Day 6: I Became the World's Most Unlikely Hurling Coach

Wow, today was quite a day. I'm the good kind of tired and my head is still spinning. On the spur of the moment, I attended a training course for coaches of hurling and camogie,* national sports of Ireland.  I have now completed my foundational level of certification for official Gaelic Athletic Association coaches. Believe me, I'm laughing good-naturedly at this. Attending this course was definitely a stretch (to say the least!) as I'm not particularly athletic and have only been playing camogie for a few months. But it gave me the chance to examine my relationship to organized sports and my place in the Irish diaspora.

The day began with registration at an Irish bar outside the city - at 9:30 AM. As I rode out of my neighborhood, with its fruit stalls, bachata music, and Dominican hair salons opening up for early morning clients, I felt a sense of flux. My feet were in two worlds, between my neighborhood's Irish past and Latino present; my family's Celtic heritage and the Latino community I've worked hard to learn about and serve through my career. My feelings of displacement continued when I arrived at the bar: I was the only woman there and the only American (besides some American born sons of Irish coaches). As I waited for the course to begin, I felt the unsettling feeling of not getting the jokes, or getting them a beat too late. I felt ridiculous, out of place, like an impostor.

As the course began, though, I felt my anxieties melt away, and I became caught up in the sessions. Our tutor, who had flown in from Galway especially for our course, emphasized the Gaelic Athletic Association's philosophy of keeping players involved, focusing on fun, and tailoring training to the players' motor, intellectual, and social development. I found that my background in training volunteers had natural parallels to coaching. And when I mock-coached a module on jab lifts, the much more experienced hurlers in the group listened patiently, encouragingly, and sincerely. 

HOW I LEFT MY COMFORT ZONE:

I felt like an outsider and an impostor, neither sufficiently Irish nor sufficiently athletic to be a camogie coach. I hope that my participation today will allow me to help my club to recruit more women for our camogie team; while I learned a lot, I still have a lot to learn and a lot of improving to do.

WHAT I LEARNED TODAY:

To get and keep people involved, make things fun and engaging. Gaelic games (Gaelic football, hurling, camogie, and handball) are heritage sports in Ireland that are up against competition from glamorous soccer and rugby; in America, they compete with those sports as well as football, basketball, lacrosse, and others. Promoting Gaelic games means fostering an environment in which everyone who wants to play has a chance to participate and contribute, and all enjoy their time on the pitch. And that foundation is necessary in order to build higher levels of play and exciting All-Ireland Finals that the whole country (and diaspora) want to watch. This has obvious parallels for my work recruiting, training, and supporting volunteers.

*(If you've not seen hurling or camogie played before, now's your chance! )

Day 4: I Rode My Bicycle and I Did Not Die

I begin an attempt to carry my bike down the stairs.

Longtime readers of my photography blog will know that I am abjectly terrified of my bicycle, or rather, of riding it. I grew up in nice little suburb that undertook a massive bicycle lane improvement project when I was in high school. So, by the time I was ready to graduate from riding my bike in endless loops around my subdivision to riding it to a summer job, I could travel the entire journey in a wide, well-marked bike lane. 

Now that I live in New York, though, I never, ever ride my bike in traffic. This is a totally inhospitable environment! I'd be crazy to want to wrangle my bike through these streets. Basically, its existence consists of having its tired pumped up, being escorted down several blocks of sidewalk and over a footbridge to a dedicated bicycle path, going for a twenty minute ride when it finally feels the wind through its spokes and on the little waving fronds of rubber that have still not worn off the tires, and returning to the hallway of my apartment, where its tires promptly deflate and it lies dormant for another four to six months.

A car drives over the ostensible bike lane. This is what I'm talking about.

This began to strike me as ridiculous. It's not like me to be dissuaded by fear; I think the proper amount of caution allows me to be safely adventurous. My inability to climb up a sheer face of ice was not really a damper on my everyday life but I decided to traverse a glacier in Iceland anyway; my refusal to ride my bike is, in fact, inhibiting me. It's silly to let this fear go on any longer. 

I'm going to get on it! I'm going to ride it! 

So I chose this morning for my ride, knowing that the time of day would provide the right number of challenges on my block. The produce truck would be unloading at the 24-hour mini mart downstairs, and a few taxi drivers would be waiting at the stand, but the traffic wouldn't yet be bad. I plotted my route so that I'd have only right turns and I'd avoid the steep inclines closer to the river. I pumped up both tires, grabbed my helmet, and wrestled my bike down the staircase. At the bottom I noticed my yoga pants were smeared with bicycle grease and a thick layer of dust.

And then I was off! Things were terribly awkward and wobbly for the first stretch, but I got into my groove a few pedals in. Although my plan was to go only once around the block, I went twice! And I liked it!

The fearless adventurer returns home.

HOW I LEFT MY COMFORT ZONE:

Um, I risked my life. 

WHAT I LEARNED TODAY:

I am invincible!

I realised that I can't wait around until conditions are perfectly right before undertaking a project, task, or challenge.  They never will be. The road will never be completely free of cars, garbage trucks, and potholes, but I don't have to wait until then to ride my bike.