Movies That Matter

When I was just a young sprout in the fourth grade, we used to have these competitions where all the kids got in two lines and the two people in the front of the line had to answer a spelling challenge.  The loser got to sit down and watch the rest of the kids do their challenges while the winner went to the next round and that sucked because I lost more often than I won so I spent a lot of time in my chair, watching the other kids trying to spell "squirrel" or "popsicle".  Anyway, there was this girl named Theresa Thomas that won every time and I hated her for it.  She never lost.  Maybe she was nice, maybe she wasn't, I have no idea.  I just know I hated her.  Spelling freak.  

And, and, AND the teacher was showing a good deal of bias against me and towards her because Theresa could spell "apple" without thinking about it.  She just spit it out without so much as a backwards glance.  She just spit out the letters A P P L E like it was nothing.  I had to pause and go back and ask for a timeout and hope that you did spell "apple" with an R.

One day,  this kid in my class that nobody liked convinced his Mom to shuttle his old, raggy looking cat and her bastard kittens to school a few weeks after the kittens were hatched for show and tell. Apparently, this kid thought if he brought something spectacular to school to share, like a batch of illegitimate kittens, it would help augment his lowly social standing. He was wrong. He just didn't understand the whole show and tell fourth grade social ladder thing. It's pretty complex, but it goes something like this:

Bring in a pet snake – plus 3

Bring in a german shepherd or rottweiler that does tricks – plus 2

Bring in your pekingese that does tricks – minus 1

Have your Mom attend class and acknowledge your presence – minus 5

There is a more comprehensive list published somewhere, but you get the idea.

So this kid's mom showed up just before recess, and we all got to hold a kitten as long as we promised not to drop them.  The kittens made noises and wiggled and chased bits of ribbon around the floor, and all the girls wanted to hold one of those cute little wigglers and then they held them up to their faces and remarked how soft they were and how “just so adorable” they were. How weird is that? Forth graders using the word “adorable?” Puke.

A couple of the girls squealed at how cute the kittens were and another girl cried. She actually teared up because the kittens were so cute. Her social status went up a plus 2 for that little tear-fest but I hated her anyway because she made fun of me for getting C's and D's on my spelling tests all year long and she always got A's and B's. I hated her so much. We all hated her and her stupid spelling A's and B's. I don't know what happened to her but I hope she lives in a mobile home in Florida. They have hurricanes in Florida.

The boys wanted to hold the kittens too but we were too boyish to admit we liked furry faced kittens, so we just sort of stumbled around and punched each other on the shoulder and waited until the girl kitten-rush was over, then we just randomly grabbed at an available cat. I finally got one but the kitten I got to hold didn't seem to behave like the other kittens. My kitten didn't seem like the others at all. My kitten was like Gumby. My kitten just sat there in the my arms, barely moving,  just staring cross-eyed at the crying girl.  Maybe she was holding him earlier and dropped him.  I didn't want to get in trouble for breaking a kitten so I did the rational thing and walked him over to the traveling kitten box with the worn out mom cat and chucked him back in.  Maybe he just had a kitten sinus condition and got better later that day.  I wish I knew how that shabby kitten turned out, but I don't.  

I have nightmares now about lots of things: Monsters. Sharks. Under-cooked poultry. Cross-eyed kittens.  I have a long list of fears that wake me up at night.  The burdens that we bear are ours for as long as we choose. We elect to carry those things too valuable to cast away: past failures and faults, disappointments and inadequacies, regrets of things done or left undone. We carry these treasures for as long as we are able, until the burden becomes too great to carry, until we set it aside and just let it go. Such is life.

You can't train for Ironman if you pack a lot of baggage around.  It's too hard.  There are too many hills to climb and pains to soothe.  You have to do it for reasons you can live with and those reasons will be your own.  You have to put in the effort without regretting the time lost.  A couple years ago, I was bemoaning my aches and pains to a co-worker while training for IM CDA.  He listened for a bit and then he said that I didn't sound like I was enjoying it.  He was right.  You have to get your mind right if you are going to do this.  Wrapping your head around the aches is part of it.

I swam today with my swim group and I got tired and wanted to quit before the set was over but peer pressure kept me going.   I wish I could say I kept going because I knew working hard when I am tired would make me a better swimmer, but that wasn't it.  Fear kept me going.  Some social compliance thing.  I didn't want to be the only kid in the class holding a cross-eyed cat.

