Leo And The Rest Of Us

My legs just wont stand up to the pounding of running five or six days a week. It hurts too much. I get too many injuries. I have limped home more times than I can count. So a year ago, I am thinking about the opposing goals of training for Ironman and leaving enough cartilage in my knees to allow me to walk upright for another couple years. It's a challenge. After thinking it over, I decided to keep running while I train for Ironman and buy stock in the Advil company. It's not a perfect plan, but it works for me.

So one day, my sadistic calendar called for a ten mile run with hills. I skipped the hills but did the distance. It was awful. Running and I often engage in a winner-take-all fight for domination of my knees. I usually lose. That run was no different, my knees freaked out and I felt sorry for myself.  On the way home, I thought I needed a treat to turn my frown upside down, so I pulled into the KFC drivethru; I figured I could find a use for a full deal meal with a three pack of chicken, some biscuits and a moist towelette. While I waited, I looked across the parking lot and saw one of those hot yoga places. An idea started to form. I got my chicken then wander over to the yoga place to peer in the window. My idea is taking shape and came down to this; I can still run two to three times a week, but in order to inflict enough damage on my body to prepare for Ironman, I can go to hot yoga once or twice a week as an easy filler. How bad can it be? Swimming is a grind and makes my shoulders hurt. Biking is hard and my quads and hamstrings cramp. Running sucks for lots of reasons. Yoga? It's just some girls doing a few light stretches and hopping around on one leg. Not a big deal. I am going to rock that hot yoga class. I might even get a medal.

So I went to hot yoga. It wasn't what I thought it was going to be. They don't tell you everything you need to know when they take your money. First, its hot. I mean surface of the sun hot. Next, its fall down exhausting. I can do the whole class, but I take breaks when I get dizzy. I get dizzy a lot. And, its intimidating. Everybody there is doing a bang-up job of making me feel inadequate. They all excel at that.

The class usually has two guys and twenty to thirty girls in it. One of the guys has a six pack and looks like he is packing four or five percent body fat. I am not sure, but he might have a super-power. I think he can pick both feet up off the ground at the same time. He probably drives a BMW. Nobody likes him. On the other hand, I am pretty sure he shoots blanks. Anyway, the girls in class are ruthless killers. They pack guns and knives to class in their Gucci gym bags. To them, yoga is a death match. They love to see guys like me show up. Those girls are so arrogant. They don't sweat, or grunt, or fall. They wrap a two hands and a foot and maybe three knees around their twenty two inch waist without so much as a primal scream. I don't get it.

There is this one girl, she is maybe five foot six inches and she can stand on one leg and put the other foot straight up above her head and not fall down. Freak. I don't know what she weighs, but I am guessing if she sat on one side of a teeter totter, my golden retriever could sit on the other side and balance her out. So, I guess she weighs one golden retriever. Next to that girl, another girl is maybe five foot five and weighs about one point two golden retrievers. She can put her foot above here head too. All these girls can all put one foot over their head except for the lady in the back that weighs about two golden retrievers. I like her. My kind of people.

There was a documentary on T.V. the other day describing the life and accomplishments of Leonardo da Vinci. It was only an hour long show, so they just hit a few of the highlights from his life. They talked about his accomplishments as a painter, as a sculptor, as an architect, as a cartographer, and as an inventor. It was really a great show and now, I find it impossible to describe him accurately in a blog. Calling his life 'amazing' belittles his genius.

What I find interesting is the degree of separation between Leo and the rest of us. Just try to imagine how far off the mark you are if you try to paint, or sculpt or invent something. Maybe you can do that stuff. I can't. I am a committed narcissist and I freely admit it is beyond me. He was a giant among men. He pushed the boundaries of human greatness and in comparison, none were able to compete at his level. The delta between Leo and the rest of mankind is hard to measure. Likewise, when I go to hot yoga, the difference between those yoga show-offs and myself is pretty good size too. I can't do some of the stuff they do. Actually, I cant do any of the stuff they do. Do I care? Not really.

Namaste.

Choose

In this life, we choose.  We choose our friends, our job, our spouse, where we live and how we live.  Our choices define us. When I was in High School, the kids were identified by which group they were in. You might not have known a kid's name, but you always knew which group he was in. You could pick out which group a kid was in by his clothes, by the way he talked or by the people he hung out with. It was like we were were wearing signs on our chest that described the salient facts of our lives. My sign would have read “My name is Mike. The groups I belong to are TheJocks and TheFarmersKids. I am sixteen years old. I am an underachiever.”

