Zen and the Art of Speedskating

Here are some pictures from my swirl of an amazing weekend…

My wife Jessica is now officially Dr. Love! Go Jess! What you are witnessing is that strange medieval ceremony known as the “hooding” of advanced graduates. The fellow in red is the Dean of vet school. A graduate’s robes are really a carryover from medieval times, and although moderns currently hang the hood from the shoulders, if you ask a graduate to actually put it on like a hood, you instantly see the medieval academic monk spring forth, either that or a Sith-Jedi apprentice of emperor Palpatine from the recent star wars movie.

Ambling through the crowds with my digital camera, feeling sore and creaky from my last few days of intense workouts assigned by coach Boris (he has ratcheted the intensity up again! yeah! and-Ouch!) , here are the equations that were going through my mind…

Roughly 80 graduates from the vet school, maybe 600-700 people in the audience at this graduation ceremony.

Each graduate, when they are announced, gets a round of applause, and they get another round after the doctoral hood is placed around their shoulders.

Each person gets about 20 total claps from applauding audience members (I counted a few people and averaged).

The veterinary degree is astonishingly hard work over 4 years, so I average the hours I estimated my wife worked, got a ballpark figure for the total number of hand-claps, and divided them into each other.

Each graduate recieved roughly 1.3 claps per hour of work (and this is not counting intense pre-vet undergraduate work, or the loads of work most do after undergraduate before even applying, 3 years of it in my wife’s case.).

I then extrapolated to the Olympics, when an Olympic athlete steps to the line, their bodies & souls are tattoed by a whole lifetime of training, astonishing hours of effort & focus, pain & determination. How many TV sets & individuals in the stands watch their efforts? what is the dividable equation for that? How many TV sets tune in to witness a lifetime of work explosively culminated in one expression of speed and perfection?

Of course Olympic speedskaters don’t do this for the TV, and my wife did not work as hard as she did for that brief applause. Things like this are too hard to pursue for some brief thunderstorm of appreciation. You do this because you really really have to do it, because there would be some part of you empty if it was not filled by the effort, because effort when combined with passion for your work, becomes love and satisfaction with your life.

Jessica’s mom gave me a poke in the ribs, and said, “be patient, your time will come soon”. I know… Olympic trials are 30 weeks away, but its not 30 weeks or even 210 days, its really 9 training cycles of hard work/rest and improve, plus a taper of drastically reduced training to get really fast.

But today is not that day, and my smile won’t be as good looking… today is Jessica’s day, today is all about DR. LOVE!!!!!

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