Musings at Year's Beginning

The New Year came and passed, with the the transition from 2012 to 2013 occurring while I was asleep in Tucson, Arizona.  C and I cobbled together a trip south for two primary purposes: visit my parents, who I had not seen in a long while, and enjoy some warmth and sunshine.  I'll address the second goal first by raising the following question for public philosophical consumption: In what kind of cruel world is it warmer in Anchorage than southern Arizona?  We woke up everyday to face unusually cold temperatures for the Sonorran desert, while Anchorage experienced unseasonable warmth.  Frankly, I was just as glad to miss the thaw.  I assure you, temperatures in the forties are no fun in January in Anchorage.  Our snow turns to ice, our ski trails turn to ice rinks, and our moods sour appreciably.  But I had been hoping for soul-restoring heat, which the good people of Tucson had apparently put back into storage for our visit, perhaps out of a misplaced desire to make us feel at home.  At least the sun came out and we reveled in its brightness.

My folks came over from their home some four hours further east to meet C and I for the duration.  We waited until late in the year to piece together our plans and had no available way of flying near their home at any reasonable price, so settled on Tucson as a convenient location to meet.  We spent the week sight-seeing, eating, and visiting.  C and I got out to run on local trails - serpents of dirt winding through forests of cacti - and did one hike through the desert.  But mostly we just sat around looking at one another, asking over and over, "Where do you want to eat?"

(With my parents, after wondering where we should eat lunch but before we started wondering where to eat dinner.)

If the question was posed to me the answer was usually, "somewhere that serves tacos."  And we did find a few places to trade our hard earned cash for corn tortillas and meat.  It is always a treat to be back in a part of the country where you can find $1.50 tacos served from counters or trucks where English is a second (and often un-mastered language) and the available fillings include head meat.  Of course these days, that means just about anywhere except for Anchorage.  I'll probably never know why is it so hard to make a good and cheap taco in this town.

One consequence of spending a week with my parents is that they inevitably fall back into their roles as disciplinarians.  As such, I spent much of the time as follows:

It is probably a good thing they didn't find the beer I snuck into the condo we rented, because I found out the number of lashings for drinking spiritous liquors was pretty severe (though not as bad as for misbehaving to girls):

This was really the first time I had visited Tucson.  I was in town once before over New Years to see Billy Bacon and the Forbidden Pigs play a special New Year's show.  That trip was a quick surgical strike: arrive, park, rock, depart.  Really the kind of trip that only happens fueled by youth.  On that occasion, I didn't really see any part of town other than the concert venue.  I was struck this time by three things that Tucson has in abundance: bike shops, tattoo shops, and head shops.  I'm pretty sure that any time, day or night, you could find a new Shimano Dura-Ace cassette, get an image to commemorate the 2013 presidential inauguration forever preserved across your chest, or buy a bong.  Curiously, we never went into a single one of the above businesses, although I'm pretty sure Mom would look pretty hardcore with some ink.

We did plan to do some wig shopping, so you can imagine my disappointment when we found the wig shop shuddered:

One look at the current state of Wig-O-Rama suggests that downtown Tucson has not found its stride.  It didn't seem to faze this guy, though:

I'm pretty sure he was planning a reception, or maybe a corporate event.  We ran into him again a few blocks later as C and I walked the Turquoise Trail, a painted stripe connecting historic sites in the city center that appears to attract a fraction of the tourist traffic of the Freedom Trail through Boston.  He offered us a blessing, which isn't exactly what I expected him to offer up, but we thanked him for it just the same.

Our week of deep desert chill came to an end, and we returned home.  I expected irony to follow and for Anchorage to plunge into bitter cold while Tucson soared into the 70s.  As near as I can tell, Tucson saw the opportunity and predictably warmed up, but Anchorage dropped the ball.  Instead, it has stayed warm here and even rained for two solid days, which did nothing but melt the snow and leave a sheet of ice in its wake.  Maybe you saw the viral photos of children ice skating on neighborhood streets?  We lived it.  At the beginning of the year, C and I registered to compete in the AMH Anchorage Cup, a series of ski races throughout the season.  Defying all sense of compassion, the race organizers declined to cancel the race last weekend, and C and I joined over 100 other people lacking the good sense to stay home.  I've never been so wet on skis.  The trails were slush and turning to puddles.  And I got my butt kicked by people who know how to ski fast.  But it was good fun (though look back a post or two for the discussion on Type 2 fun and take a guess into which category a ski race in the rain falls).

