Sporty Saturday Spotlight 6-23-10

This Saturday the sporty spotlight shines bright on twenty-two year old kayaker and skydiver, Samantha Brunner. Check out Samantha’s interview below where she shares what it’s like to compete in kayaking, how she balances school and sports, and much, much more.

Name: Samantha Brunner 

Age: 22

Sport(s): Pro whitewater kayaker, but I also skydive and like most outdoor sports

Hometown: Memphis, TN

High School/Middle School/College: I am currently a student on full scholarship at the University of Memphis. I graduate in May with a bachelors in Exercise Sport Science, then its off to Physical Therapy school

How many years have you been kayaking? I have been paddling for about 6 years.

What was your fave sporty moment or memory?

The first time I ran a creek that I had to fully memorize. The small creek was so consistent that I had to remember all of the lines because there was no time to stop in between rapids. This made me learn to trust and rely on myself.

What was the biggest lesson you’ve learned from playing your sport?

To trust myself. Kayaking, for me, is all about pushing your physical and mental limits and learning to trust yourself. Only you can truly know what you are capable of, nobody else can tell you that. Kayaking is a way in which I learn what I am capable of; it helps me become a more independent person and puts a lot of life’s experiences into perspective.

What lessons have you learned about work ethic from your sport?

Always be a team player. Getting down the river is a group effort. Your friends depend on you to know your skills as much as you depend on them to know theirs. Also, to always be respectful and truthful. Also, kayaking is a pretty poor sport, so you have to learn how to work to make the bigger trips worthwhile and how to do them within a budget. With that being said, I have learned to be able to put a lot of work and preparation into my trips to make them work and be beneficial for both my sponsors and myself.

What have you learned about teamwork?

It is the only way to be successful, you can’t do everything all by yourself. Everyone has something to bring to the table and is better at something than you are. It teaches you when to lead and when to listen.

How do you balance school and sports?

Haha, that’s the hard one. I know that school is more important and I have the rest of my life to kayak. Being in Memphis makes me a weekend warrior when it comes to kayaking. I plan my major trips around my breaks in school.

List the sponsors that you currently have:

Pretty Tough, Jackson Kayaks, Stohlquist Waterware, Keen Footwear, Kavu Clothing, SnapDragon Sprayskirts, Gaia Paddlesports, Grateful Heads Helmets, Freestyle Watches, H2O Audio, Zeal Optics, Colorado Kayak Supply

How do you plan to use your sport to influence others?

When I get out of Physical Therapy school I plan to start a non-profit, whitewater kayaking camp to fight childhood obesity and eating disorders. I find that kayaking is not only enjoyable; it can be a great motivator to get into shape. I want to show how fun kayaking can be and I think that when one is having fun it is easier to be motivated to stay active.

What’s the girliest thing you like to do? (Pretty Tough signature question)

Haha, I think it would be to dress up. So much of what I do requires pants and flats or sneakers (not that I’m complaining) so when I have a chance to have a date night with my boyfriend, which comes once every few months haha, I like to dress up. I’m usually “one of the guys” so this helps remind me that I’m not always. Also, I kayak in waterproof mascara which makes me pretty girlie ;)

Thanks, Samantha! Best of luck with your amazing career.

Do you or someone you know want to be spotlighted? Send an email to Keri Mikulski at kerimikulski(at)gmail(dot)com.

Happy Saturday!

MRP: Found – one red kayak

(Ed. Note: Artist (and good friend) Eve Beglarian is paddling, biking and hiking the length of the Mississippi River in search of musical inspiration. This is one in a series of journal entries.)

