Positive Motion blog

              Check it out - I'm Miss December!

Women of Adventure Sports - 2008 Calendar
About the photographers:
Will Ramos and Brian Knight, the photographers behind Will Ramos Photography take pride in maintaining a tradition that brings photojournalism to adventure sports. They cover events in order to make photos that tell a story, a story that often even the participants do not fully recognise at the time. They work as unobtrusively as possible in order to catch unguarded moments. They thrive in the fluid dynamics of the day capturing the essence and emotions of each event.

Unlike other race photography companies Will and Brian go where the racers go... They have traveled by foot, car, truck, airplane, helicopter, boat, and jet-ski. They have crouched in the pouring rain, crawled through pitch dark caves, clung to shear rock faces, crossed state lines, mountain tops, continental divides, and hemispheres. They have risen before dawn and stayed up way past sunset.

Their photographs have been featured in numerous publications world-wide such as: Sports Illustrated, Blue Ridge Outdoors, Metrosports, Central Virginian Newspaper, Runner Triathlete News, Men's Fitness Magazine, Hooked on the Outdoors, Trail Runner, Adventure Sports Magazine, ASX, and various others.

Professional affiliations includes membership to the North American Nature Photography Association (NANPA) & Wedding Photo Journalist Association (WPJA).

Posted by Elaine at 12:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Trail racing season ended last weekend. Cyclocross season ended this weekend. (Race reports to come.) I guess maintaining a base so I'm ready to start training for my next marathon (Chicago), and fantasizing about sunshine will just have to keep me busy over the winter. But it sure as hell isn't as exciting. Despite these plans, I still feel like saying, "What am I going to do now?" I'm only just starting out in cyclocross, and have only just started to fully appreciate the trail runs. Now I have to wait until Spring for the next trail race, and next Fall for more cyclocross. Still, the pacing of the seasons has kept me from running out of new things to try, so far. Even with whitewater kayaking and rockclimbing under my belt, I still have a new thing to try next year: Xterra EX2 Off-Road Triathlon "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." ~ Winston Churchill

Posted by Elaine at 12:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I grew up playing "one of the guys," and still see myself that way most of the time. However, I have grown to accept my girliness, too. But there is one more difference between playing at being "one of the guys," and actually being one. "The difference between you and me," he said, "is that I do crazy shit because I don't know any better. You know it's crazy, and do it anyway."

Posted by Elaine at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'd been to 2 cyclocross races - one of them DCCX where I met and got tips from some nice folks from NCVC - before trying my first race. I borrowed back the mountain bike I had sold to a friend a couple years ago, gave myself a crash course in technique at Wakefield Park, and signed up for the Wayne Scott Memorial 'cross race in Fair Hill, MD, the following weekend. I drove up by myself, knowing no one who would be there, the bike crammed in the backseat of my '94 Honda Civic. I suddenly had over an hour of downtime in the car to wonder what in the hell I was doing. I turned up the volume on the CD player so Jonny Lang was singing "won't turn around" louder than I could contemplate doing so.

It was a fun course, with a sand pit, barriers, logs and gullies, snaking turns on grass and a broken concrete retaining wall immediately before a really steep run-up. (Photos I took are HERE, if you're on Facebook). Not to mention it was the coldest day of the season yet - real CX weather. I got lapped, but after riding mostly by myself for the better part of the race, I was happy when they all caught back up with me and I felt like I was in the event again.

The best part was finally managing to do a good moving dismount when I absolutely had to, in the middle of a turn, no less. Bonus: The only 2 pictures of me (yes, my arm position was crappy - I did say it was a borrowed bike that I didn't bother to adjust) include one of the dismount, albeit zoomed in too far to really tell.

I got a singlespeed Bianchi in time for the next race, the Race Pace Cross in Sykesville, MD. Poor timing, though - this course was quite different from the last, with lots of longer hills, and none of my favorite obstacles. No obstacles at all, really, except a flattened log that was easy enough to ride right over. Only one other girl in the race (out of 14) - from Proteus - had a singlespeed. The grass was really wet at 9am, and after warming up on the course and getting through the 1st lap of the race (including making it all the way up one of the tougher hills without dismounting and around some sketchy turns I was sure I'd slide out on), I crashed out and slammed my shin into my pedal (an eggbeater) - which left a contusion and a nice gash.

I pulled off the course for a breather, but when my entire leg started to ache like crazy I knew that was it for the day. I actually thought I must have cracked a bone or something. A friend of mine asked if I cried... not until I got in the car. But only for a minute. Though I did have to pull my car over on 295 and remove the ice I had strapped to my shin - the smallest amount of pressure was unbearable. And there was no ice anywhere at the race site - I had to find a store with a pharmacy outside of town. This time, the hour of downtime in the car was just what I needed. I turned the radio down, and tried to give myself a pep talk, over and over until I started to believe it.

This is what worked: There were 148 people racing that day. Only 14 were women. And I was one of them.

I was healed enough for an 8 mile run and a 5 mile trail race (running) this past weekend. The cyclocross season technically runs through February, but I only see a couple more races coming up in the next few weeks. I keep trying to find people to practice with, but either I don't hear back from the people I contact, or the people I know who belong to clubs or teams haven't had a real practice in awhile. Even the book I found doesn't offer more than the basics I already know. *sigh* It's a good thing I'm used to just jumping into things.

Race Reports from other folks:
DCCX
Wayne Scott Memorial
Race Pace
Another Race Pace and pics
...and one more (good discussion of the course, that I happen to agree with)

Posted by Elaine at 12:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was flipping channels the other night and caught a piece of "The Unit" - a show on CBS about a special forces team that is "assigned covert military operations by the President and never get credit for their actions."

One Unit member has taken his daughter rockclimbing. She's enlisting in the army, too, and wants to find out what she can do. After multiple runs up the same rock face, she asks her dad what her time was. My best memory of the dialogue is this:


"Is that better than a man can do?"
"It's your fastest yet. But you're holding your breath - you need to breathe more"
"But is it better than a man?"
"Why do you care about what a man can do? Baby girl, that's a losing game. Focus on what YOU can do. You can breathe more, and exhale longer."


This scene really resonated with me, not just because it was a relationship I think every sporty girl wants with her father, but also because I often get in my own way by being too competitive and breathing too little.

In the first couple of years I had asthma, I still felt so good sometimes that I denied I had an illness. Then the world would come crashing down again when an environmental trigger, the wrong kind of exercise, or even a change in the weather induced headaches, nausea, and shortness of breath. Sometimes panic would start to set in. Not even of dying, but of being sick in public. I was repeatedly adjusting to different states of health that seemed completely outside my control. I was playing jump-rope with the line between hope and disappointment, and getting too attached to either expectation at a given time.

My insecurites started to go away when I joined a kickboxing class at the gym where I worked. After a few mornings-after of severe breathlessness and weakness, I finally asked the instructor for some advice. He simply said I should take breaks during the classes when I needed to, no matter what the rest of the class was doing. Up until then, I had always pushed myself no matter what.

Part of me needed that - to push past fear and to be able to experience the consequences, no matter how uncomfortable. To know that I could get through it. But now I had some support and understanding. Because nothing in the instructor's voice indicated that he was judging me for being weak, I could manage my stress better, and therefore my illness. It turned out that I only needed to rest for a minute or two, a few times per class, and my next-day symptoms went away. By giving myself a break, I could ultimately do more. A few months later, I ran the fastest 5k of my life.

I still have problems that I can't predict, but I've learned to manage what I can manage, and accept that sometimes I'm going to have a hard time no matter how hard I try. Letting go of that control is freeing, and less stressful. I am satisfied with doing my best with what I have on a given day, and not dwelling on all the ways things could have gone better.

When you compare yourself to what someone else can do, or even with your best self on an ideal day - even if you outdo these expectations, the best you can be is a winner at a losing game.

Posted by Elaine at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)