A Message From The Creator
Inspirational Woman Of The Day: Paula Radcliffe
Women’s Health: ‘Fearless With Marlo Thomas,’ Featuring ‘Sleeping Naked After 40’ Founder Rosie Battista
A Message From The Creator
Don’t Quit
When things go wrong as they sometimes will,
When the road you’re trudging seems all uphill,
When funds are low and the debts are high,
And you want to smile, but you have to sigh.
When care is pressing you down a bit.
Rest, if you must, but don’t you quit.
Life is queer with its twists and turns
As every one of us sometimes learns.
And many a failure turns about
When he might have won had he stuck it out:
Don’t give up though the pace seems slow –
You may succeed with another blow.
Success is failure turned inside out –
The silver tint of the clouds of doubt.
And you never can tell how close you are.
It may be near when it seems so far:
So stick to the fight when you’re hardest hit
It’s when things seem worst that you must not quit.
Inspirational Woman Of The Day: Paula Radcliffe
Paula Jane Radcliffe, MBE (born December 17, 1973) is an English long-distance runner. She is the current world record holder for the women’s marathon, which she set during the 2003 London Marathon, with a time of 2:15.25.
Early career Paula Radcliffe
Radcliffe was born in Northwich, Cheshire but she grew up in Bedfordshire and is a member of Bedford Athletic Club. She studied French, German and economics at Loughborough University. Her early running success was in cross country events, including the 1992 World Junior title, beating Wang Junxia. She missed the 1994 season through injury, but came back with a succession of good results at 5000 m, including fifth place in both the 1995 World Championships and 1996 Olympic Games. Although silver-medalist in the 1999 World Championships in Athletics Radcliffe seemed destined never to win a major 5,000 m or 10,000 m title, finishing out of the medals at the 2000 Olympic Games and 2001 World Championships in Athletics
Radcliffe is not known for her sprint finish and relies on setting a punishing pace from the start with the aim of pulling away from her opponents.
Later career – Paula Radcliffe
In 2002, Radcliffe made the move up to the marathon, a decision that immediately paid off with victory at that year’s London Marathon in a world’s best time for a women’s only race. Later that year, Radcliffe set a world record time of 2:17:18 in the Chicago Marathon on October 13, 2002, breaking the previous record by a minute and a half. She broke the record again in London marathon in April 2003, with a time of 2:15:25. She won the New York Marathon even though not fully prepared (the only occasion that a competitor came within a minute of her). Of the seven marathons Radcliffe has run so far, she has won six and set a record in five, building up a claim to be the best female distance runner of all time in her age group. She has run four out of the five fastest times in history in the women’s marathon (fourth place being held by Catherine Undersea).
2004 Olympics – Paula Radcliffe
Radcliffe did not compete in the London Marathon in 2004, but was the favourite to win the gold medal in the marathon at that year’s Olympic Games. However, she suffered an injury to her leg just two weeks prior to the event and had to use a high dose of anti-inflammatory drugs. This had an adverse effect on her stomach hindering food absorption. The resultant lack of energy and carbohydrates in her system before the start of the race led to her distressing withdrawal after 36 km. Five days later she started in the 10,000 metres but, still suffering from the effects of the marathon, retired with eight laps remaining.
Regarded as Great Britain’s best gold medal hope in athletics, her withdrawal made headlines in the UK. Radcliffe was aware of the public’s expectations of her and was emotionally devastated after the Marathon.
Paula Radcliffe leading the London Marathon in 2005, near to Lime house in East London
Post 2004 Olympics
She made a successful comeback in her next marathon, winning the 2004 New York Marathon in a time of 2 hours 23 minutes 10 seconds. After a close race with Kenya’s Susan Cherokee her greater strength allowed her to pull away to victory at the end.
