Author: Tom Robinson

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An old story

I wrote a newspaper story nearly 12 years ago that evidently had the newspaper’s digital hit-meters buzzing today. Cyberspace is an odd animal.

The story is this one: https://pilotonline.com/sports/a-former-nba-player-s-quest-in-life-and-love/article_43d1a233-6e76-5e5f-9bf4-45a990e7f2b4.html

It’s truly a long story about a man and a woman. Cal Bowdler was an Old Dominion basketball player who was a first-round NBA draft pick who flamed out in three dubious years. His wife Brooke was a junkie. They were trying to work out a life that ultimately did not work out. Hearsay, but I am told Brooke appeared on the Dr. Phil show Friday and blamed her drug problem on her ex-husband. Certainly there is more that was said, and I don’t know why Brooke (formerly Tamara) warrented being on the show in the first place, so we will all consult Professor Google and perhaps see for ourselves. Viewers obviously already did that and resuscitated a cold, dusty tale.

Anyway, I was interested to hear that this story resurfaced for a day. I remember all the machinations of writing it, and I am happy with the final work that came from it all.

Can’t wait to see what floats to the surface next.

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In the zone

Orange Theory Fitness. Know it? Ever hear of it? I hadn’t until about a month or so ago, when Dee started attending workout sessions at the OTF studio newly opened in Williamsburg. She loved the 55-minute, high-intensity interval group (20ish people) workouts overseen by a highly caffeinated coach barking out marching orders over an ear-splitting hype soundtrack. Man, just writing that sentence was a high-intensity workout.

Anyway, I just entered my rest-recovery-maintain fitness phase of my budding, old-guy triathlon career. Orange Theory sounded like something that could potentially work into the mix. Turns out my theory was correct. It is in my mix, and not going away soon.

The philosophy behind Orange Theory is all about heart, specifically your heart rate. Exercisers wear a heart monitor around their chest or upper arm that reads out on a screen above the treadmills and rowing machines that are essential to an OTF workout. (Half the workout also involves dumbbells, body weight lifts or TRX bands.) Essentially, everyone has a “maximum heart rate” based on age and gender. The coaches aim to harangue, um, urge and support, you into working the various exercises at a pace that will keep your heart rate in the green (71-83 percent of your max rate), orange (84-91 percent) or red (92-100 percent, lung-busting, obscenity-screaming) zones up on the screen.

Much has been written the last few years about how the best workouts for cardio, strength and weight loss are high-intensity interval workouts. I believe it. And while I have tried to do those combo workouts on my own, along the lines of P90x and such, for years, having a coach pushing you through the pain raises the bar much higher than you, meaning I, can maintain it on my own.

At the end, your calories burned, average heart rate for the workout and number of minutes you spent in the orange and red zones, called splat points for a reason I’m not sure of, appear on the screen, so you can chart all that based on whether it was designed to be a  “power” workout, “endurance” or what have you.

As in everything, you get out what you put in. I go twice a week with Dee (she goes more) — usually pre-dawn, which feels nuts most mornings – and leave a puddle of perspiration. It is satisfied sweat, though. We know challenges are being met, fitness increases are being seen, and great mojo for the day – and the spring tri season — is being cultivated. In more than just theory.

 

 

 

 

 

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Shore character(s)

A painter and sculptor of wood and stone whose sylvan retreat includes a graveyard and whale bones salvaged from a nearby beach.

An African American “Elvis tribute” singer and musician embarked on the second wind of a fascinating, accidental career.

A mystical, “spirit trained” artist and former field hand who fashions popular creations in her doublewide mobile home from only newspaper, glue and paint.

It’s been my treat in the last week to spend time with each of them on Virginia’s quirky and time-warped Eastern Shore. It’s for a local magazine story that will get at the character and the unique artistic vibe found on that stretch of land most of us know as the prairie to be crossed to get from Virginia Beach to Salisbury and points north.

