I love the Olympics and look forward to them especially the summer Olympics. You can always count on the Olympics to bring out every feeling in the book. Sports also teach wonderful life lessons about endurance, perseverance, goodwill, respect, tragedy.

Tragedy: Sad to say, we’ve seen tragedy. A suicidal man stabbed and killed the father-in-law of U.S. volleyball coach whose wife was a former U.S. women’s Olympic volleyball player. Good news is the mother-in-law’s condition has been upgraded from critical to stable. The U.S. men’s volleyball team had a moment of silence before the match against Venezuela in which they won in five sets.

I had to deal with tragedy last year when my father had a stroke in April 2007 and passed away in December 2007. Freelancers can’t prepare for every situation, but they can adapt and accept. I let my clients know of my limited availability and they respected it.

Endurance: In the 400m relay, the U.S. swim team overcame a half-body deficit in the final leg against France’s strongest swimmer to win the race at impossible odds — or so people thought. The French swim team needs to work on sportsmanship. Apparently, they spat into the U.S. lane and trashed talked. The U.S. team stayed cool and let their swimming do the talking.

Freelancers may not deal with something that big, but they overcome illness and other unexpected events to make their deadlines and accomplish almost impossible tasks. For me, I lost two major clients during the dot com crash. At that point, it was either quit freelancing (it was a side career at the time) or forge ahead.

Perseverance: U.S. women’s gymnastics team started off unlucky. Samantha Peszek sprained her ankle in warm-ups leaving the team with four gymnasts for floor, vault, and balance beam. They couldn’t make mistakes. But they did. Two gymnasts fell on the uneven bars. Despite the disappointing start, the team still made the finals and players made it to individual event finals.

Lone freelancers must persevere often. They’re responsible for their own marketing, accounting, and other non-writing or non-freelancing tasks. If something comes up in their lives to interfere with their work, they push on to keep clients happy while taking care of personal business. My son’s medical program takes up much of my time forcing me to adjust my writing schedule. While stressful to deal with working and blogging less, I know this too shall pass and I’ll return to my groove.

What Olympic-like experiences have you encountered? Anything along the lines of respect, goodwill, or other adjectives?

My daughter played in a national volleyball tournament this past weekend (don’t ask how her team did). Since it was a large event, spectators had to download and print tickets to attend. It was free — just had to have the ticket to keep away those who don’t belong, provide data to hosting city to encourage hosting again, direct people to the right courts (over 60 courts) and help plan for emergency services.

The last reason came true. On Friday night, the Dallas/Fort Worth area experienced severe thunderstorms and saw three tornadoes (last I hard). The building staff evacuated everyone in the building to the parking garage.

The Web site where you printed tickets could stand usability improvements. But that’s not the point of this post. It also contained a feature where you could pick four teams to track through SMS and e-mail. The service sent team schedules and results of their matches.

It wasn’t a perfect service since we didn’t receive some notices. The speed of notifications were unpredictable… sometimes fast and sometimes slow. Also, if you wanted to change up the four teams, you couldn’t. Every team played in two different pools in this tournament. Paul tracked all the teams in my daughter’s pool on day one. Then learned he couldn’t change them for day two.

Despite the imperfections, it was exciting to discover the feature. When volleyball was in session in the schools, we also had a resource for checking standings and win/loss records for all the schools. Only problem was the lack of updates. If I remember right, my daughter’s coach said it depended on the coach to keep it updated.

Report card day was always an exciting or nerve-wracking experience since we didn’t always know exactly what our grades were. That’s not the case today. It’s just another report our kids’ bring home for our signatures (yes, we still have to sign) since they’re grades are accessible online throughout the school year.

Love this kind of progress!