At the 2005 London Marathon she won with a time of 2 hours 17 minutes 42 seconds, a world’s best time for a women’s only race by over a minute. The race however is remembered more for a notorious moment towards the end when Radcliffe, feeling hindered by the need for a toilet break, stopped and defecated on the side of the street in plain view of the crowd and TV camera’s which broadcast the incident to millions of viewers watching live. Radcliffe apologised to viewers after the race, saying that her bowels were disturbing her and slowing her down as a result, and she knew she would be better once she let it out. The incident was widely reported in the press gaining much notoriety. In November 2006, the incident was voted “The top running moment in history” from a choice of 10 “unforgettable moments” [1][2].
On August 14, 2005 she won her first gold medal at the World Championships when she took the marathon title in Helsinki, Finland, dominating the race and setting a championship record time of 2 hours, 20 minutes and 57 seconds. For the same race, she and three other British runners were awarded third place in the team competition.
Other achievements and awards
Radcliffe has set numerous records, official and unofficial, on the track and the roads. She currently (as of 11 October 2006) holds the official world record for 10 km on roads. She has thrice won the World Half-Marathon championships, twice the World Cross-Country championships (in 2001 and 2002), and in December 2003 became European Cross-Country champion for the second time, the only woman to have achieved this feat in the event’s ten-year history. Forced out of the Paris World Athletics Championships because of injury in 2003, her greatest moment on the track has been European gold at 10,000 m in 2002. Hindered by back-markers, and in the rain, she nevertheless ran a time of 30:01.09 ( a European record by 12 seconds, and second only to Wang Junxia’s controversial world record time of 29:31.78 set in Beijing [3] ). The same year she won Commonwealth Games gold in the 5000m, missing the world record by three seconds. She was awarded an MBE in June 2002, and later in the year became the BBC Sports Personality of the Year.
In July 2006, Radcliffe, who had not raced for over six months due to a metatarsal injury, announced she was pregnant but insisted she wanted to compete in the next two Olympic Games.[1]
Anti doping
Radcliffe’s athletic ability and commitment to training are accompanied by a strong belief in playing by the rules. She has frequently made high-profile condemnations of performance-enhancing drugs in athletics, most famously at the World Athletics Championships in Edmonton in 2001 when Radcliffe and team-mate Haley Tulle held up a sign protesting against the reinstatement of Russian athlete Olga Yegorova, after Yegorova had tested positive for the banned substance EPO. Radcliffe also wears a red ribbon when competing to show her support for blood testing as a method of catching drugs cheats.
Inspiration Of Style: Summer Gives Way for the New Prettiness
BY DAPHNE MERKIN
I used to read a winsome children’s book to my daughter when she was young that began with the all-important question: “Jesse Bear, what will you wear? What will you wear in the morning?” I found myself thinking about Jesse and his daily dilemma while I was looking at the coverage of the spring shows and trying to envision myself dressed in peplums, floaty prints, and A-line frocks—the kind of clothes that convey unadulterated, unsubversive femininity. Could I imagine trading in my wintry leggings and big sweaters, my armed-for-urban-combat uniform, for such transformative, ladylike vestments? How would white lace and pastel ruffles hold their own in my essentialist, black-on-black wardrobe? Did the New Prettiness speak to my sense of being a woman, mired in the muck of postfeminist, postmodernist, “he pays/she pays” definitions that attach to same? What had happened, I wondered, to all the ironic, ostensibly empowering signifiers of contemporary women’s fashion—whether body-parading or menswear-inspired or languidly androgynous?
One answer might be innate to the fashion system itself, whereby fashion exists to pull up the shades on an eternally new day, appearing to offer us something we haven’t yet seen—or that we haven’t seen recently—while simultaneously addressing relevant concerns. Although fashion designers constantly reference earlier eras, they also put their own spin on them in part by virtue of a more distanced perspective. Dior’s New Look of 1947 caused as much excitement as it did not only because it introduced an overtly feminine silhouette harking all the way back to Madame Bovary—tiny waists, sloping shoulders, and long, full skirts—but also because it came right on the heels of World War II, when a workshirt-clad Rosie the Riveter held aloft the torch of female solidarity with our men in uniform. The New Look signaled a return to woman as a decorative object, a beautifully plumed bird in a gilded cage, rather than a practical partner in a common larger cause.
