Two weeks ago I became Jeff’s
assistant cross country coach. I still haven’t exactly been hired or anything
so official yet, but the position finally posted on the school district’s
website yesterday. Last night I finally applied for the job I’ve been doing for
the past two weeks. Progress!
It’s been two weeks since I jumped
face first into a hoard of high schoolers, and good news: it’s getting EASIER!
Wow, teenagers sure know how to give surly-closed-suspicious looks and then
after some invisible test, they flip a switch and shine all their happy joking
welcoming grins like sparkly spotlights. I don’t know the code or the test, but
I have somehow managed to pass the first round. Eventually I will even learn
all of their names too–I’m about halfway there.
On the home front, I am getting
pretty good at cooking our dinner at lunchtime so it’s ready for us the minute
we walk in the door all hungry from cross country practice. I have always
struggled with motivation to cook at 4pm, so it’s nice to have cross country
practice to get me to cook early. Jay, Rose, and Amber are doing relatively
well with our cross country schedule, the most difficult part for them being
the meets. We have already put in some long hours at the first two meets, and
there are plenty more where that came from.
I posted this picture with the
caption “working mom” last week, and a friend commented “working mom is an
oxymorn!” She was SO RIGHT. The term “working mom” has always kind of bugged
me, and that is exactly why–to be a mom is to WORK, work work. It doesn’t
matter if that work is a paying job outside the home or not, by default, moms
WORK. We are all working moms! Moms who have paying jobs aren’t more or less
than moms who don’t get paid. Ok, I’ll step down from my soap box now.
We had our second cross country
meet of the season on Saturday, September 8, 2018. Jeff left at 6:15 that
morning to get things ready for the meet, and I hustled the kids through the
breakfast-clothes-potty routine and got out the door by 7:08am. At the high
school, we boarded the big yellow school bus with the team at 7:30am and rode
it to Hermiston, Oregon–75 minutes away–for the Runner’s Soul XC Festival. (I
was so glad not to be driving a big van this time!) Jeff has picked some good
cross country meets this year. First the Ultimook with the mud pit and camping,
now the Hermiston meet.
The sun was shining brightly in a
blue blue sky and I did not wear enough sunscreen. In spite of my plentiful
past experience with cross country meets, I am still riding a steep learning
curve as an assistant coach. I told Jeff I felt two steps behind everything
that needed to happen on Saturday. We brought more than twice as many runners
to Hermiston as we did to the previous meet, so there was a whole lot more
crowd control involved. But Jeff turned the girls’ team completely over to me
and they made it to the start line in time, all warmed up. Success! I folded
under their pleading eyes after the race, though, and didn’t make them run
their entire cool down. I don’t know if that lapse/mercy endeared me to them or
if they are simply getting used to me in general, but after the race I noticed
a whole lot more of them started calling me coach!
Even one of the “icebox” girls
that I avoided for three days after the first time I tried running with her at
practice has thawed somewhat. The first time I ran with her, she gave me cold
sidelong stares and one-syllable responses and succeeded in simultaneously
shattering my confidence and intimidating me into Googling “how to talk to
teenagers/how to get teenagers to talk” later that night. Even SHE started
smiling and talking to me and called me coach. I felt like a new mom whose baby
said “mama” for the first time. Next to the family titles (mom, grandma, aunt,
etc.) is there any title better than COACH? I think not. My little heart melted
to goo and I had to resist the mother-hen impulse to gather those cute
[high-spirited] high school girls into a big team hug. Haha… maybe later.
When we arrived back in Sunnyside
after the meet and everyone was filing off the bus, at least 50% of the kids
said thank you to the bus driver and “bye, coach” to me. (Jeff was already off
the bus, unloading cargo.) I glowed. I still feel quite impressively uncertain
about a whole lot of things that I face in this coaching gig, but the scary
moody teenagers are starting to thaw around me and it is good. Don’t get me
wrong, I am still exceedingly intimidated by the 42 cross country runners on
our team, but at least it’s getting better, one name and one conversation at a
time!
Next up in my coaching progression
is to keep learning names of course, and to OWN decisions. Making quick
decisions on the fly has never been my strength and there are dozens of tiny
quick decisions that need to be made in the middle of practice or meets. When I
don’t know the official team tradition or answer, I tend to be more uncertain,
like at the start line on Saturday when I asked the girls “do you normally do
strides before the race?” Instead I could have owned it and said “two strides,
go!” And back at the tent, I was 99% sure I heard two quiet [mild] curse words
from some of the guys. I should have immediately said “FIVE PUSH-UPS!” to the
perpetrator just like Jeff does when he hears profanity, but I quailed at the
confrontation and didn’t muster the guts to face-off with the teenage boys over
their language. The fact that I wasn’t 100% sure on the name of the kid in
question sapped me of my remaining gumption and I looked the other way.
Jay, Rose, and Amber were
TROOPERS on Saturday. Amber was her usual wild self on the bus ride (flailing
limbs, hitting, instigating), but eventually I got out headphones and let her
and Rose listen to Disney music on my phone, one earbud for each girl (Amber
called them earrings). That kept them tame for the rest of the drive.
Meanwhile, Jay read-read-read over 250 pages, until he told me that reading was
getting boring because he had read so much.
When it was time for the open
race at 10:55am, all five of us White things toed the line. We convinced Jay
and Rose to run the 1.5 mile race with the promise of ice cream when we got
home, and Jeff decided to run with Amber as long as she wanted to run (she
lasted about 150 meters). Before the race started, we stacked our hands and
said “1, 2, 3, WHITES!” and I cringed just a little bit at how our last name
sounds so racist, especially at the clearly multicultural starting line. But
White is our name! The 1.5 mile and the 5k open races both started at the same
time–the 1.5 milers did one lap, and the 5k-ers did two laps around the course.
