Month: November 2015

Over the past few years of living with my girlfriend, I have gained a lot of insight into the differences between men and women.  Some of these differences have been surprising.  That nobody would ever comment on my eating habits or physical appearance in public (or that their remarks would seem odd, not offending even if they did: “It’s amazing you stay so thin eating like that” would just bounce off me), or assume I would babysit their kids, or expect me to mother them through a crisis were all pretty surprising revelations for me that came about by living with a woman who was subject to those indecencies.

It is in just the same way that the past few years’ revelatory videos of police mistreating or killing African American men has made me reflect on certain events in my life — for example, I believe that the time a good ol’ boy southern cop exuding a Napoleon Complex pulled over a young man with a scraggily beard, Yankee plates, and three kayaks on his car on the pretense of running a stop sign (???) and queried him about drug running substances the young man had never heard of (most of which sounded like “Benzomaltrodextrineiclocyde — you know, Horse Dust!“) — might have ended drastically differently than the young man offering the officer one of the substances he did have (Newcastle Brown Ale) and both of them laughing had the young man had darker skin.

Continue reading “Just To Talk: On the Differences Between Men and Women”

There’s something riveting about the idea of perfection in sports.  We dream of watching a pitcher throw a perfect game, a football team have a perfect season, and for a long time, I dreamed about having a perfect run in whitewater slalom canoe racing.

Many years ago, when I was first starting out in whitewater, the late Jamie McEwan forwarded me an article about Olympic slalom kayaking called “Two Trips to the Top.”  It was a fascinating analysis of the history of the two of the best whitewater slalom racers of their generation — Rebecca Giddens from the United States and Oliver Fix from Germany.

The author was former US Slalom Team coach Bill Endicott — probably one of the twenty most  interesting people I’ve ever met: a Harvard grad, a Marines Corps officer, the architect of the wildly successful US Whitewater Slalom Team in the 1980s, a driving force behind starting the Slalom World Cup and in slalom’s re-inclusion into the Olympics in 1992, the Director of Research and Analysis in the Clinton White House, author of numerous books about paddling and about politics, and father of a rock star.

In “Two Trips to the Top” — written in 2003 after countless interviews — Endicott delved into the question of how Giddens and Fix took such different paths to international and Olympic success in whitewater slalom.  The Giddens profile was remarkable in itself.  Sometimes students ask me who the greatest athlete I’ve ever met was.  I tell them: Rebecca Giddens.  She was amazing (even better than my high school idol Matt Striebel).

Here’s the introduction to Giddens’s section in “Two Trips to the Top”:

Continue reading “The Ultimate Run”

It’s never a good sign when people come up to you at work and ask, “So how’s the commute going?  You surviving?” I get this all the time.

Or when neighbors hear where you work and say, “Really?  Wow, how do you even get there from here?”

Or, “What is that, three hours away?”

In fact, my commute — from the North Country of New Hampshire to Montpelier, Vermont — is 57 miles and takes 65 minutes.  I cross eight  towns, four school districts, three counties, and two states.  I spend just over 11 hours per week in the car.  

Continue reading “On Commuting”