4x4

Yesterday we missed what may have been the highlight of our son's year in high school sports. He is on a track team for the first time, a very different experience than playing on a soccer team. First off, there are probably 100 other students on the track team--a lot more than on the soccer team. Second, it's a whole new technique to learn. Yeah, there's a lot of running in soccer, but he is learning how to run a race. And while there are a few team events (like the four by four), it's mostly an individual sport.
I am still learning all the terms for the distance events that I never paid much attention to during the Olympics. I get the eye-rolling, head-shaking treatment when I mess up. "4x4" is the 400-meter relay (4-person team), "4" is the 400-meter race, "32" is the 3200-meter distance race, and "distance medley" is a crazy relay race where the first person runs 800 meters, the second runs 1600 meters, the third person runs 3200 meters, and the last person (the anchor) runs 400 meters. I'm sure I've got that wrong.
Anyway, at the track meet yesterday, our son was the anchor of the frosh/soph boys distance 4x4 (the sprinters have a different relay team). It was one of the last races of the meet, so all four schools' worth of track teams were hanging around watching. The varsity boys distance runners had already run their relay, so even they were cheering them on. My son's team was ahead by the time it was his turn to run, but around the 200-meter mark the other team's anchor began to pull ahead. "But I found something inside," our son said, and beat the other runner over the finish line. They won! And I missed it. I'm really really sorry I didn't get to see it. But on the other hand, it was pretty great to ask him how the meet went when he got home and hear him say, "Awesome." And get the blow by blow description of his win. Maybe that was even better than trying to share his moment when it happened.
He took the bus home from the meet. I think he is enjoying his independence.

The Middle School Band

This year I'm the band parent for our middle school band. We have lots of band families--nearly 200 of them--who work the carwash and the bake sales and send in checks and chaperone the field trips. They are great, and constantly surprise me with their generosity. But I'm the one who sends out all the emails, writes the fundraising letters, and coordinates with the band teacher. To be honest, it's more work than I thought it would be. But then it's something I support unequivocally. I have no mixed feelings about it. The band is great! Participating in band has been a huge part of both my sons' experience in middle school. And the band teacher gives 150 percent every day to his students, and often more.
On Friday, the band teacher took the advanced band, all 55 of them, down on a charter bus to a high school in San Mateo to play in the CMEA festival. There ended up just being three adults chaperoning: me, a woman whose son wasn't even in the advanced band but just wanted to help, and a stepmother of one of the band members who toted along her two-month-old baby in a snuggly. See what I mean about the generosity?
At the festival, the band played for judges who rated them and then gave them a mini-workshop on improving their performance of the pieces they had just played. The students were a little cowed walking through an unfamilar high school, and stared enviously at the swimming pool in the center of the suburban campus (as did I!). But once they started warming up they were their usual focused, distracted, wise-cracking, serious, giggling selves--in short, that whole mix of contradictions that middle schoolers are. The only mishap was the student who discovered he had brought the broken baritone horn and couldn't play. Their performance for the judges was crisp and energized, and they earned a unanimous superior rating. We were all proud.
I watched them get off the bus back at our school at the end of the day. They are all shapes and sizes, some midway through their growth spurts, some eagerly awaiting them. Long hair, short hair, short and pudgy, tall and awkward, sagging, too-short pants--it's all there. Mostly the girls are poised and seem several years ahead of the boys in maturity. (The important word here is "seem.") But each of them already looked a bit more mature than they had in the morning, getting on the bus. They looked like they had accomplished something and it felt pretty good.

On the Mountaintop

The most thrilling moment for me on our ski trip to Breckenridge last week was skidding down the ridge below the Peak 8 Imperial Express Superchair. At 12,840 ft., it's the highest chairlift in North America. I think it is the closest to going off a ski jump that I will ever come. The trail along the ridge turns sharply to the right, following the ridgeline, so in front of me was air and the town of Breckenridge spread out before me. The wind was blowing and my fingers were trembling and I decided it was more important to get down the mountain than to take a photo. (The photo above is from partway down the ridge, looking towards Peak 9.)

I'm not a big one for heights. Even sitting on the chairlift, I don't look down. But I couldn't go to Breckenridge and miss the highest ski lift in North America, so when the men in my family said it was time to brave the Imperial Express, I followed along. My sons are faster skiers than me, but so far I've been able to get down anything they can, even with a bit more form, thanks to my ski lessons as a teenager. Making it down this one filled me with adrenaline and counts as a personal triumph.

But on our last day of skiing, my older son and husband topped my moment. I was cross-country skiing with my dad, and my dad's wife and my younger son were home with a stomach bug that had churned through me and my older son earlier. The two intrepid ones took off their skis, hiked up from the Imperial Express into the "extreme terrain" area (double black diamond) at the summit of Peak 8, traversed the ridge toward Peak 9, and finally found what seemed to be the least gnarly chute down. In the photo above, it's the one right in front of that menacing black knob. They made it down. My son said--with a huge grin and glowing cheeks--he was the most scared he has ever been in his life. I think this time they crossed a line: they went somewhere that I won't follow.
On the summit (12,998 ft)

Tennis Milestone

That's how I want to be: Serena Williams. Oh, I know it's an impossibility, but I can dream, can't I? Just look at her! What an incredible twist, perfectly balanced. My tennis teacher said it's good to watch tennis (duh) but also look at photos of professionals to examine their mechanics, so you can imitate them. This visual reinforcement even works on your brain subconsciously (there are whole books about it). So now I Iike looking at pictures of tennis players in action.

Today was our last tennis class, and Barbara and I played a match. Well, we only got through one set during our hour class. She beat me, 5-1. But this was the first full set of tennis I have played, ever! There's so much to think about, besides just trying to hit the ball, like where it's going to go, and what's going to be coming back over the net after that, and what the score is. It was fun, and I have a lot to work on.

Bike Lady

This represents a triumph for me. Not only did I walk into REI and buy a bike rack for the roof of our station wagon but I attached and assembled it with only the help of my younger son, an expert at putting small things together.
The bike rack is one of those things my husband and I have been going around and around about and neither of us has done anything. Here's the conversation:
"Honey, let's go on a family bike ride."
"Our bike rack is too wimpy for more than two bikes, it'll wreck our hatchback and they're not secure, they might fall off on the freeway and it's too much hassle to try to put them in the car, etc. etc."
"Okay, let's buy a roof rack so we can get them all up there and bring them when we go on vacation."
"It's too high, you won't be able to lift them up on the roof, etc., etc."
"Oh, forget it."
But yesterday I was having lunch with my mom and stepdad and sighing about how we couldn't bring our bikes on vacation with us, and how my husband had even checked to see how much it would cost to rent a car that we could put our bikes in ($500 for the week), and rejected the idea. They said, "Just. Go. Buy. A. Bike. Rack."
They accompanied me for moral support. Once the 9-foot-high bike rack expert started talking about Thule parts on Yakima racks and Yakima parts on Thule racks and attachments kits and optimum attachment positions, our eyes began to glaze over. "Pay attention," I told myself, while he scurried around the racks collecting feet and kits and bars and totalling it all up: just over $200.
"That's not bad," said my stepdad.
"'Course, you need the locks," said the bike rack expert. "You need a minimum of 4 for the rack, and one each for the bike carriers, but they only sell them in even-numbered packs. And how many bike carriers do you want?"
"Oh, is that extra?" I asked nervously. It turned out the $200 was just the cost of the rack, and I needed three bike carriers at least (we didn't all have to go cycling at the same time, did we?). I gulped as he added up the costs to a ridiculously large amount (let's just say more than the cost of renting the damn SUV), and then I stood there paralyzed, trying to make a decision.
My stepdad wandered over to the racks that attach to a hitch. "Do you have a hitch?" he asked hopefully. The ones that attached to a hitch were half the price.
"Uh, yeah," I said. "Maybe we should go with that."
He looked at me a bit doubtfully. "I'll go outside and see what size hitch you have."
He came back a few moments later, grinning. "No hitch. I guess it was just a figment of someone's imagination."
It was either the roof rack that cost more than my new bike, or nothing.
Here's how I rationalized it:
1. We could keep it after the vacation, unlike the SUV we weren't going to rent anyway.
2. It could be transferred to any future car that we might buy when our station wagon conks out ("Of course you may need different attachment feet..." the bike rack expert said).
3. It could be used to attach the cargo box we've also talked about buying for our camping trips.
4. It would increase the number of activities our sons will consent to do with us.
5. It would be nearly impossible for our bikes to fall off on the freeway, and we could lock our bikes onto the rack, enabling us to stop at the supermarket on the way without worrying about getting our bikes stolen.
Feeling a bit intoxicated, I bought it. We are REI members, after all.
So there would be no chance for second thoughts, my son and I spent an hour attaching the rack that afternoon. Actually my son spent about 20 minutes and I spent another 40 minutes in my windbreaker in the wind and fog. His contribution was mainly his can-do attitude, gained from years of assembing complex Lego constructions from wordless diagrams. "Remember, this is just a big Lego," I told myself as the wind whipped my hood off. It would have helped if the Thule people included a diagram showing how the whole thing was supposed to look when it was all assembled, the way the Lego people do. There were lots of close-up diagrams showing how the bolts fit into the washer plate and how the key fit into the lock, but no diagrams of the successfully assembled rack with bike attached.
Also, the REI bike rack expert had specifically mentioned that it was important to attach the feet at the optimum point indicated in the instructions. The instructions did not say anything about where to attach the feet, although there was this cryptic expression next to a picture of an allen wrench tightening a bolt: "2.5Nm/1.8ft-lb/1,8pi-lb." Could it be that I was actually supposed to measure the force I was using to tighten the bolts? That was laughable.
I finally called REI and asked to speak with our bike rack expert but he was "at lunch," so I explained my worries to the other bike rack expert who answered the phone. He said not to worry about it. "Okay," I said.
I stopped worrying about if I had attached the feet in the correct position and started worrying about how I was going to install the bike carriers. I studied the Thule website and downloaded the instructions for my model, but they were different than the instructions in my box. I decided to call it quits for the day.
The tricky part was that evening, announcing the fact of our new bike rack to my husband. To my credit, I did not lie about how much it cost. To his credit, all he said was, "I have my doubts."
But the next day, it all became clear. It's amazing what a good night's sleep can do. I finished installing two of the carriers, and me and my son got the bikes in the rack and drove down to Crystal Springs for another great ride, this time with some friends.

Here is that photo of the fog creeping over the hills that I wanted to get last time.
When my husband came home tonight, he said he was glad the bike rack worked out. Not another word about how much it cost. He is a great guy.