Catching Up and Organizing

The catching up part of this post is documenting another race. For the second year in a row I ran the 1 mile race at the Chocolate Festival in Oakdale, California. Oakdale calls itself the "Cowboy Capital of the World" but that's a story for another time. Each year they close off a major part of downtown for their Chocolate Festival and they they hold a race as part of the festivities; the race is part of our running club's Grand Prix series.

Each time that I have moved since April 2006 I have gone through my things and downsized until I really have eliminated a lot of "stuff". One thing that I always have a hard time getting rid of are old pictures. When I ask other people what they think the almost universal response is, "they don't take up that much room". Another is, "Maybe you can give them to the people in them".

Let me respond to the second one first. In December 2009 I went to Dallas, Texas to run a half marathon. While I was there I had dinner with one of my former athletes who still stays in touch with many of my athletes from the late 70's and early 80's. I took a large mailing envelope full of pictures from then and offered to leave them with her to take with her the next time she went back for a visit. "No thanks". Keep in mind, she was in many of them and the others were her friends, teammates and even family. So 5 years later I still find myself with them.

In response to the first comment about taking up room, that really isn't the issue. What they do is make it very cumbersome and time consuming whenever I want to find a specific picture or pictures for use in a blog post or to share with someone on.

The point that I am getting to here is that I finally started purging pictures. If a picture is fuzzy, blurry or any other way imperfect, it's gone. If it's not obvious who or what the picture is really of other than generic track or cross country meet pictures, then the picture is gone. I hope to do another blog eventually geared towards my 30 years as a coach and I expect to use a lot of pictures when I do. I can't continue to waste time looking through pictures that have no meaning to anyone. With that said, here is some of my first day efforts.

And that's just the beginning of trying to get better organized.

While going through pictures from Sierra High School where I coached for 20 years I came across two that really demonstrated an example of taking something for granted. In 1990 both my boy's and girl's cross country teams qualified for the state championship meet which was held in Boulder that year. It was the first time that a team had qualified from Sierra. Here is a picture of the send off that they gave the team the morning that we left school.

You can see the band, the cheerleaders, the mascot, football players, staff and students. The next year, 1991, we qualified again. Here is a picture taken from the same place the morning that we left.

A pretty sad commentary I would say. One year it's reason for a huge celebration, the second year it's expected and taken for granted. Our girl's team qualified for 9 years in a row from 1990-1998 and that send off was never repeated. And I can guarantee you the kids knew when they were taken for granted. After 1998 we qualified individuals to state but it was a long time until another team made it and there has certainly not been another 9 year streak of team qualifying.

My message here is simple, enjoy things when they are happening, don't let good times pass unnoticed because you never know when or if another one will come along. To quote Dr. Seuss, "Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened". It's a lot easier to follow that advice if you make the most to enjoy it while it's happening.