I admit that rationalization is inadequate.  It was fine today but wait until the dog days, when I have no time to spare, when all I can do is sleep, go to work, train, sleep.  What then?  

I have 23 weeks and some odd number of days left until Whistler and I can't honestly say why I am doing it. I like the idea of Ironman. I like training for Ironman. I like the t-shirts. I like the workouts and I like putting my fat pants in the closet. But so what? Who cares? There has to be more.

Movie: Bite the Bullet.  It is one of the best westerns ever made without John Wayne.

My favorite scene is when the character "Mister", played by Ben Johnson, is telling "Sam", played by Gene Hackman, the reason why he wants to win the horse race. Mister is dying, just minutes away from death, sitting by a camp fire, when he explains that he has held every job possible, from cowboy to miner to barman, but he never made a decent living and, because of it, he wasn't important enough for anybody to know his name. He feared that he would die unmourned and unremarked. Then he died and his fear was realized, so Sam said “I didn't even know your name, Mister.” Maybe you had to see it, but it was a great movie moment. Mister wanted to make the world stand up and take note of his life, and his death. Through victory, Mister thought some unrelated, unattainable goal could be realized. He was wrong.  I don't know that it is my top movie choice of all time, but it is definitely top five.  Definitely. 

I used to have similar dreams and visions, thinking that, through competition, I could repair my past failures, resolve those things unresolved, maybe even validate my life. I think Ironman means something different for all of us. What thing do any of us hope to gain? A three cent ribbon? A t-shirt? Winning? Victory?  Do I hope to see my name in a newspaper or on the Ironman website? Will some stranger stop me on the street and ask for my autograph? Will Cannondale offer me a sponsorship? Do they give out sponsorships in the seniors division? They give out senior division sponsorship for golfers, so maybe, maybe they have me spotted as the next spoksemodel, ala Arnold Palmer.  Now that I think of it, I gotta brush up on my interview technique.

As odd as it sounds, unless you are a pro or trying to be a pro, you aren't competing against anybody else. Your only competition is yourself. There isn't really a 'win' in the age groups. If you come in first in your group, that's great and good for you, but I think your complementary t-shirt looks a lot like my complementary t-shirt. Definitely.  Of course, I won't be going to Kona.  Definitely.

  

The Brown Thing

One of my all-time fav movies is Christmas Vacation with Chevy Chase. Everybody has seen it so I won't post a recap of the thing, but just know it was a good movie. The scene with the squirrel and the dog running through the house, knocking stuff over and scaring the bejeebers out of the Christmas dinner guests was a crazy-funny thing to watch.

Everybody thinks that particular scene couldn't happen in real life, but it happened to me. It really did.

It was about ten years ago and I sort of stumbled into it. My marriage bed co-habitant owned two cats at the time that I hated, and somewhat coincidentally, they hated me back. We never got along, but we made a silent pact of mutually assured destruction, sort of like the US and the Russians did in the cold war. I didn't drown them and they treated me like an old, uncomfortable chair that nobody sits in. They ignored me.

Preamble -Night One

So one night, I went to go get into bed at maybe ten or whatever time it was. I pulled the covers back, slid into my spot, reached back and adjusted my two pillows a little better to fit my sensitive melon, then I noticed the cats. They were watching me. They didn't move a muscle, they just sat by the bed and stared. They didn't blink, they just looked at me with their evil cat-eyes, not flinching, just waiting for something to happen. I thought they were waiting for me to die. I grabbed one of the little pillows that has no purpose but lives on my bed and I threw it at the cats. I missed. Stupid cats, I promised myself that tomorrow, as soon as I woke up, they would die in pain and agony, but for next eight hours I would ignore their cat-shenanigans. 

