BABY ON BIKE

Coaching Questions: A Coach's Guide to Powerful Asking Skills

The single most important skill in coaching is asking powerful questions. In this volume, master coach trainer Tony Stoltzfus joins with 12 other professional coaches to present dozens of valuable asking tools, models and exercises, then illustrates these coaching strategies with over 1,000 examples of penetrating questions. Covering the gamut from basic techniques like options and actions to advanced concepts such as challenge and reframing, Coaching Questions is a book that will find a home on any coach's short list of handy references. Coaching Questions: A Coach's Guide to Powerful Asking Skills includes: 1. Dozens of asking tools, models, and strategies. 2. The top ten asking mistakes coaches make, and how to correct each one. 3. Nearly 1200 examples of powerful questions from real coaching situations. 4. Destiny discovery tools organized in a four-part life-purpose model . 5. Overviews of 15 popular coaching niches, with a tool and examples for each. 6. A schedule of training exercises to help you become a "Master of Asking".

Reims Notre-Dame Cathedral

26th August - Arcis-sur-Aube to Reims
It was only 15 miles north to Reims, just over an hour, so I thought I could make it there before it got too dark and I could wander round town for a while. I made it to the outskirts of Reims without a problem but like many times before, road signs are not made for cyclists. I got completely lost in the suburbs and then when I finally got back on the right road, it pointed towards the motorway for "Reims - Centre Ville". It got so bad that even my cycle computer stopped working, insisting that I was doing 15.8 mph even when I wasn't moving. After a fairly unpleasant tour around the outskirts of Reims and between a dirty canal and the motorway I finally made it to the centre, 25 miles of cycling after Epernay - 10 miles over my estimate. However, Reims' Notre-Dame Cathedral dragged me away from my tiredness. It looks almost exactly like the Notre-Dame in Paris but is even bigger. I found the youth-hostel easily and not long after I had arrived another guy came in to share the room. Another cyclist! However, after being put in the shade by other cyclist who had vastly superior equipment, experience and the like, this guy made me look professional. He was cycling from Cologne in Germany to Paris, in 5 days, Reims being at the end of his fourth day. All he had with him was a rucksack (he was meeting friends in Paris that had his other luggage) that he strapped to his bike with string. He had no tent and so when I was sheltering in my tent all day when it was raining, he was almost drowning in a forest. His clothes were still wet two days later he said. I had no reason to doubt him.

27th August - Reims to Prisches
Reims likes to call itself "The Crossroads of Europe" and nowhere was this more evident than when I was leaving Reims: Turn left for Paris, straight on for Brussels, turn right for Luxembourg. I chose the Brussels route, heading vaguely towards Lille and then Dunkerque and Calais on the last three days of my trip. There isn't a lot going on north of Reims. Just a lot of hills and fields. The further north I got the more it became like Normandie, even down to the cow muck covering the roads and the smell that goes with it. I arrived at a tiny village called Prisches where there was a campsite which I shared with a campervan. For the second time, there was no reception, just a shower block and no one turned up to collect any money - excellent.

On my way out of Reims I had finally found a "Decathlon" store which as the name suggest sells sport equipment. This was where I could finally buy new elastic for my tent pole which had broken 2 weeks earlier. So with plenty of time before it would get dark, I started threading the new elastic through the poles. About half an hour later it was getting dark and I was still struggling with the last section of pole which refused to allow the elastic through. Despite having all the time in the world to think about things whilst cycling, it was only when I was about to snap the pole in half in frustration that I realised that you don't actually need the elastic going through the pole to make it work - the elastic is just there to help you and stop the poles getting seperated. So I set up the tent without the elastic and it worked brilliantly. TWO WEEKS of sleeping in a tent that barely stood up and... It didn't matter, it was working now.

28th August - Prisches to Houplines
I left early in the morning again, partly because I had no food for breakfast and so wanted to get some food as soon as possible. Sunday 28th August must be National Cycling Day in France or something because there were more cyclist on the road that day than I had seen on my whole trip. They seemed to be in groups of 4 or 5 wearing matching tops so I guess there are a lot of cycling clubs in this part of France. Certainly it was very pleasant/easy cycling - easy hills and nice countryside. It wasn't too far too Denain where I had lunch and where the hills completely stopped. I suppose this is the start of the flat lowlands of Holland and Belgium. Although it was completely flat, it was still a fair ride on to Lille but I managed to arrive there at about 4pm so I had plenty of time to wander around the city a bit. Its quite a nice city and it would have been nice to stay the night there to spend some more time there but the tourist offices were closed and my "Cycling France" guide book (I wouldn't recommend it) doesn't say anything about the north of France.

So at about 6pm I headed north-west towards Dunkerque hoping to find a campsite at some point. This was also towards the Belgian border! Exciting times. I reached the border not long later but it didn't look very interesting so I only stayed for a minute or two before heading parallel to the border. The towns of Houplines and Armentieres run along the borderto the west and I checked the town plans that can always be found in French towns

At 19, The Film Student Has A Near-Death Experience

A true-to-life parable by B.S. Wise

This night, more than two decades ago, RRR*rrrr*rriding my little scooter on the rain-slicked streets of Eagle Rock, California, heading to the college library to watch mad bloodied Viet Nam war documentaries and work more on the my surreal Tarkofskian-Jodorowskyish-Lynchian sci-fi war screenplay/poem/book/reve, it had begun to rain harder, and, huddled in my scarf and jeans jacket, full and downhill speed ahead, I plunged helmetless through a dark intersection lit only by a swaying green light and a streetlamp sputtering like spark-wood

.......SSSSCCCRRReeecCHCHHC**!!*** *CRRAJVDWSKKFFFFKKKFKFK..........
hah....hahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa....ha*BKCHHRSSSHH**KSSSSHH!!!

Brakes locked, I skidded instantly into the oncoming metal of a Vintage Dodge 1972 Station Wagon, and my left leg crumpled against the sharp wing of it, shattering my femur into bone shards sent screaming through the flesh of my inner-thigh. While my scooter quickly disappeared under the car.
I had left gravity...
tumbling...
tumbling...
tumbling through the air, with a fire in the mind.

An odd sensation, for I thought I 'd reached the ground safely and was rolling, rolling somehow protecting my head, but no, catapulting in a great whiz-whirling somersault through the air...

*BAM!* I hit the light pole and crumpled to the street onto my broken leg, which, now unsupported by the femur, snapped at the tibia and fibula into two clean breaks. The leg disappeared under me, broken backwards at the thigh.

Well, I thought I'd lost it, gone was my leg.

I began screaming: "OH MY GOD!! MY LEGGGGGG!!! OH MY GOD MY LEG!! OH MY GOD MY LEG!!! YOU TORE OFF MY LEEEEEEEGG!!!"

And yelling, "YOU COME BACK HERE!!! OH MY GOD MY LEG!!!" at the driver, himself in severe duress, slowly dragging my bike under his car, which scraped and scratched at the street as he slowly drove in a wide bewildered circle.

This man, so like God in the shape and movement of this story, turned out to be an 82-year-old grandfather who rarely drove, his eye-sight failing, but had taken the old boat out just that night to fetch some medicine from the for his poor bed-ridden wife.

(O, who knows where even our best intentions will lead us.)

In unending fire of pain, I managed to lift this non-leg out from under me, and saw it there to be all higgely-piggely and zig-zaggedy and just a completely sad and utterly f*cked-up looking leg.

Soaked in rain imagined to be blood, I had a delusion of my foot falling off and my life's water draining away into the gutter and coursing on into the boundless sea....

But then I realized that it was just my shoe that had fallen off from the end of this infernal pain machine leg, and I sunk back towards the curb, adrenalin rush waxing into shock and madness, to experience a rapid-fire series of very lucid and empirically rationalizing epiphanies:

Thinking back to my screenplay, I became excited that I was actually experiencing a small taste of what a soldier whose leg has just been blown off from a land-mine might be feeling and that this was "great stuff" for the writing and film and well because of this event and possibly having to live my life with one leg I would never be called to service should there be a draft in coming wars and any way this isn't even half as bad as that and wasn't all that a jolly good relief and living with one leg or in a wheelchair is so much better than being dead and wow despite my lack of helmet and the simple common sense to wear one I had managed to not to hit my head so thank the Earth Mother and Great Omnisexual Oneness of The Universe for that.

At that moment, I was lifted up and held there by the Living Embodiment of Good Will and angelic potential in all human beings... the local high school football coach, who had just been walking by when the accident happened.

"Lean on me son," he said with a kind, strong, deep voice tenured from years of comforting injuries on the playing field. As I did, a great golden light emanated from his strong coach's arms, illuminating, calming, and warming us like a crackling campfire...

A strange curtain of onlookers with blackened eyes had gathered around us swaying gently, mouths agape, as if submerged zombies lit by a flickering TV set.

This static zombie curtain was then parted by a Biker, who, at first, appeared to me a dark angel come clad in leather to claim my soul for Satan's domain. Revealed to be also an Agent of Good Will, hell-bent and free, he started screaming at me:

"OH MAN! OH MAN! OH MAN! The same thing happened to ME! MAN! I was ridin' along, saw the whole thing, MAN! and *SccrrreeecCHCH* Bam! SAME THING! "

(Now, some of you may recognize these lines and this scenario as being very similar to a throwaway scene in David Lynch's "Wild At Heart." However, I submit to you