My interactions and interviews are obviously still stewing around in my head; the work of committing them all to compelling words and narrative is pending. But my two five-hour round trips to the nooks of the Shore, with a side visit to the Chincoteague oceanfront thrown in, were (the most recent) reinforcements of how lucky I still am for the opportunity to sit with strangers and, with their invitation (and for money), let my natural curiosities loose on them.

You are always alone when you write, but never more so than when you commit to writing on commission on someone else’s deadline. Isolation is often a friend, except at those frequent times when it is not. That’s the reality that helps me appreciate, as I began to do in my latter full-time days, the universal forces that allow me to do this thing I do.

There will be pressure, self-imposed as always, to give these stories the truth and energy they deserve. But it is a pulsing thing that lends vitality – and yes, a central relevance – to this phase of time that despite all still seems to answer to “transitional.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Misplaced

Today the swell of man and stars

Clouds the field, rejects memoirs

Of graceless happenstance and cruelty.

 

Impossible to delineate, visions

Flash harsh and thunderous, collisions

Thick with fever, delirious and deviant.

 

Home is hallowed? Rest and wonder

Lurch unresolvable now, asunder

Amid the roiling burden of minute and day.

 

Ever wishful, truce and truth elude arrest

Dazzling farther, dimmed and possessed

With idle scrawl, wicked and vacant to every sorrow.

 

 

 

 

 

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ODU football (circa 2007)

I came across this old column just now, foraging a cabinet for something else. It’s a pleasant surprise, in that it is actually one of my old columns that I like, because so many make go “meh” at best.

It’s about the day more than 10 years ago (!) that Bobby Wilder was introduced as the head coach of Old Dominion’s football team, then little more than a glow in the eye of the ODU athletics department. Today, the Monarchs are a contender in FBS Conference USA, play ACC opponents (no W’s yet, but maybe soon) and have a stadium renovation on tap.

I have decent recall of introduction day; the swirl of activity and buzz in the Constant Center, Wilder, a longtime assistant at Maine, where he played quarterback, showing up with hair and an impressive 5 o’clock shadow to give his first rah-rah pep talk, me softly approaching Wilder’s welcoming wife Pam to pose some questions as her husband did other interviews afterwards. For sure, I remember his energy and his promise to bring it every day, around the state, to start carving a name for ODU football.

It seemed a daunting chore, for sure. But ODU fan or foe, you have to judge the past decade a wild success, probably beyond even what Wilder, the most self-assured of men, saw in his quiet moments back then.

Here’s what I wrote for the Feb. 13, 2007 edition:

 

Key to success may lie in a schmooze transition

NORFOLK — One interesting fact on an afternoon filled with them at Old Dominion: New football coach Bobby Wilder and his wife, Pam, operate a cable-free household in Bangor, Maine.

Sports are Bobby’s life. But, Pam Wilder said, ensuring their two young sons are undistracted readers is worth an ESPN vacuum. Not that the coach himself avoids the temptation 24/7.

“A few times he’ll say, “Oh, important meeting, gotta go,’ ” Pam Wilder said, laughing. “Hmm, there’s a game on right now and he has to go? I’m not a rocket scientist, but I’m not stupid either.”

It’ll be hard not to learn a volume of interesting things about Bobby Wilder over the next couple of years. His preference in defensive line schemes. His taste in office decor and uniform styles. Heck, boxers or briefs maybe. Anything and everything.

If there’s a radio or TV, soapbox or service-club meeting near  you, Bobby Wilder is going to be on it or at it — in the words of athletic director Jim Jarrett — “sell, sell, selling” ODU football.

Questions? Wilder will take questions until  your well of curiosity runs dry.

Comments? He’ll comment till the cows AND the sheep come home.

Pitches to move tickets and luxury suites for ODU football in 2009? Wilder will wind up and deliver all day for you — until it’s time to go wind up and deliver for you neighbor.

