was showing respect to the Grand Master, I realize now that it was earned reverence.  You see, Chip Miller was truly at the center of that community.  If you look at the cover of The  Guide to Mountain Biking in the White Mountains, you will see Chip Miller on the cover with other local legend Craig.  They had personally mapped out most of the routes. When people tell you about the early days of mountain bike racing you soon found out no one beat Chip Miller, and no one made the scene more fun.  He had found the routes we road, he started the Wednesday night ride.  He had never missed one Wednesday night group ride.  When he needed to have shoulder surgery he scheduled it in the winter so he would be ready to ride the Wednesday night ride the next spring. But these are details that are revealed slowly and over time, and never by Chip himself, so you are never blown away by the greatness of this man all at once.

Sometimes magic is happening around you and you don’t know it at the time.  Which is a different kind of magic than we are use to.  It is not in your face or obvious, but instead unfolds quietly over time.  Here is the magic that happened right in front of me.  Remember how Chip Miller was always there when I sucked?  Pushing me back up to the group, teaching me the rules of the road, telling me the tricks of road riding?  He was also there when I got faster. In fact, no one ever waited for the Grand Master on the Wednesday night ride at the regroups.  He always rolled up looking calm and refreshed and smiling with a twinkle in his eye, always about to say something funny and make everyone laugh.  So how was it he was back there with me when I was sucking so badly? And back there for whoever needed him, yet still was always keeping the ride on track, always catching up to the fastest riders by the end of a climb or town line sprint?

Now, when I met Chip Miller he was no longer living the life of a Pro athlete.  He was waking up at 4 in the morning, driving 2 hours to work, working on construction projects all day in the hot New England sun, driving 2 hours back home, jumping into his bike clothes and riding the Wednesday night ride.  Then he wouldn’t get on his bike again until Saturday or Sunday for a nice long mountain bike ride through the mountains. The Grand Master spent two to three days at most, per week on his bike.  The rest of the time he spent with his sweet family, fishing with his son and daughter, visiting his father, going to church every Sunday, and going to bed every night at 8pm to wake up again at 4am.  How do I know this?  Because Chip and his wife Sheila (one of the most capable women I know) took me in for two summers when I became a homeless mountain bike racer.   I never saw him sad, or short with his family.  He only ever showed me and other people around him kindness, compassion and humor all the weeks I lived with him.  The same is true from his whole family.  Now that I have a family of my own, I now realize this is unbelievable, truly magic. 

This is no ordinary person.  But somehow he seemed to appear ordinary.  You may not expect the guy working on your house to have figured out most of life’s secrets, or that so much could be learned from riding a bike.  But there it was.  I suppose it was Albert Einstein who famously said, “Life is like riding a bicycle, to keep your balance you must keep moving”. The Grand Master’s values radiated through an entire community.  From the bike shop that took care of me, to Ben, Tyler, Avery and Adam who took care of me like brothers through my travels (Tyler even rescuing me as far away as Italy).  The Grand Master believed in me well before I ever did and that made a world of difference.  

I look back at that time and try and collect all the lessons I learned from the Grand Master and Plymouth. Many of which took much more practice and learning to even understand let alone perfect.  I take all I can from my lessons in Plymouth and with the Grand Master and I try and use them as much as possible, and share them when and if I can.  Can we all create our own Plymouth if we practice what the Grand Master lives?  Communities that help people reach their goals and dreams and potential?  I feel like that is where the real magic and hope lies for this world and probably always has. 

Here are just a few things I believe I learned from Chip Miller, the Grand Master and would like to try and share:

1.     Maintain a healthy body.  It will serve you well.

2.     Maintain a healthy mind. It will help others.

3.     Find happiness where you can, let yourself have it. It is good for you and others. When you are happy you can give to others.

4.      Find peace.  Go fishing, go to the forest, it is nice there.

5.     Cultivate kindness, compassion and empathy – you will change yourself and others for the better.

6.     Be Generous – remember, when you are happy you can give.

7.     Learn and Teach - Teachers have students, and students can become friends, and friends help keep you safe and happy. This is the basis of a community.

8.     Transforming people transforms a community.

9.     A strong community will take many people where they need to go in the world.

10.  Have a sense of humour – laughing transforms fear, anger and sadness.

And on that note I will leave you with this. Try not to take yourself too seriously.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn0FF1KwL4I

The Limit Pushers

It may come as a shock to some of you that I am descended from and seem to be surrounded by a type of human known as the “limit pusher”.  What is a limit pusher exactly, you may ask? I found this definition “works beyond accepted comfort norms to challenge and encourage change and growth in a specific area.” It was actually the first random definition I found in someone else’s blog and I think it works splendidly for what I am about to attempt.

You see, I was raised essentially by a pack of limit pushers starting with my grandfather, John DeWolfe.  Three hundred years of Nova Scotian selection had turned whatever a DeWolfe was before, into John DeWolfe, a happy man of about 5’5”, round Buddha belly, skin almost black from being in the sun, thin grey hair.  He was a train engineer.  Yes, my Grandfather drove trains, possibly the coolest job any grampy could have had.  But more important than what he was I think, was how he got there.

See my Grampy John was born cheeky, like every other DeWolfe male probably before and certainly since.  This lands them in terrible trouble the entire way through school.  Grampy began smoking when he was twelve for instance.  But his mother was notoriously kind and generous and this she was able to teach him.  Therefore after a less than stellar school record my grandfather found work as an engine stoker (the guy that loaded coal into the trains engine fire and kept it running at the right temperature) with Dominion Atlantic Railroad.  Now his ability to be light hearted in hard conditions worked to his advantage.  He was well liked on the railroad. 