So I’m driving back from dropping off Rafaela at the Quad Cities Airport (I felt really bad that her whole visit was taken up with searching for the lost gear: not much of a river trip for her, that’s for sure), and as I was heading over the Burlington bridge, the phone rings and it’s the Lee County sheriff saying he thinks they’ve found the kayak just down from the Green Bay launch caught in some trees and reeds. EXACTLY as I had hoped; exactly as I had asked you all to dream! We had gone out looking very slowly and carefully yesterday, and hadn’t found it, but maybe the wake from the boats in this morning’s bass tournament dislodged my kayak from where it had snagged! So I go sit impatiently in the library for a bit and the sheriff calls again and tells me to come down to the Fort Madison launch. I drive down and find John Pawling from Lee County Conservation and the sheriff, James Emmett, standing there with my kayak. Not only my kayak, but ALL the accessories: paddles, life jacket, skirt, safety gear, even my well-used boat shoes and slightly stinky gloves. EVERYTHING!

And then John looks up at my roof rack and says “Where’d you get that bike?“ Cindy and Tom had lent me one of their bikes yesterday, and we had made a plan to meet up in New Orleans when I’m done with the journey for them to retrieve it. (A fine excuse for a trip to NOLA, don’t you think?!) John says, ”I’ve got your bike, too.“

Can you imagine?!? It turns out he saw it locked up at Ortho landing and thought perhaps someone had stolen it and hidden it down there, so he cut the lock and brought it back to the Lee County storage facility.

It’s hard to describe how it feels to have imagined I had lost everything, and suddenly have it all restored in the snap of the fingers like this. The Lee County Conservation folks even gave me a new lock to replace the one they had cut!

So I spent the rest of the day driving back and forth several times between Fort Madison and Burlington: returning Cindy’s bike, picking mine up, heading out to River Basin Canoe to buy a lasso lock for the kayak, and calling all the amazing people who had offered me replacement kayaks and bikes, written articles to get the word out, offered money to re-outfit, places to stay, searchboats to go look, to tell them the miraculous outcome of this story.

And I’m going to choose to believe that the wind pushed my boat six to ten feet down the beach into the river all by itself. No kids, no vandals, no theft, nothing like that. The outpouring of kindness from the people of Burlington and Fort Madison and Keokuk has been such an amazing gift to me. And the support and love from all of you here and on Facebook means so so much: I really feel like I am carrying all of you with me on this journey: you are keeping me safe, and all shall be well.

If you want to make a gesture in support of the people of Lee and Des Moines counties, and all they’ve done to make this story have such a wonderful ending, you could send a donation to either Des Moines County Conservation or Lee County Conservation.

And I’m heading down to Quincy and Hannibal this weekend, to the heart of Huck and Jim territory, and Lincoln/Douglas territory, and the Underground Railroad, and more cool stuff I can’t even predict, and it’s gonna be GREAT!

View Original Post at evbvd.com

MRP: Missing – one red kayak

(Ed. Note: Artist (and good friend) Eve Beglarian is paddling, biking and hiking the length of the Mississippi River in search of musical inspiration. This is one in a series of journal entries.)

When we went out to Green Bay landing this morning, the kayak was gone. Simply gone, no trace. The last time I saw it was Sunday around noon, when I was about to paddle down to Ortho landing where the bike was locked up. The wind was too strong, so I decided not to paddle, and I thought it was a bad idea to try to put the kayak back up on the car, partially because I was alone, partially because I needed to drive up to the Quad Cities to pick up Rafaela at the airport Monday and the wind was strong enough that highway driving with the kayak seemed dangerous. I had already left the kayak there overnight with no trouble, so I thought it would be okay.

I was wrong, obviously. Totally wrong.

We called the Lee County sheriff and he came out and took a report. I talked to Mike, a local farmer, whose friend owns some of the hunting camps just upriver and they both promised to ask around.

But there’s more.

We drive down to the Ortho landing ten miles downriver, where I had parked and locked my bike with a big NYC-type chain. And, I bet you can guess, the bike was gone, too. Simply gone, no trace. Not even the presumably broken lock. There was a woman there who comes out every day on her lunch hour who had seen it yesterday, which means the bike was stolen between 1 pm Monday and noon Tuesday.

We called once again, and the police came out to take a report this time (Ortho launch is within Fort Madison city limits, while Green Bay is north enough of Fort Madison to be under the aegis of the county.)