“He’s perfect for this,” promised Pam Wilder. “For him, it just rolls right off, he’s so comfortable  doing it.

“I think it comes from probably all the years of being an athlete, being in the spotlight, being a quarterback, having to think on your feet. It just comes natural to him.”

That’s huge because Wilder, 42, is a coach with no one to coach until — clear the calendar, Monarchs fans — 4 p.m. next Feb. 6. That’s the time and date of his first open tryout for walk-ons for his first team.

Every new college coach does community breakfasts, campus lunches and donor dinners till his belt expands a notch. But being the coach of a program that owns one football — the souvenir pigskin Wilder toted Monday at his media introduction — means never being able to say, “Sorry, can’t make it.”

Garden club? Preschool assembly? Car-wash ribbon cutting? Wilder has scissors, and he’s not afraid to use them.

“That’s primarily what  I’ve talked to Dr. Jarrett about: keeping that momentum behind the program,” Wilder said. “Building the war chest, so to speak, not only of support financially, but support from the people who are excited about the program.”

So many ODU people he’s already chatted up, Wilder said, “want to know what we’re going to do offensively and defensively, but they also want to know where am I going to park on game day?

“I’m not sure where I’M going to part on game day right now. So there’s going to be a 2 1/2 year-period where we’re trying to work our way through all of that.”

Schmooze his way through it is more like it, with boosters and potential boosters, of course. But even more importantly, with the raw material of his construction project: a state full of recruits and coaches who’ve never heard of this 17-year assistant from Maine.

Yet. Give him till next Tuesday.

“I plan on getting a database of every high school coach in Virginia,” Wilder said, “and I plan on being in touch with everybody as soon as I can.”

Cable sports, Wilder has shown he can live without, sort of. But a fully charged cell battery? A new coach in a new land can have no greater friend.

 

 

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Out, but very much about

I hate that I have been absent for the longest stretch since beginning my blog a couple years ago.

If I am a writer, I need to write. Right?

I apologize if you have checked in here over the summer and found nothing new. I understand if it’s been a while since you tried.

It isn’t as if there’s been nothing to write about. Let’s see. Well, Dee and I got engaged in the Eiffel Tower in July. Let’s start there. 🙂 It was during a European swing through Amsterdam and Bruges, the postcard-perfect old Euro village in Belgium. Dee set up a dinner for us in the tower, so the time and place could not have been more perfect. We came back with Eiffel Tower mementos and a thrilling future before us.

Traveling has been big. We visited Houston in June; Dee’s brother, sister-in-law and other relatives live in the area. Two months later, we watched the Hurricane Harvey devastation of that huge metro area with jaws agape, on edge while waiting for text messages from Mickey or Teri to say they were all right, stunned to see the photos of the tree that crushed the roof of Dee’s aunt and uncle’s house.

Where else? Yes, Dee took her kids (and grandkid, and me) to Vancouver, renting a rambling old house in pricey Point Grey that overlooked English Bay, with its busy traffic of container and cruise ships. Downtown Vancouver sat off to the right. The view, the entire vibe, was very San Franciscan. Houses on a hill, bridges spanning the bay, fog and mist in the morning, light air due to lack of humidity. Vancouver has a huge TV and film industry, did you know that? It’s the setting for many shows and movies, subbing for someplace else. Johnny Depp was filming a movie around the corner. We loitered outside the house a couple of times, drawing narrowed brows from security. We saw nothing, but also were not arrested for ogling.