When World War 2 broke out my grandfather wanted to join but he was considered skilled labor and was required to stay on the train.  He found a loop-hole however discovering he could join the Navy and be a stoker on a Corvette, a small mine sweeper (ship) known for making it's sailors very sea sick, only slightly larger than a good size fishing boat.  Away he went, only to have his boat frozen into a Nova Scotian Bay for an entire winter.  There he figured out ingenious plans to smuggle rum aboard the ship and throw parties for all the stranded crew.  Thus earning his nick-name “Yum Yum”.

After the war Grampy worked his way from engine stoker to train engineer.  He married his childhood sweetheart Catherine Lombard, who had grown up near his family cottage on the red sandstone shores of the Minas Basin.  They spent every summer at the cottage, raised their two girls and four boys.  And eventually I came along and got to meet this wonderful man, the first limit pusher.

Now Grampy John is responsible for many traditions in the DeWolfe family.  I will start with learning to dive.  Every DeWolfe kid has to learn how to dive.  Grampy would tell us the stories of how they used to dive off the thirty foot cliffs down the shore, but the tides had made those unsafe now.  So we would learn on small rock outcroppings, three to five feet out of the water. “These will have to do for now” he would sigh, and start our diving lesson.  He would instruct us to put our outstretched arms over our heads.  We were to point our fingers to slice the water before our heads hit.  We then needed to jump out to where he threw the rock.  That spot would ensure our correct trajectory.  Now, don’t think I wasn’t scared.  I was certain the first few times that I would a) slide down the rock like a finger nail against a file, b) belly flop painfully or c) some horrid combination of these two things.  “Oh you won’t do that” Grampy would scoff.  He would splash some water over his arms and legs so he “didn’t have a heart attack diving into the cold water” and then dive gracefully off the rock.  He would swim 15 strokes and then turn like a seal underwater and float lazily on his back, belly and toes effortlessly floating to the top.  “See, it’s easy. Just have some faith in yourself.”  This is how we all learned to dive in my family.

Grampys next lesson for us was “the candy run”.  Now if anyone wants to know what motivates me to ride my bike to this day, here is the secret.  My grandfather and grandmother loved each other the way you dream of two people being in love.  And somehow after fifty years, this love remained intact.  The cottage was always filled with grandchildren (picture rats if you will, dirty, wild, and happy).  But my grandmother was actually a fairly orderly clean lady.  She grew up on a respectable farm just up the road from the cottage and needed some peace and quiet once a day to get ready for another onslaught of guests and grandchildren.  Thus my grandfather’s most brilliant plan.

To give my grandmother and him some well-needed and deserved peace and quiet he would give each of us grandchildren 50 cents.  “Go ride to the Pereaux Store and get anything you want.” He would say.  Well, you can imagine the happiness that ensued.  I mean 50 cents was as much money as we could imagine getting in one shot.  It would buy a whole candy bar, or a freezie and some penny candies or a popsicle and penny candies… well the combinations were enough to get all of us on our bikes and off on our 10 km (6 mile) round trip journey, complete with three mountain climbs, bullies, dehydration, farm dogs, you get the picture.  These journeys were some of the hardest training I did, but the reward.  The sweet reward of penny candies and frozen treats, the freedom, and the independence is what makes me love riding bikes to this day.  My grandfather taught me that pushing limits always lead to sweet reward, and though it was a hard journey, it was almost always worth it in the end.

My grandmother died of cancer when I was in grade four.  My grandfather retired from his role as limit pusher during the last few months of my grandmother’s life. He decided to take on the role of chief observer and passed his duties on to his sons and daughters.  It was them that went on to teach me to swim in the rain, dive off of much higher cliffs, taught us to ski, how to run, how to race obstacle courses, they became the new generation of limit pushing teachers.  Meanwhile my brother began learning.  

“Karen, you can jump your skies you know”. Really? “Yeah just like gymnastics but with skies on, just look for the bumps and lips in the hill, there’s one.” He took me on ski adventures through the woods, through snow storms, he took me on bike trips over his favorite trails, we would ride to the near by towns, find the best swimming spots, the highest cliffs to dive off of.  My brother taught me as much as he could, as much as I was willing to learn. 

Meanwhile I found Amanda Sin.  By the time my brother Jay went off to Memorial University, I had found a new limit pusher.  Amanda was the first girl who would come biking with me a second time, or skiing with me a second time.  We got ourselves into all sorts of adventures, including almost deploying all of Fundy National Park’s Rangers on a rescue mission when we were sixteen and decided to traverse a gorge on our mountain bikes.  She split her knee open that day and so we had to switch bikes because mine had pedal cages, which allowed her to ride the rest of the way with one leg. I ran that route last summer and that section she had to ride one legged goes on forever, rolling continuously through the forest.  Amazingly, Amanda stayed with me through University until I was able to locate Matt Betts.  Amanda then went on to become a professional mountain bike racer and a physiotherapist. You can find her today riding beside Geoff Kabush on Scott Bicycles 3 Rox Racing Team and the Canadian National Team.

If you are reading this you probably have seen me riding behind Matt hyperventilating at one point or another.  Some people may ask me why, why would you try so hard for so long to keep up with him (…when it was an impossible task).  Well, because that is what my family does.  We ride as hard as we can, pushing those limits until we burst through the other side, or fail, and yes, either way it involves a whole lot of suffering.  But here is the thing.  After the hardest ride I ever did with Matt, three hours of mountain biking through mosquito infested New Hampshire forest (well before I was in shape to do such a thing), Matt asked if we could just “ride up this little hill, it will only take ten minutes”.  I said sure, trying to impress my new boyfriend.  I think I remember smiling confidently and then pointing out the fact we had no food or water.  It was a 12-mile climb.  Matt left me at the beginning after I told him to “go ahead of me, I’m slowing you down.”  I began crying after 20 minutes, angry, dehydrated, sugar low, watching the climb continue and disappear corner after corner.  I made it to the top on angry fumes alone.  But afterwards we found the best ice cream in the world (Bishop’s Ice Cream) and I therefore married him. 