I am now without any form of human-powered transportation. Except walking, I guess(!) And I am kind of in shock. In nearly two months of traveling down the river, nothing has prepared me for this, not even a hint that something like this could happen.

So. We go to the Fort Madison newspaper where I talk to a sympathetic reporter named Joe Benedict, who promises a story for tomorrow’s Fort Madison Democrat. And then we drive back up to Burlington, where I talk to the very kind and helpful editor, Randy Miller, at The Hawkeye, and he, too, promises a story for tomorrow’s paper.

Randy puts me in touch with a local person who wants to remain anonymous, who has put us up in a hotel for the next two nights, and will take us out on the river to look for the kayak tomorrow downriver and in the back sloughs, just in case someone decided it would be fun to launch the kayak just to see where it ends up.

All these people have been so great, so generous with their time and energy and sympathy, that it seems almost unimaginable that both my kayak and my bike could really be gone forever.

So here’s what I’m praying for. That we will go out tomorrow, and my little red sportscar kayak will be caught in some reeds down the river a bit, victim of a dumb prank by some bored kids, and all will be well and I’ll be able to continue on my way almost as if this whole bad adventure didn’t happen. I don’t have much hope for recovering the bike, because in my experience a stolen bike is gone forever. But I’m focusing on the kayak right now, and if you have a little extra space in your day, if you would just dream about my little red kayak half-hidden in the bullrushes waiting to be rescued, I would be really grateful.

View Original Post at evbvd.com

Mississippi River Project: Out and back

(Ed. Note: Artist (and good friend) Eve Beglarian is paddling, biking and hiking the length of the Mississippi River in search of musical inspiration. This is one in a series of journal entries.)

After nearly two months of continuous travel in the company of other people, I am seriously ALONE for the first time. Tonight this campsite (Wildcat Den State Park) is completely empty, I am the only person here, the only person within at least a couple of miles, I imagine. It’s a lot different from being alone on my land in Vermont, not just because my neighbor Mike isn’t within hailing distance, but also because this place itself, the land itself, is not familiar territory. I am really beginning to understand the sheer immensity of the country in a way that I never have before, and in my mood today, it’s somehow a bit oppressive. All these towns, all these houses, all these lives being lived out in these places I had never even thought about, let alone visited; all these factories and roads and bridges and railroads. And the river itself going on and on.

I biked to Davenport and back today, forty miles round trip: no bike path past the city limits, so most of the ride was on Route 22 with cars and trucks lumbering by, and south of Davenport the riverside is really industrial, a huge limestone quarry (it had a sign out front saying hopefully: ”Quarry Beautification,“ but I couldn’t see the results,) many factories, knots of railroads. The road past the quarry was muddy with accidental cement made from the combination of limestone dust and the morning’s rain, it coated the underside of my bike, my legs, the tires. And the road has been pockmarked, perhaps to make it less slippery for cars and trucks, but it was a drag to bike on.

I get to thinking how everything has its price. You want cement, you have to tear holes in the bluffs to get limestone. You want steel, you dig a pit nearly the size of the Grand Canyon up in Hibbing to get the iron you need. You want to use the Mississippi to move goods, you have to constantly dredge a nine-foot channel and build dams and locks and all that stuff. Perhaps we could have done things differently, perhaps we still can do them differently, but I do realize that even my relatively green, relatively low-impact life is unthinkable without cement plants and dams and brutal quarries hidden in out-of-the-way places. I read somewhere that there are only 2500 acres of real prairie left. Can that really be possible? Maybe just in the state of Iowa? Still, it seems unimaginably low.

Going in to Davenport, I climbed the hill a bit and rode Sixth Street over to the cafe at River Music Experience, passing through a poor part of town, past a group of people lined up for free lunch, and many abandoned houses, some of which had once been mansions. The inhabited houses in the neighborhood were painted in bright colors and had excellent gardens, as if to counteract the orphaned sadness of the abandoned ones. It made me want to buy and fix up one of the lost houses, just to tip the scales a bit further towards vitality.

