RISE-UP enables participants to measurably run faster (speed), jump higher (explosiveness), improve agility [...]]]> The Riekes Center for Human Enhancement is excited to introduce our new and improved Acceleration Program – RISE-UP.  As competition on the athletic field continuously gets tougher, the benefits of RISE-UP increase due to the tangible competitive advantages they give our athletes.

RISE-UP enables participants to measurably run faster (speed), jump higher (explosiveness), improve agility and build physical endurance.  Each athlete’s individualized program is based on his or her pre-evaluation, then further tailored by our elite coaching staff using cutting-edge training techniques and industry-leading proprietary methods adapted from Athletic Republic’s protocols.

Our coaching staff benefits from years of relevant experience in training athletes of all ages and abilities. State-of-the art equipment and facilities, provided through our partnership with Athletic Republic, create the platform for our expert coaching staff to take Speed and Explosiveness Development to a whole new level.

Please visit the RISE-UP page for more information

By Barbara Wood
Special to the Almanac
Troy Williams, a pony-tailed military veteran who grew up in Menlo Park and now lives in Redwood City, says he came home from military duty six years [...]]]> Riekes Center works with the VA in helping
injured veterans and others ignite their ‘spark’

By Barbara Wood
Special to the Almanac
Troy Williams, a pony-tailed military veteran who grew up in Menlo Park and now lives in Redwood City, says he came home from military duty six years ago with a mysterious stomach ailment that left him unable to gain weight and hardly able to get out of bed, let alone hold a job.

“This past six years I’ve been sitting it out,” he says. Then, late last year, he joined a program that Menlo Park’s Riekes Center had begun in partnership with the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“It is the only thing that has made any significant difference in my life for the past six years,” Mr. Williams says. “As soon as I started coming here, I began to feel better,” he adds, as he pedals an exercise bicycle. “It makes you want to work your body, coming here. It’s creative exercise.” Since starting at Riekes, he has gained 25 pounds. “It’s one of the only things I look forward to,” Mr. Williams admits. “I look forward to beating myself up so badly, it hurts for three days.”

Mr. Williams is exercising his way back to health at what may be one of the Peninsula’s best-kept secrets. The Riekes Center is in the North Fair Oaks neighborhood of unincorporated Menlo Park in a sprawling collection of industrial buildings. Chances are, those who have heard of Riekes thinks it’s a gym for high school jocks. But poke your head inside and you’ll see immediately that this is way more than a gym.

Yes, the center has rooms filled with the latest equipment for athletic training and rehabilitation. But wander the buildings’ labyrinth of corridors and something new is around every corner. Here, music drifts from recording studios and practice rooms, while upstairs the smell of chemicals wafts from the photo darkroom, next to the nature awareness classroom. Back downstairs, past the weight-lifting area, a group of students on an intersession break from Everest and Summit high schools play drums in a circle. The area is sometimes a batting cage; other times a concert stage. Another intersession group works on computers in a brightly lit laboratory.

Outside one of the back doors, reached by crossing the indoor sprint track, is a fire pit and student-made wood-fired oven, where students learn to cook and to start fires using friction. Inside again, past artificial turf, a shockabsorbing wood floor, racks of giant exercise balls and contraptions with moveable rubber straps that add resistance to exercises, is the “video barn,” where students practice all things video. In a neighboring room that feels like a converted garage, a piano and students’ in-progress artworks are stored.

There are photos everywhere, hundreds of them. All available walls are plastered with photos of current and former students, plus articles about their successes and testimonials about how Riekes, officially named the Riekes Center for Human Enhancement, changed their lives. Since the center partnered with the Department of Veterans Affairs, Riekes has housed special equipment to accommodate veterans with physical disabilities who have been coming for classes and to work out. They join an already diverse group of students, from elementary school-age kids to retirees, from those recovering from an injury to professional athletes.

In addition to special adaptive equipment installed in the workout areas and an adaptive archery set-up, the center hopes to offer wheelchair basketball and tennis, sit volleyball and goal ball for those with visual impairments, in the full-court gymnasium. The philosophy at Riekes also sets it apart from the typical gym, says Athletic Director Ron Curcio. “You don’t join — you become a student. This is a university of learning,” he says. “Everybody who comes in here is a student,” Mr. Curcio says. “Everybody is equal.”

