Tall Tara

So we all know what an Ignite junkie I am, right?

(And for those of you who don’t know about Ignite, educate & enlighten yourself.)

Basically, ever since Andrew Hyde and Jeremy Tanner peer pressured me into speaking at the very first Boulder Ignite, I’ve had a deep respect for the short-form visual presentation style. It reminds me a bit of stand-up…but with more Powerpoint. And way more geeks.

Last year, I gave my fourth Ignite talk in front of a sold-out crowd of 800+ people at the Boulder Theater. I made people laugh, taught them a thing or two and shared a little bit of my dorky past with everyone.

If you want to brag about knowing a game show champion, you best watch the video below.

You can thank me later.

Dewey and Jessica have known me since I was nineteen. Anyone that has known me that long, and still talks to me, is a true friend.

Suffice it to say, these two have a permanent place in my heart.

So a few months ago, when they realized one of their dreams and bought a bike shop, I knew that I had to support them…by purchasing a new bike.

(You might remember that my fancy bike was stolen last year.)

And beside my awesome new bike and my amazing old friends, there’s an even cooler piece to the bike story. Dewey and Jessica didn’t buy just any bike store. No, the bike store they bought, The Pedal House, is the same bike shop where I rediscovered my love of bikes in college. It was also where I bought my first-ever “grown-up” bike, of the Kona mountain variety, back when I was nineteen. I still have my Kona, with all the original Pedal House stickers.

The circle of life is complete. Especially if  life=bicycles + friends.

I’m off to ride my new Bianchi. She’s too pretty not to hop on.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.”          -Iris Murdoch

Ahhhh yes…the Dorothy Hamill bowl haircut that took YEARS to recover from…

(Courtesy of some salon in Orlando near DisneyWorld)

You’re welcome.

I earned serious street cred at work today for busting out my childhood eraser collection* and putting it on display. Although I’m not sure what kind of packrat mentality my mother was trying to instill in me, it’s pretty amazing that I still have all of these. They were given back to me by my parents (who were trying  to clean out their garage) and when I realized that this bit o’ awesomeness was withering away inside a plastic bag in a drawer, the twenty year old erasers** made a triumphant return to the light of day.

Doogie Howser lesson:  Never forget where you came from.

(Check out the close-ups to see some serious detail and funny shit.)

*For the record, the above picture only represents about two-thirds of my collection.

**In England, children call their erasers “rubbers”…because you use them to rub things out. True story as told to me by my co-worker Pip, who should know. Because he’s British. Not because he likes to rub things out.

Back in the day, I really got into documenting all the training I was doing. Whether it was weight workouts, excursions to the climbing gym, or runs around town, I wrote it down. Something about looking at all of my physical activity made me feel good.

I also blame it on not having a coach and being a later-in-life athlete.

In fact, not only did I write it down, I kept it all. Since I never received any awards for the races I ran, the binder represented a trophy of all my athletic achievements and fitness milestones. It contains approximately 4 years worth of training logs. Don’t worry, I’m not going to unload all of that on you but I would like to give you an idea of my OCD around this particular area.

Click to see the ugly details.

I think the records tell an interesting story of what my life was like then and what was important to me. Fast forward a few years and I’m now living more of my life online.  Why not transfer my race record-keeping to a more digital (and eco-friendly) form?  Welcome to my experiment.

I found a free tool that allows me to easily record my training online. There are lots of similar programs out there, but I wanted something that was going to have a dead simple interface without any unnecessary bells and whistles. No reason to make training for a marathon any harder than it already is.

<ulterior motive>In the hopes of keeping myself honest and accountable, I’m putting a link to my public training calendar in my sidebar. Gulp.  Should you ever be curious how I’m doing in working towards my goal of running a marathon, simply click on that link. Double gulp. It’s out there and I’m interested to see if my training transparency does the trick of getting me across the finish line.</ulterior motive>

If making my training calendar public doesn’t prepare me for the marathon I want to run, then five months from now, when I’m woefully unprepared to complete 26.2 miles, you can point to my digital training log and say, “I told you so”.

Yes, Mom, even you.

In the words of Gatorade and Jeremy Tanner, no excuses.

Hip dysplasia is when you are born with your femur dislocated from your hip socket, although most people know it as a hereditary disease most frequently associated with dogs. It usually manifests from birth, is most common in firstborn girls and is caused in part by breech birth.

Although if you ask my dad, he’ll swear the doctor was responsible.

I was born with left hip dysplasia, which meant lots of X-rays as a baby to determine if the doctor could “fix” what was wrong with me. The solution involved a brace (similar to the one in the picture above), a spica cast and took almost nine months of my early physical development.

I don’t remember much about my time in the cast, but it must have been difficult for all those involved. It’s bad enough having a cast on both legs when you can walk and take care of yourself. Can you even imagine what it must have been like to take care of a baby in cast like this?

Fortunately for my parents, the doctor setting the cast was thinking of the hard times they were going to encounter when he fashioned a handle for the back of my cast. My parents had a convenient way of picking me up and carrying me around. I was like a baby suitcase. Worn down my entire left leg and half of my right, the cast forced me to drag myself around on my arms because normal crawling was not possible.

The first time I put much thought into any of my early developmental experiences was in my last quarter of massage school. I had a teacher who did a lot of somatic patterning and thought it most interesting when she heard of my situation as an infant. For an assignment in her class, we were given a list of questions to ask our mothers about our birth story.

It was interesting to hear my parents talk about my time wearing the cast. They said that everything was ten times harder than with any other baby but that they always knew where I was with that thing on. Family members thought it was adorable to see me drag myself and the cast around. And then, when the doctor took the cast off, I started walking right away. I never crawled like a “normal” child.

(Interesting side note: I never took the bottle either, but that’s a completely different story.)

Like lots of older dogs, I seem to have a harder time with my hip as I age. There is lots of stretching, arnica, massage therapy and rolling around on tennis balls. What’s amazing is that I’ve always been able to do whatever I wanted to physically, from running a marathon to hiking over a thousand miles, without giving the slightest thought to my birth condition.

It simply never occurred to me that something that I went through more than 30 years ago would have such a far-reaching impact on my body. But, as I’m realizing, that’s what life is all about.

And radiation.

Sadly, none of the baby pics are of me. I’m working on changing that. Photo credit: Jenna7 and SpicaCast.com