Miles, I suppose should have come as less of surprise.  Take a DeWolfe male and cross him with Matt Betts and you have my son Miles.  That is a whole lot of limit pushing boy. Yes the girls push limits too, but not like Miles. With the girls I can tell them no, and for the most part, they listen and stop, even if they get angry.  With Miles I would tell him what to do, and then I would watch him make a calculation, “Do have time to get away with it?” his eyes would estimate the distance between me and his goal and most of the time he would decide to give whatever it was he wanted to do a fighting chance. He was a fighter, willing to accept the consequences if it meant trying what he wanted to do. I was now raising my brother, father and grandfather.  I knew him all too well, but had no idea how to be his mother. He repeatedly found my breaking point in both my tolerance of bad behavior and then my temper.  I read once that 3-4 year old boys have as much testosterone as a 16-year-old teenage boy. “Oh, well that explains some of it” I thought.

What does a “limit pushing toddler” look like you ask?  My brother would run away from adults on a regular basis getting lost for up to an hour in the local mall or shopping center.  It was his game.  He is the reason why child leashes were invented.  He once turned a hose on my neighbor John for three minutes laughing the entire time.  His footprints are in Johns cement patio.  With Miles it took the form of hitting other kids, running away from me everywhere, licking the brown sugar spoon in the bulk section… One day he tried to run out of the ballet studio and I caught him just as the sidewalk ended before 2^nd street downtown.  I only wore footwear I could sprint in for 2 years. 

Now we are not supposed to hit our children anymore so what do you do to discipline a two year old who is constantly trying to hit, bite or pull hair of other children or engaging in life threatening behavior?  How do you explain hurt before kids are talking?  This was my dilemma, and I will not pretend that for 6 months to a year I did little else but pull out my hair.  But somewhere between Miles being 2.5 to 3 he got on a bike with training wheels and we started riding down to pick up Ava from Kindergarten and riding back.  This began to take the edge off his energy.  One day he fell playing and cut his chin open.  He needed stitches and all of a sudden I had an easy reference to hurt.  “When you hit your sister it hurts! Like when you cut your chin open that day and needed stitches”.

Miles told me he was ready to ride a two-wheeler when he was three and half.  I had watched him ride his training wheel bike.  Often his head was completely turned around looking backwards for long periods of time while he laughed wildly, his bike jogging from side to side.  The biggest rule in biking is your bike goes where your eyes go.  You crash when you look behind you unless you are very talented.  “You are not ready, Miles.” I replied.  “Take off my training wheels Mom.” Came his reply.  Ok, I thought, he has to learn the hard way. I took off the training wheels and held onto the back of his seat while he rode down the hill. “Let go!” he yelled at me.  I let him go.  And away he rode.  He crashed 70 times that first week.  He would scream at his bike, cry, get angry.  “Do you want to load up in the chariot?” I would ask.  “No!” he would yell and get back on the bike and ride angrily away again. 

In the first week he learned to jump curbs, start on his own, brake, and go down big hills (in that order). He discovered that speed wobbles suck every time, riding on and off the sidewalk does not work out well in many situations, and that he could ride 6 miles in a day.  I found out that after 3 miles he could play lego quietly all afternoon, and after 5 miles he took naps all afternoon. He now rides beside me while I do big runs around town during Anna’s naps or on our way to preschool or the grocery store.

He now understands hurt, he is not afraid to get hurt, but he doesn’t like it and he doesn’t like to hurt other people now (or not as often anyway).  If he makes a mistake I have seen him work hard to fix it.  He is generous with his toys and his candy, sharing with his sisters and his friends.  He makes mistakes still but he grows from these mistakes.  Like a tree, he explores the limits of his world and his roots grow deeper into the ground, he branches up towards the sunshine.  He is sweet and tough and he will never stop pushing the limits, so I guess it is my job to try and direct those experiences in a positive direction.  And I have to be brave like my brother, father and grandfather and be prepared to watch a few crashes, because this is how certain people need to learn. And like my grandmother, and my mother I need to always love my limit pusher through both his mistakes and his victories, no matter how hard it is. It is through the mistakes that I watch him grow deeper, and by continuing to love him through the mistakes I watch them turn into victories and watch him branch up higher than ever before.

My friend Avie said the other night (and I hope I am honoring your words Avie);

“I think some kids test our love by misbehaving, like they are just trying to find out if there is a limit to our love.  Can they do something so bad that we won’t love them anymore? And perhaps every time we are able to forgive them, they see how much we actually love them.”

I don’t think I have ever understood so clearly the power of forgiveness until Avie made that statement the other night, and that Miles’ gift to me really is that.  He makes me so mad sometimes, so embarrassed as a parent, so scared for him, his safety and well-being.  He challenges the limits of my love everyday, and it is my job to make sure it never breaks. If it doesn't break and I forgive him than my love actually gets a little stronger.  This is what my grandmother learned with her six wonderful children, what my mother learned with Jay and I, and what Miles is teaching me everyday.  He has helped me understand why we need exercise, that it calms us down, gives us challenges, and tests limits in a mostly healthy fashion. And when we test our limits, we get stronger.  Exercise helps us push the limits of our humanness. I can then bring this to my children as a parent.

My limit pushers have taught me everything so far.

Sharing Rocks! or How Good Was Nicki Bluhm?

If you have been around me at all in the last year you may have heard me mention my newest hero, Nicki Bluhm and her amazing band The Gramblers. My friend Chris O’Connell sent our band a link to her youtube video of “I Can’t Go For That” originally performed by Hall and Oates.  It rocked, and I went further and further into their youtube video spiral, only to discover this band rocked many other songs and reworked them into greatness.  Check out the “Nicki Bluhm and the Gramblers Van Sessions” on youtube. “Faith”, You’re no Good”, and “Can you get to that” will get you started on your own spiral.