All Riekes’ students, young or old, aspiring Olympians or concert pianists, have a program customized to help them meet their individual goals, he says. “We want to say, ‘What are YOU interested in?’” The center also prides itself on not turning anyone away who can’t afford the fees. As many as a third of the students either receive scholarships or work to cover their programs’ cost.

All students at the center must sign a contract called the RPM (for Riekes Philosophy and Methodology) Guidelines for Building Positive Culture. Each student agrees to supervise himself, communicate honestly, and be sensitive to others. Profanity, bullying and put-downs are all outlawed, as are lengthy conversations that don’t involve everyone in the immediate vicinity. Students also agree to train safely, manage their time efficiently, and keep track of their progress toward meeting their training goals. Break the rules, and no matter who they are, students will be suspended from the program. The suspension is short on a first infraction and permanent for repeated violations.

The Riekes instructors have adapted their programs to work with veterans whose disabilities include missing limbs, visual impairment, post-traumatic stress disorder, spinal cord injuries or traumatic brain injury. Some of the veterans come in several times a week with their VA recreation therapists; others come on their own, including those getting in shape as part of the VA’s Motivate Obese Veterans Everywhere (MOVE) program. Veterans come from as far as the Livermore and San Jose VA programs as well as Menlo Park and Palo Alto. The ultimate goal is for them to learn enough to come to Riekes on their own, or to transfer their skills to a gym closer to home.

Riekes instructors also go to the veterans, for activities such as a workshop on drum-making this month, and participation in last month’s Creative Arts Festival and a digital photography workshop. The VA partnership aims “to create total wellness” by combining athletic training, nature awareness, and arts and music says Athletic Director Curcio. Gerald Schock comes to Riekes from San Lorenzo twice a week and says he would come more often if he could, despite the fact that each visit costs him at least $10 in gas and bridge tolls. Three years ago a car hit Mr. Schock’s motorcycle, splitting his helmet and leaving him in a coma for three weeks. His left leg was later amputated after a bone infection set in.

The program is modified for Mr. Schock’s disability. When the others use exercise bikes or treadmills, he is helped into Riekes’ “Alter G” machine that allows him to walk or jog upright on a treadmill with the help of technology that takes as much as 80 percent of his weight off his lower body. The machine helps those with injuries or even who are paralyzed, to exercise. “I really like the way they do it,” Mr. Schock says of Riekes. “They modify a workout for me … so you don’t feel like you’re left out.” Mr. Schock, who has a prosthetic leg, is becoming more and more independent. On a recent visit he walked twice the length of the 70-yard indoor sprint track without his crutch. When an onlooker says, “I thought you told me last week you can’t walk,” Mr. Schock answers with a chuckle: “I can’t. I call this hobbling.”

The VA partnership program is funded by a grant from the U.S. Paralympics Division of the U.S. Olympic Committee, which wants to have Paralympic sport programs in 250 American cities by 2012. The program’s website says: “With 21 million physically disabled Americans, including more than 35,000 military personnel who’ve been severely injured during the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, this is an important community need.” An additional grant is paying for veterans to take the center’s fine arts programs, while other veterans receive scholarships for classes not covered by either grant.

Caroline Wyman, the VA’s chief of recreation therapy service in Menlo Park, says the partnership in working well. “They’ve been incredible,” says Ms. Wyman. “What we do, and what they do at Riekes, is work on your ability, not your disability.” Both Riekes and the recreation therapists look for each person’s “spark” and work on igniting it, she says. Alisa Krinsky, a recreation therapist supervisor at the Palo Alto VA, explains that recreation therapists work with patients in many different areas including mental health, fitness and wellness, long-term-care and rehabilitation. Their goal, she says, is to prevent re-hospitalization; to help the veterans function comfortably in the community. Riekes Athletic Director Ron Curcio may be the perfect person to head this program. He has spent more than 17 years in the business of training athletes, but also has worked with athletes training for the Paralympics, an international competition for athletes with disabilities that occurs immediately after the winter and summer Olympics. Mr. Curcio says he hopes to be able to offer scholarships for athletes to pay for the special wheelchairs used in wheelchair athletics.

