Lemon Drops

The Discovery Channel narrator with the Australian accent said something like 'the hapless seal tried in vain to flee from the great white shark.' It isn't an accurate quote, but it's close. It got me thinking that great white sharks must be a recent invention since you never used to hear about great white sharks, but now you hear about them every day. You hear about great white sharks at work, you hear about great white sharks on the radio, you read about great white sharks in vacation brochures, those toothy fish are in the news everywhere. But think about this; Did you ever hear about some sixteenth century explorer mixing it up with a great white? No. We have an extensive written history of the oceans compiled by very detailed note takers over the past five hundred years and nowhere in there do they mention great whites. The first mention of great whites is in about 1980. It's like they just appeared when Carter jacked up interest rates. Coincidence? You be the judge.

When I was in third grade, we had to learn about the different explorers and what they discovered and how their discoveries changed history and impacted our lives. I don't remember all the details, there were a lot of guys in leaky boats wandering around, sans great whites, and who actually did what got pretty confusing. Somebody tried to find the Northwest passage (and got lost), somebody drove from France to China (and got lost), somebody else found Atlantis or Atlanta or something (and lost it); Like I said, it's pretty confusing.

I was running today and after thirty minutes, I got pretty bored so I started to sort out which explorer did what and I thought I better put it down in electronic format, lest I forget again. Here is all I can remember about who discovered what:

name                    discovery                                     when

Magellan               Circumnavigated the earth           A long time ago

de Soto                 Mississippi River                          A long time ago

Ponce de Leon      Puerto Rico                                 A long time ago

Raine                    Apathy                                         1974

Capt. Cook           Pretty much everything else         No idea, probably A long time ago

I think its a pretty good list. Its pretty complete.

Like I said, I was running today with my daughter, we knocked out nine miles. I was thinking about reporting a pace of between five-thirty or maybe six minute miles, but that would be inaccurate and I would feel bad falsifying run times here in the cauldron of truth Ironman blog. I think it would be more accurate, and I would feel quite comfortable to report a six-thirty pace. That's pretty accurate. Six minutes, thirty seconds per mile. The guy with fur hanging out of his nose like a walrus ran past us doing six-thirty miles. He was flying. His nose toupee was flapping.

I wasn't going quite that fast, I limp at a more leisurely pace, and because of it, my knee can now be qualified as a carbuncle. Most people don't know what a carbuncle is, but if you show up at my house and give me a dollar, I will show you a carbuncle.

Saturday, I rode with my old gang of riders, chatting while we rode along. We discussed the various charities we support, healthy recipes we might try out and books we liked on Oprah's book list. I think it was a wholesome ride. We didn't use foul language or shoot snot rockets at each other or generally do any of the disgusting stuff that other triathletes do.  It's beneath us.  

Then at some point, my saintly gang felt the pace I was setting wasn't sufficient and peeled off. It was fun while we were together, but I haven't seen them since and I am a bit worried.  If you see some older gentlemen wearing spandex, looking lost and shooting snot rockets, let me know and I will cancel the missing persons report.

Today, I ran. Tomorrow, assuming my knee unlocks, I go to an early spin class at O'dark thirty, followed by a trip to starbucks for a recovery smoothie. Speaking of a recovery drink, try this out the next time you run in ninety degree heat.

Lemon Drop

½ cup freshly squozed lemon juice

1 cup freshly poured vodka

add simple syrup to taste (sugar mixed with water)

Pour it over ice in four glasses.  Drink each in turn.  Whatever pain you are feeling will just melt away.  Promise.

Stinkenstein

A couple days ago, I was walking from one end to the house to the other looking for a finger nail clipper when this tsunami wave of nasty gag-reflex inducing smell hit me in the face. It smelled like old diapers. My chest locked up tight and I couldn't breath. My first thought was that the dog found another dead critter and brought it in for show-and-tell. He does that once in a while. Come to think of it, the dog isn't the only treasure hunter living with me. Sometimes a sparrow with a broken wing falls into the cat's jaws then gets tucked in between the top sheet and the bedspread. Once in a while, a newly hatched duckling decides to play russian roulette with the cat.

The dog brings in bigger stuff. He brings in deer or elk bones, bags of food he pilfers out of the garbage can or whatever forest animal slow enough for him to kill.  Once in a while we find squirrels without their heads in the living room and figure the dog had another busy afternoon thinning the local squirrel herd. If he tucks his treasure in under the couch, we don't see it right away and after a few days it gets to smelling like holy hell.