Now I honestly think this woman may have one of the best voices I have ever heard live.  She packs some serious power and emotion into every song she performs, with always just the right touch.  She is beautiful, she commands the stage, and her band loves her.  You can tell, every member is just so happy to be playing music with this woman.  And yes, she rocks.  Yeah, let ‘em have it Nicki, that old boy friend who broke your heart, he never was man enough for you!

How good was she, you might ask? (or possibly not since perhaps I can go on about something a bit too much when I am excited).  She was good enough to counteract this much suck:

Husband Matt left for Costa Rica on a Monday for three weeks.  On Friday, just minutes before I took our three kids to the super awesome gymnastics gym for three hours of fun awesomeness, Anna throws up all over the floor.  “Oh bad.” I think.  Our own band had our first amped gig the next night at Calapooia Brewing Company.  Matt’s gone, Dale may be very late because most of his staff is out sick, I may now be out and that would leave 3 of the 6 members off our band to carry off the gig… I spent most of the night lying on a crib mattress in our bathroom feeling very bad for my very sick two year old, cleaning up vomit and a bit of time wondering if there was anyway I may get to the gig. 

Miraculously I made it out the next night, Anna was better, no one else went down, my babysitter braved my house, which I cleaned for five hours straight that day, disinfecting every surface I could.  It went great, we had a blast and I returned to my house full of hope and energized for the rest of my week.

Wednesday night Miles went down, Saturday I went down.  Tuesday I threw my back out disinfecting the bathtub. Wednesday was the Nicki Bluhm concert.  It had been a week and a half since I had been able to leave my house, due to the Noro virus’s 72 hour isolation period after each Noro victim.  Wednesday at 5pm Miles walks up to me with his entire lower face covered in blood. He had a major nose bleed which dripped all over my carpets and his bed, the carpets I had just spent two days steam cleaning.  Good grief.  My babysitter arrived 50 minutes later to blotches of blood soaked baking soda from one end of my house to another. 

How good was Nicki Bluhm?  My friends Dave and Kendra and Avie and Jason kindly invited me to come along on their double date, I went along as the happiest fifth wheel ever. We went to dinner and had hours of adult conversation and then to the concert.

She came on.  She is six feet tall, slender build, gorgeous black hair.  There are maybe three hundred people gathered in Cosmic Pizza, a pizza restaurant, bar, music venue. Everyone is watching her, waiting for the music to start.  Likely all of us have watched her “Van sessions” videos on you tube, and we all know we are in for a great show.  Every note she sings is perfect, the band is perfectly timed, no one misses one note, one beat.  But it actually isn’t until the last two songs that the band transcends great.  The second to last song starts and it isn’t even one of my favorite songs, but half way through, they stop just playing the song so much as just making music in front of us, aka "the jam".  The lead guitar player just starts rocking out, Nicki Bluhm gracefully turns the stage over to him and everyone is happy to go anywhere this band wants to take us.   You could almost see everyone nodding their heads in unison to the beat of the music except for those who were already on their feet dancing.  I could feel the crappiness that had been my families unfortunate last week and half, begin to dissolve.  By the end of the show, I was fully ready to go back to my home and make the best out of the rest of my single momma time.

Nicki Bluhm was so good that I was able to accept it when Miles came down with the fever so many of our friends had gotten, the start of the flu, which may spread through all of us before this weeks end, but hey, I have Nicki Bluhm’s concert t-shirt and CD to get me through.

She was so good that I went to the library on Friday with Anna and got some books out on how to sing, because watching her made me understand how much more I have to learn if I truly want to express myself.  And watching her made me want to be able to express myself better.  Watching Nicki Bluhm made me realize this woman needs to be shared.  I want all my friends to see her and listen to her, and be able to enjoy such an amazing human performance.  This is the product of group of people that have devoted their lives to making music, not for the money or the fame, but because they love it, feel it and want nothing more than to share it.  And it shows.

I talked to her after and told her how amazing I think she is.  She signed my CD.  She told me they were trying to get an Apple sponsorship because their youtube videos had been so popular and were recorded just on an iphone, but it hadn’t gone through yet.  Nicki, skip Apple.  I have heard they are notoriously stingy with their money.  Go find an even better technology and work with that company and make them famous along with you.  You are amazing and thank you for bringing some light into an otherwise tough two and a half weeks.   In the meantime I will do everything I can to share your music, perhaps nowadays with social media, we the people can finally decide who should famous, by sharing what we really love with one another.

And the on the last note, lets talk about sharing, because this is what got me through my two and a half weeks of pretty intense single parenting.  Here are my thank you’s to you folks who got me through:

Chris – thanks for sharing Nicki Bluhm, we are indebted to you for finding this awesome music and taking the time to share it with us! Angela – thank you for changing pick up/drop off duties with me and picking up Ava from school for me whenever you could.  Huge help! Thanks babysitter Kelly for still coming into my home in the midst of a virus.  Neighbor Susan for bringing me food when I honestly was sick enough I likely would not have fed my children.  Thanks Helen and Heidi for joining the Noro virus recovery club with me and taking my extra children whenever you could.  Dave, Kendra, Avie and Jason, for letting me laugh and tell you in detail the horribleness of my two weeks, and then letting me have adult conversation for hours. My band for always being there and helping me express myself the best I can where I am.  To Miles – for biking happily with me on my 20 km run of desperation on our first day out of quarantine. To Ava – for getting Anna and Miles cereal every morning and letting me sleep in, you are an amazing seven year old! Evie – thanks for the Hydrogen peroxide/baking soda blood cleaning tip. Afton – thank you for the Ava play date of our little kindred spirits.  And my husband, for doing some awesome research, discovering natures beautiful little secrets, for sharing these secrets with me upon your return and letting me spend all day in bed. You all helped lighten my load and keep it bearable.  I am feeling much gratitude to you all!  I will work on paying it back out when I get out of bed tomorrow!