We got back, and left again. I always miss my kids, so after spending a few awesome days with Rachel in San Francisco in June, I planned a trip to Colorado to see Connor. It had been more than three months since I’d seen him. That’s about the outside of how long I want to go without seeing him or Rachel. And after having not done a triathlon, my new hobby/obsession, since June, I thought to piggyback a race with our visit. I looked and it so happened there was a race (Olympic distance) in Boulder, a ground-zero area for triathlete and triathlon training  in the U.S. What better place to test my progress and my will? I saw, I trained, I worried about the 5,000-plus-foot altitude — it was an issue, but not as bad as I feared. Bottom line, I thought I’d have to get fished out of the Boulder Reservoir a few minutes into the 1,500-meter swim leg. I was gasping, struggling to find a breath/stroke rhythm. I stopped a couple times to tread water. But I persevered, always the key in triathlons, and survived the swim, endured a tough bike ride with the portrait-like Flatiron mountains hulking on the horizon (a beautiful bonus) and battled leg cramps during a super-slow 10k run to finish. Connor and Dee were waiting with arms open and wide smiles at the end. I tear up still thinking about their love and support. What a great day.

This weekend, we’ll celebrate Dee’s birthday with some wine-tasting outside Charlottesville, one of my favorite places. What happened there a month ago breaks my heart. I don’t understand how the town came to be the involuntary host to people spewing such vileness, or why the latter has come to its present state as it is. After a while away, I was fortunate to visit Charlottesville last weekend, wearing my sports writer hat again for the Associated Press at a U.Va. football game. The day was beautiful, and I was filled with blessed memories of my time there with my two beautiful children. I was filled with gratitude for the days I’ve spent there, and lifted by the love and good fortune that surrounds me now.

Life is great. (So is Ollie, btw, if a little more hobbled due to his hip dysplasia/arthritis.) It is so full. I propose to return here more often to share and to say hi.

 

 

 

 

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The layover

Way back in the day, when men were men and newspapers minted money, I’d fly a lot for work. Many times, I would intentionally route myself from Virginia through Philadelphia with a longish layover, two hours or more.

I grew up in a house about 10 minutes from the Philly airport, the home my parents lived in until about 10 years ago. I’d give them a heads-up when I’d be coming through town, and dad – mom never learned how to drive – would meet me outside the terminal, behind the wheel. I’d pile in to the little green Escort wagon and we’d be off for the house, a quick lunch and a great and timely visit before the dash back to my connection.

I am thinking of all of this now as I sit in the Philadelphia airport, an hour from boarding a connection to San Francisco, one of my top-five places to visit. That could be because my daughter lives there now, although I think it was in the top five anyway. Nonetheless, I haven’t seen her since February, so I plan to royally enjoy the next four days in the Bay Area. Catching up, hanging out – at the Giants-Rockies ballgame tonight, incidentally – just being.

Family. That is what I’m thinking of as I wait. My parents, my daughter’s pop-pop and mom-mom who died in 2008 and 2012, respectively. My two siblings who live not far from here. We have neglected each other. We should correct this. Also nearby, close to that tiny Cape Cod that built me, my nephew and his wife, a week away from being parents themselves for the second time.

I feel I drift too much in this world, untethered and aimless. I occupy far too much of my own headspace. It hurts me and others close to me who don’t deserve the drag of my fears, conceptions and preoccupations.

In an odd bittersweet way, as I sit and watch the people and think, my first pass-through Philadelphia in many years has helped bring me back to the ground. It’s where I have to stay. In my mind, I see my father outside the terminal and my mom busy in the kitchen as we walk through the back door 10 minutes later. She shouts “Tom!” as she always did. They are healthy. They are happy. They are proud of me.

I need to make them proud of me again.

 

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Merging from the shoulder

A year ago I wouldn’t have believed I could or would attempt, let alone finish, an “Olympic” distance triathlon. A year ago, the thought that I could or would swim a hair shy of a mile in open water, bike just under 25 miles and then run 6.2 miles — in successive order with barely a couple of minutes in between individual exertions — was crazy. Crazy to me, I mean.

I was aware people did it all the time. I, with my balky knees, tight hamstrings and vast disinterest in cardiovascular suffering, just wasn’t inclined to ever be one of them. About a year ago, it was all I could do to jump off the proverbial psychological cliff and actually commit, in word and dollars, to fly to California and attempt a “sprint” triathlon in September.