Similarly, the New Prettiness comes at a moment when the culture at large seems freshly enticed by old-fashioned values, whether served up in extreme form by the Tea Party or conveyed by the hipster embrace of everything vintage and homegrown. Nostalgia is everywhere you look, no longer self-consciously so, but fully in play as a motif, informing such theater revivals as Porgy and Bess and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and (underviewed) TV shows Pan Am and The Playboy Club. Prabal Gurung, whose own clothes this season almost singularly manage to hint at racier concerns (in the form of a black leather and silk-cord harness and the use of erotic images) while also gesturing toward a softer treatment, observes that “the world is moving so fast that we are feeling a bit lost in the whirlwind.
Another answer might be that we have all, designers and customers alike, grown tired of identity politics, that we yearn for the sort of social sureties we imagine existed in the decades right before consciousness raising and bra burning. “I feel that right now is an uncertain time,” says Jason Wu, “and there’s something about a polished, dressed-up look that’s a nice contrast. When times are challenging, the one thing you can control is the way you look.” We might ridicule the gender constrictions that marked the ’50s and ’60s, but the success of Mad Men, among other backward-looking phenomena, suggests that they also speak to some part of ourselves that doesn’t want to construct a working model of femaleness from scratch each day. I can’t be alone in sensing a withdrawal from embattled agendas of self-definition, especially among younger women, as well as a renewed interest in traditional modes of femininity—even if it’s as gestural as slipping on a skirt instead of a pair of pants. It’s hard enough getting out the door in the morning in these complex, economically shaky times without having to put on a suit of armor first—and looking pretty might require less energy, conversely, than we have been taught to think.
To this end, designers, with Miuccia Prada leading the pack, seem to have studied their theme books and visual inspirations and decided to bypass the contested ideological territory of the female figure in favor of exploring a tried-and-true template of femininity, someone pristinely ladylike, not so much retro-anything as prefeminist hullabaloo. And there is indeed a certain comfort to be had, after so many years of overly exposed and overly sexed-up fashion, in clothes that flatter the feminine shape without parodying it or exploiting it. Perhaps we are feeling our way back to a period when it was possible to look pleasing without feeling insipid or obeisant to male dictates. Think of Bette Davis in All About Eve, a ballsy and driven dame if ever there were one, admitting toward the movie’s end that being a woman is “one career all females have in common, whether we like it or not.”
Of course, for some designers, such as Carolina Herrera, it has been ever thus. “The idea of getting dressed is to look more beautiful,” she tells me in a phone conversation. “I want to see women dress very feminine, very soigné.” Herrera goes on to ridicule the notion of fashion as a deliberate statement, a costume to be painstakingly pieced together from what we see on the runway and in magazines. She thinks the metaphysics of getting dressed is simpler than that: “Women want to be admired by men and women,” Herrera observes. “They don’t want to be laughed at.” I listen to the note of assurance in her voice and wonder at my own resistance to the feminine mystique, my entrenched fear of Stepford Wife glossiness and insistence on comfort and informality. Even so augustly cerebral a figure as Virginia Woolf fretted about looking risible in the wrong dress and consulted with the editor of British Vogue about which dressmaker to see. Who am I to eschew the seductions of a nipped-in waist and prim pumps?
Then again, I can’t help feeling some unease about all this reclaimed femininity and where it might lead. Does dressing like Doris Day in an A-line or pleated skirt mean that we have to go around batting our eyelashes and acting all helpless? Is it possible, that is, to go back in time without feeling railroaded into an older, discarded style of being? Gurung, who insists that “there’s got to be something that cuts the sweetness, a bit of grit,” sounds a cautionary note: “Femininity is good, but conflict and confrontation are not a bad thing. Are women really going to dress up in clothes that look like a rehash of vintage? It feels a little regressive.”