At my school, there were three or four big groups and a few smaller ones. The big groups, with lots of kids in the group, were TheJocks, TheStoners and TheStudents. And BandKids. None of the other groups liked the BandKids. It was like the BandKids all had the plague. But, that was thirty years ago. I am pretty sure that things have changed and the BandKids are popular now.

There were lots of little groups, like ThePoorKids, TheFarmersKids and TheFFAKids. I am just guessing here, but I bet there aren't more than ten or twenty schools outside of Iowa where TheFarmersKids and TheFFAKids were two separate groups. In case it isn't obvious, I should say that I grew up in a farm town. We had kids that drove tractors to school. Tractors. It wasn't an every day event, but once I was walking through the parking lot and I saw Dawn Patnode's brand new Datsun 240z parked next to Dave Walker's dad's twenty year old Massey-Ferguson tractor. The Massey-Ferguson was red. And a piece of crap. I don't remember what color Dawn's car was, but it was brand new. The rest of us rode the bus or drove our Mom's Oldsmobile to school. Dave and Dawn must have lived in homes without Oldsmobiles.

On my first day of High School, I was placed into two groups, TheJocks and TheFarmersKids. I was in TheFarmersKids because my dad was a farmer, which seems obvious, but that group was unique because it was the only group that you didn't volunteer for. If you wanted to be in TheStudents, you would skip woodshop and take AP math and maybe wear a bad sweater. Those kids made a choice. If you wanted to be in the TheFFAKids, you bought a blue corduroy jacket and went to the monthly meeting. But TheFarmersKids, we were marked at birth. Most of us lived in average houses, but our houses weren't in neighborhoods or on cul-de-sacs, our houses were all on dirt roads.

It is a little known fact that over ninety percent of farmers houses don't have lawns. Not many people know that. Most of the farmers houses were just stuck down in the middle of an orchard. The lawn would cut into the productive land so farmers, being what they are, they go without lawns. For most farmers, a lawn is strictly a financial decision. Our family had plenty of room for a lawn, but my Dad thought it was a waste of time and money to water and mow a lawn.  I thought that was weird at the time, but I have a lawn now, and I think it's a waste of time and money. I hate it.  I think that is a farmer trait, and while I am not currently a farmer, I was.  I wonder if that makes my kids TheFarmersKids, once removed?  Not sure about that and I don't know where to look it up.  Google has nothing on that topic.

A lot of TheFarmersKids wore jeans that had holes in them from working in the orchard. We all worked after school and on weekends for our Dads. Sure, we all were paid, but we were paid thirty cents on the dollar.  I guess the rest was deducted for rent.  One of the kids at school always came to school smelling like diesel oil, which immediately qualified the entire family for TheFarmersKids, cum laude status.  But, here was the rub; his dad didn't have a farm or work on a farm. His dad was a fall down drunk, but the kids in his family all worked on the neighbors orchard to keep from starving, so they were in TheFarmersKids group, but only held non-voting membership.

You could switch groups if you wanted to. If you got cut from the basketball team, and you liked to smoke dope, you could joine TheStoners. TheStoners didn't have a big prerequisite list to gain full membership, other than maybe a Bic lighter and I am not sure you had to prove you actually owned a lighter. I think you could say your Mom took it away and still get in.

Andy was one of my best friends, he was in TheStudents group and his girlfriend was in TheCheerleaders group. TheCheerleaders acted like they were in TheJocks group, but we hated TheCheerleaders. They served no useful purpose.  We liked TheStoners. TheStoners were a lot more fun. If we held meetings, we would have voted TheCheerleaders out and TheStoners in.

No matter which group you chose, you had to be in one. It wasn't an option to not be in a group. If you weren't in a group, you defaulted into TheLeftovers. If you were in TheLeftovers, it really meant you had no friends, or if you had friends, your friends were in TheLeftovers. Nobody wants to have leftover friends.

It's amazing to me now, but I still associate those people that I knew in high school by the group they were in then. I don't mean to imply that the person still qualifies for group status. Most don't. None of our Dads still farm, but I am still in the group. I think that is how the caste system got it's start. If I lived in a country with a functional caste system, I would be an Untouchable and my kids would be Untouchables.  This stuff stays with you for life.