I ran the full 5k and even though
it was pretty flat, the grass was spongy and full of little uneven lumps and
divots that sent much of my momentum sideways. But I managed to run a 23:29 5k
on that lumpy course on a hot sunny day, and I felt satisfied. Rose finished
with a 16 minute-something 1.5 miler, and Jay came in at 18:30.
The race provided free slices of
fresh, local Hermiston watermelon for everyone. Sinking my teeth into a thick
juicy wedge of sweet watermelon after a hot sweaty run was a beatific balm to
the heat. YUM. Hermiston watermelon really is the best. I wish I had taken
pictures of all the sweaty runners with watermelon juice running down their
chins and elbows, but I had watermelon juice running down my chin and elbows
too! It was sweet, sticky, and soothing.
Jay and Rose were not happy that
I stayed away from the team tent for two entire races. I was busy running all
over the giant field and cheering on our team! Apparently Amby got violent
again. Next time we bring them to a meet, I’m turning on a movie for Amb during
the races, if only to save Jay and Rose the bruises. At one point, Amber
snuggled up to the teenagers playing a Nintendo game they had brought, and
convinced them to give her a turn, whereupon she shocked them with her skills.
The girl was born with technology in her thumbs.
The team was relatively
discouraged overall after the meet (hot days are always discouraging). In his
pep talk on the bus ride home, Jeff expertly sandwiched in praise and specific
things to work on, with a nod to their solid week of hard training and a
reminder that this is the part of the season where we do the extra running and
work in order to gain the fitness and reap the rewards later in the season.
Before this speech, when Jeff told me what he was going to say to the team, he
asked me if there was anything I wanted to add. I suggested the explanation
about the WHY of the hard training through meets (aka not resting before the
meets early in the season). Jeff is so dutiful and good at asking my opinion
and keeping me involved in the coaching, even though he doesn’t really need my
input. He was all for me standing up and speaking my two cents before or after
his speech, but I told him to say it–I may be making progress at coaching and
ice-breaking, but I am not quite ready to address the entire team and command
their attention in that intuitive TEACHER-way Jeff does, especially in a school
bus while roaring down the highway.
On Saturday afternoon, we got
home at 4:45pm. It was a long day for us as coaches and a long day for our good
kids. Jay, Rose, and Amber were feeling quite exhausted from the intense day,
so we agreed to watch HP4 while eating leftovers for dinner. That cheered them
up, along with their ice cream dessert, which we promised previously. A benefit
to limiting our kids’ dessert intake: ice cream is a sufficiently decadent
reward after a long day.
Captions and pictures:
- Sisters, sharing “earrings” while listening to Disney music on the bus.
- More bus time. We missed having Amber in a five point harness.
- Amber, stealing the show with her untapped Nintendo skills.
- The girls were taking a team picture and they said “Coach, we need you in the picture too!”
- My extreme watch tan line, right after Saturday’s sunny toasting.
- Amber brought a stack of books to read at cross country practice one day. It mean a few extra pounds for me to push in the stroller, but at least she didn’t drop any.
- Hanging out on the bike path, waiting for the team to run past during their tempo run. That was a hot hot day in Sunnyside.
- Still on the bike path: Amber got out and played in the dirt while she waited.
- The tempo run was only 20 minutes, but standing in the 90+ degree sun on the side of the road for even 20 minutes felt long.
- Take a bow, Jay! One morning last week Jay got ready for school (including practicing piano for 35 minutes!) and then disappeared. When it was time to leave, he materialized, saying “I have a surprise for you.” HE CLEANED THE ENTIRE DISASTROUSLY MESSY PLAY ROOM! Cleaning surprises are my absolute favorite kind of surprises. This was a first and it came out of nowhere. YES!
- I have been cooking a lot–daytime cooking agrees with me, apparently. We had leftovers for three extra nights to finish all of the week’s dinners: chicken tikka masala, parmesan chicken, and chicken enchiladas. It was a chickeny week.
- On Labor Day I went on a run along the canal road by our house and startled a loose cow. It wheeled around and trotted away from me at a brisk pace. I was amused.
- September in Sunnyside means the divine perfume of sun-warmed grapes wafts gently on the breeze. (until the wind changes and we get the perfume from the various dairy farms…)
- A grape view.
- We have had such pristine fresh mornings this month. September sunrises make me happy to be alive.
- Amber and I can’t resist going for walks or jumps or swings to enjoy the gorgeous morning weather.
- A sword and nun-chucks at the dirt piles.
- Dirt: an Amber’s best friend.
- While Amber dug in the dirt, I drank in the scenery.
- I appreciate the symmetry of the big irrigation wheels.
- I discovered a clump of tall fuzzy cattails growing down by the mini creek near the dirt piles.
- Shopping with Amber is like taking an octopus in the cart. She reaches ALL of her limbs, arms and legs, out to try and touch, bump, knock down, or grab anything and everything we pass. All I do the entire shopping trip is say things like “Amber, please stop that.” and “AMBER, NO.” That’s why we need our dirt piles and country rambles, so she can explore somewhere without a bunch of negatives, and so we can have a positive interaction after all of the grocery store NO’s.
- This week I came down with a mild head cold and made a large pot of chicken noodle soup to soothe it. I also restocked our medicine and all of the above are helping me through.
- Swinging free in our front yard. Amber kept saying “I can fly! I can fly! I can fly!” just like they say on Peter Pan.
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