The museum at River Music Experience was mostly a series of kiosks with information that could just as well be on a website, but they seem to give lessons there, and the concert hall is probably cool, and the cafe downstairs is great, so it was a fine halfway point to the day. The trip home was a slog, though. I don’t really like doing out and back routes in general: they feel artificial and sort of pointless, because they are. And going past the factories a second time was even more disheartening. But once I was past the big plants, there was a bit of a climb and suddenly the river was spread out below me, and I could coast down for the last couple of miles, down to the riverside, blessedly free of factories, just green and birds and a house now and again, and the road and the river, and I was filled suddenly with the most amazing joy, and gratitude for being given joy after a day not so full of it. (Plato is right, for sure! (see Philebus))

Doing this whole trip alone would be unimaginable for me. While I enjoy my self-sufficiency, I am really glad I am not doing the rest of the trip this way: it brings out my dark side almost immediately. Caroline Walker is driving down from Chicago for a few days and will be arriving tomorrow. I am glad for that, and I’m saving the sights of Muscatine so I can discover them with her.

Eve Beglarian’s River Blog

Samantha Brunner – Pro Kayaker

Sport: Freestyle Kayak
Home: Tennessee
Birthdate: 3/24/87
Occupation: Full time student
Other Sports/Accomplishments: I skydive, rock climb, and snowboard.
Favorite Athletes: Nikki Kelly, Emily Jackson, Clay Wright, Jessi Stone
Favorite College Team: Memphis Tigers!!
Favorite Sports Drink: I actually like the PowerBar electrolyte mix that you put in water, but I also like Gatorade.
Favorite Workout Music: Oohh, thats a toughie! I like the Bravery and Pendulum.
Hobbies and Interests: Photography and music!
Best Moment: Learning a trick right before my first competition and using it to win 1st place!
Dream Job: Traveling the world with my camera, kayak, and boyfriend.
Favorite Books/TV Shows: Nature Girl is a funny book and I like The Office.

What has been your biggest accomplishment?
Getting the first female descent of a creek in Colorado.

What advice would you give to up and coming female athletes?
The only way to progress is if you set reasonable goals and focus on them with hard work. Don’t get caught up in comparing yourself to other people, it only gets in the way of your progression and can get you down. Stay positive and stay strong.

Competitive Highlights: 2008 USACK Women’s Pro, 1st Women’s Descent of Upper Daisy Creek, CO; 2008 North Alabama Whitewater Festival, 1st Place Pro Women’s Waterfall Freestyle Comp; 2007 North Alabama Whitewater Festival, 2nd Place Overall Pro Women’s Athlete.

Mississippi River Project: A dog in the night-time

(Ed. Note: Artist (and good friend) Eve Beglarian is paddling, biking and hiking the length of the Mississippi River in search of musical inspiration. This is one in a series of journal entries.)

Monday we finally left Wabasha for real: I started out from Minnieska in some pretty gorgeous fog and before I could even get out of the main channel, the phone rang, and it was David Echelard, countertenor and hurdy-gurdy player, a good friend of my old friend Jeff, who invited us to stay at his house in town, OR out in a slough where he has a boathouse, OR to show us some cool hidden campsites. I put Mac and him in touch to figure it out and by the time I got going in earnest, I could actually see a little bit, definitely a good thing, ’cause this being Labor Day, there were really A LOT of powerboats and jet skis and all that, not to speak of the towboats and barges, who don’t seem to get a day off from their laboring.

I had a long wait at Lock 5A (it got put in after the Army Corps had designed and numbered all the other locks; they suddenly realized that without it, Winona would get flooded out. Oops! Glad you caught that little design error, guys…), so I didn’t arrive until about four, and we went out to David’s very excellent boathouse, which Mac had wisely chosen for us from all the riches David had laid before us. This boathouse deal is something new for me: a series of sheds, really, like garages out on the water, that people fix up and appoint to various levels of fabulousness and use sort of as retreats, hanging out there even when they aren’t boating at all. David told us he did most of the memorization work for Anthony Gatto’s opera out there, something I really like picturing. Gertrude Stein would definitely be pleased.

