Olympic Dreams & Bobsleds

What are dreams made of?

You wake up one day around the time you’re turning 50, and you wonder, or I did, about where you want your life to head next. A career I never loved had come to an end. I was taking time to find my next path. I knew I wanted a major change. And I wanted to see the world.

Feeding a lifelong passion for sports and a keen desire to empower women athletes, I volunteered at the Women’s Sports Foundation. The first generation of Title IX women athletes were coming into their own. As Olympians, as professionals, in basketball, and weight lifting.

By chance, I read a short piece in Sports Illustrated announcing the addition of women bobsledding teams in the next Winter Olympics. It sparked something in me. Since the last Olympics I had yearned deeply to once in my life march into an Olympic Stadium as part of the US Team.

I have no competitive sports experience, and I was woefully overage for such a challenge, my reasoning mind told me. But my dreamer’s mind said, heh, maybe nobody’s reading this but me. Maybe I have a tiny window in this first year. Maybe… A dream was taking shape. I was excited. A fellow volunteer, who happened to spend a lot of time in Lake Placid and knew the “sliders”, got excited with me. She egged me on. I was all too willing to dive head first into this wild idea.

Long story short: Visit Lake Placid’s USA Olympic Training Center. Take a test run on the bobsled training track. I’m thinking: you don’t have to drive the sled, just push like hell, jump in, and go for the ride. I stop in the training office and get a copy of the physical test for sliders. I go home and hire a personal trainer. He doesn’t laugh! I train hard, harder than I’ve ever trained for anything. My new WSF friend assures me, “they take anyone who signs up.” I sign up.

The time comes and I register to stay at Olympic Village – I am beyond excited, or is that fear… I have a new pair of track spikes in my duffle, with 110% penciled on the toes in gold permanent ink. I dine in the Olympic Athlete’s cafeteria. I am star struck. Then it’s morning and I head out to the track for try-outs. I’m nursing a slight hamstring pull.

College track athletes mill around the field. Women half my age who have excelled in sprinting, jumping, exploding off the line. With massive rock-hard thighs, their upper bodies are lean lean and cut. One of the women is Carl Lewis’ sister. (Mentally I compare these athletic specimens to my own chesty, skinny legged physique.) I know I’m outclassed and overaged. But I don’t quit. I don’t turn tail. And I don’t make the cut. (Since it will be an Olympic sport this year for women, all effort must focus on those with the right stuff.)

Still dreaming, I hang around for the week, staying at my friend’s apartment. From the sidelines I offer any help I can give to this budding young team, so full of hope and confidence. Finally the team coach asks me to run one of the athletes to the airport – a 2 hour drive to Albany, and the long, hot trip back to Lake Place, a/c in my fire-engine red Saab convertible on the fritz. Dreams now dashed, yet a dream fulfilled.

I pick up a few souvenirs, including a nice Olympic insignia jacket for my trainer at the gym, grab a selfie in front of the bobsled team van (with a hand-sized digital camera pointed backwards, not a smart phone – it’s 2001), and I head home. It is only a few weeks before terrorists will attack America; the World Trade Center’s twin towers still anchor the NYC skyline.

Crushed, and not just a little embarrassed, drove home. I had taken my shot. And that shot was the boost I needed to step into a new skin.

Turn the page: My trainer asks me, “So now what?” I joke, “Maybe I’ll take up triathlons. Never an endurance athlete, soon I was raising thousands for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society through their Team in Training program. I worked my way up to a half ironman distance of 73.2 total miles. In my mid-50s, I was smoked by women in their 80s. I didn’t care. I showed up at the start line knowing that, in my own time, I would cross the finish line. By then the donuts were gone and the massage tents folded and packed away.

Through this process, this grand dreaming experiment, I discovered a passion for helping people achieve their fitness goals. Thus began a new career as a personal trainer and exercise instructor for ‘people of a certain age.’ And that somehow led me to adventure travel.

Since retiring from paid work, I continue my volunteer work as a trip leader for a well established outdoor recreation, education, and wilderness preservation organization, the Appalachian Mountain Club. Designing and running trips anywhere in the world that interests me, somewhere that 14 or so like-minded travelers will follow me. These days I keep the activity level light. We smell the roses. We savor the food and sample wines. The natural world feeds the soul. I get to know the people and the history of a place.

And yes, in 2002, on USA soil in Salt Lake City, still reeling from the attacks of 9/11, US Women Jill Bakken and Vonetta Flowers won gold, Team Germany took silver, and TeamUSA2 the bronze. Though I couldn’t be there to witness it, I like to think I had some skin in that game. My heart marched into Olympic Stadium that year, proudly waving my imaginary flag over an astonishing group of American athletes.

After all is said and done, just what, exactly, are dreams made of?
Where shall we go next?