Why does a turtle cross the road?

• 2 bunches scallions
• 1 head red leaf lettuce
• 1 head bok choy
• 1 head some leafy green with a fancy Italian name

It was fun to meet our new farmers, and see who else was there. But the 5:00 traffic was awful, so next time I’ll be riding my bike!

Biking with dogs on leash through town, as many often point out, is a brave venture. Crazy. Deadly even. I have mastered the art of standing on one peddle, leaving one foot in emergency position in case the dogs decide to bolt after another dog, a squirrel or worse, god forbid, a deer. Only once in my years of biking with dogs have I actually had a brush with my demise, but each ride is an exercise in hand-eye coordination and cardiac pump capacity. As we ride I scan ahead, aside, behind (I wish), searching for potential stimulus that may possibly cause the dogs to veer from our forward momentum, dragging me into sheer misery.

That is until I discovered Doggy Ride. Yep, Doggy Ride. The canine equivalent of the behind-your-bike carts for kids. This one comes complete with a sunroof so your four-legged friend can pop his head out Dino style. Mine take turns. It took awhile to get them comfortable with it, but now they ride in style and comfort. So much so I half expect one of them to call out “driver, how about a stroll at the park first eh?”

As this modern rickshaw heads out onto the streets with two dogs in tow, we ride safely to trail heads for hikes, to visit friends, to run errands. All is well and green in the world. Plus, I am getting some wicked quads from pulling 80 lbs uphill everyday.

We had much better luck digging a tunnel through the bank of snow next to the driveway fence. A nice crust of freezing rain helped support the roof of the tunnel, and even held up under the weight of 3 kids when they climbed on top. It has melted a bit since last week, but the forecast calls for more snow this week, so we should be able to build it back up. A project like this helps make shoveling more interesting.

Other things I learned:
Digging a snow tunnel helps keep you warm and out of the wind - good survival tip!
A garden trowel makes a great snow tool when your hands are frozen.
Kneeling in the snow makes a parents’ knees achy, but doesn’t seem to bother children at all.
Cocoa tastes better when your nose and cheeks are still pink and windburned.

Terrestrial by nature, my interactions with water over the last 20 years have been rooted primarily in getting from one landmass to the next, fording rushing rivers, traveling with ease through meandering streams, bathing in creeks on multi-day backcountry trips. I have, on occasion, puttered around in quiet, high mountain lakes, but this did not prepare me in any way for my experience in the pool.

In the pool, I wasn’t so much pushing my boundaries as maxing them out in the terrifying aquatic realm. In the pool, surrounded by beautifully muscled people, pulling themselves through the water with ease, only to reach the end where they flip-turned and launched perfectly in the opposite direction, I was suddenly morphed into a small child, starting anew. The lesson learned this day was one of humility, of abandoning ego altogether.

Starting a new sport takes more courage than I had realized, especially one so foreign to my body’s natural rhythm. As a life-long active, athletic woman, I am used to pushing my body and my personal comfort zones, actually seeking opportunities to do so out. I’ve run marathons and backpacked solo in wild places, but I have never had to wrestle with finding oxygen. Breathing is so simple and something I had, until this day, taken for granted entirely. As I approached the wall, instead of flip turning, I clung to it, heaving, trying to find air, relieved that I had made it this far without drowning. Somehow I had to find satisfaction in at least this much or forever be discouraged.

“You need to keep your head down Kathryn,” said the woman leading the class. “Follow the one eye in the water rule to know you are doing it correctly.” She demonstrates how in my desperation I am cranking my head to the ceiling to breath and how this throws off my stroke, slowing me down considerably. I nod, think this over and stand in the shallow end for entirely too long feeling utterly befuddled while my fellow classmates whiz up and down the lanes in a non-stop chain. I am still on the first exercise, while they have moved on to using accoutrements that help work on different muscle groups, to help perfect stroke. Even Jim is ahead of me, faster than me, using a kickboard.

I focus on letting go. I focus on my swimming, on keeping one eye in the water. As I move awkwardly through the water, I think about acceptance of myself as a beginner, starting completely over in a new realm. Celebrating every small victory, trying to turn what could be a nightmare scenario into a game, suddenly the sleek bodies speeding by disappear and I make it through the last half of the lane comfortably without gasping even once and with one eye in the water. I feel phenomenal. I feel like I have done something. A miniscule step, but I did it. I stuck with it.

When the class ends the friend who talked me into this madness emerges from the fast lane, having swum thousands of meters never stopping. “What did you think?” she asks. Silent for a moment, allowing my ego to slip away, realizing that I had faced a foreign, terrifying realm, “I feel awesome!” I respond. “I have never sucked so badly at anything in my life.” She laughs. She provides some encouraging words, explaining how she thinks group lap swimming is one of the hardest things to do as a beginner. Harder, I think, when you are an adult with a history of picking up sports quickly, easily and with extreme coordination.

