Athletics and Olympiads

 

Erin's Outdoor Track season got off to a slow start due to Osgood-Schlatter pain in her knee. She grew several inches in the last 6 months and the tendons from her quadriceps into her knee were overstretched. After a month of PT and rest from racing, she recovered. 

The distance crew for the outdoor season included the cross country kids from the fall and the stars from the winter indoor season. They had incredible depth and for example qualified 9 girls into the state championships for the 2-mile event. This photo was from a relay meet, where they fielded two teams in the 4 x mile event. The #1 team had 4 girls who ran sub-5:20 miles and and qualified for the high school National Championships. Erin's team finished 3rd and all ran sub-5:45 miles. 

In addition to the 1-mile and 2-mile events, Erin tried out the 2K steeplechase. In this race there are 5 barriers, aka immovable hurdles, that you jump over during each 1/4 mile lap with one of jumps landing in a water pit.

On the water jump, the pit slopes backward, and runners push off the barrier to try to land far out in the shallower water. This is an example where the girl really exploded off the barrier and landed with one foot in the water, keeping her momentum

It is difficult to time the jump and most runners, like Erin here, land midway in the water

And sometimes it is difficult to start those strides again. Erin ran two steeple races including one in NY near Grandma Joan and Grampa Ed's house

While down there, we stopped by the annual horse jumping show held at Old Salem Farm. Watching professional animals jump was not as entertaining as watching the amateur humans.

We fished

and netted a turtle

Back at home in the League Championship race, Erin ran a personal best in the 2-mile at 11:33. The girls team dominated and won the league title by a record-setting margin

At the State Championship, the Lex girls won their first ever outdoor track title

Meanwhile, down on the farm team known as Jonas Clarke Middle School, Tessie completed a season running the 200m and the long jump

Maybe it was all the practice in elementary school for the Waltham Track club, but Tessie was a top jumper

so much so that she earned a trip to the Massachusetts Middle School Championships, where she jumped a personal best of 13'1" and finished #13.

I chaperoned Caroline's Science Olympiad team on their trip to Lincoln Nebraska for the National Championship

We stayed in the dorms and I do not miss the days of an uncomfortable twin bed

University of Nebraska hosted both the high school teams and the middle school teams

UN-L used to be famous for its football team. On Saturdays in the fall, when 85,000 fans are in attendance, the stadium becomes the 3rd largest city in Nebraska 

You know you're not in Massachusetts anymore when your college hosts its own rodeo

and the university dairy bar offers corn-flavored ice cream

The opening night featured a parade of states introducing each team and the tradition is to dress up celebrating your state. My favorite were the crew from Memphis and their Elvis outfits

The Lex team

I watched some of the engineering events. This is Tower, where you're given fixed construction materials and create a tower that can support increasing weights from a bucket of sand. Because it is destroyed at each meet and is difficult to transport, for this event 3 builders from Lex flew out a day early in order to build their Tower

Caroline did the Bungee build event. For Bungee you have a water bottle attached to an adjustable length of bungee cord. The day of the event you are told the weight of water to add to the bottle and 2 heights from which you will drop it. From each drop you are scored based on how close to the ground your bottle comes without touching and lowest score wins. I provided a venue for practice at the 2-story atrium of my work.

Caroline and her partner Lucas did all the work to dial in their rig

and based on practicing they derived an equation that calculated the required lengths of cord. As they say, "Gravity, it isn't just a good idea, it's the law". In this case it is Hooke's Law, and the SciOly wiki freely gives out the instructions for how to construct a winning rig. 

And the maths work. From a 27-foot height, this is an example of how close to the ground they could get. At the State Championship they won 1st place. At Nationals they won 2nd place! 

For the Nats award ceremony the tradition is to dress up in formalwear

and these days that allows for sneakers for the guys

When scores were tallied Lexington finished 11th. They were a little disappointed and Caroline admitted that the seniors were not on top of their game due to everything else going on in their lives.

Because the same teams from the same states finish in the top every year, they award a best newcomer trophy to the highest finishing newbie team. Lexington won that.

and carrying the massive trophy through the airports on the way home garnered lots of attention. When someone asked what they'd won, the answer was "11th place in high school Science Olympiad". The natural response was "I wonder what 1st place looked like!"

