Rancid – Fall Back Down

G’s motor gets in the way of her thinking. She’s a play-past-the-whistle player, not a sniper. 20 years of team sports makes it easy for me to recognize. Handling it appropriately is another challenge. She’s not even 5; they are all bouncy-bouncy-ding-dong-dell retards at that age.   and you can never go full retard.

She wants to improve, she doesn’t want to work on it, i want her to improve, i don’t want to work on her. An agonizing responsibility and chore – my kid WILL appreciate athletics, i WILL not be DooshBagDad. I’ve tried to give her guidance and structure, up to not ever ruining her stoke. Agonizing. last month i caved and shelled out $120 Lifetime Bucks to get someone else to teach her to swim, the elusivs break-through on stroke mechanics so threatened to piss us both off. She’s like this with the Wii, she’s like this with reading, her teachers said it in her conference, she’s like this with Candyland. Shoot first, apologize later.

So when do you push your kid and when do you drift?

G is the fastest kid in her school. I’ve never run with her for more than about 200 yards before she gets bored or lazy. Maybe all the other kids in her school are scatteredbrained athletes too?

Anywho…

There was this Kids 1k at Tempe Town Lake that Beckie had sorta been talking up. G was non-commital, as were we, registration being at 7:30 and the run not being til 9:30.

This article pushed me over the edge. Good thing too, cause Beckie came home with 5 lbs of potato salad and 5lbs of chips from her company xmas party. Details, grouchy morning, cold registration, bathroom lines, way too early to get G excited, and hours to fill making sure she didn’t blow up. Though the sunrise was nice.

How To Care For A tinyRunner:

1. use all that preRace time to potty, over and over again, while…
2. reaping the rewards of forcing water on her for the last 12 hrs
   1. see above about 5lbs of chips
   2. who would suffer if G crashed and burned in her first race?
3. feed tinyRunner apples and bananas and get used to the weather
4. build stoke

Meanwhile Beckie ran a 23 min 5k, leaving us 37 additional minutes to stall a hopping G! Getting her to sit still, to relax and save her energy, was archetypal of her coaching challenges.

For the last few days I tried to get G to think about pace, reminding her how sometimes on the 2-bike we go superfast and sometimes we go steady. That was pointless, her idea of steady is goofing off and letting me pedal. Beckie said we should just let her do her thing – sprint out til she almost pukes, then pick up the shattered pieces and try to guide her home.

Which is pretty much exactly what happened. Parents get to run with their kids so I kept in her ear, like i do on the 2-bike and did in Ouray. After the initial wall she mostly settled into a steady run, and didn’t walk a bit. It got ugly, not like when its just us and she’ll throw a tantrum when faced with some suffering; she tried really hard to be strong, the effort was hurting her. We rarely put in her places with structure, so she rarely deals with adversity. I’m impressed she was so strong, mentally and physically. There were a few small hills, and she’d try to sprint only to blowup, then want to compensate on the downhill. By the end she was starting to get it about pace, at least for those ~7 minutes. She wobbled in a few spots on the back half of the lap, paced herself up the last climb while dodging potential-concussions running at her from the other directions, and rallied hard for the finish.

Hard to say if any lessons stuck with her, but she was ready to get on the 2-bike and ride to the park for sunset.

shitty cell phone pics

and the shwag. not bad for $10. Kids are the loss leader, it got Beckie to pony up $25, more than a $1\minuite