Few more pictures from in and around Tucson:

Musings at Year's End

Merry Christmas world!  As the year comes to a close, I find myself taking time to reflect on another year past.  Mostly, though, I find myself wondering just what the hell it is I did over the last twelve months.  Unfortunately, the only way I have left to keep track of my own comings and goings is by reviewing my updates to this blog.  The fact that there have been no posts -- absolutely none -- since sometime in September, leaves me in a particular bind.  How did I pass the time?  Was it time well spent?  Did I better myself in some fashion, perhaps finally learning the fine art of origami or the intricacies of long division?  Did I better the world in some fashion, perhaps replacing an incandescent bulb with an LED or stockpiling garbage in our spare bedroom instead of the landfill?  Did I better a neighbor, perhaps with a well timed application of the Heimlich maneuver or by simply staying out of someone's way while he or she was having a bad day?  I'll never know, and as a result, unless I helped you dislodge a poorly chewed piece of meat from your esophagus, you will never know either.

Be that as it may, I spent Christmas in my pajamas, which seems like the way it should be spent.  And someone was thoughtful enough to wrap up and gift me a pair of white clown gloves with rainbow cuffs, which seems like the way hands should be clad.  So the year is coming to a fine close.

Long time blog readers (Hi Mom!), will recall that this blog started as a chronicle of a cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatment.  (And, yes, long time blog readers that are paying close attention will also recognize that the Mom joke, and indeed the entire first sentence, are pretty much recycled from an earlier post).  Well, to bring things full circle, be advised that 2012 marked the last of the maintenance Rituxin infusions.  I was scanned for positron emissions (after injection with a radionuclide tagged sugar) in December, with what my oncologist described as no signs of uptake.  That means, in short, no cancer.  So, treatment worked as hoped and expected, and until anyone tells me otherwise, I pretty much wipe my hands of the whole thing.

In the meantime, I look forward to a 2013 filled with jet-packs, entire meals packed into a pill, technology that will finally let us all live a life of leisure, and all the other wonders that the future promises.  I also fear the inevitable rise of our new robot overlords and the evaporation of our oceans, but those are small prices to pay for the convenience of jet-packs.  Happy New Year everyone!

P.S.  Please let me know if anyone recognizes any of the people or places in the following photos.  It might go a long way towards helping me reconstruct the last three months.

Type two blogging

A cursory review of the “I just finished my first marathon” literature will find lots of people describing apparent life-changing moments.  People weeping with joy.  The best days of their lives.  Never again to meet a challenge in life, love, or career that can’t be met with the same dogged determination that carried them across the final six miles. Never to be forgotten.

 

I don’t remember it like that.  I don’t remember it like that at all.

Was I glad to finish my first marathon?  Sure, but only because I could finally do what I had wanted to do for some miles: stop running and, with that, hopefully, stop the pain.  I crossed the finish line of the Equinox Marathon in 2005, accepted my finisher’s patch with a vacant stare, and shuffled to an empty spot in the grass where I could sit.  Not comfortably, mind you.  If I tried to bend my legs, my hamstrings seized.  I tried to project an aurora of comfort and ease while grimacing, jacked at an obtuse angle.  Since I couldn’t stand back up without bending, I was effectively trapped, and ultimately resigned myself to concentrating on the ache in my legs rather than my increasing thirst which I could not attend to without rising.

I did not know it at the time, but I was having fun.  Type two fun.  Familiar to alpinists, type two fun is the kind that only becomes fun after being viewed through the haze of time.  Type two fun is usually no fun at all when you are experiencing it: cold, tired, afraid, maybe bleeding.  But once back at the bar with open beers, type two fun suddenly morphs into real fun, as you and your mates congratulate one another, exalt the day’s triumphs, and—here is the kicker—start planning to do it all again.  The amount of time it takes to go from suffering to thinking a second time around is a good idea is directly proportionate to the degree of type two-ness that your fun involved.  For me, the Equinox Marathon must have been pushing the limits, since it took seven years to once again think running the full course was a good idea.