That’s how good Nicki Bluhm was. 

Check Nicki Bluhm and the Gramblers out here:

http://www.nickibluhm.com/

Momthlete Evolves

Sometimes we feel ourselves changing, sometimes we don’t, sometimes we struggle against it sometimes for years. Some people I watch accept all of life’s events with much more grace than I seem to.  It is funny how sometimes we see ourselves as a certain thing. For instance when I was a kid I was a gymnast, a runner, a singer.  As I got older I played trumpet, I was a McDonalds employee, I was a girl guide.  

When I was 16 I bought my first mountain bike.  That is when I knew I wanted to be a mountain biker.  For some reason, whoever those people were in spandex, all fit and healthy, having fun on their bikes, I wanted to be them, not like them, I wanted to be a mountain biker.  I rode my bike as much as I could, wore some of the clothes, did some races but was I them?  I wasn’t quite sure.  But I kept riding my bike more and more hoping someday, I would be a mountain biker.  I would leave my small town of Nova Scotia and ride away from home for five days with my tent, sleeping bag and camp stove. But was I a mountain biker?  I refused to ride road bikes, yeah, that is what a real mountain biker would do, never ride a road bike.

I went to University right after high school. I had a pretty nice bike that I had worked many hours at McDonalds to buy.  It was a very nice Rocky Mountain.  I would ride it every Saturday and Sunday, clean it in front of the residence before putting away in the storage area downstairs. I was proud of my bike.  I had some friends who would take me out and show me the trails.  I was becoming a mountain biker.  We would drink beer after rides, have potlucks and play music at night.  I was pretty sure I was really becoming a mountain biker. 

I started hanging out with Matt Betts at some parties, the New Brunswick provincial champion!  I couldn’t even believe it, I was so nervous sometimes I would hide from him when he came over to visit my roommate. He took me on a few rides.  Now I was dating a “real” mountain biker.  I could see the holes in my game.  I needed a road bike to increase my fitness.  Soon I would need a heart rate monitor to measure my intervals.  Soon I was trying to beat my own workouts. Yes, I had a workout schedule that I followed, lifted weights.  Soon I was racing the top girls in New Brunswick, Canada, the US, I was in a World Cup, whoa.  I was on a team, I was training more than working, racing all summer.  I was a mountain biker.  My environment became mountain biking, my friends were mountain bikers, my community was the race scene. 

Then I had my first baby.  I was a mountain biker with a baby.  I could do this, right? But it was hard trying to work out racing, and workouts around my baby’s schedule.  It was also lonely, I trained alone or with Ava napping in the chariot.  No more long bike rides learning so much from my friends and community. No one else had such a limited window to train in or a breast feeding schedule to work around. I would train, do baby care, race, baby care. I struggled, I didn’t want to give it up.  

When we moved to Corvallis I found most of my days were spent with other Mommas.  They didn’t mountain bike but they sure knew how to help me with potty training, where to go to preschool, which library story times I could go to with Ava for the age appropriate stories.  They changed my parenting game.  They were Pro Mommas, dedicated to parenting like I had dedicated myself to mountain biking.  All they wanted was to be great Mommas and I learned from them every single day.  They thought I was crazy running all over the place with my babies in tow (and they are somewhat correct), but they let me hang out anyway and learn from them.

Each year when I had to relax my racing I thought, oh well, just this year, then I will do it again, once Ava is older, once Miles is older, once Anna is older… Wait a minute.  I think it took me three babies to realize I was not a mountain bike racer Mom.  I am a Mom who mountain bike races sometimes, but more often runs because it is easier. 

After the triathlons this summer, our band played lots of music and I took lots of time to do music instead of training.  And for the first time I realized I didn’t disappear when I stopped being or trying to be a racer.  I simply started changing. And even then it wasn’t easy.  One day in October after 2 months of not racing, Matt and Adam (one of my closest team mates from the good ol’ days) took me out on a ride.  I got dropped on every section on flat rolling terrain. I was miserable.  I couldn’t believe I had given up, I was so mad at myself, so crushed to find out how quickly my training had disappeared.  How horrible that I may never be able to ride a good ride with Matt or Adam again.  Trust me when I say I mourned the death of a part of me that day.

Now I kept trying to do workouts, but when I tried to go hard my body hurt.  My neck would seize, my calf would clench up.  Weird things that had never happened before would happen every time I tried to push my body.  I am getting old, I thought.  I am certainly getting older.  So I would go back to music and my kids, which started becoming more and more fun.  The less I rode my bike, the more other parts of my life would trickle in.  Eventually it occurred to me, maybe I wasn’t losing myself, perhaps I was just changing.  I began meeting more musicians, hanging out with my Pro Momma’s group more, knitting with my preschool moms.  I would go for slower fun runs, do gymnastics with my kids.  If my sports were for fun my body was happy, if I pushed it hard, it would shut down.  I have never had my body send me a clearer message.  “I am finished with this for now”, it said, “if you want to go hard you will suffer.” More surprising for me was my response, for the first time I answered “no, I don’t want to suffer for this anymore”.

And that is when I noticed just how good the change felt.  How much fun I was having in my changing role.  How music often happened at night after my kids went to bed instead of during the day when I wanted to be with them.  I could share music with them a bit, run and ride with them more because there was no more specific workout to do. I just had to keep my body healthy.