David paid us a visit as we were finishing up dinner, and we had a great time together. He and I had been on a concert together in Minneapolis in maybe 1991 or something, but haven’t seen each other since, so there was a lot to talk about! We had such a fine time that it was well after dark when he went back to town and Mac led us out to the slough where he and Mary Kay had set up camp in the afternoon. It was very cool to bed down in my hammock in the dark having no clue what my surroundings actually were.

Here’s the view of the slough that greeted me from my hammock in the morning:

Pretty great, no?

And last night, after Mary Kay’s long day of paddling, we all gathered at David and Suzanne’s for a great meal, and David played us some of his multitracked countertenoring (really beautiful) and I had the first shower since I can’t even remember when, and we got to meet their very fine son, Hudson, who turns 14 in a couple of days, and then we headed back out to the slough, where this gorgeous hunk of a dog came out of the dark and greeted us as we parked the car, and accompanied us out to the camp, and ended up staying the night. He decided to sleep directly under my hammock, which I really loved, except that every hour or so he would rouse himself and go dive off into the slough (hunting? a moonlight dip?) with a serious splash, so my sleep last night was just a series of dognaps, and I’m definitely ready for another one right about now…

Eve Beglarian’s River Blog

Mississippi River Project: Point No Point

(Ed. Note: Artist (and good friend) Eve Beglarian is paddling, biking and hiking the length of the Mississippi River in search of musical inspiration. This is one in a series of journal entries.)

Today’s paddling was one of the harder days I’ve had. Most of it was in Lake Pepin, which swallows any current the river might have at this point, and the wind is not your friend: it comes from the south, and I was paddling mostly east, which makes for a choppy journey. And it got really sunny and hot as the day went on: I thought I was about as tan as I get, but I got some more color today. I was expecting lots of drunken powerboaters and waterskiers (waterskiing was invented on Lake Pepin, who knew?), but thankfully there were hardly any until right before Lake City, where I finished up. There was one guy who had moored his boat in a bit of a cove and was draped asleep, buck naked, across the stern. I definitely had a twinge of jealousy at the sight. I can’t drape myself (naked or clothed) over the back of my kayak, a definite drawback on a beautiful late summer day like today.

The bluff at Frontenac State Park is called Point No Point, and it really is well-named: you see it from a distance as a well-developed point that seems about a mile off, and you paddle for probably more than three miles, and suddenly you’re at the town of Frontenac, and the point never actually materializes as a point. It’s a very curious optical illusion, and it pleases me to be tricked by it just as it has tricked riverboat pilots and fur traders (and pleasure boaters, too, no doubt) for generations.

Eve Beglarian’s River Blog

Mississippi River Project: 10,000 lakes; 1000 pictures

(Ed. Note: Composer  – and good friend – Eve Beglarian  is on a year long odyssey kayaking the length of the Mississippi River  from its source at Lake Itasca in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. This is one in a series of journal entries about her River Project).

I’m sitting in a snack bar overlooking Lake Calhoun in the city of Minneapolis, and of course it has free wi-fi and power outlets wherever you might need them: the Twin Cities being one of those places that seems to regard wi-fi as a public good, very handy. It’s been a delightful and very full few days in the Twin Cities: but totally out of the rhythm Mac and I had developed over the last ten days or so, so I’m WAY behind on blogging. Suffice it to say that Mac paddled from Anoka to NE Minneapolis, a neighborhood I had never spent time in before now, which has a very cool new library in an old brewery; I paddled through the entire city of Minneapolis and to the border of St. Paul on Friday, which required me to go through THREE locks (I was very scared beforehand, but it was actually very cool and manageable, and the lock wardens or tenders or whatever they are called were very kind and friendly and didn’t seem to mind using all this huge technology just for me and my tiny kayak.)

