Somethin' Happenin' Here …

Saturday, October 4, 2008

Meters: 6,000
Time: 27:50
500-meter pace: 2:22-2:23, with sub-2:00 at 5, 10, 15 & 20 minutes
Strokes per minute: varied
Total strokes rowed: 44,088

Here’s a good sign. Today I did another “sprint” workout. I just kind of decided as I sat down. I feel good, let’s go … One minute of sub-2:20 pace at 5, 10, 15 & 20 minutes. Can I say it like this: It was easy. Or at least, not hard. I’ve been back at the Concept2 consistently for a month now. Every other day after day. Closing in on 50,000 meters rowed. And this one felt real good. So good I decided to extend it past the 25-minute mark and take it out to a well-rounded 6,000 meters. I can feel the base beneath me growing solid, as if the past 20 years on this machine have come back to me. I have rediscovered it, it has found me, something.

Of course, keep in mind that my sub-2:20 “sprin,t” all of a minute, still brings me home in a full eight minutes for 2,000 meters. And that’s provided I could hold that pace for seven more minutes!

An After-You-Read “My Father’s Heart” Book Recommendation. “The Real All Americans” by Sally Jenkins (Broadway Books 2007; paperback). The subtitle describes it: “In 1912, a Native American football team, led by Jim Thorpe and Coach ‘Pop’ Warner, defeated the U.S. Military Academy on the fields of West Point. The astonishing winning streak of the Carlisle Indians, including victories against Harvard and Penn, changed American football into the game it is today.”

Actually, the subtitle doesn’t describe it. It’s really the story of how the United States tried and succeeded a bit but mostly failed in the seconf half of the 19th century in its attempts to aculturate the “American” Indians. This book is speaking to me, and maybe it will to you. Starting in 1975 I spent two years teaching English, Reading, Drama and Phys Ed. at St. Mary’s High School in St, Mary’s, Alaska, an Eslimo-Indian boarding school out near the Bering Sea on the lower reaches of the Yukon River. Maybe the best experience of my life. Surely, deciding to join the Jesuit Voilunteer Corp and go up there was THE crucial decision of my life. It changed everything. It got me out of York, Pa., and also away from my insular (though wonderful) college experience and demanded I see the world from within the uncomfortable vantage point of the minority eye.

“The Real All Americans” spends much much much of its time in the 30-year lead-up to that Carlisle-West Point game, describing the U.S.-Indian confrontation, the establishment of the Carlisle Indian School, it’s struggles to say open and — here’s the eye-opener for me — questioning its value while always recognizing the colossul effort requred to get the school off the ground and keep it going, often just day to day. This is what spoke to me. it brought back all of the emotions I remember well from my days at. St. Mary’s. Of how I was so fabulously full of myself for even just being out there, saving the world. And yet all the while living with the nagging doubt that all the while my being there was doing harm in ways I couldn’t then, and can’t now, describe. Jenkins captures ALL aspects of that dilemma, from the big-picture bureaucracy of it all to the little day-to-day happenings — good times and bad — that I remember so well from my two years at St. Mary’s.

I’m not finished the book yet. It is 1904 and Jim Thrope has just arrived on campus, “a brooding teenager who stood just five foot five and weighed a waiflike 115 pounds.”  Stay tuned for SportCenter. Meantime, yeah, read this book.