But run the whole thing again, I did.  Last Saturday I lined up at the start with C’s family.  She, her sister, and mom were doing the relay.  Her dad was doing the full, perhaps a bit undertrained this year.  As he described it, the 26.2 miles of the race would be greater than the sum total of miles he ran to prepare.  I suspect if it hadn’t been the 50^th anniversary of the race, he would have sat this one out.  But why let details get in the way of a beautiful fall day in Fairbanks?

I was hoping to run under 4:00:00 this year, but failed to meet that goal by a fair margin.  The opening miles were slower than I expected or remembered, and I felt sluggish for the first five or more miles.  I started to feel better as I reached Ester Dome and the trail pointed upward, but by the time I reached the half-way mark it was clear that sub-four hours was going to be a hard sell.  I plodded out the out-and-back, a section along Ester Dome of single-track and mining roads where you get to pass runners ahead and behind and see a good slice of the field.  With a high-five from C (who was running leg 2 of the race and starting the out-and-back section as I was finishing), I headed for the Chute.  Runners descend about 1,000 vertical feet in a third-of-a-mile down the Chute, a steep, rocky, and loose bomb down a section line.  Any hope of making up time died as the pounding cramped my left leg.  I pulled off to the side of the trail to stretch and try to walk through the discomfort, losing about 5 minutes as piles of racers tumbled past.

Luckily, I recovered pretty well from the leg cramp, and continued on my way, cautiously at first.  The miles kept going.  A little girl offered up mini-doughnuts at an unofficial aid station, which I gladly took but didn’t end up eating.  Do you know where her hands had been?  Why risk the GI distress!  Before long, the final descent to the finish line appeared, I came around the corner, kept running, and finished.  Final time: 4:21, good enough for a top-quarter finish in the overall standings and a top-third in my age group, but pretty far off of my goal.  Nevertheless, I was satisfied with the day.  I felt good at the end, could sit and stand at will, and had time for a hot shower and sauna before the rest of the family started coming across the line.  And it didn’t take any time to think that I could do the race again.  No type two about this fun at all.

Once home (a trip characterized by high-winds and sheets of rain), I was able to download data from my Garmin and carefully analyze the day.  It took awhile, but I did discern why I was unable to meet my goal time: I didn’t run fast enough.  Something to work towards, I guess.

A photographer posted some pictures from the event that he has made freely available (http://zubenelgenubi.smugmug.com/MostlyPeople/EqnxMarathon2012/25416697_LJcPZx#!i=2092604897&k=5zwkqsR).  I grabbed two of them.  The first shows off the fall colors on Ester Dome:

The second shows that, as sure as the night will follow day, if you take my picture during a race I will be scowling.  

Why can’t I just take a normal picture that makes it look like I enjoy running?  Maybe there was more type two to this race than at first I thought.

Going Deep

(Full disclosure: All of the photos below were stolen off of the web, and are of places I went long before I owned a camera or started taking pictures.)

So this long run I have planned is coming up in just under two weeks now, meaning, among other things, that part way through September I can start doing something with my free time other than running as a form of preparation for yet more running.  It turns out that distance takes time, and not just the time it takes to cover miles but also the time it takes to harden legs against prolonged abuse.  My training plan is pretty low mileage—averaging about 35 miles per week with higher peak weeks.  There are plenty of folks in the world who will tell you that anything less than 60 mpw may allow you to finish but not race a marathon, and others who are running 90+ mpw in pursuit of the coveted “personal best.”  Even still, I feel like all I’ve done all summer is work, run, cook, and pack lunches and snacks as I transition back to the start of the list and repeat.  With any luck, it will allow me to achieve my time goal at the Equinox, but we’ll see.

There was a time when I did other things.  I spent a good fifteen years self-identifying as a climber first, whatever the hell else I happened to be doing with my life second.  I haven’t done much climbing for awhile now, but that has nothing to do with running.  Prior to climbing, I was actually introduced to technical rope work as a caver.  My dad spent a little time in his college years poking into caves in southwest Virginia and beyond, and maintained an interest in caving as he moved forward with his life.  He took me on a few introductory trips once I was in high school and then turned my loose to the Virginia Tech cave club when I too wandered off to college.