To spend an hour feeling completely awkward, struggling and fumbling terribly was one of the best things I have done for myself in a long time. I had to let go and be entirely comfortable with me and what I was capable of, however pathetic and small that may be. I had to let myself be a kid again, exploring my body like I had just shown up in it. I had to accept that I didn’t dive into the pool and kick it Amanda Beard-style, though I’ll admit it was my fantasy while driving to the pool that evening.

I have stuck with it, swimming a few days a week with a goal to move out of the slow lane eventually, but not putting any pressure on when. I can’t flip turn yet, but I swim continuously without stopping to heave. Still, every time I get my swim gear together in the morning I think about how much I don’t want to go because I am so bad at it. I think about how when I tag the wall I long terribly to instead be somersaulting with speed. I think about how good I am at other sports and how I really just want to do those for the positive feedback. And then I realize this is exactly why I have to swim. Because it is such a big personal challenge.

“There’s too much to do,” says Rosemary Agneessens, principal of Creighton Elementary School in Phoenix, where morning and afternoon recesses for even the littlest kids were eliminated two years ago.

The same sentiment was put even more bluntly by Benjamin O. Canada, superintendent of schools in Atlanta, when he told The New York Times, “We are intent on improving academic performance. You don’t do that by having kids hanging on the monkey bars.”

Or do you?

Stewart Trost, assistant professor of kinesiology at Kansas State University, asserts, ”Kids who have recess display an improved ability to stay on task, are less fidgety in the classroom and are better behaved…movement is essential to the physical and social development of all children.”

Echoing those sentiments is Olga Jarrett, a child development specialist from Georgia State University: “An experimental study found that fourth-graders were more on-task, less fidgety and less disruptive in the classroom on days when they had recess, with hyperactive children among those who benefited the most. Breaks are helpful, both for attention and for classroom management and discipline.”

Ask any teacher after a rainy day where the students had to stay inside, and I guarantee you’ll get the same response: recess matters. In a country where nearly 20% of our children are obese, 4.4 million children are diagnosed with ADD or ADHD, and after-school time for children is frequently hyper-structured, does anyone who’s worked with kids really think that banning recess is a good idea?

Get the children outside. And while they’re there, maybe we adults should try it as well. Maybe it would clear our minds so we would quit trying to implement such horrible ideas on our children.

Whether you are running trails, climbing hills, cycling through rocky creek beds, or strapped in a pack for days on end, the outcome can be similar: pain in the butt. More precisely, the gluteus medius, the smaller neighbor to the more familiar gluteus maximus. These large muscles in the buttocks contribute greatly to forward and upward propulsion, in addition to sideways motion. Called into action in supporting the body on one limb, abducting the thigh when the limb is extended and steadying the pelvis, preventing it from rotating downward when the opposing side is lifted, the demands on this muscle are high. So high, in fact, that gluteus medius weakness is recognized as a likely culprit in many overuse injuries. Neglected in the quadriceps-dominated activities of running and cycling, which primarily involve forward movement in a straight line, even knee pain can result when glute muscles are not working at peak function.

Once your everyday, active, lifestyle causes sore, tight hips or when snapping off your pack’s hip belt at the end of the day brings tears to your eyes, its time to pay attention to your all important, oft neglected, butt. If vanity hasn’t pushed you to work for a firmer, tighter behind, pain and immobility are phenomenal motivators.

Being the New Year, I began to wonder what the heck this resolution stuff is about anyway. Naturally, I turned to the dictionary first. According to the online version of the Merriam-Webster:

res·o·lu·tion, pronunciation \ˌre-zə-ˈlü-shən\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English resolucioun, from Anglo-French or Latin; Anglo-French resolucion, from Latin resolution-, resolutio, from resolvere
Date:14th century
1: the act or process of resolving: as a: the act of analyzing a complex notion into simpler ones b: the act of answering : solving c: the act of determining d: the passing of a voice part from a dissonant to a consonant tone or the progression of a chord from dissonance to consonance e: the separating of a chemical compound or mixture into its constituents f (1): the division of a prosodic element into its component parts (2): the substitution in Greek or Latin prosody of two short syllables for a long syllable g: the analysis of a vector into two or more vectors of which it is the sum2: the subsidence of a pathological state (as inflammation)3 a: something that is resolved b: firmness of resolve4: a formal expression of opinion, will, or intent voted by an official body or assembled group5: the point in a literary work at which the chief dramatic complication is worked out6 a: the process or capability of making distinguishable the individual parts of an object, closely adjacent optical images, or sources of light b: a measure of the sharpness of an image or of the fineness with which a device (as a video display, printer, or scanner) can produce or record such an image usually expressed as the total number or density of pixels in the image