Back in the late mid-80s, as I was finishing law school, a lawyer I worked with told me I needed to train physically for the CA Bar Exam as if it were a physical endurance event (because it was - 3 full days of sitting, concentrating, analyzing text, and writing, which is more demanding than it sounds). I took him at his word, lost about 60 pounds, and started working out and riding my heavy-as-lead 1972 Gitane 10-speed racing bike all over San Francisco's hills. Right after the exam, I also quit smoking, and a friend talked me into starting to run. Even with the biking, it was hard at first.
When Sunny conned me into doing my first 5K, I thought she was nuts. She was about 10 years older than me, and at the time, her youngest daughter was already a young adult. Sunny told me about when she had taken up running, with her then pre-teen daughter. Kasey had taken to it much more easily than Sunny did. During their first 5-miler, Sunny was ready to quit at about mile 3. Kasey urged her to finish just one more mile,ad she did. When she started to walk, Kasey said, "Oh, c'mon, Mom, it's the last mile. You can always run one more fuckin' mile." And they did.
Now, among my words to live by that I've squirreled away over the years, the prime directive, handed to me by my junior lifesaving instructor in about 1965, is "Don't panic [specifically, if you're swimming in a lake and think you feel a snake around your ankle]. Take a deep breath and look underwater to see if it's just seaweed. If it's really a snake, THEN panic."
In 1987 I added Kasey's words of wisdom to my cache: You can always run one more fuckin' mile."
I shared these rules for living with HRH at an early age. Like all children, she had a tendency to catastrophize, and those sayings sometimes help calm her down, and sometimes royally pissed her off, but she learned to use them to give herself space to deal. She also took tae kwon do from the age of 4 until she was 7; one of the major tenets of tae kwon do is "indomitable spirit," and it always resonated with us both. I went on for my black belt and she moved on to other sports and pursuits, but whenever we'd find ourselves in a rough spot, "indomitable spirit" was our secret code for buckling down and dealing.
Today we learned of someone who personifies all those sayings. HRH follows on social media a musher who has worked hard to make it to the Iditarod. His first race was in 2020, and it was cut short because of COVID, so he didn't finish. This year, he tried again. There were major problems with the race. It didn't actually start from Anchorage, because there wasn't enough snow. It started in Fairbanks, a day late. They added a loop, so it was actually longer than the traditional route by about 100 miles. This musher then found out, right before the start, that his mom had died. Then, a lot of the volunteers had to leave, because their travel plans were based on it starting a day earlier than it did. The upshot is, they cut a bunch of mushers off well before the end of the course and said they couldn't finish because the checkpoint volunteers couldn't stay for the full normal duration of the race. Quince said fine, go ahead and close the checkpoints, just give me my drop bag. He took all the gear and supplies he had at that checkpoint and finished the rest of the course with no race support. The residents cheered him through the villages, let him sleep and rest his dogs if he needed to, and cheered him on his way. He mushed into Nome alone a couple of days ago, met only by a friend who lives in Nome, but he mushed through those arches and finished the race!
Now, that's some indomitable spirit!
When Sunny conned me into doing my first 5K, I thought she was nuts. She was about 10 years older than me, and at the time, her youngest daughter was already a young adult. Sunny told me about when she had taken up running, with her then pre-teen daughter. Kasey had taken to it much more easily than Sunny did. During their first 5-miler, Sunny was ready to quit at about mile 3. Kasey urged her to finish just one more mile,ad she did. When she started to walk, Kasey said, "Oh, c'mon, Mom, it's the last mile. You can always run one more fuckin' mile." And they did.
Now, among my words to live by that I've squirreled away over the years, the prime directive, handed to me by my junior lifesaving instructor in about 1965, is "Don't panic [specifically, if you're swimming in a lake and think you feel a snake around your ankle]. Take a deep breath and look underwater to see if it's just seaweed. If it's really a snake, THEN panic."
In 1987 I added Kasey's words of wisdom to my cache: You can always run one more fuckin' mile."
I shared these rules for living with HRH at an early age. Like all children, she had a tendency to catastrophize, and those sayings sometimes help calm her down, and sometimes royally pissed her off, but she learned to use them to give herself space to deal. She also took tae kwon do from the age of 4 until she was 7; one of the major tenets of tae kwon do is "indomitable spirit," and it always resonated with us both. I went on for my black belt and she moved on to other sports and pursuits, but whenever we'd find ourselves in a rough spot, "indomitable spirit" was our secret code for buckling down and dealing.
Today we learned of someone who personifies all those sayings. HRH follows on social media a musher who has worked hard to make it to the Iditarod. His first race was in 2020, and it was cut short because of COVID, so he didn't finish. This year, he tried again. There were major problems with the race. It didn't actually start from Anchorage, because there wasn't enough snow. It started in Fairbanks, a day late. They added a loop, so it was actually longer than the traditional route by about 100 miles. This musher then found out, right before the start, that his mom had died. Then, a lot of the volunteers had to leave, because their travel plans were based on it starting a day earlier than it did. The upshot is, they cut a bunch of mushers off well before the end of the course and said they couldn't finish because the checkpoint volunteers couldn't stay for the full normal duration of the race. Quince said fine, go ahead and close the checkpoints, just give me my drop bag. He took all the gear and supplies he had at that checkpoint and finished the rest of the course with no race support. The residents cheered him through the villages, let him sleep and rest his dogs if he needed to, and cheered him on his way. He mushed into Nome alone a couple of days ago, met only by a friend who lives in Nome, but he mushed through those arches and finished the race!
Now, that's some indomitable spirit!
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