The smell that hit me this time was different. This one smelled like an ammonia factory explosion, so I got down on my hands and knees and started to crawl around with my nose to the carpet, looking for where the cat pee was. I spent forty five minutes on all fours smelling the carpet. Nothin.

I tried again the next day. Same deal, hands and knees, sniffing the carpet. Nothin. I gave up. Then about three days go by and the smell hits me again. It made my eyes water. I wandered around doing the hotter/colder thing until I was able to triangulate the smell down to the laundry room.

My running shoes live in the laundry room between runs. They get wet and muddy and I don't want to track mud into the living room so I jamb them under the leaky sink in the laundry room when they aren't in use. My yard shoes go in there too. After my recent bout of aroma sleuthing, I realized that both pairs of shoes could have been launched as primary weapons in the WWI mustard gas attacks. The garbage guy comes on Monday, but I don't think I can wait that long, so I might make a special shoe disposal trip to the dump tomorrow.

My dog stinks too. He gets in the lake twenty to thirty times a day, so he never dries out. He is wet twenty four hours a day. I think he has a yeast infection. I called and booked an appointment this afternoon with an OBGYN to get my dog the right meds.

Since my race is less than thirty days away, I need to order up my shoes today. I have to plan my shoe purchases a couple weeks ahead because my size thirteen double E can only be found online or at the local feed store between the shovels and the garden gnomes.

I took a farewell run today in my smelly shoes, four miles with the dog. Felt good, no knee pain. Tomorrow I bike to the stump. The new shoes should be here next week.

Superfund Clean Up

My daughter and I have been training together for the half-iron at Lake Stevens over the past months and I have no complaints, so far, so good. We lake-swim together, we occasionally run together and we ride together every weekend. Its a pretty good training partnership, all things considered. We don't yell, we don't bicker and we try to stay positive. No screaming aloud. All of that makes for a happy ride and a happy me.

I admit, once in a while I do the wrong thing. A couple weeks ago, we were riding and some semi-human troll with a garden hose and a big mouth assaulted us from behind a garden fence with his hydro-verbal double barreled weaponry. I responded with some foul language of my own, which didn't produce any desirable result. I should have just ignored the troll. Someday I will grow up, but not just yet.

Last Saturday, we rode from Black Diamond to Orting and back, 54.6 miles with just one hill, sort of a chit-chat ride, everybody had a good time. One difference I did notice about riding with young ladies instead of my usual band of misfits is that you need to mind your P's and Q's in a mixed gender ride. I can't utter my usual disgusting oratory in a mixed company ride. It's like the great Charlie Allnut said; "It's a great thing to have a lady aboard with clean habits. It sets the man a good example. A man alone, he gets to living like a hog.” True words, Charlie, true words.

Anyway, once we got to Orting, we pulled over to check a possible mechanical issue, which turned out to be nothing, then we looked up and found ourselves queued up in the line to get into the doughnut shop. Understand this, I had no idea they had a doughnut shop in Orting and if I had, I would have complied with the restraining order and stayed a least one hundred yards away. The existence of that doughnut shop was news to me, but once we were there, standing in line, I didn't want to not order doughnuts. That would be rude. So we went in.

They had a marvelous selection of doughnuts and brownies and cakes and all manner of good treats for road weary travelers. They had the cake type doughnuts that were sugar dusted (192 calories), Bavarian Kreme (210 calories), standard chocolate frosted cake doughnuts (270 calories), maple bars (220 calories) and a bunch of other, lesser doughnuts. I was zeroing in on the puff pastry with big sugar crystals sprinkled on top but I couldn't choose between the strawberry filled one or the apple pie filled one. I went back and forth, back and forth, eeny meeny miney mo, I just couldn't noodle out a tie breaker. Then, perched just inches away from the chocolate glazed eclair, I spotted an apricot and cream cheese filled puff pastry with sugar crystals sprinkled on top. A winner. The angel of mercy behind the counter with the facial tic and the "My child is an honor student at Hogwarts" tattoo on her wrist handed my treasure over and pointed me to the cash register.

I don't know what my daughter chose because I was ever so gently holding my apricot  and cream cheese puff pastry up to my cheek, feeling it's still oven-warm sugary goodness. I could only concentrate on my apricot and cream cheese puff pastry. I yearned for that puffy pastry. I was drooling like the dog when I fire up the bar-b-que.

