Circles of Life

Circles of Life by Daf

My tight inner circle, by our sport is bound,

working together for goals of our own.

Fam’ly circle, mainly in love is found,

where care and support is so freely shown.

Most reliable quality is trust;

Mental strength is also required at work.

A changing world where diligence is a must,

equality of effort, none will shirk.

The neighbourhood bond has a life to live

more distant but standing in solid stone,

help given when needed without a thought;

Know with them there, you are never alone.

Five solid steel rings that sometimes will link.

Olympic spirit holds me from the brink.

The poem above was written this morning and mentions five of my regular circles. My Poetry group is one of the circles that links in with the other rings too. You see, some friends and family are common to several of my life circles. The inner circle, go to the theatre and the movies, we celebrate birthdays with a meal together and a few attend the poetry afternoons and have caught the poetry bug enough to read, or recite from memory and have started to write their own poems which is sheer great joy to me.

We have over the years, cycled or raced together. Our arms when swimming go round in something similar to circles, well continuous loops anyway, as well as our legs spinning fit to bust. Only yesterday morning Steve and I ran multi laps of the Arundel streets, again not exactly circles but starting and finishing in the same place and sometimes our thoughts go in circles too. 

Higher stronger faster? Well I do my best; but these days its more like keep on plodding. The circles of life take many forms as we all know and not all of them are nice. We all have our ups and downs, so enjoy the ups when they come. Every athlete loses some time to injury and those are frustrating periods of time. I have struggled through the inconvenience of a couple of broken bones twice, both times putting me out of training and races for an aggravating amount of time. Yet I have bounced back and filled the injury time with reading, writing, viewing, some coaching and things to occupy my mind as much as resting the damaged bones.  

 

 I had my first swim in three weeks this morning due to a set of biopsy’s to check some sun damaged places on my face. Had I known that it would take that long to settle, I would have put the treatment off until the end of the season. The rest of my training went on as usual or rather more than usual to make up for the swim time lost, though I have to say on this, my first swim, I did not feel as though I had lost any power at all, the set seemed to feel exactly the same as it ever was with no aches or pains.

Being put out of training is hard for anybody and getting an injury during an event can be so hard mentally. Saying that, I am reminded of my husband Steve, who developed a back spasm toward the end of the bike ride section in Ironman Austria some years ago. He had done that race at least a half dozen times, it was his favourite race and who can say what brought on the pain, when he had trained very well for the event.

He had so much grit and determination that he forced himself on and even though he was in horrible pain for the full duration of the marathon run. Astonishingly, he still managed to cross the finish line with the support of a stick found along the way. He looked like one of those images of an old Saint striding on his pilgrimage and I have called him Saint Stephen since that time because God only knows how he got through that day.

It is not something that I would want to go through but Steve would not be talked into stopping, as many would have done, so from about the half way point a friend and I walked with him to make sure he was still standing. Getting through those last miles was torture. The contrast in the finish photos after so many happy leaps over the line in the past, was agony but pain or not he got to the finish which is so impressive. Steve has completed well over thirty Ironman events and that is incredible. A mere eighteen is my count of Ironman or iron distance events.

Birth to death is the longest circle of all. Don’t waste a moment of it.