A sprint is roughly half the distance of an Olympic. It had been a while since I felt proud of a physical accomplishment. But just registering for the sprint and beginning my scattershot preparation for it gave me a mental kick, one I liked. I ran and biked and swam and over-prepared, by all accounts, for my big day, which went well to the degree I won a towel for finishing top 3 in my old-guy age group (albeit a small group).

Nonetheless, a spark, well, sparked, as I’ve previously shared here. Now I’ve done an Olympic, I train in at least one discipline most days  and I at least pretend I want to get much better and compete for age-group prizes in Olympic-distance tris.

I say pretend because I’m finishing a recent book written by endurance athlete and author Matt Fitzgerald called “How Bad Do You Want It?” He’s filled the book with new sports psychology and brain science amplified by real-life stories of endurance athletes demonstrating jaw-dropping physical and emotional strength in competition — although strength puts it lightly. Champion athletes like cyclist Greg LeMond and triathlete Siri Lindley own indescribable, implacable will. By describing their training and important races to their career and legacy through gripping narratives, Fitzgerald tries to tangibly get at the intangibles that set them above and beyond other supernatural-seeming athletes.

It is inspiring, intimidating and humbling to dip a toe in that kind of pool. I would answer the open-ended question “How bad do you want it?” with “a lot” or “pretty much.” But to honestly back those words up with honest effort, to push or get angry over wavering intensity and use it as searing motivation in ways that don’t injure muscles and joints and nerves, is challenge on top of challenge that I wonder if I am up to at this stage.

That’s among the reason triathletes and ultra-endurance racers, all of whom can be a precious bunch I know, like to reference the “journey” they are on via their hobby/passion/reason to live. The road goes and climbs and twists around blind corners that they often never see coming, but they lower their head and rebuckle in to their driving mission.

A year ago, I noodled around on the edges and decided to at least step out along the shoulder. I’ll just say the journey has gotten interesting — consuming? — much quicker than I would have believed.

 

 

 

 

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A diamond season

I was fortunate to sit in the dugout and watch one of the finest high-school baseball games I’ve ever seen Wednesday night.

Hanover, a dynasty in Virginia 4A baseball, needed 13 innings at home to take out Jamestown High of Williamsburg 2-1 in a game that sent the winner to the state semifinals.

It was a stunning display on both sides of skill, desire, resiliency, poise and coaching, a state-final caliber contest, no doubt. Wheels were turning, stomachs were flipping, fastballs were buzzing, bats were mostly flailing. That didn’t reflect on the hitting so much as the pitching, two guys apiece for each team. Both starters are committed to Division I programs and threw like it. It was top-notch stuff, a man’s game, a street fight, as they say.

Jamestown — I am a JV coach for the Eagles — pushed a run across early on a triple and an RBI ground out. It took Hanover till the bottom of the fifth to even the score on an error and calm, temporarily, its nervous crowd.

Seven innings later, the length of a full game, consecutive two-out doubles ended Jamestown’s 20-game wining streak and 20-3 season.

Heartbreaker. Heartbreaking.

John Cole managed his brains out in the Jamestown dugout, calling pitches, moving fielders, flashing signals at third base trying to get something going, rallying the troops. Cole spent a career, that may not be through, in college coaching, as an assistant and then leading a Division I and a Division III program.

He came to Jamestown last year and took the senior-laden Eagles to the state semifinals with a team that included a couple of Division I recruits, including in the ACC. This team wasn’t as talented or experienced as that one, but it was enterprising and baseball-savvy thanks to Cole, who pretty much conducts a coaching master’s class at every practice. It’s why I always tried to attend at least an hour of varsity practice before the JV practice, to expand my own knowledge base and become a more confident, accomplished coach.

Cole spoon-feeds nothing to the high school kids, even the first-year varsity guys. As in college, he expects a lot, demands a lot, moves fast, teaches constantly, brooks no nonsense. He is stout in his belief in himself and what he teaches. For the obvious reason that it is tried, true and effective.

The proof is on the field and, better, in the players’ heads and hearts. Players that move on to college ball report back that it’s as if they took graduate courses in high school by playing for Cole. They come in to their higher level of baseball significantly ahead of the curve, they mean.

But for the greater number of kids who will never play beyond high school, their season or two with John Cole will unquestionably serve them when it comes to the (old school?) life and business skills of listening, respecting, committing to a task, following directions and setting challenging, even elite, standards for themselves and for their colleagues.

Expect nothing, get nothing.

I expected fun, satisfaction and reward when Cole accepted me into his program to work with his future varsity players. I had no idea.

Thanks, JC. What a night that was. What a season.

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Giving it a good tri

I run like a madman now. And swim, even though my elbow is killing me. (Another surgery in store? :/) Oh, and I bike a lot. I have this great, new mack-daddy Cervelo road bike, did I mention?

This is all part of a nutty, consuming, late-50s – my late 50s – hobby I’ve taken up called triathlon. Believe me, I’m as stunned as anyone. More stunned than anyone. Endurance sports never, ever were of interest to me, although I guess you could argue pretty well that baseball and golf are endurance sports in their own way, given their innate sloth-like duration (and tedium).

Anyway, the point is, I acted on a slow-building urge to do a sprint triathlon, the shortest version of the swim-bike-run trifecta, last year when my daughter informed that she had entered a September tri in Santa Cruz, down Highway 1 from her home in San Francisco. Why, I exclaimed in a Eureka moment, let’s do Santa Cruz together!

Running had been an issue for me following three arthroscopic knee surgeries over the last decade. Pounding the pavement was too much discomfort and risk, so I flat stopped. But a funny thing happened over a year ago; I’d gone for a short run for the hell of it and . . . nothing hurt. I couldn’t believe it, actually. It felt good, and it formed the foundation, unspoken but percolating, of this triathlon idea.

I had started swimming to replace running way back when. So now if I could run without incident, and I had the swimming down decently enough, well, I’d biked since I was a little kid, right? Maybe I could actually do this.

Long story short, I have started and finished, with varying degrees of timed success, three sprint triathlons, plus a few 5K races in the last year. Now, the sights are set on the next natural step – an Olympic-length triathlon in and around Jamestown, Va. in four weeks. What’s an Olympic triathlon? In this case, a 1,500-meter open-water swim in the James River, a 40k bike ride (roughly 25 miles) and then a 10k, or 6.2-mile, run.

Why are the sights set so? I think it is for the feeling of gratitude I get after I have put one foot after another for an hour and experience no out-of-the-ordinary aches and pains. And, other than my something-is-clearly-wrong elbow situation, the satisfaction of being able to swim non-stop for an hour. As for biking, which I had never really done beyond neighborhood toddles, I have learned straight up that it is harder than it looks and that it is the area in which I need to improve the most in order to compete.

And I do mean to compete in my age group (55-59), although honestly competing to WIN the age group appears to be a pipe dream. Let me tell you, a lot of these old fellas are beasts! Their genetics, determination and iron constitutions can be intimidating to behold. I admit it seems beyond my capability and nature to rise to that level.

Still, I could surprise myself again. That I have come this far, to where I have visions in my mental attic of actually eyeballing the half-ironman (70.3 miles) challenge, is inspiring. And scary. And, of course, insane.

I don’t share this to be annoying or to fish for any sort of compliments. The name of a Facebook group I’m in says it best, the Pathetic Triathletes Group. Our kind can be self-important and obnoxious; go run and swim your little race there fella, who cares? But I share it more out of a sense of amazement at the course – pun intended – I have taken and an appreciation for the possibilities I have placed before myself after years of inertia. Gone is that reflexive notion that I just couldn’t, when in fact I and you and we always can.

Maybe we won’t always finish, but we damn well can start. Nothing pathetic about it.