Because Riekes has special equipment for those with disabilities, it can offer adaptive programs for non-veterans as well. They include Zack Wenz, a Menlo- Atherton High School senior who has been using a wheelchair since he was paralyzed following an accident a little more than two years ago. Mr. Wenz was a Riekes’ student since before the accident and was named “Most Valuable Player” on M-A’s varsity tennis team his freshman year. Now he is looking to compete in the Paralympics. “Sports is like my life,” Mr. Wenz says. “Sports and my girlfriend, now.”

Mentoring is something Riekes encourages for all its students. Once they become proficient at a skill, they teach it to others. Mr. Curcio says they hope to soon have the veterans also mentoring younger students. The influence of the Riekes philosophy goes far beyond the center. Founder Gary Riekes says that while about 2,000 or more students study on site, off-site the center staff works with more than 6,000, including those participating in other wellness programs. Menlo School’s new athletic center uses Riekes staff and their training philosophy, and East Palo Alto Tennis and Tutoring students come to the center to improve their fitness and lose weight. The center even has a partner at Daraja Academy in Kenya, which uses the center’s guidelines for culture and values.

Go to Riekes.org for information on the Riekes Center, located at 3455 Edison Way in unincorporated Menlo Park. Barbara Wood is a freelance writer, photographer and gardener from Woodside who has written the “Dispatches from the Home Front” column for the Almanac since 1991.

“Each kill site is different, but we treat them all like crime scenes,” biologist Ken Clarkson notes as he hunches over a dead sandpiper. He is surrounded by an intent clot of students from Katie Kling’s fourth-grade class at the East Palo Alto Charter School. Twenty-six nine-year-olds are [...]]]> Written by Richard Rapaport

“Each kill site is different, but we treat them all like crime scenes,” biologist Ken Clarkson notes as he hunches over a dead sandpiper. He is surrounded by an intent clot of students from Katie Kling’s fourth-grade class at the East Palo Alto Charter School. Twenty-six nine-year-olds are taking what Clarkson calls a “NatureMapping bio-blitz,” hiking though the salt marshes of a wildlife refuge that runs down to nearby San Francisco Bay.

This hike is a training element for NatureMapping, a wildlife data-collection and monitoring methodology that relies on school kids and other volunteers to help refresh inadequate inventories of America’s habitats and species. Beginning in 1992, NatureMapping has grown into the nation’s broadest, most complete computerized biodiversity database, offering unique species mapping capabilities.

In the Field

Along the trail, some kids are taking advantage of a respite from class. It is the second week of the program, and as Kling explains, some of the kids are “still getting used to being outside when it’s not recess.” Most of the fourth graders, however, are transfixed by their task, groups finding and identifying bird and animal tracks, kill sites, and various varieties of scat. “Scat,” and its interchangeable synonym, “poop,” are frequently mentioned, but there are very few “Eww, you touched it!” kid-stuff exchanges. This is serious science, and the kids find nothing icky about animal waste, which, they are learning, provides important clues for biodiversity exploration.

On this hike, Clarkson, instructor and director of the Nature Awareness Program at the Riekes Center for Human Enhancement, in nearby Menlo Park, California, is eager to see whether the class can find signs of two of the park’s endangered species: the salt marsh harvest mouse and the California clapper rail. Pairs of clapper rails have been tagged, and their habits and flight patterns are being tracked through a tiny broadcasting collar.

Moises, one of Kling’s star trackers, excitedly leads Clarkson to a pile of bones and feathers. “Moises finds everything,” one of the kids exclaims as Clarkson analyzes the site. “I know who did it,” he explains about this particular kill. “When a land mammal kills, it eats everything.” Birds, according to Clarkson, are fussier, “plucking out the feathers before they gorge.” This is definitely the site of a predatory bird kill, Clarkson says, pointing out a final clue: pellets of what he identifies as hawk scat. “This is really cool. I’m going to take some of these back with me,” he tells the excited kids, who often bring back sighting reports for NatureMapping’s biodiversity database.

