Most extreme sports should be left to the very young and the very foolish. Extreme sports, just in case you don’t surf the sports channels, involve free-falling from airplanes, rock climbing, roller blading, snow boarding or skateboarding. There are other extreme sports, but this shortened list should be exhausting enough. Basically, extreme sports are dangerous and they might cause any mother to say, "If you break your neck, don’t come crying to me," followed by, "I told you so." However, much of this changed during the past year, when the first World Extreme Ironing Championship was held in Munich, Germany. Inga Kosak won the event, based on running a course through several stations (for example, up in trees and in the middle of streams) and ironing a designated garment. According to the Wall Street Journal, a South African later proclaimed, "I came, I saw, I pressed a crease," after he ironed his national flag at the 20,000-foot summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. Oh, did I mention that he did all of that while nude and in freezing temperatures? This spring, a British diver sawed through lake ice in Wisconsin, put on a wet suit, dived in and ironed a shirt that was braced against the underside of the ice. Finally, we have an extreme sport most women my age or older can understand. We have been training in our homes for all of our lives for such a competition. It may not be too late for many of us to strike while the iron is hot. Ironing clothes, week after week, has never been a job for the fainthearted, and it’s one of the reasons why we live in a wash-and-wear world. As far back as I can remember, it was a triathlon with three main events. The first challenge involved sprinting to the outdoor clothesline, often through hail, sleet or snow, while balancing a heavy basket of newly washed laundry on one hip. (One woman once told me how, as a new bride with critical neighbors, she would dip her bed sheets into a tub filled with water on Monday mornings, and dash outside to the clothesline in an effort to look like an industrious early-riser.) The second step of the triathlon included dashing back into the house with the dried or freeze-dried laundry, sprinkling each garment with water, tightly rolling each garment into something resembling a jelly roll, and refrigerating the rolls until they were ironed the next day. The final event usually took place on Tuesday, the day set aside for ironing, or as it might be called today, "pressing issues." It was the most dangerous of the three events, often resulting in accidental burns on hands and forearms of the women doing the ironing and any child wandering too close to an ironing board. Triangle-shaped patterns were burned forever into carpets and kitchen floors when the irons toppled over. Some fancier homes had mangles with huge rollers for flattening sheets and pillowcases until they resembled proverbial pancakes. However, wary homemakers from more modest homes figured they must have been called mangles for a good reason. They didn’t want to be the subject of some newspaper headline reading, "Local woman mangled." Clothes irons are not for novices. A young relative recently confided how she tried to steam-iron wrinkles from the front of her skirt – – while she was still wearing it – – and she landed up with a nasty-looking burn on her leg. She might be well-advised to stay away from Munich when it’s time for the Second Annual World Extreme Ironing Championship.
