Gimme Toes and Elbows, you little punk!

Yesterday I did the exercise ball workout I've been doing lately.  One of the exercises looks like this:

As I strained to hold the position for 60 seconds, it occurred to me that it was very similar to something my fellow campers and I were made to do back when I was a kid at summer camp: the dreaded "Toes and Elbows."  Toes and Elbows was the one-size-fits-all punishment for any of a long list of infractions.  Here I am assuming the traditional Toes and Elbows position:

The most sadistic counselors made us do it on a gravel surface so we would end up with rocks embedded in our elbows, or maybe over a pile of fresh horse dung to ratchet up the stakes.  But Toes and Elbows was plenty unpleasant on its own because of the extreme discomfort it caused in the abdominal area.  Who knew that we were actually strengthening our core muscles?

By the time I was a counselor myself in the mid 1980s, our society's attitude toward corporal punishment was changing, and the camp administration, fearing accusations of child abuse, ordered an end to Toes and Elbows and all other forms of physical discipline.  So I never got to exact "revenge" on the next generation of campers.  And that's probably a good thing: emotionally-disturbed souls don't need to be running around with carte blanche to dispense torture.  But did we unwittingly deprive subsequent generations of the core strength to conquer the world?

Since Rebecca Giddens and Scott Shipley wound up their competitive careers a few years ago, U.S. paddlers have had a tough time in international competition.  Even though I am a fan of the U.S. Canoe and Kayak Team, I'm not outraged about it; very few people get to be among the best in the world, and that small group simply doesn't happen to include any U.S. athletes at the moment.  But for those who are determined to point the finger of blame, I suggest a look at the demise of Toes and Elbows.

The glory days of U.S. canoe and kayak racing were the 1980s and early 1990s, when flatwater athletes like Mike Herbert, Norm Bellingham, and Greg Barton and whitewater athletes like Jon Lugbill, Dana Chladek, Cathy and Davey Hearn, the Haller brothers, and Rich Weiss were putting our nation on the podium.  These people would have been summer campers in the early 80s or before; could it be that they were especially naughty, and had to do lots and lots of Toes and Elbows?  I think it is a question that deserves serious study.

By this morning I had recovered enough from my exercise-ball-enhanced Toes and Elbows to do my little workout with the pushups and step-ups and stuff, and then head down to the river.  I paddled for 60 minutes in a pretty stiff wind.