The Virginia Tech cave club was an active group of students and locals, situated with access to some pretty amazing cave systems, including caves with substantial in-cave vertical.  But once you start talking vertical caves in the lower 48, you start talking about TAG.  TAG is a karst region centered on Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia.  Hence the name.  The area is characterized by a number of pits, surface and sub-surface, that make it something of a vertical caving playground.  The crown jewel is Fantastic Pit, a 586 foot drop in Ellison’s cave, the deepest in-cave drop in the lower 48 (exceeded by a pit in Alaska—everything  is bigger, and apparently deeper, in Alaska).  But there is a lot more to the region than just Fantastic.

Fantastic Pit, Ellisons Cave

The region hosts the annual TAG Fall Cave-in, a coming together of cavers in a field to cave by day and socialize by night.  I first went with a guy named Brian.  We packed his circa eighties-era Mazda RX7 with plenty of rope, sleeping bags, and, given the size of a RX7, likely little else.  By day we bounced surface pits with names devised to evoke respect and awe—Valhalla, Neversink—and those with names more mundane, but no less impressive in the flesh—e.g. Stephen’s Gap Cave.

  

Neversink

Stephen's Gap 

Valhalla (Caver, barely visible, on rope ascending in yellow about half-way up for scale.)

By night we admired the bonfire from a safe distance.  The TAG Fall Cave-in bonfire was, at least at the time, truly epic.  A dedicated crew was in charge of piling timber to heights requiring a crane, dousing the whole with any number of different petroleum byproducts, and stuffing the nooks and crannies with fireworks, widely available from giant outlets as soon as you cross south into Tennessee.  The fire crew wore t-shirts with photos of a prior year’s burn, flames leaping into the sky made all the more impressive once you realized that the tiny silhouette in the foreground was not a person at all but a telephone pole.  It turns out that the local utilities had seen copies of that picture and stepped in to limit the height of the structure in subsequent years.  The fire was, nevertheless, something to behold, and made just a little dangerous by the fact that a bottle rocket could suddenly ignite at any time and fly in your direction.  I assume the bonfire remains central to the evening events at modern day cave-ins, an assumption supported by the fact that the online cave-in FAQs state that pictures of the bonfire are only allowed before noon.  I can only guess that is an attempt to keep documentary evidence out of the hands of the current regulators.

The following year, a TAG caver named Mike (I think?) moved to Blacksburg to go to graduate school.  Mike was part of a dedicated group of Atlanta based cavers that spent significant time in Mexico exploring and mapping huge cave systems, and he thought nothing of heading to the TAG region for the weekend, all in the name of training.  No surprise, he offered to lead a group of us from Virginia to the cave-in that year.  We teamed up with some of his other friends and picked up where Brian and I had left off, bouncing pits.  

We also headed further underground to do some in-cave drops.  One such trip was to Surprise Pit in Fern Cave, a 400-foot drop.  As is the case with a number of caves, the entrances take some hiking to reach, and in the case of Fern the hiking took us straight uphill.  One of Mike’s buddies (name forgotten to history) was in his thirties—maybe older.  Like Mike, this guy spent time in Mexico on trips better characterized as expeditions.  He was pretty focused and pretty intense, and while happy to show us around, he looked at the weekend as simply another opportunity to train.  As such, he volunteered to carry the rope up to Fern (or simply though is he let any of us carry it we would slow the whole operation down to the point of hopelessness).  Sufficiently burdened with 500-feet of static line, he faced the hill and started to move.  We fell into step behind, a group of six or seven total.  Gaps opened almost immediately.  I don’t remember how long we spent grinding uphill, probably somewhere between 30 and 60 minutes.  I do remember reaching the cave entrance second only to Mike’s friend.  He looked at me as I approached.

“You’re pretty fast.  Do you do anything to stay in shape?”

Stay in shape?  I was, what?  19?  My body ran on enthusiasm and hormones.  I gave him the honest answer: “No.”

Mike’s friend thought on that for a second.  “Just wait.  You’ll have to in time,” he said, and went on getting his gear together.

I wonder now to what degree the 19-year old me could have gotten up and around the Equinox course.  Fact of the matter is Mike’s friend was right, and I have lost the ability to safely jump off the couch and attack real athletics.  As a consequence, I too train.  Luckily, I take pleasure in it, and regardless of the result on race day, can sit back and reflect on a season executing a plan without missing a single scheduled run or inviting injury.  That, alone, should put me in better position than 2005.