I tried to go to sleep. I was tired. I wanted to go to sleep, but those cats were merciless. The cat-loving spouse said she thought the cats were smarter than I was and maybe they brought a bird in, so we looked under the bed. We looked behind the bed. We looked in the closet. We looked everywhere. For two hours we looked. Sometimes the cats followed us, sometimes they left the room, but they were always back in a few seconds. Waiting. Watching. Judging. Something was wrong, but I couldn't figure out what, so I get into bed, pick up the top pillow and try to adjust it when something brown and fast explodes from between my top pillow and my bottom pillow, bounces once off my shoulder and launched into the closet, one claw width in front of the murderous, vile cats. My wife screams for help. The cats scream for blood. The dog tucks tail and runs into the kitchen, whining like the chicken-dog he is. The only thing that calms that dog down is when he digs through the garbage can for scraps, so he does that. It's 1.00AM and with all the noise and swearing, it woke my son so he shows up sporting his tidy-whities and a baseball bat, ready to defend the family.

We spend the next hour in the closet, digging through shoes and shirts and clothes, looking for the brown-thing. Nothing. It was too late and I was too tired to find the brown-thing, so we sent the boy back to bed with his bat and the wife and I slept in the spare bedroom while the cats sat in my closet, staring at my shirts on hangers.

The next day, we went our separate ways. The boy went to school, the wife and I went to work, the cats took up guard duty and watched my shirts in the closet. The dog was made of sterner stuff, so he kept up his garbage can patrol against the brown-thing, comforted with the knowledge that dinner scraps were only twelve hours away.

The War- Night Two

The next night, after the family was home from work and school, we approached the closet much like Wyatt Earp and his family must have approached the OK corral. The winner and the loser were as yet undecided, but one way or another, the battle would come to a close. No quarter was given, nor was it requested. The smell of death was in the air.

The cats took up sentry duty, ready to slash any combatant trying to flee the battleground. The dog stayed in the kitchen with the garbage can, protecting it from the brown-thing. I settled on a seven iron after the driver proved too long to swing. My son brought his baseball bat and a lid to the new frypan. My wife was unarmed.

We slid one shirt at a time on the clothes hanger-pole, looking between the shirts for the intruder. We found it in seconds. It sat there, unmoving. It had disproportionately large eyeballs and flaps of skin between the front and back legs. It stared at me, bravely waiting for my coup-de-grace, my killing stroke. I couldn't do it. The mess would be catastrophic, besides, it was afraid. It might have been shivering.  It just stared at me with those bug-eyes.  I couldn't kill it.  My son proved his worth by slapping the frypan lid down over the brown-thing that looked vaguely like Rocky, the Flying Squirrel. The cats started to jump up and claw my shirts. I sent the wife for a cookie sheet, which we slid under the fry-pan lid, thereby imprisoning the dangerous, toothy beast. We walked out onto the deck, me holding the cookie sheet, the boy holding firm the fry-pan lid. On the count of three, the boy unlidded the brown-thing and I flicked the cookie sheet up, dislodging the prisoner. It spread it's legs like a working girl and gracefully glided down to the lawn, then ran behind the bush.

Prologue

I don't know what became of the brown-thing, I never saw it again. I hope it ran home safely and lived a full life, with a family of his own, in a safe place, with plenty of nuts to eat and without evil cats chasing it. I hope.

I rode fifty four miles today. I got dropped twice in the first thirty minutes, and once in the last thirty. That is a thing I live with these days. Tomorrow I run.

Bag Balm Isn't Just For Cows

I don't mean to offend. I am not trying to splatter some questionable text onto the page and derail anybody's puritan sensibilities, nor am I looking for literary shock, ala Howard Stern. I just think this topic we are discussing here isn't covered in Lava online and it should be. There is zero data available in any triathlon literature and it's high time somebody covered it with some real life, scientific data. Somebody needs to throw down some raw data (pun intended) and let the reader decide. The following lines are the real McCoy, the Good Housekeeping seal of approval, lab tested facts documented by double blind testing, whatever that is. What I am going to talk about here, in this private setting, this inner sanctum of truth, this completely secure forum is the uncomfortable topic; 'Bike Seat Rash'. You know what I am talking about. Don't be shy. We all suffer, we just don't throw it out as a conversation starter at the church social. Well, I do, but you probably don't.

Now, don't run to to the freezer for a double scoop of fudgeyvanillacaramel ice-cream emotional salve just yet. I am not going to drop an auto-biographical Full Monte video on you, but I am going to start the ball rolling and tell you what I think. If you don't want to read it, don't read it. Don't get your panties in a wad. If your grade-school sensibilities prevent further investigation into this important topic, go watch Bambi on your VHS. Again. For the thirty-seventh time. But if you are a real man, or a real woman, read on. If you dare. Only if you dare.

