WORK TO FAILURE - Go to the gym and work to failure for each exercise and you are an in-house hero, but go into the classroom and work to failure and you’re some kind of loser. It’s all very confusing. I know when I was coaching runners I never worked them to failure because that decreased the probability that they would return the next day for more pain and failure. The classroom was different, mainly because one wallows to failure, and if you simply hang around for four hours someone will punch your lunch ticket.
AMPED - Energy drinks are now prominently placed in supermarkets and I’ve been sampling some before they end up renamed in vodka mixtures. I was wondering what would happen if you slipped an energy drink to a bona fide lazy person? Actually, I know exactly what would happen - their laziness would be accelerated. I’ve seen it; they basically do even less, just complain more because they are aware of distractions that keep them from sleeping. Every teacher suffering through August anxiety nightmares knows exactly what I’m talking about.
RESTLESS LEG SYNDROME - Just exactly what was I doing when this affliction became a national epidemic? I was probably doing toes-rising calf contractors using the full stack on a gym machine. That’s what real athletes do!
If we feel a part of our body is quivering with the threat of an exotic illness, we immediately try to hurt ourselves to prove it isn’t true.
Drug companies are losing their ever-loving minds because they know that millions of morons change their lives based on what they see on television.
I just read that after the Demi Moore movie “Striptease,” thousands of fitness centers had to install a pole in the aerobics room.
ICE CHAIR - Shelly Talmo is my former student going back to her Shelly Backus days before the Shelly Pratt days. She may be over 40 but remains an irrepressible kid in my eyes and the eyes of just about everyone else. Shelly has been running the Seven Sisters Series races preparing to head out to off-road Appalachia this summer where one thing that ain’t running is the water, to offer volunteer help fixing up substandard properties. I know her son Dane is part of the community service, with no court order, just people helping people. Shelly ran last Saturday in the Venus on the Half Shell 5K under brutally hot conditions, then collapsed into the finish chute “ice chair” where she was tended to by Jim Mays, a paramedic and Dewey Beach Patrol guy, on her right and Lewis Sacks, a Sussex County paramedic, on her left. Shelly, trapped in the world of being Shelly, saw the camera and sprang to her feet indicating she was all right, but had absolute zero left in the race. I believe she needed the expert attention she so graciously accepted.
KIMEE KLABE - “She got everything she needs, she’s an artist and she don’t look back. She can take the dark out of the nighttime and paint the daytime black.”
- Bob Dylan.
Kim Klabe, YMCA fitness director for the last 14 years, is resigning that position to devote her creative energies to her artistic talents. Long-time members of the YMCA have seen Kim’s paintings hanging on the walls and I am a local collector since before numbered prints were cool. I’ll tell you take a number because if you want a Kim Klabe original from the collection you won’t get one. Kim has run just about every Strider and Seven Sisters road race over the last four years and I have the action photos to prove. Best of luck, Kim.
TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL - There is a monumental lesson to be learned by watching the summer junior lifeguard programs. Young, enthusiastic guards, still well shy of college graduation, teach very young kids life and lifesaving skills while getting them to reach down and push themselves and at the same time increase their sense of self-esteem. This is done without any bogus certification or portfolios, just young people teaching younger people.
I know the classroom is different - more sedentary and not much fun - but it doesn’t have to be that way and a teacher or mentor shouldn’t need a court order to take kids into the open air. The old dogs of war need to pay attention to all this or maybe even move over Rover.
SNIPPETS - Bonds is a sad case and not worth gnashing and grinding one’s teeth over after bonging an Amp for energy.
The Eagles are at the Ravens Monday at 7 p.m. in the first preseason game of the season and many starters won’t even suit up. The Ravens have already broken camp, and I don’t want to hear how rugged NFL camp is because it is not nearly as tough as high school and college camps back in the 60s where hydration was a word known only to volunteer fireman. You had to tackle lineman escorted by a blocker in a drill called an eye-opener. As a nation, from football to military boot camp, young men may look hard, but most have grown soft which is ironic considering all the survival programs where yuppies without real jobs just scream to be abused and, in fact, pay for it. I’m going for a walk. Where’s my IPOD?