(Surprise Pit, Fern Cave)

Incidentally, we did try to bounce Fantastic Pit on that second TAG trip.  Four of us opted to try on our last day, all tuckered from a good week of hard caving.  To get to the Fantastic lip takes a little bit of time underground, including negotiating a 100-foot plus drop.  We got to the pit, conveniently and permanently (at least at the time) rigged to rappel by a local rope company (PMI).  Chummer, called such to distinguish him from the other Dave in our party, went first.  Water levels were high.  Where he should have been rappelling free and dry, Chummer found himself in a full waterfall, at risk for bone-crushing hypothermia.  He changed over and ascended back to the lip, and we called it a day.

I rode back to Blacksburg with the other Dave.  As, I believe, can only happen to the young, we pointed the car north expecting to be home in about eight hours, but ended up in Kentucky, as evidenced by the giant “Welcome to Kentucky” sign we flew past.  Kentucky?  How does anyone survive their youth?

A Very Slow Walk

I think earlier blog posts have alluded to the fact that at some young and precocious age I discovered popular music beyond the limits of my parent’s Carpenters and Simon and Garfunkle albums.  My first music came on 45s, including a copy of “Afternoon Delight” that I loved, misunderstanding the ode to the afternoon quickie and thinking it was actually a song about rockets.  At some point, an older cousin gave me a few singles for Christmas, the only one of which I remember is the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm.”  In any case, those slabs of vinyl have long, long since been lost.  Maybe my parents figured out just what the Starland Vocal Band thought was so delightful about the afternoon and confiscated that single.  While that music is lost to history, my copy of Pat Benatar’s “Fire and Ice” single still sits in my record collection.

I bought that 45 at Gamble’s, a general store in Socorro where you could buy a box of nails, a mop, a lawnmower, and Pat Benatar’s music in one stop.  And I became a huge Pat Benatar fan.  Soon thereafter I bought (or had purchased for me) my first magazine dedicated to the glories of rock-n-roll.  Was it Circus?  Hit Parader?  I don’t know.  But there are two things I do remember from that magazine.  First, it had fun facts about Pat Benatar, which is probably why I got the magazine in the first place.  According to that article, Pat Benatar and I were the same height.  To my pre-teen brain, this meant we were made for one another (notwithstanding that I would continue to grow and she had probably leveled off for good).  We would probably marry, and she would sing me songs while I continued to play with my Star Wars action figures.  Maybe she would play too and we would just listen to her songs on the radio, although I would limit her to the Princess Leia figure, being a girl and all.  Second, an article about AC/DC reported that Angus Young lost ten pounds every night the band played, sweating under the lights and as a result of his energetic performance.

You might be wondering what Angus Youngs’ weight loss has to do with anything.  I think I’ve mentioned that I went for a run in Reno?  And that I am turning this blog into an insufferable training log?  Well, nothing is more insufferable than a detailed weight record, except for maybe a detailed record of dieting.  My in-laws have a scale in their guest bathroom.  I happened to weigh myself before and after that Reno run, and interestingly lost something over 5-pounds over those couple of hours.  I gained it all back within an hour or two.  In that case, I rehydrated with water and refueled with cookies, but under normal circumstances at home I would refuel with chocolate milk.  Chocolate milk is now widely recognized as the best post-exercise recovery drink, with a perfect blend of protein, fat and sugar.  Using the Reno run as my benchmark, I’ve taken to consuming 5 gallons (approximately 5 pounds) of chocolate milk after every run.  As such, I now drink a minimum of 20 pounds of chocolate milk a week.  Strangely, I’ve been putting on a ton of weight.  And bloating.  If this continues, I may need to forego the chocolate milk, take a page from the Angus Young playbook, and rehydrate with beer and whiskey.

But before I can drink the milk, I need to run, and towards that end I signed up for and ran Alaska’s state 10k championship.  I finished in 42:53 (chip time, 43:02 gun time), with a 6:55 pace, good enough for 41^st place overall out of 161 males, and second in my age group.  Age group awards are, of course, a concession to the majority of racers who have no hope of actually winning.  It lets us try and triumph over the other middle-aged slow guys while the front of the race fights it out for the overall.

