Pick the right role model

Erik has decided to call his business Team 6

20.11.2014
Day 220
Thursdays are great: a session with Erik (battles ropes, halo squats, bicep curls, one arm stretches, rotation, side raises).
A crisp, promising late autumn morning

After that. I cycle happily to Southwark Park (this week weighed down by 2x2kg dumbbells as well as the yoga mat), for my Buggy Runners session with Paula and Anuja and the babies: warm up, dynamic stretches, strides, jogs, faster work punctuated by squats, weights, rotations, then 4-min cross country. Power walk to new location, then some sprints, lunges and apparatus and mat work.
Cycle to and from work. Very tired.

Southwark Park, the area where I time their 'long' run -

Role modelling
The Better Bones blog, which I follow with interest, had an interesting suggestion for its readers today: identifying women we admire who are at least 15 years older than ourselves, and aim to be just like them.  I don't know that many older women. I admire my sharp 94 year old auntie, Gill, but shudder at the thought of ending up like my demented 86-year-old godmother. Some of my friends are between 5 and 10 years older than me, and I admire them. It's important not to go down the route of fixating on sacred celebrities beloved of magazines like Good Housekeeping (you know their cover girl roster: Lulu, Helen Mirren, Joanna Lumley etc). You can't admire anyone you don't know well.
It made me consider my own potential as role model though. The young women who attend Buggy Runners are presumably in their early 30s. I, as their coach, encourage them, push them a little, inform them, I hope I don't patronise them, in that 'awesome abs' PT way.  I hope they find me helpful (I do at least look after their babies while they practise strides, sprints, squats and skips). Perhaps they think I'm a frightful old bore. Who knows, at least I feel I am doing some good.

"When I am an old woman I shall wear purple 

With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me''.