Winterlude

I borrowed the term "Winterlude" from a section of Neil Peart's "Ghost Rider," his personal journey of motorcycles and healing from the loss of both his daughter and wife in the same year.  Perhaps more on that some other day.

Suffice it to say Neil spent winters at his lake house in the woods somewhere outside Montreal and came to appreciate the cold and the snow.  Much as I have here in Maine.  Some winters are interminable and intolerable; others can offer bounty.

Saturday found me, not for the first time this year, in 20 degree weather, gliding on my cross country skis through soft snowshoe paths in the woods, climbing, exploring, descending, learning, balancing, and falling.  With technology come the benefits of GPS tracking, and I can even see where I've been and how long it took me to get there.  But the journey is the important part.  Does it really matter that I covered 4.96 miles at an average moving speed of 3.94 mph?  I knew I'd made progress by the way my legs responded joyfully to the request to climb the hill.  Progress!

Sunday was bitter cold, single digits and below zero over night.  What a difference a day makes.

Monday was back to the high teens and another exploration up and away across the hill.  Glorious! You could hear me shouting for joy as I completed sharp, fast turns on the narrow trails.  Turning on cross country skis is not at all like downhill.  It's a strange form of balance and technique, and like learning to ride a bicycle, the faster you go, the better you'll be.  I'm still learning.  I'm sure the felling trees (yes, they're doing some clearing this winter) could hear my whoops of joy.   For those who are curious: if you're in the woods, you can hear them too.

Tuesday I awoke to a fresh three inches of snow, but by 1:00 pm it was 50 degrees and it rained hard all afternoon.  In the evening I plugged in the pump and fought back the tide rising into the garage.  What a difference a day makes, indeed.


I've seen winter break and give up its stranglehold on Maine as late as the end of March, and more specifically during a walk on a March 30th, (the year I can't remember, maybe 2008) at 1:30 in the afternoon on a bright day and the temperature pushing a balmy 30 degrees.  One moment it was still the bright cold of winter, and the next it simply snapped and coiled away.  Gone.  This year, winter's hardly made an appearance, with just a handful of nights below zero, a couple of rainy thaws, and snow here and again.  Bummer of a year to own a snowmobile; kind of a let down if you're starting to get the vibe of cross country skiing.

But it will return next year.  And I'm pretty sure it's not done yet.  That said, the golf clubs need dusting and I've got some scoring to do come spring.

Sizing up the Competition

Our eldest Toadroller,* Luke, pursues golf with a passion (and skill-set to match) the likes of which I never really thought possible, and it's taught me a thing or two.

I mean, sure, pros can shoot that 66 to come from behind and win a tournament, but my personal experience with the game has been that it takes time and dedication to simply break 90 here and again.  Luke has taught me that mere mortals CAN play golf; it is possible.

We spent Sunday and Monday together at a fancy resort in New Hampshire, where he attempted to qualify for the USGA's Junior Amateur national tournament.

In the tournament, playing with truly skilled peers, he shot 86, 83 over 36 holes of golf in one long day.  He finished middle of the pack and tied with his two playing partners.  There is pressure in a tournament, and there are differences when portions of your game go missing.  During Sunday's practice round with me helping caddy and map out the course for him, he split the fairways, stuck his irons, and made his putts to shoot a 73.  Yesterday his woods found the woods, his irons didn't strike such fire, and he did a lot of work with the putter to earn pars and bogeys with just a few birdies.

I thought it would be a long, quiet drive home, but Luke was chatty as could be and confident. 

"I can play with those guys," he said to me.  Not cocky, not wishful thinking, but simply confident.  He's proven it to himself.  He's had a taste of the next level and it fired up his competitive juices.  "I can't wait for golf season to really get rolling."  I don't know what he thinks the last three months have been- he's already played a good thirty rounds- but in his mind, baseball has kept him from the course and he as work to do.

Luke is on the left, sizing up the hole and the competition on a 200 yard par 3.  He stuck that one to 9 feet and made the birdie.

*Actually, he's more of a turtle.

Learn by doing

My experiment is paying off. 

Levi trapped the ball on defense, waited, carried around an oncoming player, passed it up-field and then dropped off the play, settling into the precise position a defender should be in for the next ball to come his way.

This spring I watched my 7th grade daughter's softball team play a forty-five minute first inning.  Neither team had a put-out on defense, a hit, or a strike out.  Each team walked the entire batting order around.  Some pitches landed three feet in front of the pitcher; most went three feet over the up or short of the plate.

I watched her team at practice.  They started off with the coach hitting grounders to the team, one player at a time.  Grounder, catch (or miss), throw it back in, next player.  All fourteen.  Each player handled the ball for about two seconds every five minutes.  Batting practice was (of necessity?) pitched by the coach.


It dawned on me that these kids never actually spend any time playing sports and consequently they have no skills at sports.  Practices are short and made up of skills drills.  The coach tries to get their attention for five minutes to explain the drill, then runs them through it for another ten.  Each kid maybe gets one minute of experience in a ten minute drill.  The rest of their lives fully scheduled, they never play sand-lot baseball.  I'd doubt they know what "ghost runner on third" means.

There's no play in the sports.

So I decided that this fall, when I coached the boy's soccer team, I wouldn't do any drills.  I'd go full scrimmage from the first player to show up.  And so my experiment.  I have a whistle.  When it blows, everyone freezes where they are and I ask what's going on, make them think and answer, and then blow the play back on with another whistle.  If the play is at the other end of the field, I'm guiding my players, explaining and showing where to be and why.  In this way I am, single-handed, keeping fourteen nine to eleven year old boys fully engaged and playing soccer for an hour, giving them a full season's worth of drill and experience every week. 

And so Levi, one of my favorite human beings, went from a defensive mindset of boot-the-ball to trapping it, carrying it around an oncoming player, passing it up the field to his wing, and falling back into position.  In a span of ten minutes.  And he kept doing it.