Clarkson enters information about the bird kill on his CyberTracker handheld global-positioning-system devices. This is just one of dozens of animal finds by Kling’s class that Clarkson will input during the hour-long outing. So intent are kids like Moises that they ignore Kling as she rounds up the students. Clarkson encourages patience: “We’ll get it next time,” he reassures.

As the kids trudge back to school, Clarkson explains how this exercise goes beyond exciting kids about natural surroundings. In addition, he says, he is using this hike to train students to become part of NatureMapping’s lifelong cadre. Within weeks, Clarkson notes, kids like Moise will be as fully capable as adults at going into the wild and “telling us what they see and where they see it.”

A Growing Effort

Since its founding in 1992, NatureMapping has grown from its origin as a small-scale Washington State nature program that enlisted retired resources professionals, zoo docents, and Audubon Society members as citizen-scientist volunteer wildlife reporters. Then, the tracking was done by hand, with reports mailed in to NatureMapping’s Seattle program headquarters.

Today, the program has trained thousands of student volunteers in 11 states who make up a growing effort that relies on kids from third grade up to track, input data, and reporting it. Like Kling’s class, kids involved in the NatureMapping program evidence a seriousness that compares to that of adult volunteers. “If you have a kid in the wetlands with a net,” notes NatureMapping cofounder Karen Dvornich, “not only will that data be highly credible, but they’ll also find it faster and better than you or I will.”

Fresh Scientists, Fresh Data

Utilizing students for the NatureMapping program has made a difference in the sheer volume of new nature-related data. In 1993, for example, NatureMapping managed to enlist 23 teachers, 4 farmers, and several dozen students who were able to produce only 3,000 records. By contrast, now, in Washington alone, the NatureMapping program has produced more than 110,000 observations of 420 species.

This mass of new data has had the ironic effect of casting doubt on earlier records, which, according to Dvornich, show that the majority of wildlife was found “running along roads.” It seemed that early data collectors tended to take the lazy way out, staying close to roads and trails and often skipping private property and farms that made up a huge amount of relevant natural areas. This lack of adequate data has even had the effect of discrediting field guides based on this flawed information. Today, according to Dvornich, because of NatureMapping’s extensive data, “we simply make better habitat-related decisions.”

If NatureMapping is a boon for America’s natural sciences, it has been equally helpful to thousands of kids in the classroom. In virtually every class that has taken on NatureMapping, kids, sometimes the most unlikely ones, have emerged as competent researchers and potentially the next generation of scientists.

Dvornich mentions one middle school in Washington where a student from each of the seventh-grade classes was asked to come to school early to monitor soot trays that had been baited with food the evening before. Their job was to take a census of the wildlife tracking across the trays during the night. According to Dvornich, these kids, many of whom began by flunking science or had never volunteered to get up in front of a class, became an important cadre proselytizing for the program and for science in general.

Treat Students Like Scientists

One of the precepts of NatureMapping is that real science doesn’t coddle kids. While one Washington third-grade class produced noteworthy results about insects, the initial write-up was replete with grammar and spelling errors. When the class’s teacher asked what she should do, the reply came back, “Treat them like scientists.”

The class was encouraged to redo their presentation until the work was good enough to be presented. The results led to high-fives when the material was posted online, and, according to Dvornich, “their work represented something that was not just kid stuff.”

Indoor Training

Not that kid stuff doesn’t have a place in NatureMapping training. In another classroom at the East Palo Alto Charter School, Ken Clarkson led Meg Barrager’s third-grade class in a series of simple mental-awareness exercises designed to help sharpen kids’ abilities to spot interesting and unusual anomalies along the trail. In it, the students paired up, scanned each other, turned around, and then slightly changed their appearances. Some were better than others at spotting a reversed belt buckle. The point was made: “Who will pay more attention?” Clarkson asked the class. Many hands were raised as Clarkson noted that the brain “is a very good muscle to work on.”

