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.