Revolution to Revelations

April 19th marked the semiquincentennial (or bicenquinquagenary or quarter-millenial) 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord that initiated the American Revolutionary War. Our holiday began the Friday before Patriots Day  

where Heather and the Boston Phil played Mahler's 2nd symphony at Symphony Hall downtown

From our home in Lexington I can see Massachusetts Avenue, which follows the route of Paul Revere on the evening of April 18th 1775. Upon learning that the British were marching to Concord, Revere and another rider, William Dawes, rode through the night from Boston to Lexington, where they met at the Hancock-Clarke house and warned the Lexington militia. Lexingtonians alerted militia from surrounding towns, and even though Revere was captured before reaching Concord, he passed the message to the unsung hero Samuel Prescott, who made it to Concord and enabled their resistance.

We roused the family before dawn to assemble at the Lexington battle green at 5:30 AM for the battle reenactment. Being perfectly flat on the green, the sight-lines are terrible, but big-screen TV screens broadcast the action

At 5:45 AM they ring the bell in our Old Belfry to alert the townspeople of the arriving troops. At 6 AM the British redcoats march up the street and form their columns to face the Lexington Minutemen. The video at the end captures the chaotic encounter. No one knows who fired the first shot, but in the end 8 militiamen lay dead and the British marched onward to Concord. There, the organized patriots repelled the British advance and prevented seizure of the colonial weapons store. On the 18-mile march back to Boston, the fired-up militia fired shots from the forest, tallying 250 killed and wounded Redcoats to 90 of their own.  

I signed up for the 5-mile road race, which was started with a musket firing, and I managed a respectable 47:02

Another event was landing of the Army parachute team on the Battle Green

We flew to North Carolina for a quick trip to the Outer Banks. On the drive we stopped at Guilford Courthouse NMP, site of a key battle in the Revolutionary War's Southern Campaign. After a stalemate of fighting in the Mid-Atlantic for the first half of the war, in 1778 the British tried to cut off the Southern colonies, who were thought to be more sympathetic. Led by General Nathaniel Greene and that Polish master engineer Thaddeus Kosciuszko, the battles in the Carolinas inflicted heavy losses on General Cornwallis's troops. Starting with King's Mountain, then Cowpens, Guilford Courthouse was the 3rd "Link of a Chain of Evils that followed each other in regular Succession until they at last ended in the total loss of America"

Many people know where Coca-Cola was invented, but how many of you knew that Pepsi Cola was invented here in New Bern, NC.

Pepsi's founder Caleb Bradham invented a flavored syrup first called "Brad's Drink". Except to all those Brads out there, that name didn't catch on and in the first of many marketing master strokes, the name was changed Pepsi-Cola, pulling the root Pepsi from dyspepsia, or indigestion, which the drink allegedly lessened.  

PepsiCo employed my Dad for many years and gave all three of us kids generous college scholarships. You might say that Caleb Bradham's invention was the first in a Chain of Benefits that got me to where I am today 

We stayed on Emerald Isle in the southern Outer Banks, where the water was plenty warm enough for our cold hardy girls

Cape Lookout National Seashore encompasses a series of barrier islands on the southern half of the Outer Banks. Several of them have wild horses and we thought to visit, but Tessie was under the weather.

Instead we found an outfitter for a trail ride on the beach

The final park site was Moore's Creek. The "battle" here took place early in the War in February 1776 and involved Scottish highlanders armed with broadswords charging across a narrow bridge into a hail of musket fire from North Carolina militia. 

When I think of North Carolina's early economy, I think of tobacco, but before that the value of the land was for naval stores, specifically longleaf pine trees for ship masts and harvesting pitch to waterproof rope and boat seams. At Moore's Creek, there is a Tar Heel trail where one can learn how live trees were tapped for sap to be distilled into turpentine and dead trees were collected and burned at low temperature to release tar. This was a messy business and somewhere along the line a nickname for NC's inhabitants became the Tar Heels.

When we starting visiting National Park sites in 2015 there were 206 of them east of the Mississippi. After Moore's Creek, we have visited every one of these pre-2015 sites, but subsequent Presidents have created 14 more. We have visited 10 of the newbies, leaving 2 in Illinois and 2 in Maine unseen. It's a fool's errand chasing every President's new Parks and we might have to rest our weary feet at this eastern accomplishment. But Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument does sound compelling, doesn't it? 

As a graduation gift, we took Caroline downtown for dinner and a show, the show being the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater. They closed with their performance of Revelations, which as expected brought the house down.

And Caroline's revelation to us what that she will be attending Dartmouth next year