Fort Collins Lady Ruggers

Sore.  Every muscle in my body is screaming at me due to the 7-hour rugby camp I elected to attend yesterday.  Shout-out to the Glendale Raptors women!  These ladies hosted the camp and offered their expertise and facilities at no charge to growing teams in the area.  Their goal was to promote safe rugby and progress the sport, especially for women as we are so often left to our own coaching devices due to lack of funding, spotty commitment from players, and the absence of facilities.  Not to bring on a pity party, we did just fine at Kent State and had a blast doing it!

The most impressive part of the day was learning from women my age, who are svelte-er than I have EVER been, and watching them teach the game.  There was no screaming about "champions getting up even when they can't" or "digging deep" while I rupture something or feel my muscles sliding around under my pansy, turf-torn flesh.  This wasn't a competitive camp, its sole purpose was rugby education.  The Raptor ladies were humble and bad-ass at the same time and genuinely love the sport they have worked so hard to play. We covered everything from appropriate scrum techniques to ball handling to safe tackling; offense and defense general strategy and articulation of field positioning.  Great for our new girls and I learned new things every drill...mostly that I'm out of shape.  I was in good company though, one girl got up from being tackled and said "Oh yeah, the muffin top pinch, just a little reminder that it's the beginning of the season..."

To add to my awe of Glendale's rugby program, we played at Infinity Park, right outside the same-name stadium.  That's right rugby folk, I said STADIUM!!!!!  For RUGBY!  Try-posts, seating, and everything.  Seriously, click on the link.

The Fort Collins team showed with 7 ladies and I say ladies because we certainly aren't girls anymore.  I am 27 and hate the words "I'm too old to do that anymore", especially from my peers.  We're not "OLD"!  There are 70-year olds who run marathons so let's get over ourselves people!  That said, there IS a significant difference in how tackling affects me now versus when I started almost 10 years ago.  There were many moments yesterday when the team almost collectively decided to make ourselves the Fort Collins Cranky Old Bitches.  Anyone available to be our mascot?

All in all, it was as great though painful kick-off to our season of conditioning, scrimmaging, grant seeking for travel and jersey funds and getting our name out there in the community.  Check us out on Facebook AND our new website!!! Fort Collins Women's Rugby  The bio page is pretty funny.   Stay tuned for more details of excruciating fun and team bonding!

Hiatus of madness!

Hello happy readers!  Looks like I've adapted a 3-month blog cycle, New Years intention #1: record more, communicate better.  I've added a few pictures to encapsulate my semester.  Each photo should have been a blog in itself.  Here's the run down:

Since we last met, I attended Net Impact 2011 in Portland, Oregon.  It was a fantastic conference, focused on innovation across all fields.  Some key highlights involved hearing executive officers from REI and Nike speak as well as every day people who truly make a difference doing what they love.  Click on the link above to get a run down.  One of the most important take-aways came from interacting with several of the hundreds of other MBA students who also attended.  While many were taking a class or two on sustainability, we in the GSSE program are totally immersed in it.  It was nice to feel validated by every single speaker I saw.  We are, in fact, setting ourselves up to compete in the world of innovation and change.  The morning we flew out, a group of us made the trip over to Multnomah falls and though it was a rainy day, it was great to see some sites outside the city.

At Net Impact, Portland.  Breakfast of champions!

Multnomah Falls after our weekend conference.

Just as we all hit our mental capacity, Thanksgiving break arrived and I had 10 sweet days to sleep, marinate in what we had learned so far and head up to Leadville for some friends and home cooked food.  Check out those rolls by Rocky!

Thanksgiving in Leadville, great friends and food!

In the few weeks between fall break and winter break ( I forgot how much I love the academic schedule), classes kicked into high gear and we wrapped up presentations, projects, and finals.  The work paid off and I'm sincerely looking forward to building on what we learned, next semester.  Sidenote, one of my spring textbooks is "Statistics in Excel for Dummies".  Good thing we're all realistic enough to avoid being insulted...

Our very last final of the semester...40 hours and many pizzas later.

After some post-finals celebration, I headed up to Leadville and realized altitude + exhaustion = extreme sloth.  Recovered nicely in clear view of the Rockies and flew home for some family time.  Hadn't seen them in a year so it was great to eat mom's food, see friends (Shout out to Keith Chervenak & Co!), and pet my dog (who keeps fighting the good fight and never loses that puppy glow amidst the tumors).

Coming home always tastes so good!

I'll just re-start working out in January...

 Colorado State has a fantastic winter break, a complete 30-days!  Classes start on the 17th and in the mean time, I'll be searching for just a wee bit of snow to board on (it's a low year in Co), prepping for classes and grant seeking for a projected summer trip to Brazil to research sustainable housing solutions in the greater Sao Paulo area...but that's a whole different blog post. 

On continuous watch for dropped food.

Happy New Year everyone, may your good intentions be fruitful and communication channels be open!