A little history to set the stage - A couple million years ago, about a week after the whole apple and the snake and the garden debacle, the man and women were given a second choice. They got to pick internal or external. Do you want your private parts inside or outside? Do you want to get a rash on a bike seat or not? That really happened.

The guy was without reason and completely extemporaneous so he said “I want to hang loose and feel the breeze and what the hell is a bike seat anyway?” Idiot. Moron.

The girl, being thoughtful and having already gone zero for one on the scorecard said “I don't want a rash from a bike seat. And I am NOT with him.  He is an idiot.”

So that is how we got here.  If you posses excess nose hair and external organs, you suffer on a bike seat.  It isn't your fault.  You didn't design it, you just happened to come up tails in the great gender coin toss when you were born.  Too bad, it sucks to be you.

Fish got it right. The boy fish and the girl fish look fairly similar, they swish their fishy tails the same way on the same river, but the boy fish isn't getting blisters and a really painful rash when his boy parts rub up against his bike seat. The boy fish isn't dropping ten bucks on a pint of Bag Balm every month during bike season.  To reflect a bit, the question occurred to me; "How does it feel knowing a salmon is more evolved than you are?

So now, I bought stock in the bag balm company. Bag balm is the only thing keeping me on my bike.  You girls go ahead and laugh but you guys are all nodding your heads and thinking “Ya. This dude knows. He's an idiot, but he has this bike seat thing wired.”

Sharks and Charts

I have been randomly scribbling in my blog for a couple years now, sweeping everyday nouns up against reluctant verbs and giving birth to new, indecipherable adjectives as the need presents itself. Sadly, the King's English has been butchered at my careless hand and will never be the same. If you are familiar with the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, then know that history does in fact repeat itself in this blog. There is some chance that you may lose your hard-won ability to speak English if you read this blog, due to poor authorship and the subliminal commercial message that flash on your screen. I know this is true because half the readership doesn't know what the hell I am yammering about. I have heard with regularity from readers some variation of the following theme; “I really like reading your blog, but what the hell are you talking about? It makes no sense.”

I have a pretty good idea of the potential financial implication of my blog. This knowledge isn't based on research. It isn't based on actual experience. It came to me in a dream. I was noodling the numbers around and I made a chart.

Reads per Month	Cash Money I Make Every Month
10000	$100.00
40000	$300.00
100000000	1 zillion dollars

To put some perspective in there, I have been bloggin' for three years and eleven days and my net payout is three dollars sixty five cents. Since my advertising contract with the company that hosts my blog specifies that they wont pay me until I make at least ten dollars, I have a ways to go. I haven't quit my day job just yet, but I do have some extensive plans in that area.

Some years ago, I started riding with a motley group of social deviants and we started doing a coffee ride every weekend. If you don't know what a coffee ride is, I made another chart.

8:00AM-9:00AM	Ride hard
9:00AM-10:00AM	Order up a tray of grande mocha's with extra whip, extra choco-drizzle and a six pack of cookies. Sit outside in the comfy chair and relax. Observe everybody walking into Starbucks, make snide comments about each and every one as soon as they are out of listening distance.
10:00AM-11:30AM	Get back on our bikes for an hour long ride home.
11:30:00 AM	Get back home and wonder how an hour long ride home put me home ninety minutes later.

I was disappointed to learn that the coffee ride is a thing of the past. I thought everybody rode bikes that way. I thought that coffee and sitting and making snarky comments was part of Ironman training. I miss it. I was good at it. It was fun. Isn't this suppose to be fun?

Today I rode with a group of sharks. I think one of them slipped some cat wormer in my water bottle when I wasn't looking because I wanted to throw up.  These guys and girls made me look like a poser. I thought I could ride, but I found out today that I can't. I called the Ironman people and asked if I could get my money back, but it's too late and besides, they don't give rebates just because your riding group doesn't stop at Starbucks.

I am trying a new nutrition plan on my bike. It's pretty simple. I made another chart.

Hour	Calories Consumed
1	300
2	300
3-forever	300 – You get the idea

I guess I didn't need a chart for that one, but I am a creature of habit.