Phillip and Preston, our incredibly generous and unflappable hosts for all these days at their very cool place, which has its own blog, took us on an amazing walk after my kayaking day to a new park in St. Paul that has been reclaimed from being a railway yard. It had previously been an encampment for the Ojibwe and there’s a magic cave there. And the walk continued up into a place called Swede Hollow, a sort of camp where immigrant workers in the nearby brewery lived up until the 50’s or something.

Friday night we all had dinner at Maura and Jeff’s, Saturday we said goodbye to Richard and welcomed Heather and Mary Kay as new fellow-travelers, and celebrated by going to the State Fair, oh my oh my oh my!!! this totally fascinating conflation of rural agricultural stuff right in the MIDDLE of the city of St. Paul, very very cool.

anyway, I could write for days about all these excellent adventures, but I think I’m just going to post some pictures and leave it at that for the moment. I’m pretty fried and today is a day of rest, right?!?

here are a few photos from friday, the day I paddled from NE Minneapolis to St. Paul

Mississippi River Project: Reading the river

(Ed. Note: Composer  – and good friend – Eve Beglarian  recently embarked on a year long odyssey kayaking the length of the Mississippi River  from its source at Lake Itasca in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. This is one in a series of journal entries about her River Project).

I begin to learn the very basics of reading the river: learning to see the difference between ripples in the water caused by wind and those caused by branches or rocks just under the water. It’s a funny thing how the kayak wants to go right where the obstructions are, to join the faster water that’s created there. I am aware that I am a rank beginner at this river reading: it’s about equivalent to my Ojibwe recognition: a ”g“ at the end of a word makes the word plural, I know that much!

I’m actually quite good at being a beginner at things: perhaps it’s my only real expertise. I know 300 words and the conjugation of the present tense in as many as 10 languages, but I can’t really speak any but English. I can play simple music on virtually every instrument, but I’m not a skilled performer on any of them. I realize I am in certain ways a total dilettante, a ”generalist“ as my father described me to my chagrin as a teenager. I berate myself all the time for not mastering Greek or the piano, I put myself on disciplined schedules of study that invariably fall by the wayside because the next project requires me to learn the rudiments of the Persian radif and carpentry, kayaking and Ojibwe. After first spending some time with my music, my friend Susan pronounced me a bricoleur, without a trace of disdain, so I’ve decided finally to embrace my bricoleur self, make my peace with my own nature. I have the confidence that I can learn almost anything I need to know to do what I want to do, to make what I want to make. But sometimes I do get lonely for that sense of pure mastery of a single subject. I think of Mark Twain’s immortal description of the river pilot’s expertise in Life on the Mississippi, and I would like to have that mastery in something more, I don’t know, elevated than driving a car, using a Mac, editing audio, setting up a tent.

Although writing this, I’m suddenly realizing that the pleasure I take in dumb little rituals like organizing the car, setting up the tents elegantly and efficiently, keeping my databases and hard drives ridiculously tidy, and a million other tiny tasks, which I execute in a laughably OCD and control-freakish way, are a way of counterbalancing my openness to beginner status and serendipity (otherwise known as ignorance and luck) in the most important parts of my life.

And there is a moment sometimes when I’m writing a new piece when everything falls into place, and suddenly I do have that sense of mastery of the needs of that exact piece and no other, and I feel this oceanic sense of utter certainty: it didn’t exist at all, then the fragmentary thread of something shows up, and then all of a sudden, I know exactly how it goes, what it needs to be. It doesn’t feel like MY mastery at all, more like something visited upon me. But perhaps that’s my version of reading the river. I’ll take it; it’s enough for me, for sure…

~Eve Beglarian
Original Post

Mississippi River Project: A song and a dance

(Editors Note: Composer  – and good friend – Eve Beglarian  recently embarked on a year long odyssey kayaking the length of the Mississippi River  from its source at Lake Itasca in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. This is one in a series of journal entries about her River Project).

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