Fitness Room TV Rage

It's winter.  There's a lot of snow on the ground, and there's more to come.  I can't run outside because I don't want to risk hitting an icy spot.  Plus, my younger son is playing in the Hampshire Regional Y's basketball league this year, which means practice during the week and games on Saturday. As a result of all of this winter horror, I find myself spending a lot more time working out at the Y these days.   

I'm not complaining.  I've got to do something to stave off cabin fever, and the Y is just as good a place as any, I guess.   But it recently occurred to me that when you exchange the freedom of exercising outside for the warm confines of the Y, you're also giving up a tiny part of yourself to an institution.  The Y may be family friendly and all, but it's an institution nonetheless, with its own quirky rules, both written and unwritten.  And my God, have you seen some of those classes?  The way the instructor gets everyone doing the same thing at the same time? 

So take a hard winter and an institutional, soul-crushing mindset and you've got a recipe for trouble.  The discontent bubbles to the surface most notably in the cardio room, where members sweat as they manipulate various machines in front of a bank of flat screen televisions.  Everything will look hunky-dory until Channel Changing Time comes.  The staff working the cardio room are slaves to these blue binders that apparently outline in minute detail what channels should be showing what shows, when.  The idea, I suppose, is to remove the personal preference for a set of rules.  (If that's not institutional, I don't know what is.)

Of course, the problem with these institutional rules is that they don't take into account the human element.  If the rules say change the channel from X to Y at Z time, the rules don't take consider either what might be on, or what people might want to watch.  This is why lately I've found myself being entertained by infomercials for weight loss programs and The 700 Club.

I like to think that the anger from watching these shows makes me workout harder.

But I don't know how much longer I can keep it up.

That damn groundhog better not see his shadow tomorrow.   

Supporting the Armor

Last night, in the middle of the latest winter storm, I braved the icy, snow-covered streets to head to the MassMutual Center to watch the Springfield Armor of the NBA's D-League take on the Erie Bayhawks.  the Armor won a pretty spirited game. 

We watched from some pretty sweet courtside seats, complete with waiter service.  I have to say, though, the whole experience was a bit strange because there couldn't have been more than 100 fans in the whole place.  Check out this picture from Masslive's coverage of the game and note the empty seats in the background:

Here's a picture I took from our seats just before tip off:

Overall, it was a lot of fun.  We even got on television when local ABC40 sports anchor Scott Cohen interviewed us as part of a "braving the storm to support the Armor" story, most of which ended up on the cutting room floor.  It turns out he was there mainly because the Armor game was literally the only game in town last night, since everything else was canceled due to weather. 

One final note: I checked the box score in today's paper.  It listed last night's attendance as 1,910.  I can only assume that a lot of those people were disguised as empty seats. 

Late But Still Nice

Every year I appreciate the kind elves who every year decorate this spindly but hardy evergreen on the bike path for Christmas. 

Oh, The Stories They'll Have

Both of my sons are playing on traveling basketball teams this winter, and even though their seasons are barely underway, I've visited a lot of gyms in western Massachusetts over the last couple of weeks.  This week my younger son is playing in a CYO tournament hosted by Our Lady of the Rosary Parish in Springfield.  The gym is certainly one of the, shall we say, coziest gyms I've ever been in.  Spectators are restricted to folding chairs that line one wall of the gym, and anyone with a shoe size greater than about 5 will have to watch their toes.  Of course, people can always sit on the stage during the game.  The teams' benches are old church pews, and James Naismith would have been right at home.  But while the gym is small, the competition has been spirited. 

I never played much basketball when I was younger; it just wasn't my game.  And I certainly never played organized basketball.  I learned to appreciate the game more when in college, when I went to a basketball school, and I've grown to appreciate it even more now that my kids are playing.  When I walked into that gym last night, I felt for a moment that maybe I'd missed out on something by not playing basketball when I was their age.  But I think that regret may have been fueled in part by the mistaken belief that these places didn't exist anymore, that basketball had been cleaned up and homogenized and corporate-tized into something antiseptic and generic.  I was able to overcome my own regret with the thought of the stories my kids will tell their kids in 30 years about the crazy places they played basketball when they were kids. 

Yes, I guess I'm appreciating basketball stories as much as I'm appreciating basketball these days. 