I was pretty pleased with my result, that is until I got home and turned on the Olympics.  I caught the finish of the men’s 10,000 meter, which was won in 27:30 (4:25 pace).  Kind of humbling, but then it isn’t really fair to compare myself against an Olympian, right?  Then the end of the 20k race walk comes on.  Keep in mind, this is a walk.  The fact that the competitor from Russia collapsed in exhaustion just 100 meters of so from the finish line, unable to finish, suggests it is a strenuous walk, but a walk just the same.  Then I did the math based on the gold medal finishing time: these guys covered the 20k in a 6:20 pace.  It turns out that the run I was feeling good about was nearly a minute slower a mile than a stroll through the streets of London.  Assuming I make it through the next month-and-a-half uninjured and manage to finish the Equinox, I’ll just have to forget that a guy from China could have probably walked the course faster.

(Just another pace update as a frame of reference: we watched the women’s Olympic marathon today.  The pack finished the first 10k in 34:56, 5:37 pace.  Also, you can find video of my triumphant finish at:  http://results.bazumedia.com/event/results/event/event-931.  Put my name in where prompted to get results and the video.)

Everything Has Its Price

Sometimes life forces each of us to face uncomfortable questions, but I never expected such a moment to occur at the grocery store.  It happened last weekend, walking out of Fred Meyer’s, looking at the receipt and unable to duck the obvious: “How did we spend $17 on grapes?!?”  Really, is that even possible?  Or have we entered an alternate universe where different laws of economics apply?  It wasn’t like we rolled out of the store with a wooden vat filled to the brim, ready to be stomped into wine in celebration of our small-village Italian heritage.  We bought two bunches, one red, one green.  And it cost $17.  There is a lesson to be gleaned there about household budgeting.

But rather than focus on important monetary lessons, I’ll focus instead on turning this blog into an insufferable online training log.  I noted in my last post that I’ve decided to do the Equinox again, a race with 3,000+ feet of climbing and descending, and that as a result, C and I travelled to Reno to do a training run.  Well, a week ago we realized that Anchorage is actually closer to the race course itself than to Nevada, so C and I took a weekend trip to Fairbanks and did a 15.5 mile run up and down Ester Dome.  The profile of that run looked something like this:

The run felt good, but came at a price.  To break up the drive north, we decided to camp in Cantwell.  In a sad comment on the frequency of our camping trips these days, we had not used our tent since our trip last year to McCarthy.  Following that trip, it became clear that the tent poles needed restringing, so we restrung them.  But we didn’t put them back into the tent stuff sack, a fact we discovered when it came time to set up the tent on our way to Fairbanks.  So we felled a dozen or more trees and bucked the timber into manageable logs, which we quickly stacked into a formidable wall.  We strung the fly into place minutes (really) before it started to rain.  It alternated between a drizzle and a hard rain for the course of the night, but we stayed dry.  No complaints with respect to the rain.  Lots of complaints with respect to the mosquitoes.

(C, looking out from our improvised tent)

I think I act like a non-lethal bug zapper, attracting bugs but unable to ring the death knell.  I slept with a head net, which was useless since the net rested snuggly against my skin.  The bites could not be counted.  I hardly slept at all, being driven slowly to madness by the incessant whine of swarming bugs.  Did you know that individual mosquitoes buzz at unique pitches?  I got to know several of them by sound.  C didn’t get a single bite, safe sleeping next to her mosquito magnet.

I certainly did not want to risk another night of bug bites, so we couldn’t go and run the Equinox course again.  But trips to Nevada are expensive.  So what is the alternative?  Well, it turns out that Anchorage has mountains.  So we found a run at home that looked like this:

And now my legs are tired.  I think I’ll rest them by counting grapes before we move them into a safe-deposit box.  If they keep, I may have just found a new source of retirement income.  

Dog Days

Ah, July.  The month has settled on us here in Anchorage like a homemade quilt, bringing with it an average temperature of 52.7 degrees and the potential to set the record for the coldest July on record.  The public is ecstatic.  The weather now dominates casual conversation, which may explain why I am leading with it as part of this post.