Now don’t get me wrong, I went out with Matt and we did a three hour ride together in the Mac Dunn and it was so fun.  I will always love mountain biking and I always hope I am fit enough to enjoy the Mac Dunn and Oakridge.  I may run the Mac Dunn 50 again.  Then again I have no idea if I will and for the first time in probably 15 years, that is ok with me.  The change is almost complete, I am a mom who mountain bikes and plays music.  I hope if I can’t do those things I will be a mom who finds something else that is interesting to do and learns how to do as well as possible and meet the wonderful people doing that thing as well.  For me it is finally ok to change, but for me the evolution within my lifetime was not always easy, pretty and without some serious ego suffering. I imagine many of the changes in my life will be similar, like when the kids leave my house and I am convinced they were just born yesterday.

But wouldn’t it be wonderful, wait, would I be a better person if I stopped trying to be someone or something in particular, and just welcomed what came into my life everyday?  Then would my evolution tick along just as well, without my body finally needing to scream at me “Stop you idiot, I quit! Go find something else to do!”

So there it is folks, I think I have changed a bit this year.  But in reality I change a bit every single year, day, minute, second.  My town has changed, country, community, friends.  My environment is constantly changing, and so does the surface of me, I am getting older, I care more about my house being clean and struggle to make it so.  I want to look nicer most days than I did before (I need to cover up my aging).  And yet I feel like all my friends, towns, family from those past moments come with me all the time being picked up by my self like a snowball, adding layer after layer to who I am.  And yet who I am probably really hasn’t changed that much in 35 years, a kid who liked to ride her trike, sing songs, play with her friends and go for long walks around White Rock, Nova Scotia.

And that is just about enough naval gazing for this night.  Thank you for reading.  Keep changing, keep staying the same.  Sometimes we struggle.  Sometimes we are at peace.  Does anyone know the right path? If someone showed it to me would I follow it to a tee?  If I did, would I learn as much?  

Running to meet the fall

The end of the summer brings about changes.  I know the freedom I have enjoyed with the kids is slowly going to be taken over by school, activities and other obligations.  It is all good, but it is a change.  With it this momthlete begins to change as well.  With the local Xterras over with, I now start to focus on running.  The air gets cooler and my memories of racing cross country in school resurface.  I feel a bit like a salmon that needs to return to its spawning grounds.  I have almost no choice but to run, it is simply in my blood.  The Mac Forest in my back yard has endless miles of flawless trails to run on.  And I get to feel the wind slowly creep back from the Pacific Ocean, bringing cooler temperatures that slowly tell the big leaf maples that is time to start thinking about dropping those leaves.   Year after year I need to run out and meet the fall.

I love the simplicity of running.  I love quickly throwing on my shorts, shirt, socks and shoes and running out the door.  There is nothing else to rely on but my body. No bikes to fix or clean or break.   Almost right away I hear my breath, hear the rhythm of my feet hitting the ground, feel my heart beat.  My body becomes an instrument.  I hear music.

Let’s talk about music because it is the other thing that has been coming up this fall, lots and lots of music.  I just can’t get enough of it, listening to it, dancing to it, singing it.  Our band (The Brutal Bridges) has just wrapped up our first CD, and we are starting to play outside of our living room for people who are not us.  I am beginning a new relationship with music, taking on the job of sharing it with other people and accepting the risk of everything that entails.  Dealing with my own judgment, the reaction of those gathered, are we good, are we not? Learning about microphones and having my voice thrown out into a crowd, or not. 

Matt and I had a pretty crazy week, starting with an amplified band practice on Monday. Tuesday was the Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros concert in Portland. Wednesday was our bands first show at Les Caves.  Friday was a jam in my friend’s garage.  Saturday we played a wedding.  Monday we wrapped up the crazy week at the Ninkasi brewery in Eugene at a benefit show for the GOATS trail building group in Oakridge. It was a fitting end to the week for this old mountain biker. Oakridge is where Matt and I spent our 10^th wedding anniversary on August 24^th this summer riding our bikes on some of the world’s greatest cross country trails.  I felt honored to share music with these amazing folks.  The free Ninkasi beer was also a nice perk.  It was the first “mini tour” for the Brutal Bridges and I feel like I have learned something in this last week.

Band practice was great, trying out the amps and microphones.  Microphones are interesting.  My voice goes in and then comes out a speaker that is far away from my body that just produced that sound.  There is a delay to my voice being sent out and my ears hearing the sound, because the sound I am making is no longer coming out of my mouth (which is close to my ears), it comes out of a speaker, louder than I have ever heard it before and takes a moment to return to me.  If I wait to hear my sound to adjust to the note I just made, than I risk stepping out of time with the next note I need to sing.  However if I don’t listen to the sound, how do I know I am singing in tune? This is a new skill I have never tried out before and I fumble along much like my first day on a piece of single track.  If this were a race I am not sure I am at the point where I should be on the start line. But I suppose I need to start somewhere.

The next night was the Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros concert.  My friend Jamie Simpson sent me a link to the song Home back at the end of the school year and over the summer it occurred to me that if this band produced one great song, perhaps they have more.  But it took me awhile to check, even though it is now so easy to do with the internet.  Sometimes I think I am nervous that the rest of the music may not be as good as that one song and I will be disappointed. But Edward Sharpe did not disappoint me, the more songs I listened to, the more new songs I liked.  Soon I had bought both their albums and was listening to them almost nonstop.  It was like making a new friend. I now had all these great songs to follow me through my house work, dance with the kids to, drive around town with, sing loudly as I ran alone through the burned forest wilderness area at Waldo Lake (I believe I chose “Man on Fire” as my cougar repellent).

When I found out they were coming to Eugene in September I knew I had to see them.  I couldn’t tell you why I had to see this band.  Taj Mahal has played in Eugene and I did not have to see him even though I really love Taj Mahal.  But I had to see Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.  “No matter what” I told Matt.  He said ok.  We were close to booking our Eugene tickets when Adrian (our band leader/lead guitar/singer song writer and recording engineer) got us our first real gig at Les Caves.  Hmmm.  Well the Portland show was Tuesday night.  “How crazy would it be to see them in Portland on Tuesday leaving our 3 children with an all-night babysitter (Uncle Adam Hadley) and play a show on Wednesday?” I asked Matt.  Too my surprise Matt replied, “Not that crazy”, even though we both knew it was a bit.

I was actually surprised to find myself driving to Portland on Tuesday night to see our first big live show since our pre children Tragically Hip days back in Canada. We were late and had to run from our hotel about 20 blocks to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, but we know we could run it faster than a taxi could take us (another strange perk of being an athlete).  We whipped through the Portland streets, Matt navigating using the wonders of his new iphone. We arrived a bit sweaty at the concert hall with enough time to grab a Bridgeport IPA (which has to be drunk with a lid and straw in the concert hall, who knew that was a good idea? A piece of information I feel will be useful in other situations).

Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros is no small band. There were twelve musicians on stage including an accordion, trumpet player, two keyboard players, bass, violin, two lead vocalist, and two drummers.  This added up to a lot of sound in this turn of the century concert hall that I don’t think was quite designed to hold this much amplified music. I could barely make out the lead singer Alexander Eberts’ amazing vocals in the huge wash of sound.  At first I was almost disappointed, but that feeling was quickly replaced by just feeling the amazing vibrations that soon made their way straight through my body.  It was the first time in over seven years I had heard this much sound with this many people.  It felt amazing, feeling my body respond to each song, this one making me so happy, this one making me feel so sad, the next one lifting me back up.  It was a giant reminder to my body of what my emotions actually feel like.  It was one of the most amazing things I have ever felt, and there is nothing I can write that would explain it without me sounding more ridiculous than I already do. 

At one point Alexander asked everyone to raise their hands if they were cool. There were many beautiful and very cool Portlanders in the crowd that night.  I was in awe of their stylish clothes and beautiful hair.  Probably a third of the crowd raised their hands.  He asked them to stop dancing and have a seat. Then he asked everyone who wasn’t cool to raise their hands.  Slowly Matt and I added ourselves to this group.  If you know me at all, you know I have not a cool bone in my body.  I have absolutely no ability to keep myself at one cool level of being for more than three seconds.  I get too excited, too happy or too sad or too angry at almost every experience I encounter and this makes me fundamentally very uncool.  “Stand up uncool people” Alexander asked us.  Matt and I obeyed with about a third of the crowd.  “Now, you don’t have to be cool to dance, I bet you never dance because you don’t think you are cool, but it is not about being cool.  It’s about feeling the music. I want to see you dance”.   Slowly and maybe not as awkwardly as I expected myself to, Matt and I started dancing. 

By the time we got to the song “Home” the fullness of how great life is hit me hard.  I sat there with Matt after 10 years of marriage, three kids, death, sickness, health and happiness and realized how amazing and beautiful my life is.  And that I just couldn’t have known that as fully as I do if I hadn’t of held Miles in my arms for those first 5 minutes of his life waiting for him to breath, sat with Matt’s Dad for three months at the end of his life, or been with Ava for days in the oncology unit in New Hampshire.  I could only truly know how amazing my life was by fundamentally understanding that life is by no means guaranteed.  It is one crazy, amazing, sometimes painful, sometimes beautiful gift.

Is that the power of music?  It matches the vibrations of our emotions and makes them clearer to us than words maybe ever could? I believe music helps us feel all of our emotions, good and bad and accept these feelings without as much judgement as we sometimes feel in the heat of life's moments. And I really think it is feeling this full range of emotions and feelings that our bodies can produce that truly makes us human. Without the good feelings life is just too miserable, but without the bad feelings we don't fully understand just how beautiful those good feelings really are. Is that why I love running so much? It allows me to hear the rhythm and the beat of my own body until my emotions surface and I can deal with them in a reasonable and healthy manner? Is this what being a human being is really all about?  Not just going through our days and doing what needs to be done, but truly feeling the full range of feelings that life has to offer?

 The next day was our first gig at Les Caves. It was my turn to share as much of that feeling I got the night before as I could.  We played and had fun, our friends came out and drank beer and listened and clapped for us, and we put out our music for whoever would listen. Perhaps we livened up the atmosphere a few shades that night.  But it wasn’t until the wedding, when we got to play the first dance for the bride and groom that I got that feeling.  We played a song I wrote for Matt a few years ago and soon other couples joined in and danced, and I realized we were all together in this moment, and that was a very cool feeling.

We finished our mini tour in Eugene.  It was just Adrian and I and we were amped.   I tried to enjoy the feeling of my voice going out into the crowd; finally I could sing quietly and not have the sound get lost.  I tried to back off on the p sounds that were causing the mic to make a loud, distracting puffing sound.  I tried my best to stay with the music and not worry too much about the resulting sound.  Then Etouffee performed.  Two guys, violin, rhythm guitar, Cajun music.  The first song brought everyone’s ears and eyes to the stage, focused on them.  It was fun, uplifting, fast, and very happy.  We all were captivated by the sound.  Before long my friend Danielle said, “These guys need people dancing”.  Well, since I don’t need to worry about being cool I figured we may as well be the dancers.  And that was probably the first time I have ever found myself dancing in public on a Monday night.

The next morning Miles, Anna and I listened to more Etouffee and danced around our living room together.  I want them to feel this with me, the music filling up our living room making us spin in circles until we fell down.  I want them to sing with us around the campfire and someday make music that is all their own.  I hope we figure out how to make more and more people dance.  Perhaps I will figure it out, that perfect song as I am running through the forest, listening to the rhythm of my feet, feeling my heartbeat and meeting yet another fall.

