Summer days

Summer break.  I only feel about five years older than when I started teaching, but somehow nineteen have gone by.  Time is funny like that though.  People tell you that everything goes too fast when you're watching your kids grow up, but things that my daughter started doing three weeks ago feel like they've been that way forever, and yet I left home yesterday for the last day of school feeling like the previous school year had just ended.  

Maybe that's just a matter of familiarity though.  Maybe in designating a period of time as "the last day of school," or "Thanksgiving," or "Sunday," the brain seeks to link it to previous last days and Thanksgivings and Sundays, and that's where the feeling of "didn't I just do this" comes from.  Maybe the reason that time stretches out so much with my daughter is that she's always doing something new, and I'm focusing on the endless novelty, rather than an endless repetition.

I did actually come one here to talk about climbing, but while we're on the subject of kids, people also tell you that having them is an adjustment.  It seems more accurate to say that having kids is a constant adjustment.  I'm back to climbing twice a week now, and am still fitting in good workouts at home, but something changes every few weeks and I have to figure out how to do it all over again.  Currently that means I do my core/stability workouts with my daughter in her Pack'n Play for as long as that lasts, and my pull-up workouts with her in my backpack, doing laps on the stairs between sets.  And now that I've typed that, I can almost guarantee I'll have to find a different way to do things next week, especially since she started walking yesterday.

Through the winter I was probably getting out on rock twice a month or so, and even though I didn't finish any of my projects, I definitely felt strong.  Moby might have happened if I'd gotten to it frequently enough that I didn't have to remember the moves every time, but I had a lot of fun working on it, and honestly it felt good just to let myself go out and push hard again.

On top of getting in some local bouldering whenever I could, I also made it to Sugarloaf in the spring for my first trad routes in almost two years.  I forgot how much I missed that!

                                                                                              Photo: Jeffrey Lash

Since spring break, I've still been getting to the gym regularly, but hadn't gotten a chance to climb outside aside from one route at Carderock while giving a clinic.  When I got out of work yesterday, it was right during my daughter's nap time, and I found myself with an hour and a half to kill before picking her up from daycare.  I felt the air outside my school, thought how good it would have felt as a climbing day if we hadn't been in school, and immediately went down to Northwest Branch to get in a quick session.  Even though I probably only climbed for 45 minutes, it was an unexpectedly perfect start to the summer.  Hoping there's plenty more where that came from!