The wheel turns and history repeats itself. Today, we choose. Do what you will, but choose something. For now, I choose to be in TheTriathlon group and I have an Ironman event always on the horizon. I like being in that group. The people in TheTriathlon group are fun. The lifestyle is healthy. I mean, except for your knees, the lifestyle is healthy. Gaining membership doesn't mean you have to do an full Ironman before you can get in the group. Just start training.  Or do a Sprint. Do an Olympic. Whatever. Choose. I fell into TheTriathlon group by accident. I thought I was going for a beer with friends but they lied to me and made me run three miles and throw up; In the end, it doesn't matter how you get there, it only matters that you chose to do it. 

There is a great line from the movie “The Shawshank Redemption”. One of the characters says, “get busy living, or get busy dying”. Words to live by.  I read that quote to my wife, she reminded me I was going to die in either case.  Killjoy.

If you want to be in the group, just show up. We take everybody.  Even BandKids.

Choose.

Simon Bar Sinister

Due to some genetically derived character flaw that was unfortunately passed down from many generations of low functioning social deviants, interpersonal relationships are a challenge for me. I struggle in group situations. There is always some guy in a group setting or at a party who can tell stories, or who can tell jokes or pick up women. Everybody loves him.. That's not me. There is always some guy who knows everybody's name. That's not me. I am the guy at the party in the corner who makes friends with the dog.  I was told I don't play well with others. Guilty. I relate well to food, not people.

Do you remember that 'Twilight Zone' show where the guy wakes up and finds he is the last person on earth? It was a pretty good TZ and it made you think. What would I do if it happened to me? How would I handle that situation? I thought about it. For thirty years I have thought about it and here is how that would play out: I would steal a Mustang GT 390 and drive like Steve McQueen in 'Bullitt'. I would move into a house owned by somebody famous. And, I would eat cheeseburgers all day and not worry about what I looked like. I think that would be an ideal situation for me. It could happen.

My wife and several of my more outspoken friends have mentioned to me that I might have lost a small bit of my cognitive function over the years. They said I am getting forgetful. They even said I repeat myself. I don't believe it. Liars. All of them. Liars. They even said I repeat myself.

I ran seven miles today with my trusty dog Rin-Tin-Tin. It wasn't a bad run I guess. I ran most of it, but I have to admit I walked a bit too.  I credit my walking to the dog and his poor running technique.  He can't handle my pace.  It makes me think about the diametrically opposed training methods that I have heard about. Here they are in no particular order:

Theory one is supported by a friend of mine and a Youtube video I saw, so you know it must be good. It goes like this. If you train with long slow distance runs, then you will race a long slow race. You can't expect to race fast if you haven't run fast in training. What you do is a lot of 800 yard sprints, with a minute rest or two minutes rest between them. Add to that a bunch of mile repeats. Run a mile, walk a minute, run a mile, walk a minute. Do that for an hour with negative splits. Makes sense, but it means the training runs you do are going to be short. You can't sprint for three hours straight. I cant anyway, so I don't know how that works in a Ironman. I mean, really, you do sprints in training, you end up running on fumes at the thirty minute mark. So what do you do for the other three hours of that training session?

Theory two is of course lots of long slow distance runs. You train your body to run longer and longer distances. Its fine, but you end up at a certain pace. You train your body to take the distance, but not the speed.

Enough about training theory.  Even I am bored with that topic and I wrote it. Here is what I really wanted to talk about. In my first Ironman, my training partners and I all started together. I don't think we were holding hands like those cute little kids on the first day of kindergarten, but we might as well have been. We stood together at the starting line, shoulder to shoulder, ready to inflict maximum damage on ourselves and those around us. At the end of the day, my buddies all finished ahead of me, but they politely waited for me at the finish line. We had our pictures taken together, we had our families together, everybody was standing upright and smiling. We hugged the spots off our finisher t-shirts. It was great and made me think we were all twenty years old again. No injury or harm could befall us. We were impervious to pain. We jousted with failure and failure was found wanting.

In my second Ironman, one buddy was injured all year, starting with a broken arm and a pretty bad genital rash, another buddy pulled a hip out of whack and limped to the starting line, and a third buddy messed up a hamstring which turned black and blue and he couldn't meet the bell in round one.

At the end of the day, the three of us that were able to attempt the day ended up in the medical tent. No pictures were taken, for which we were thankful. We limped back to the rented house, wondering where our youth had fled. Not once did I feel like I was twenty. I think somewhere around mile seventy on the bike Simon Bar Sinister shot me with his most recent evil invention.  I got zapped by the 'Getting Older Than Most Of The Other Ironmen' gun.  Curse you, Simon Bar Sinister.  Curse you and your evil ways right to hell.