Thank you for reading. Start dancing:

http://edwardsharpeandthemagneticzeros.com/music/ 

http://www.etouffee.com/

Racing to Happiness

I have a reoccurring theme in my life.  It goes something like this.  I start to race, it goes pretty well, I want to race more, I do race more, other parts of my life need attention and then I have to make a decision – do I continue to race no matter what and continue to chase my racing goals, or do I attend to the other parts a bit more and let go of the race. 

I think this is a very human problem, whether you are a Mom, Dad, athlete, musician, actor, professor, whatever.  Where do we put our energy? What is good enough?  Matt asked me the question long ago – “When will you be satisfied with racing, when will you have achieved enough?” Winning the local race, national race, world cup, Olympics? Where is that magic line we are looking for, so that when you cross that finish line, in that position, you finally win satisfaction?  And does satisfaction bring about happiness?

I remember the day when I had to make the decision to continue racing with Ava – do I want to keep pushing forward, or is it time to slow down or stop.  But the real decision I realized I needed to make was “What do I want out of this life?” And after some reflection, I realized what I wanted was to be happy.  Now this sounds ridiculous I know, but at that point, I think it was probably the first time I realized that the main thing I wanted in this life was to be happy.  This for me was a turning point.  Realizing for my first time that my primary goal was happiness, I now only had to ask myself, “What makes me happy?”. And believe it or not, for me this was an easy question.

There are thousands, and perhaps millions of things that make me happy, and they are luckily, amazingly easy to find, and obtain.  Being with Ava made me happy, taking her for bike rides to beautiful places made me happy, playing music makes me happy, spending time with Matt makes me happy, talking to my friends, my family makes me happy.  Seeing fireflies makes me ridiculously happy.  Racing can make me very happy.  But here I begin to approach a line.  For racing to make me happy, I still need to be able to enjoy the little things in life.  If racing starts to take up so much of my attention that I no longer have time for music, family and friends, then I begin to sacrifice the many things that make me happy for the goal of racing. 

And there it is – my answer is so clear, perhaps clearer to me than ever as I write this.  For my life to run well my first goal is happiness. For me to be happy, I like to do and experience the various things that make me happy.  If I am not careful, it is easy for me to let racing start to edge out happiness as the primary goal in my life.  And that is when things start to get out of balance.  I don’t have time for friends and family because I am racing.  I don’t have time for music, I am racing. And I will admit to this – I don’t have time to be happy, I am racing.  I will be happy when I have finished racing… oops.

And this is the point at which I am out of balance, I want more time to train, but life is in the way, that pesky life thing that stops me from training. If only there was less life so I could train more and be a better racer.  And it is only writing these words that I can laugh at how ridiculous these thoughts sound on paper, because they seem perfectly justified when I hear them in my head at the time. And luckily I have my brave husband, who gently steps in the way of the race track, and says as carefully as one can hold a red flag up to a charging bull “are you sure you want to be racing right now?” and yes we crash, because I was racing and he asked me to change my pace. But as I slow down a bit, I am able to look around at all the things around me, this life, that I was just rushing past, and it slowly starts to occur to me that I started racing through life, instead of just racing a race. I am then able to reset my goal to “happiness” and return to life.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love racing, but sometimes it is that wrong kind of love, like when you obsess about someone and you start to become that creepy kid stalking your loved one, or holding on to them too tight and too often.  It is when I let racing be a fun thing that I do along with the other things that make me happy, that my life really works.

Yes, this entry comes about after I needed to make decisions with my family about how we were going to spend our summer, our precious few months of warm, beautiful sunshine, precious weeks off as a family.  Do I train to be the best triathlete I can be? Does our family travel to the races and does that become our focus? How much of that can we balance and still show our children the alpine wildflower blooms in the mountains, tent in the mountains under fields of stars, spend long afternoons at the pool swimming with our friends, riding bikes around town to get snow cones?

We decided on two races, that were fairly close to Corvallis, Black Diamond Xterra and Portland Xterra.  I trained when it fit into our summer activities.  I was able to do two huge road rides as Matt and I traded off riding to our vacation spots on the coast and to Bend.  They were beautiful days on the bike seeing miles of Oregon from the uninhibited view of my bicycle.  They will stand out in my mind as some of the most beautiful rides I have done in my life.  Matt also gave me a whole day to go running in the mountains.  I ran Iron Mountain, Cone Mountain and Browder Ridge in one day while the wildflowers were in peak bloom.  My mind could barely understand the colours I was seeing all at once.  There was one spot on the shoulder of Cone Mountain where I actually had to run back and see the flowers for a second and third time. 

Then my friend Diane Leclerc arrived from Quebec with her three beautiful children and husband Joel.  Diane actually radiates happiness so vividly I am pretty sure she creates her own magic.  Our family was happy to fall under the spell.  Diane fills every moment with beauty and fun.  We would all ride our bikes to get snow cones, go swimming at Osborne, pick fresh blueberries, make a quick batch of berry sauce with no recipe that was perfect.  We climbed mountains, swam in hot springs, mountain biked through old growth forest giggling wildly and whooping as dark approached.  Our children played tag, picked endless bouquets of flowers, ate far too much candy and had the kind of time only children (and Diane) can have in the summer.  Diane is what happens when I live life for happiness.  And yet it was her that insisted I go race.  “You love it Karen, you need to do it,” She said, giving me the most serious look she could muster before bursting out laughing.  She understands at once the seriousness of doing what I love and the silliness of what I do.

And Voila, I am able to race with lightness and ease and sense of humour again.  Ava and Miles also raced and had a wonderful time playing with Mel’s wonderful sons.  Matt bought a fishing rod and everyone went fishing in the lakes.  And though I struggle with that line, I know that I crossed the finish line of these last two races with my life in balance – at least for now. I know that I will get out of balance again, and I will need Matt to bravely stand in front of me and say “Karen, are you racing for happiness or for racing?” and I will have to examine my motives.  This will happen over and over.   And that is why I am glad I married him, he makes me happy.