I am going to run tomorrow morning.  I usually run with the dog, but he just found the porkchops that were in the bottom of the fridge and had rotted and started to stink.  I didn't weigh them when I threw them out, but I am guessing about two pounds worth of soupy porkchops.  So the dog stays home on the run.

Dogoppotamus and Pistachio

Some triathletes are seriously attached to their running shoes and I guess that makes sense. The run is where you suffer the most and the last thing you want is another excuse to cry. You need to be happy with your footwear. If five hundred dollar gold embossed running pumps turn your crank, then knock yourself out. Throw those bad boys into your T2 bag and feel good about the choices you make.

Some other tri guys are really hooked into their bike gear.  For instance, I really like my bike seat.  It cost about forty dollars on the close-out  rack and it fits my sensitive posterior.  They quit making that model during prohibition, so if somebody stole it, I would be in a tough spot.  

I know a guy that if his tri bike ever gets a scratch, he is going to buy a special bullet and write his own name on it. Another guy I know will only wear these crazy big mittens when he rides on cold weather rides. They look like boxing gloves. I think he had those mittens custom made out of live beavers. I used to make fun of him and his rodent hand protectors until we rode on a subzero day and he was the only guy who could hold his water bottle.

I am not that tightly wound about my gear. For me, my gear is just a bunch of tools. Mostly it's just a bunch of tools. Sort of. OK, I do admit to having a sock thing. My two hundred dollar amazon bill over the last three months reflects my recent sock problem. I don't know why, but I can't buy socks that fit. My feet are oddly shaped maybe. Or perhaps my running gait isn't properly tuned to my choice of hosiery. I don't need the high-tech super-speed socks. I just want to run and not get blisters and not have my socks slide down into my shoe and wad up in the toe. That seems like a small thing to ask, I think. Why don't they make socks that fit my extra sweaty 13EE hooves?

I had a tough day today. I went to spin instead of riding outside. I should have ridden but the weather sucked, which I guess is just another excuse to not train. No matter what, spin isn't the same as riding your bike. It just isn't.

I ran after spin and I felt like a sack of rocks. I ran with my dogoppotamus and John and his dogoppotamus. That's fun, but my run sucked. The good news is I tried out a new pair of socks, which worked pretty well. I don't usually do product placement ads for sock companies, but my contract with the beer company and the soda company didn't pan out, so I am hoping this unsanctioned sock thing will net me a healthy endorsement contract. 

Oh, I almost forgot, my new socks are available in 'Pistachio' color. I like how that sounds when I say it and I like how it looks when I type it.  Pistachio.

I Am Not Chuck

Over Christmas break, I had a conversation with some family members about New Years resolutions. One person said they were going to go to the gym more, one person said they were going to be a better housekeeper or a better cook or something sort of like that: I should know that one, but I wasn't really listening. Instead, I was frantically searching for a decent answer to contribute to the conversation. What the hell am I going to do for a New Years resolution? Diet? Already on it.  Rescue lost golden retriever puppies? I do that now.  Crud.  I got nothin'.

Anyway, the conversation now moved away from the housekeeping answer on to the third person who said they a were going on an adventure. That answer was pretty good, but a little too non-specific for me. I need an achievable goal or I wont do it. I can't just say I am going to work out more. How much more? Lift or run more? I need specifics.

Earlier today, while I was at the shoe store, I figured out what my resolution is. I am going to take all the shoelaces out of my tennis shoes and go with those elastic quick laces. They work in my race shoes, so why not all my tennis shoes?  That way I don't have to bend over to put my shoes on.  It just feels right.

Here is the definition of a generational gap. Kwai Chang Caine. If you don't know who Kwai Chang Caine is, you are from a less worthy generation.  Sorry, that's just how it is.

I used to watch a TV show called “Chuck”. Chuck seemed like he was just a run of the mill geek that worked at a discount store and fixed people's computers, but he had a secret identity.  His secret identity was that he worked for the CIA and had a superhot girlfriend and had been infected with a computer virus sort of thing that allowed him to instantly learn anything he needed to learn. Whatever he needed to know, or whatever he needed to do, he just waited for three shakes of a lamb's tail and boom, he knew how to do it. For instance, when the bad guys were going to cause all kinds of mayhem and beat him up, Chuck would learn Kung Fu in about three seconds and then kick the bad guys to the curb. The thing was, he could do anything he wanted to do and didn't have to try hard. He didn't pay the ticket price. It didn't cost him money or pain or anything.  That is the opposite of how triathletes do things.  We never get a free lunch.