Clarkson continued the indoor training by showing off the NatureMapping GPS software and its ability to represent the range of animals and birds from a regional level to a neighborhood one. They were also able to see how the numerous data points on the map, representing the collected observations of thousands of fellow students, could add up to stunning and often original natural insights.

The kids in the classroom were very much at home with the CyberTracker device, which Clarkson refers to as a “Game Boy for nature.” The program is kid friendly, originally designed for use by often illiterate South African Bushmen using PDAs to track wildlife. Indeed it is Clarkson’s observation that his students tend to be more at home with the NatureMapping software than even he is. “Within a month, they will end up being faster than me at entering data,” he admits. Abria, a quiet girl, sitting toward the back of the class, seconds the notion, simply wanting to know, “When will we get to use our own CyberTrackers?”

3oo guest joined together at the Menlo Circus Club in Atherton to raise funds for the Riekes Center for Human Enhancement in Menlo Park and to fete Founder Gary Riekes.

For a lucky community of [...]]]> Imagine this: a place dedicated to the enhancement of the individual. A place where people are challenged to set personal goals and a community has been established to help them pursue those dreams – free from judgment by others and reinforced by mutual respect. Sounds pretty good, right? It is.

For a lucky community of young people in the San Francisco Bay Area, this place is a reality they can enjoy every day. Starting it out of his home in the late 1970s, Gary Riekes created the Riekes Center for Human Enhancement to build self-esteem in young people through a strength-and-fitness academy. Woven into the model was an emphasis on providing outlets for personal expression through the creative arts and a set of values that reinforced teamwork, confidence-building, goal-setting and lifetime wellness, regardless of skills or background.

Before long, Mr. Riekes’ home became a hub of activity for neighborhood youth.

Because of its popularity, in 1996 Mr. Riekes moved the center from his home to a 40,000-square-foot complex in Menlo Park. Today, when you walk inside the Riekes Center, you are swept away immediately by the scope of the vision and the energy of the space.

The center’s focal point is a massive gym where trainers are working with young people on every level of fitness. A high schooler learns advanced sprint techniques, a middle schooler is working through balancing exercises, a group of elementary students are doing stomach crunches under the watchful eye of a coach. On the other side of a curtain, a high school basketball team is running drills next door to batting practice. Through all of this, the air is punctuated by the rhythmic booms of a drummer practicing in the music studio while another student mixes beats for a CD he is creating.

Upstairs is the photography darkroom; around the corner is a film-editing suite. An art studio is tucked into the corner where recently created oil and acrylic paintings hang. On another floor is the Nature Activity Center, where students are taught about the natural world and prepare for local hiking excursions. Every wall in the center is filled with photos of young people and recent alumni, some of whom have gone on to play college-level and even Olympic sports.

A nonprofit organization, the Riekes Center offers an array of classes, monthly gym memberships and a wide variety of customized fitness programs. These “fee-for-service” dollars, when matched by substantial philanthropic gifts raised in the community, makethe Riekes Center accessible to all. About a quarter of its participating students receive financial aid or scholarships along the way. Students also are able to earn classes and membership by working through the Volunteer Center, where they either contribute to the community or perform jobs for the center, such as guiding tours for curious visitors (a coveted job).

Our tour guide’s name is Aaron. He arrived in the United States six years ago without knowing a word of English. Shortly after unpacking, Aaron cameto the Riekes Center through the invitation of a neighbor, and then he won a scholarship. First attracted to the gym, Aaron quickly branched out into the creative arts, becoming an accomplished photographer, painter and drummer. Three years ago, he was invited to mentor other students (peer mentoring, coaching and teaching are important parts of the Riekes model) and now is one of the primary creative arts teachers. His personal goals are virtually boundless – starting with his recent enrollment in a local university.

As one is strolling through the Riekes Center, one question keeps popping up: Can we bring this to our community? The potential benefits are undeniable, but can the magic translate to another site? We won’t know until we try. In the words of the Riekes Center, we must “dream, explore, create and achieve.”

Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek are founding partners of New Mountain Ventures, an entrepreneurial leadership development company. They can be reached at authors@lifeentrepreneurs.com.