Hall of Fame

My son had the opportunity to play basketball on the court at the Hall of Fame in Springfield on Sunday.  His Sister Elizabeth Ann Seton CYO team from Northampton beat a spirited Agawam squad.  It was funny watching the players on the bench who spent more time looking up at the big screens and the pictures of all of the inductees.  Just before that game, they played a game in East Longmeadow in a tiny gym with linoleum floors that doubles as a cafeteria.   You've got to be versatile to succeed in Division 1 grade 3 and 4 CYO basketball. 

Shout Out

I knew that the Sugarloaf Mountain Athletic Club liked the last blog entry I did about their 2010 race series, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that they'd posted it as an essay on their site.  Always nice to see what I write published in various places (yes, they did have permission.)

How I Spent My Spring and Summer

When they run, kids don’t worry about personal records or electrolytes or their mile pace and they don’t wear $100 running shoes or satellite-synched wristwatches that would make Dick Tracy jealous.  They just run.  I used to be like that, before injuries, a driver’s license, adolescence, and a lot of beer and late nights made running less attractive.  So I stopped running, for about 20 years.  Five years ago, fearing that I would not be able to keep up with my active children, I set out to see if I could recapture some of what it felt like to run as a kid.  One day, in the middle of a bike ride, I stopped by the Smith College track and ran a lap.  I barely finished.  Fast forward to this past week:  I completed the Monson Memorial Half Marathon, the last race of the Sugar Loaf Mountain Athletic Club’s 2010 race series. I ran 10 out of the 12 races in the series. 

But I don’t want to write about my own running achievements, because let’s face it, to anyone who doesn’t run, and to a great many people who do run, listening to someone else’s running stories can be a bore.   I’d rather talk about my dreams.  I regularly dream about running now, something I don’t recall ever happening before. In my dreams, I run without effort.  I don’t need a watch or fancy computer to tell me what I can feel instinctively: that thanks to effective training and a flawless technique, I am running as fast as I possibly can.  This is where I can see the payoff for consistently getting out of bed in the morning at while the rest of my house is asleep—and probably the rest of the neighborhood, as well.  I feel the wind in my face, but that’s pretty much all I feel.  I don’t feel too hot or too cold, I don’t feel worried about traffic or whether I’m late for work, and I don’t feel any impact from my feet hitting the ground.  I’m gliding, and it’s perfect. 

And then, as they say, I woke up. 

I haven’t come close to replicating that feeling during my waking hours, but it’s not for lack of trying.  My last entry in this blog highlighted a race I ran in April, the Ron Hebert Road Race, where every finisher gets a pair of socks.  That race marked the first race in a new racing series put on by the Sugar Loaf Mountain Athletic Club, or SMAC.  Before this race series, I’d never participated in such a thing before, and while I had a vague notion that these things existed, I had no real idea of how they worked.  But one thing jumped out at me as I read through the rules: participants who finished six of the 12 races in the series would get a prize.  That was my motivation.  I have run enough races to confirm that fact that I am too slow to win any of the “traditional” running prizes; you know, the ones you get for running faster than most, if not all, of the other people in the race. But I was pretty sure I could run six races in 8 months. 

I paid my series entry fee—a reasonable $10—and began to look forward to the email updates that the series organizer, John Reino, would regularly send out after each race.  I ran my sixth race in the series in September to qualify for a prize, and then I was pleasantly surprised when I looked at the standings that my name was much closer to the top of the list than the bottom.  I also realized that I had a chance at making 10 races in the series, so I signed up for the Monson Half. 

For running these races, I got socks, t-shirts, technical shirts, pint glasses, and even potatoes.  I got a couple of black toenails and some nasty chafing issues.  More importantly, I got to experience the hospitality of the race volunteers (I still can’t get over the pastries at the Lake Wyola Run) and the excitement of race day on both a big (2000+ runners at the Bridge of Flowers Classic) and small scale (a couple of races drew only 100 or so runners.)  I also got to experience a feeling of accomplishment and I got to share it with my family, who met me at the finish line on Sunday.  My younger son even held a sign up as I passed: My Dad=My Hero. 

It’s kind of a bittersweet feeling to know that the series is over.  There’s a race I’m thinking about running on Sunday, but part of me says it’s not worth it because I won’t get any points for doing it.  Another part of me says, haven’t you run enough already this year?  But still another part of me says that maybe, just maybe there’s another PR out there for me. 

Thank you, Sugarloaf Mountain Athletic Club, for putting on this race series and for allowing me to experience joy in running again.  I was a middle-of-the-pack runner who didn’t stick around much after the race was over, but I enjoyed every minute of it.