We got up to the register and they asked me what I wanted to drink. I said water. Somehow, my water order wasn't communicated correctly to the coffee girl and I ended up with a twelve ounce mocha with a really big thwack of whip cream and a double portion of chocolate sauce drizzle over the top. Then I started to eyeball a tower of elephant size self-serve cookies that were dipped in chocolate. I tried to wrap my lips around one, but I ran out of money and they made me put the cookie back. I didn't mind, I had enough cash for the mocha and the apricot and cream cheese filled puff pastry, so I handed over my seven dollars and I sat down at the counter to eat my treasures. I sort of lost track of the next thirty minutes. My apricot and cream cheese filled puff pastry and extra choco-mocha bounced me into a pre-diabetic sugar coma. I think now its a good thing that they took away my cookie. That cookie could have been terminal.

I came out of my sugar coma and found we were riding back up the trail, heading home, burning as much sugar off as quickly as we could. I was high on sugar and life, riding as fast as the wind, singing something from "Les Mis" when I saw in the middle of the trail three distinct piles of moose poop,  each larger and more formidable than the last.  I veered right, ducked left and cut hard to the right, slalom skiing through the poop ski-gates.  To be honest, I am not sure where it came from or what it came from, it might have been moose poop from a live moose, I just know it was the right size to be moose poop if the contributing moose was an overly large moose. Or a medium sized giraffe, maybe. Whatever, I had to go around it, riding through it was not an option.

A hundred yards later, I saw this guy being dragged down the trail by a huge black Hellhound with lasers on his forehead and iron caps on his teeth. I felt sorry for the guy. That dog was lunging at the end of an industrial strength chain, snapping at everything in eyesight: trees, babies in baby carriages, me. I got scared and tried to hide behind the baby carriage. I thought there was a good 50/50 chance the Hellhound might not eat the baby in the baby carriage before he ate me.

Today, as I recall that ride, it occurs to me that the poop in question might not have been moose poop at all, it could have been from the Hellhound. No matter who deposited it there, its a navigation hazard. The NTSB should get out there with the EPA and get that trail listed as a Superfund clean up site. Its going to take years before you can ride to get doughnuts in Orting again.

Tour

A common human trait is that we qualify our lives wrongly. We all do it. When I look back at my life, at the good memories that make me smile and the bad memories that refuse to die, I count my life in days. That is, I recall the day this happened or the day that happened, then I count those memorable days up and that numerical tally of those days is the mathematical expression of my life. Depending on how old you are, your total might be ten thousand or twenty thousand or thirty thousand days. It depends on your age multiplied by the probability that you will do something worthwhile on a daily basis. It's not complex, but it is difficult to calculate with accuracy.

Then I look forward. I pull up the actuarial table that my life insurance agent uses to predict my demise and I count my remaining time I have left in years. I think about the days to come and I assume they will be too numerous to count. I'm an optimist.

That's backwards. It isn't about math. Euclid was wrong. The time already passed is meaningless. It doesn't matter how many good or bad memories you have had up to this point. The time left to each of us may be one day or ten thousand, in the end, it matters naught. If we try to derive some mathematical formula to categorize it, we miss the value, we miss the gift of life we were given at birth. It isn't the number of days left that matters, its the quality of those days that counts.

Last Saturday, I ran 6. It was a good run, my knee wasn't paying attention and it forgot to fire a pain salvo until about an hour after the run. That might sound bad, but its good, really. See, it's like this; Knee pain and taxes are really the same thing. You know your knee is going to revolt and you know you have to pay taxes. Delay them both. Don't let your knee revolt until after you finish your workout and don't pay your taxes until next year. Or the year after.  Delay delay delay.

Sunday, my daughter and I rode 56 miles, including a quick jaunt up Mud Mountain. My daughter isn't used to the longer rides yet, so it was sort of a surprise she finished so strong. I didn't expect that, I thought she was going to blow up but she did great. For me that ride wasn't that big of a deal. I can knock out 56 as easily as I can snap-hook a #2 Titleist into the fat lady on the next fairway. I am not bragging. Cycling is a function of money. If you have the funds to go to spin class all year long, if you swim or run or bike or lift or go to yoga six to eight times a week, you can ride 56 without popping a head gasket. I pay big money so that I can ride 56.

As I was thinking about my workouts over the past weekend, I was comparing them and trying to decide which one was the better, which offered the highest return on my investment of time and effort. The run was harder, and therefore was the better workout. The more I run, the better off I will be in Lake Stevens, but the ride was by far a better day. I spent the day with family, I rode to the top of Mud Mountain and spent a few minutes taking in the view and I got to ride without a jacket, which is a huge plus if you ride in the cold nine months of the year like I do. And I got to ride with the view highlighted by the majestic Rainier. It was a good day.

I am watching the Tour.  Those guys are amazing.  They can pull a big gear for hours on end and they weigh 150 tops.  Freaks.  See the link  for a few fun stats.

pro cyclist vs the rest of us