Back Spasm

This is the third in a series of three cat posts in the blog. I don't particularity like or dislike cats, but my roommate/part-time housekeeper always seems to find a non-rent paying cat to move in and freeload and that bothers me. This money-suck feline appendage wasn't in the marriage contract that I remember and honestly, I feel a little bit ripped off. I never agreed to cats. Anyway, this post is sort of related to cats.

I guess I was a little over-excited when I first heard of Schrödinger's cat in my psych 101 class all those years ago. I was eighteen or nineteen years old and for weeks after I heard about it, I couldn't stop thinking about it. If you don' know the what-for of this Schrödinger guy and his cat, it goes like this; Build a box and in the box put a geiger counter. Then hook up to a hammer on a hinge that can swing and will whack a sealed vial of deadly poison if the geiger counter detects the presense of a decaying atom. Then put in just enough radioactive stuff so that there is a 50/50 chance that the geiger counter will see a decaying atom in an hour, which makes it swing the hammer, which breaks open the poison which kills whatever is in there. Get it? Whatever is in the box will stand a 50/50 chance of getting a bad case of dead in an hour. Then grab a cat and chuck it in the box and shut the lid. Don't open the box for an hour.

That's it. That is the famous Schrödinger's cat experiment. Now, you might ask, why you would do that? You wouldn't, it's just a theoretical experiment, but the idea is really just some crazy rainy-day fun for the kids. Is the cat dead or alive? There is no way to know unless you open the box, which you can't do because it ruins the experiment. That's it. That, and the dangling question that calls for an answer; Is cat dead or alive? There is no such thing as an unknown amount of dead. You are either are or you aren't. The fact that you personally don't know the state of the cat has nothing to do with the actual state of the cat. It's the same thing as being a little bit pregnant; There is no such thing.

So why bring up the question in an Ironman blog? It's this question: Is your training plan going to get you there? There is no middle ground. It's a yes or no question. Is it enough, and, is it the right kind of enough? It's one or the other. It's going to get you to the finish line intact, or it's not.

In my past training endeavors, I was riding a hope and a prayer. I did as much as I could and I hoped and prayed that it would be enough. If I was exhausted at the end of the day then my plan must be working. Right? At the end of the day, I would leave my sweaty clothes on the floor in a pile with my fragile emotional state and wait for my housekeeper to clean up the mess.

I have a different plan this year. So far, I am barely hanging on. The training calendar I am on is harder this time. I think the Navy Seal training guys looked at this plan and decided it was too hard. Maybe not, but it feels like it. Here is how my week shakes out.

Work – 40 hours

Commute – 8 hours

Sleep – 50 hours

Houseduty (cooking, eating, taking the garbage out, cleaning something) – 7 hours

Training – 15+ hours

Getting ready to train (packing a bag with shoes and shirts, finding my HR monitor) – 8 hours

Remodel (we are remodeling the house) – 7 hours

Bloggin – 1 hour

Offering unsolicted advice – 7 hours

I am over budget on my schedule.

I ran yesterday, my back sort of seized up, so I limped home. I got up this morning with the intention of running, my back sort of seized up, so I limped back to bed from the bathroom. Maybe I need to do more core work to keep the joints and wires and strings in my back all lined up.  I wonder if Schrödinger ever volunteered his housekeeper's cat to get in the box, and, if he did, did the cat have back spasms?  Did the cat feel like I do?  I think ya.

Inego

Looking up the term Blog on the online version of the Merriam Webster Dictionary, we find the following:

Blog noun \ˈblȯg, ˈbläg\ – That electronic medium that writes itself, as long as the author is in possession of the two basic tenants of writing, inspiration and an idea. If the author possesses only one of those two requirements, his soul is deemed to be lost along with his literary reputation.

For those of you out there claiming to be the owner and agent of the singularly fantastic book idea for the next 'The Grapes of Wrath' or 'A Tale of Two Cities', just sit back down on your Rascal motorized scooter and quite waving your arms around like a willow tree in a windstorm. Ideas are cheap. I have ideas all the time. Some of them might even be good, but it doesn't matter. Claiming to possess an idea is just an excuse to not work hard. You have to get the idea down on paper, or into electronically formatted bits and that takes a little inspiration and a lot of perspiration.

You may be inspired to write prose like Dickinson, or describe the search for our lost humanity like Hemingway, but if you don't have an idea, a theme, a focus for your tomb, you just scatter words devoid of value on the page like a manic Easter Bunny scatters eggs. You may do this for as long as your inspiration holds sway over your soul, adding to the summation of worthless drivel created by man.  Trust me, I know of what I speak.  I do it all the time.  As an interesting side note, well over half of the Oprah booklist books were rendered by misled souls with too much inspiration but devoid of theme. So sad.

The worst possible case for a writer is when you posses neither idea or inspiration. Inspiration has been know to abandon me like a sorority girl leaves her lover for a bigger trust-fund. When my idea-garden becomes a rocky place, where no seed can find purchase, I blog no more. Ideas and Inspiration: They gravitate away from me with interstellar speed, leaving me to languish in perdition for eternity, subject to ridicule and toxic self-contempt. Until today. Today I got somthin'.