But July brings with it much more than the potential for termination dust and a hard frost.  July marks the return of the most spectated sporting event in the world.  Having seen the blog viewing statistics for my corner of the web, I know that the majority of the few of you who are likely to read these words reside in the U.S., which means you may be surprised to learn that it isn't the Superbowl.  The rest of you might be surprised to learn it isn't the World Cup, or whatever the equivalent is for cricket or rugby.  No, more spectators turn out each July to watch approximately 200 men pedal their bikes around France than turn out for any other single event, thanks in large part to the fact that attendance doesn't require a ticket (read: is free), the race stretches over some 20 days, and (if the images on TV are any indication) attendance amounts to little more than getting drunk and having a picnic atop a glorious mountain in the Alps.  Go figure.

In case you haven't been paying attention to the race, and at the risk of spoiling it for you if you've been DVRing each stage with plans to watch the whole thing in one marathon session once the real cold of August arrives, I'll let you know that Britain is poised to have its first Tour de France champion.  Bradley Wiggins donned the yellow jersey signifying race leader early, and has solidified his position.  As they say, it is a three week race and anything can happen, but barring disaster it seems exceedingly likely we will see the Union Jack flying in Paris a week hence.

I for one look forward to a British champion, if for no other reason because we are likely to be graced by the beauty of the Queen's English for weeks to come in post-race interviews.  If C and I learned nothing else on our trip to London last year, it is that the British are a polite and cordial people.  Indeed, as the current race leader, Wiggins has already shown the world how much better he wields the English language than his counterparts across the Atlantic.  For example, observe the crass manner in which Lance Armstrong, a yank best known for riding a bike and dating Sheryl Crow, responded to the (most recent) accusation that he relied on performance enhancing drugs in order to win seven Tour titles:

"I have never doped, and, unlike many of my accusers, I have competed as an endurance athlete for 25 years with no spike in performance, passed more than 500 drug tests and never failed one."


The man clearly has no sense of lyricism, no love of alliteration, no understanding of history.  Indeed, his cold and calculating use of the language suggests the reliance on bought and paid for legal assistance.  In comparison, Bradley Wiggins, when confronted with a question requesting a response to those drawing parallels between Sky (Wiggins' team) and U.S. Postal (Armstrong's old team), replete with all of the implications that since U.S. Postal was doped to the gills so then must be Wiggins and Sky, showed how a gentleman formulates an answer, weaving words together as befits a citizen of the city housing Shakespeare's Globe:

"I say they're just f***ing wankers. I cannot be doing with people like that.  It justifies their own bone-idleness because they can't imagine applying themselves to do anything in their lives.  It's easy for them to sit under a pseudonym on Twitter and write that sort of s***, rather than get off their arses in their own lives, and apply themselves and work hard at something and achieve something.  And that's ultimately it.  C***s."

You'll see that I have censored some of the more poetic language for the U.S. readers who may not be used to such artful metaphor.  After that outburst, Wiggins tossed the microphone off of the table and left the room.  

Can you imagine if Tiger Woods, Lebron James, or, for that matter, Lance Armstrong let loose with a "c***" at a press event?  The airwaves would be plastered with apologies within the hour, sponsors would be lining up to demand refund of fees advanced, and shame would rain from states blue and red.  The outfall from Wiggins' tirade?  None that I can discern from the press reports.  I'm now considering a move to Europe, with the hope and expectation that I may one day confront my critics by calling them all c***s and being done with it.

Pending that move, however, I've decided to make the most of having to carefully craft my outbursts with the precision of a legal team (that is, after all, my job), and commit to running the Equinox marathon this September in Fairbanks.  I ran the full thing once before, in 2005, at survival pace, and I'm hoping to get in enough training to do the run at race-pace this time.  The Equinox is complicated by its profile:

As such, training runs need more than just distance.  They need ups and downs to get used to the climbing and the pounding of the descent.  I looked around to find a suitable training run and found a track with this profile:

Close enough.  Problem was, the run corresponding with that profile was in Reno.  So, C and I packed our running shoes and went to Nevada for the 4th of July.  Conveniently, C's family lives there now, so we had somewhere to shower.  And it was warmer than 52.7 degrees, so we were freed from the smothering burden of having to talk about the weather with everyone we met.

Parting shot: