Month: December 2018

Why We Travel

Our family just returned home from a family weekend trip to the town of Frankenmuth, Michigan. Frankenmuth – as the name suggests – is a bit like a small town was scooped out of the Bavarian part of Germany and transplanted in Central Michigan. My wife and I stopped by Frankenmuth on our way to Traverse City in the summer and we concluded that this would be a fun place to bring the kids for our Christmas trip. I don’t think I’m spoiling the blog post here to tell you, dear reader, that we parents miscalculated the kids’ embrace of this little trip. Put simply, we missed the mark.

Scooped out of Bavaria

I started drafting this post in the hotel room the morning of our departure. As I sat down to write, three of our four kids were staring creepily into their personal device screens with headphones in. The older two kids were sharing a sofa, which means they were within 2 feet of one another, and yet they were in their own little worlds. As I watched them geeking out, I sat for a moment pondering the failure of this trip.

We reserved a suite in a hotel with a water park, replete with kids’ adventure areas, multiple water slides, a lazy river, and an old fashioned indoor pool and hot tub combo. Right next door was Bronner’s Christmas World, which is an out-and-out extravaganza of Christmas consumerism. If nothing else, it is worth a walk through to see the nearly countless ornament combinations in terms of color scheme and thematic character. The town of Frankenmuth is well-decorated year-round, and although it could be accused by more cynical travelers of being a bit of a tourist trap, it has a quaint charm that draws people in.

Before we think more deeply about this failure of ours, let’s first talk about the magnitude. Our daughter didn’t bring a swim suit. The two youngest boys brought swim suits, but each was at least one size too small. No one brought sandals or any form of cover up. In essence, this trip wasn’t really on their minds. All of the kids turned us down when we offered a walk down town in the well-lit evening to see the Christmas decorations and to pop in and out of the nearly 20 fun and unique shops on the main street. Instead, they opted to keep their noses in their individual devices in the hotel room. The three boys spent an hour in the water park. Our daughter went out with me the morning before we left to pick up breakfast for the family. But other than that, it was a pretty dismal showing.

Where did we go wrong? The last several years, we have had fun trips to some great destinations that they’ve really enjoyed. Have we lost them? Has the internet cyborg finally mind-melded with our children to the point of no return? I resisted the temptation to get angry and tell them off. “Your mom and I planned this trip for you and now you’re going to enjoy it!” But that’s self-serving. Yes, their devices can be like black holes, but we’ve overcome this digital inertia before.

In short, we missed the mark because my wife and I were drawn in to the quaintness of this town and we projected our 40-something perspective onto the kids. “Oh they’ll love it,” we told ourselves this summer. “We can take them shopping and get them tickets to the water park and they’ll have a blast.” The truth is that our kids mostly don’t like shopping and they rarely go for swimming these days. This caused me to start thinking about why we travel in the first place. Now wiser from a failed journey, I think I have it.

We travel so the uniqueness of the new experiences will pull us out of our routines and to challenge us to think differently about the world around us. Frankenmuth didn’t do that for our kids. Don’t get me wrong, Frankenmuth is a lovely town. But given our kids’ historical travels and experiences, there was nothing new enough for them to overcome the tractor beams of WiFi. Are they spoiled? Debatably, yes. Could we, rather, should we have predicted the outcome? Absolutely. Next year, we may not travel with the kids. We might be coming to the end of a cycle with them where our interests are just too different to pull together. However, if we decide to travel, the uniqueness of the new experiences must be enough to pull them out of their routines. Because if not, it isn’t worth the time and energy.

Taking a Zero Day

In hiking parlance, taking a zero day means taking a day off. It isn’t often that I take a day off of running, especially with a long race coming up. I am preparing for a 50k trail race, which is the first time I’ll officially run longer than a marathon. To support the extra ups and downs of a trail race, I recently added 3 mile stair workouts with a weight vest and the change in training strained some muscles in my arches. I did my best to run through it, but the pain kept increasing as I put in miles on my other runs. So… time to take a break.

Taking a break from 6-days-per-week running after eight months should be easy in theory. As in, I could simply not run. But breaking a habit, even a habit that takes effort, is leaving me feeling adrift at the moment. This weekend, I found myself feeling stuck – almost paralyzed – and quite unproductive. It was like I had a computer program in my brain that said, “run” and when the “run” program didn’t execute, I struggled to figure out what was next. Instead of just skipping it and moving on to the rest of my chores, I sat stewing on the fact that I couldn’t run. I’d flex my feet and wince at the pain instead of simply moving on. What a wonderful opportunity to use a bit of mindfulness practice to overcome my faulty program!

First, sit with it. Instead of fighting reality, I took the opportunity to sit with the discomfort of the break in routine. I sat in meditation and worked on settling my brain. I found that I was stuck on repeat. “I just want to run. But I can’t. Stupid foot. Why did I have to overtrain? Maybe if I flex it, it will feel better.” Rinse and repeat. I thought through my attachment to the task of running. Really, I was attached to the expectation of being pain-free. I wanted things to be different than what they were right now. Instead of repeatedly berating myself to accept what was, I decided to focus on what I could do. Perhaps an anti-inflammatory or some ice or a bit of massage therapy? So after breaking the mental cycle of wanting to run pain-free, I decided to make a to do list. First, I’ll use a tennis ball to put pressure on the affected areas. Then I’ll follow that up with some ice. Finally, I’ll take some ibuprofen at bed time to calm the angry muscles. Satisfied with a plan, I was starting to let go of the attachment.

Second, take action on what I can do. I put my plan into action. I grabbed the tennis ball and put as much pressure as I could stand on the affected area. Rolling it over and over for about 5 minutes. The logic here was that I probably made the small muscles in my arch area “angry” with all the stair work and needed something to break up the knotted tissue. After some rather intense moments, I got an ice pack and applied 10 minutes on, 10 minutes off cold therapy for a half an hour. Nearing bed time, I took some ibuprofen and called it a night. The next morning, my foot was feeling significantly better.

Finally, accept the progress and use it as motivation to continue on the path to recovery. This morning, I decided to take another zero day. Two in a row? Yep. My wife and I took the kids skiing this morning for our second-youngest child’s birthday, so it served as a nice distraction. After we got home, I resisted the urge to attempt a run and – even better – resisted the urge to go back to stewing about not being able to run. Instead, I folded laundry, I tidied up the kitchen, I wrote my first blog post in a month, I caught up on televised soccer matches from the day, and this evening I’m going to watch a movie with my lovely wife.

Who knew a zero day could be so much fun?