The traditional model of a story is generally told from the beginning, progressing chronologically through to the end. Remember Huck and Jim, setting off down the river on a raft, searching for nothing but their individual version of freedom? It started upriver and then they drifted downriver, time counted by the passing days and the passing miles. That's how you do it. Time goes forward, never back. It's the same when you write a blog. You start at the start, stick a middle in the middle, then push on to the end. Done and done. That is, if you proscribe to the Marquis of Queensberry rules, you do it that way. Except. Except not today, not here and definitely not now. Today's installment of the Unironman is reversing things. I am going to tell the end thing, then circle back and discuss how I got here.

Follow me here. This part is the end part.  You need to trust me.

3:37 PM – I can't type well. Usually, I type pretty fast, if overly enthusiastically, wearing out keyboards with some frequency. Not today. Today I am using about 75% of my fingers. The right and left pointer fingers are apparently on strike and slowing the production rate down considerably. I am injured. I fell on concrete from pretty high up, breaking my fall with my hands and everything hurts. 

My injuries are listed below, sorted geographically East to West

Item	Symptom	Pain Level
Left Elbow	Won't Bend	Medium
Left Wrist	Won't Bend	Minor
Left Fingers – Ring/Middle/Index	Won't Type	Minor
Head	Numb	None
Right Pectoral	Strained	Medium
Right Fingers – Ring/Middle/Index	Won't Type	Minor
Right Thumb Tendon	Won't Move	High
Right Elbow	Won't Bend	Medium
Right and Left Thighs	Cramping	Owweeee

How did I come to that low place?  How were the mighty felled so far, so unfairly?  Read on, only now we circle back to the beginning.

1:00 AM I roll the clock forward, or to put it another way, I lose an hour of sleep. Usually that lost hour is no big deal, I can lose an hour and it doesn't bother me one way or another. I can get by on six hours sleep a night, but when I am training a lot, I need eight hours of sleep. Nine is better. If I don't get my beauty rest, I get grumpy and I lose focus. And everything hurts.  And that is my out.  That is what I blame the rest of the day on.  That lost hour cost me dearly.

8:05 AM I am five minutes late to meet my ride group. Crud. We roll out and I can't get comfortable. I think I have a boil someplace close to where my bike seat rubs my bike seat, but it's cold enough that it goes numb.

8:15 AM My bike group decides to go all PED on me and push the pace up about three gears more than I have with me.  I feel the pain. My legs feel like jelly ten minutes into the ride. This bodes not well.

9:05 AM I get dropped. Why? Because, that's why. Don't ask. It's rude.

10:05 AM Since my riding companions were going faster than I deemed prudent, I am riding by myself, wandering the roads of Enumclaw, trying to stay on the narrow shoulder, causing harm to no man and hoping to not get pancaked by a Chevy. An old man, maybe seventy five or eighty years old is walking towards me on the same narrow shoulder that I claim as my birthright. He is obviously wrong, wrong, wrong in all things; walking where I will soon be riding, leaning the heel of his right hand into his cane, hobbling and bobbling down the shoulder of the road and generally being a menace. I thought he looked harmless, but that opinion turned out to be in error. I veer out of the shoulder into the car lane, giving my pedestrian friend the entirety of the shoulder. It's not my fault that he didn't think I gave him enough room. He should have jumped into the ditch if he wanted more room. Right? Well, maybe I could have allowed a bit more room but I don't like riding in the car lane. It makes me uneasy. Then, without warning or provocation, and even though it was his fault for being where I wanted to be, he starts to swing his cane at me like a rapier, shouting and growling and jousting his weapon at my person. I am not sure, but I think he said “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” Maybe not. I wanted to loop back and express my displeasure at his lack of manners, but I don't need to get yelled by the octogenarian Political Action Committee any more than necessary. And besides, I was afraid he would bean me with the cane, so I continue on.

11:00 AM I face a choice. The hill I am on is inducing a pain response beyond my ability to cope. My choice is 'Do I keep riding'? Or 'Do I walk'? I kept riding, but it was a close call. My legs betrayed me. I feed them, I care for them and I buy them pants and all I ask is that they push my bike. It seems like a fair-square deal to me and I held up my end.  

11:30 AM I get home, there is no food. Why isn't the maid standing there with a freshly made smoothie and a roast beast sandwich? I had a rough day and nobody cares.

12:30 PM Since my ride sucked, due to the cane wielding swordsman and my leg betrayal, I thought I might as well be a little bit productive and do some work on the remodel. If you didn't know, about six months ago, I convinced a loan shark to help with the remodel and loan me more money than I have made or will ever make. All I had to do was sign a 'multi-generational mortgage' thing and hand over a kidney.  

So I am perched on a five foot high platform, holding a cordless drill in one hand and an electric cable spitting sparks in the other hand. My plan was to...I was trying to..., honestly I don't know what the hell I was thinking, but I tripped and fell off of the table, my foot stayed stuck on the table wrapped in the pile of rope that I left there weeks ago, and I dropped head first onto the concrete. I caught myself with both hands down so that was good, then my wrists and elbows both screamed out loud. I hit my head and sort of half way passed out. Its hard to describe it better than that. I didn't pass out, but time sort of got tangled up.

Epilogue – That's it, that's my story. I had a bad day. Tomorrow will be a better day.