I would take the Chuck route if I could. If I could take a pill that made me a better triathlete, I would do it. I would pay maybe a thousand dollars to just be a good triathlete. But I can't. There isn't a magic pill, there is no shortcut, there is no skill or talent you can be born with that gets you there. See, the triathlon deal is harder than that. It takes a lot of time, a lot of pain, a lot of swimming and running and riding with people who are way better than you are.  If you want to be a better triathlete you better accept the idea that a beatdown is in your future.

Yesterday morning, I swam with three swimmers that just left me in the weeds. I was trying pretty hard but I could tell that they were swimming at a pace I couldn't hold.  At the 1000 yard mark I had to take a breath.  At the 1500 yard mark I think my uterus prolapsed.  It hurt my ego, and I wanted to cry, but I was breathing too hard and I couldn't lift my arm to wipe the tears away so I went to Starbucks for a 500 calorie cup of sugarwater with coffee flavoring.

I guess I shouldn't feel bad that I was unable to hang with the good swimmers, since I know it's a process and every time I get dropped, it's really a good thing. I get better every time I receive a beatdown.  You gotta pay to get better.  Unless you are Chuck.

Severe Injury

There was a painting I saw at a garage sale a long time ago that I can't get out of my mind. The guy in the folding lawn chair wearing the Hawaii shirt and holding the Colt 45 beer can wanted two hundred dollars for it, which seemed like a good deal since it was signed by the artist, or at least it was signed by somebody, and besides, it came with a frame made out of real wood. But, I didn't buy it because it wasn't painted by anybody famous and if I remember correctly, it wasn't really very good. And I didn't have any money. Anyway, the painting looked sort of cartoonish, but even so, that image on that painting stuck with me for years and years.

The painting was of a fifty-ish year old guy working in a forge or maybe he was working in a blacksmith shop, and now that I think about it, I can't tell you the difference between the two. A forge and a blacksmith shop look the same in movies and paintings. The edges of the shop were cast in such poor light it was hard to see anything more than dark gray shadows, but the middle of the shop was brightly lit by an orange-red forge fire. In the man's meaty right paw was a big hammer raised high and ready to strike, and in his left was a big pair of long-handled pliers holding a hot piece of metal that was pressed against an anvil. I don't know what he was suppose to be making out of that white-hot hunk of metal, but it seemed to be giving him trouble because he was sweating and had an ugly grimace on his face. Sparks and red hot smoke wafted up from the forge and cast a hell-fire glow on the anvil and on the man's face and arms.

I didn't think about it at the time, but now I wonder if the hair on the guy's arms was burned off by the heat from the forge. I do that sometimes. Yesterday for instance, I was trying to solder a piece of copper pipe so I fired up my propane torch to heat the pipe and melt the solder. I was holding the pipe in my left hand and the torch in my right and, for some reason I didn't consider how far that torch can throw a flame before I did my Bob Vila impression with the torch.  I was sweating, just like the guy in the painting, and I had an evil grimace on my face, just like the guy in the paining.  Unlike the guy in the painting, my left forearm wandered in between the pipe and the torch and I burned all the hair off my arm with that %$#@ing torch. Twice.

That was yesterday. Today, I am comparing my left arm with my right and trying to decide which is best. The left one still smells funny and is nearly hair free from wrist to armpit. The right one is hairy but it isn't heat blistered.

I ran 6 miles today, it felt great. Best run in a year. Great run. Super run. To be fair, it wasn't a fast run. A guy with a limp wearing a “I just turned 70” t-shirt passed me, which I thought was pretty rude, since it's obvious to anybody with half a brain that my left arm was recently injured in an industrial forge and/or propane torch accident. I tried to pace the guy, but he dropped me after a hundred yards or so. Those septuagenarian runners are so arrogant.

IM Whistler 29 weeks, 5 days, 12 hours, 50 minutes, 55 seconds to go. Plus or minus.