My guess is that designers are betting on our being able to have it both ways, loosening up on power dressing while losing none of our power. One has only to look at Michelle Obama’s relaxed habitation of a wife-and-mother role versus Hillary Clinton’s rather strident efforts to influence policy when her husband was in the White House to realize that there has been a shift in the wind, that women no longer feel the need to roar. Wu, meanwhile, insists that the new femininity is sharper, infused with a tougher attitude and the cleaner lines that are a legacy of minimalism. And Miuccia Prada sprinkled images of cars over pleated skirts and demure white and yellow dresses as if to suggest that toughness is at best a pose you can borrow as you please. Here’s hoping that they’re right, that this time around the lady is neither a vamp nor a tramp but serenely in charge, not waiting for Prince Charming but confident in her ability to save herself.
Women’s Health: ‘Fearless With Marlo Thomas,’ Featuring ‘Sleeping Naked After 40’ Founder Rosie Battista
At Marlothomas.com, we’re always talking about how important it is for women to continue dreaming, no matter how impossible their goals may seem. Rosie Battista is one woman who took this attitude to heart. At 50 years old, Rosie decided to reinvent her life and pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a professional bodybuilder. We found her story to be inspiring. We hope you do, too.
“The turning point happened in my kitchen. But it wasn’t when I was cooking, eating or washing dishes. What happened in the kitchen actually took place in my head and changed my life forever and for the better.”
So begins Rosie Battista’s story of how she completely transformed herself at the age of 50 from a self-proclaimed “fat head” (always thinking and feeling fat, hating her body and just tolerating life) to a competitive bodybuilder, finally comfortable in her own skin — and competing onstage alongside her 20-year-old daughter.
For Rosie, a closetful of beautiful vintage clothes that used to fit was a constant reminder that she had fallen into a rut, and that she was not living her life as the person she wanted to be. She was teaching fitness and weight loss for a living, but she was 35 pounds overweight herself. She was selling her house in a bad market, she had just ended a committed relationship, and her business was on shaky ground. And though she often spoke to her kids about her dreams of becoming a bodybuilder, she never acted on them. Even when her kids encouraged her to “just do it,” the odds simply seemed insurmountable.
Then one day something clicked, and Rosie decided to reinvent herself and achieve her dream. It wasn’t easy and there were many tears along the way. There were feelings of dread and despair. She had to battle her own internal voices of fear and doubt, which repeatedly told her she was too old, hormonal and menopausal to ever reach her goals. But sheer determination and inspiration kept her going. The mother of three kept moving forward.
Today, Rosie is the author of several books. She’s a weight-loss specialist, a nutrition and lifestyle coach, and a figure (aka bodybuilding) competitor. She writes, teaches, coaches, and competes from a place of confidence, strength, and happiness. She went from being a “fat-feeling, frumpy, 50-year-old” to a “fabulous, focused, confident 50-year-young woman” who is now so comfortable in her skin that she sleeps naked every night — and loves it.
Three fearless lessons Rosie learned that you can try yourself:
– Set manageable, daily goals for yourself. Focus on those while keeping the bigger goal in the back of your mind.
– Think about how you can inspire people and make their lives better, instead of dwelling on all the reasons you have to be afraid.
– If you are scared and nervous about a goal you have set for yourself, plan to do it with a partner. That will motivate you and surely help in getting you there!
Women In The News: 2 women in their 80s parachute for Ohio charity
Associated Press
LIMA, Ohio (AP) — Two great-grandmothers in their 80s have parachuted from a plane to raise money for a veterans’ food pantryin northwest Ohio.
The Lima (LY’-muh) News (http://bit.ly/NwU102) reports 83-year-old Marjorie Bryan and 82-year-old Marianna Sherman parachuted Saturday at the Allen County Airport in Lima. They made tandem jumps with retired Sgt. 1st Class Michael Elliott, who has done tandem jumps with former President George H.W. Bush.
The women parachuted to raise money for the local chapter of Blue Star Mothers of America and its veterans’ food pantry. Blue Star members are mothers whose children have served in the military.
Bryan is from Lima. Sherman is from Kenton. Bryan likes parachuting so much she wants to accompany Bush if he jumps for his 90th birthday. She would be 85.
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Information from: The Lima News, http://www.limanews.com
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